I am back again this year at the Computer Using Educators of British Columbia (CUEBC) conference and I am looking to find new ways to refresh my curriculum and improve on some skills in my tool kit.

Keynote with Dr. Alec Couros

It was a nice surprise to see Dr. Alec Couros speak again on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). I attended one of his workshops Jan 18th of this year, and I was curious to see if he would be doing the same workshop that I saw almost a year ago, or would there be new interesting points to make?

He shared his slides with links to all of his findings for later review and personal interest. For the most part, there was a lot of overlap, but what was interesting to note was that he shared there were serious predictions for generative AI to match/exceed human creative outputs within the decade.

He mentioned 3 different types of Generative AI that illustrate the trajectory of AI – Narrow AI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). Narrow AI is often goal specific task, but not skilled at other unrelated tasks, such as Magic School. AGI is a more general AI in which it is a jack of all trades, but not a master of any of them. Alec suggested that we are in the transitionary period where AI is becoming more generalized. The final step is the ASI phase where AI can produce high quality outputs beyond our expectations.

Dr. Couros suggested that if educators and students are to use AI effectively, the key to success is an effective prompt. He suggested the RISEN model:

  • Role – assign the AI a role to fulfill
  • Instruction – provide the basic parameters of the prompt
  • Steps – what steps should the AI take to complete the task?
  • End Goal – what should the final product look like?
  • Narrowing – how can we fine tune the solution?

Once a teacher has mastered the art of the prompt, it opens up the teaching space where we can utilize AI to generate new learning activities by engaging with custom Narrow AI GPTs such as Claude for writing, or Perplexity for research.

Dr. Couros recommended a few resources for teachers including

I was really blown away at how so much could change in the span of a year in the field of AI. It was reassuring that the keynote was not a rehash of an older findings. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of how will I use AI to inform and improve my practice as a teacher. I take a lot of pride in creating my own lessons, or using high quality resources, so the idea of using AI is something I’m still getting used to. My personal next steps look toward becoming a better prompter and I will try using the RISEN model and a custom narrow AI to help with output creation.

Taskmaster and STEAM with Ian Landy and James Gill

The first workshop I attended was on how teachers can bring the game show format of the tv show Taskmaster to a STEAM education classroom. I had heard great things about the tv show, but I had never watched it before. I was really curious as to how these two concepts would be blended together. The workshop was hosted by Ian Landy and James Gill. Ian is the regional principal of Edgehill Elementary School in the Powell River School District, and James is a teacher at École Citadel Middle School in the Coquitlam School District.

Taskmaster is a game show in which several comedians compete to complete seemingly simple tasks for points (that aren’t cumulative and don’t matter), such as bang a drum in exactly 9.37 seconds. Players are encouraged to take creative risks with how they complete the task, and bend the task to their will through careful interpretation of the prompt. For example – “place 3 exercise balls on the yoga mat on top of hill” vs “place 3 exercise on the yoga mat, on too of the hill.”

The purpose of the workshop was to introduce teachers to the Taskmaster EDU program that had been developed by the show creators to format the games for classrooms. There is an emphasis risk taking and critical thinking skills in a supportive environment that celebrates failure just as much as the we celebrate the successes. Creative and critical thinking, communication, and collaborative skills are the pillars of the program. We were told that compromise is not negative when it comes to how students should approach the task. Sometimes “good enough” and not “perfect” are the keys to learning the trick to the task.

Once students get the hang of how taskmaster works, Ian and James suggested the students have a turn at being the taskmaster where they must design their own task (often with a loophole in the prompt). The best prompts they have had students come up with involve the loopholes being so covert, that only 1/5 students would catch it.

My colleagues and I were really excited about this workshop and it opened up a lot of interesting possibilities for how we could apply something similar to this in our school setting. We are not ready to commit to the subscription fee, but we have been having conversations on this Taskmaster EDU almost daily since.

Micro:Bit Cars and Block Coding with Dan Wiebe

For my second workshop, I signed up for a course on adding a car element to Micro:Bits. The session was hosted by Dan Wiebe – a technology teacher in the Coquitlam School District, and my former high school computer science teacher.

The focus of this workshop was to show how add-ons to the Micro:Bits, such as Cutebots, Rovers, and halos could be coded to make a car-themed unit. The Cutebots and Rovers were attached the Micro:Bits to make cars with wheels, while the halos were attached to other Micro:Bits to make traffic lights.

He went over the three different codes really quickly and gave us the rest of the session to tinker away and try out our own codes. As a teacher with a basic coding background, the course was really fast paced. I could barely keep up. When it came time to explore and try things out, I was at a loss for what I could try, so I researched online what codes other people have written and tried them out.

It got me thinking about my classroom and whether or not I would bring the car element to my teachings. As of now, I don’t think I would. My students are not there yet in terms of their understanding, so they would have major struggles designing their own codes using the car attachments. These tools feel more like middle school level materials, and this workshop has given me more perspective on how I should be elevating my students to make this level of learning more accessible.

Canva Pro with Hans Lee

For my final session, I chose to explore Canva Pro with Hans Lee, a business education teacher in the Coquitlam School District. I have been playing with Canva for Teachers for over a year now and I’ve had a very positive experience exploring all of the features. I was really curious as to see what other features I might be missing out on utilizing and what the Teacher version of Canva might be offering.

The class was very fast paced going over the different features and editing capabilities of the Canva platform. Once again, I struggled to keep up with the pace of the instruction. Thankfully, the content was mostly review for teachers if they had prior knowledge. There were many suggestions on how to make eye catching visuals for a school’s social media presence (i.e Instagram and TikTok).

What really stuck out from the workshop was the introduction of the Magic tools that are AI powered and it was really helpful to see how AI has been integrated into some of the features. I am looking to start using the magic tools in Canva to help make my school’s winter concert theming. I left the workshop with an extension to ponder in which I could better improve my classroom visuals and learning guides.

Final Thoughts and Takeaways

This year’s conference provided a spread of topics to explore. I enjoyed having more to dive into other that more discussions on primarily AI, or MyEducation. I would have liked a lab style offering where teachers could tinker and play with technology they were interested in (i.e. 3D printers, Micro:Bits, Minecraft Education, etc) with a trained professional. Because my school district was the one hosting the conference this year, I would have loved to have had a space to discuss and troubleshoot some concerns I have with the 3D printer they purchased for me.

Moving forward, I will continue to attend this conference and I’m quite excited about sharing my knowledge of AI with my colleagues. We have been in talks of how to integrate the Taskmaster EDU style into our school schedule for a possible start date of September 2025.

I’ll be continuing to tinker and play with both Micro:Bits and Canva Pro. I intend to teach with the Micro:Bits in semester 2 and continually make new documents using the Canva platform. My new goal is to try to use the AI tools using the RISEN model Dr. Couros modelled for us.