OTS 143: Navigating AI as a School-Based Practitioner
- Jayson Davies
- Feb 10, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 20, 2024
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 143 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
Are you curious to understand how school-based OTPs can use AI?
Tune in as Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L, dives into the future of AI and occupational therapy.
Discover how AI tools like Chat GPT can change your approach to evaluations, IEP planning, and beyond while ensuring ethical practice and preserving confidentiality.
Whether it's creating personalized goals, drafting treatment plans, or enhancing service delivery, Jayson discusses the potential of AI to level the playing field and optimize OT services.
Whether you're a tech-savvy OTP or an AI novice, this episode will educate, and inspire you to harness the power of AI in your daily practice.
Listen now to learn the following objectives:
Learners will identify ways in which school-based practitioners can use AI to support themselves and their students.
Learners will understand the role of AI and tools to assist in the development of treatment plans, documentation, and monitoring of student progress.
Learners will identify the importance of ethical considerations and maintaining confidentiality when integrating AI into school-based practice.
Guest Bio
In 2017, Jayson founded the OT Schoolhouse website and now supports school-based OT practitioners via courses, conferences, and the OTS Collaborative community.
With experience as both a contracted therapist and an "in-house" employee for two distinctly different districts, Jayson has had the opportunity to appreciate the differences between both small-rural and large-suburban districts.
Recently, Jayson has put forth his efforts toward supporting therapists interested in tiered intervention, collaborative programming, and managing their workloads.
Quotes
"AI is training computers... to have so much knowledge that they can then make decisions and craft responses on their own."
- Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L
“We need to at least be familiar with it in order to make sure that when push comes to shove, occupational therapy practitioners can stand up and say, hey, I know AI and this is how I'm using AI.”
- Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L
“I think it's going to help us be more organized. It's going to help us to better evaluate and understand our caseloads and our workloads.”
- Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L
Resources
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
Hey there, school based OT practitioners what is happening? Welcome to Episode 143 of the OT schoolhouse podcast. Thank you all so much for being here today. Now, as you read in the title of today's episode, we are talking about occupational therapy, and AI, specifically school based occupational therapy, and AI because that's what we talk about here, school based occupational therapy. So you might have heard, you might have even attended that about two weeks ago, I was part of an EO ta panel on AI and occupational therapy, there are about five of us and all of us have had some sort of experience using AI and occupational therapy. And I became kind of the pseudo pediatric school based therapist about AI on that panel, that panel was completely free to attend, you didn't even have to be an A OTA member. And they should be releasing the replay very soon. If it is available, you can probably click on the show notes for this episode to figure out how to get access to it. But anyways, it was a wonderful, just a fantastic webinar panel, so many knowledgeable people. And we got to dive into a lot of questions from ethics to service delivery to documentation. And it was just awesome. It blew my mind. I learned a lot and I helped a lot of people also learn a lot about AI. So I figured I'd do a follow up to that. And we would talk about AI specifically in school based occupational therapy with this podcast episode. So we're gonna go ahead and dive into the intro music. And when we come back, it's all about AI in school based OT hang tight.
Amazing Narrator
Hello, and welcome to the OT schoolhouse podcast, your source for school based occupational therapy, tips, interviews and professional development. Now to get the conversation started. Here's your host, Jayson Davies, class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
All right, welcome back to this very special episode on school based OT and artificial intelligence. Before I go any further with this discussion on AI, I first want to give a big thank you shout out to a OTA for inviting me to be a part of that panel, it really was a great time. And we found out as panelist, and as a OTA as a whole, that occupational therapy practitioners are really interested in AI. In fact, they even shared during the panel that this was the most registered webinar that they had had since like, the COVID times. And it was also the most attended webinar that they had since the COVID. Time. So AI and occupational therapy huge right now. And it's a very important discussion to be having. With that said, I don't want to assume that anyone listening knows anything about AI. So I'm going to give just a brief overview of AI from my own learning from my own perception. And then we'll go into the specifics about school based occupational therapy. So if you're already familiar with AI, hang tight, just give me like two minutes, and then we'll dive into the specifics here.
Jayson Davies
So what is AI, in the most basic sense, AI is training computers very, very strong and powerful computers, to have so much knowledge that they can then make decisions and craft responses on their own. You know, at some point, they're even like talking to one another. That's where things get a little scary. But, you know, this isn't the first time we've had a big technological shift, right? When Google first came about, that was a big change, you know, schools got scared that everyone's going to be able to copy or find answers to tests and whatnot. And that's nothing new. We're kind of living that all over again. And we'll talk about ethical concerns in a minute. But I just wanted to talk about that, you know, this is this is a similar shift. And computers are learning and they rely on a mass amount of data, like data from the entire web, or a large portion of the web, in order to craft their decisions, create responses, and to support us as the consumers using the AI. Now, here's an example about how AI has taken the search query to a new level. I think we are all very familiar with google.com, the basic Google search engine, and the way that the Google search engine works is that if we ask a question, like what is OT, it's going to provide answers from 2000 individual websites or more or less whatever might be about what OT is from that specific website. So you might get a definition from a OTA you might get a definition from Ida from NBC, OT from OT school, house, whatever it might be, but their individual responses from each of those websites and Then they encourage you to click on to go to that website to learn more, right? Conversely, Google bar or chat GPT, rather than showing you 2000 different responses, they're only going to give you one response. And it's going to be the quote unquote, perfect response based upon all the definitions of occupational therapy that it has access to. So behind the scenes in a fraction of a second, it read the OTA definition, it read the NBC OT definition or read the OT school has definition, and then it crafted a response from that. Which then leads me to this fun exercise where I asked Chet GPT, what is school based occupational therapy, it offered me a full paragraph about OT. In fact, it gave me a really long paragraph. So I asked it to short in the paragraph, which you can do. And this is what it gave me. School Based occupational therapy. OT in parentheses, involves therapists working in educational settings to support students participation in school activities, addressing challenges related to motor skills, sensory processing, attention, self care, and academic performance, ultimately promoting their success in school. I didn't make that up that is straight from chat GPT. And I'm sure that it pulled it from a various number of resources. I don't know where it got this from. It's not quoted, it's not cited. But I assume that it is sourcing it from a OTA state websites, maybe the Department of Education websites, and perhaps even the OT School House website and other school based OT, blogs and websites. I did ask it to please cite its answer. And it basically told me sorry, I can't cite. But you can learn more over at a ota.com and other occupational therapy websites. So that is how chat GPT and these other chat bots are different from Google, Google is going to give you a list of websites where you can go learn more, versus chat. GPT is going to kind of summarize everything he knows about everything on the web, and then bring it in together to one answer, you can then follow up and have a conversation with these chat bots. And it will continue to do the same thing over and over and over again, every time you ask it a question, it's going to look at its previous response that it gave you, then it's going to search the web based upon the context you gave it and find the best answer to provide you with and every time you ask a question or a follow up question. It's doing the same thing over and over and over. So if you came into this podcast, never heard of the term AI. I hope that that definition that working definition is enough to help you understand what we're going to be talking about today, with AI and occupational therapy, mostly related to how we can use chat bots to support us, as well as the students we serve. Now, there is a whole nother universe of AI and that has to do with enabling machines to operate without human interaction. And I hope and in fact, I do plan to talk more about that in the future. But for now, I don't know enough to have the discussion with you on my own. Yeah, sidenote, Robo dogs scare the heck out of me if they don't scare you, there is something wrong, but we're going to talk about how AI within technology might support students on another episode. All right. Now, for the fun part, let's have a discussion about AI and school based occupational therapy, where we are kind of today and potentially where we might go in the future. I'm going to break down the rest of the podcast into about six sections. We're going to talk about evaluations, IEP planning and writing, documentation, service delivery, program management. And yes, of course, we cannot leave ethics within occupational therapy and AI. In fact, we are even going to start with ethics in AI because I believe that school based occupational therapy or occupational therapy providers are some of the most ethical people that I know. And this is often the first question that comes up whenever I bring up AI is how is it ethical? Is it going to take over our job? Should we be using AI? Should we cite AI? All of these questions are very important and I want to start right there. But I also want to start with a slight disclaimer. AI is moving very fast right now.
Jayson Davies
So please understand that everything I say is from my perspective only. I am not aware of legislation pertaining to AI and OT AI in education or AI in general. And legislation may change the day after or years after this podcast goes live. So just keep that Have in mind that I am speaking from my personal understanding. And I am not a lawyer. So yeah, make sure you check with your district at the very least, on anything I say today. All right, so HIPAA and FERPA the two acronyms that we are all familiar with, but don't completely understand. Basically, we have to protect our students, our patients, our clients confidentiality, when it comes to AI, I am very skeptical about this. And without going too far into all the details for you and I as school based occupational therapy practitioners who either are employed by a school employed by a district employee by county and or contracted with one of those areas, you have to be very, very careful. Open AI, which is the owner of chat GPT Typically holds on to data for 30 days. Now, there are ways to go around this. But basically, you have to have an agreement with them, which your district probably doesn't have. So unless your district has said, Hey, OT team, we're all good to go, you can use AI in the same sense that you would use any other documentation application, then I would not put any names in, I would not put any date of births. And I wouldn't put social security numbers in not that we really have access to social security numbers. But what I'm saying is don't use personal identifying information within these chatbots. A lot of them are saying that they don't keep your information. But you also have to think about the outputs, right? Not just the inputs, you don't want it to keep what you're putting in. But if it's then regurgitating what you put in on the output, you got to make sure that it's also not keeping that output for their own training purposes to make their bots even smarter, and who knows where that data is going. So again, as far as I think we should be treating this as school based occupational therapy practitioners, and protecting the rights and the names and the personal information of our students, we should not be inputting any personal information into a chatbot, we can absolutely use pseudonyms. And then when we copy and paste, whatever it is that chat bot gives us over to a secure document, then we can go back and you can even use the Command F button on your keyboard or Ctrl F on your keyboard, and basically change out all the pseudonyms for the actual students name. But don't do that until you are on a secure platform, your district likely has a contract with Google in place to make sure that their Google you're at whatever email address that you have that's on Google or Microsoft, whatever it might be, they likely have a system in place that makes that secure. But that system may not be in place for using chat GPT or Google bar yet. So don't use names. Unless someone at your district someone high level at your district has told you it's okay. And that leads me to the second most common question or concern that I get when talking about AI with OT practitioners out there. And that is that people are afraid that chat GPT is going to take their job, or they're also afraid that chat GPT cannot do what they can and therefore there's no use to chat GPT to that I say two things. First, it is not taking our job. Not here not now. I can't save, you know, for 2030 years, I don't know. But I can confidently say that it's not taking our job right now. And we should actually get on board with understanding it and with using it. Because if we don't someone else will. And then we might even be more in trouble. Right? Like we don't need computer science, figuring out how to basically replace occupational therapy. No, we need occupational therapy, understanding AI so that we can have a seat at the table. We have lost seats at too many tables to lose another seat. So we need to be here. We need to understand AI. And we need to understand legislation that might come down the pipe in regards to AI. Now as far as the idea that we shouldn't use AI because AI can't do task analysis and AI just doesn't replace us and it can't replace me. I won't let it replace me. I say this, I like to think of working with a chatbot and AI chat bot in a similar manner to working with a level two student or a research assistant. Right? We can ask the research assistant just like we can ask AI to look something up for us to I look up research to look up IEP goals to look up SOAP Notes. But at the end of the day, it is you that is transferring what the AI chatbot or the research assistant is giving you on to the official paperwork, right? So at the end of the day, it's not chat GPT is license that is up for debate. If something goes wrong, it's your license and your certification. That is up for debate, right. So you need to make sure that anything you look at anything that you receive from any one of these chat bots, is actually legit, at the end of the day it is on you, you can get information from these tools. But they are that they are a tool, they're not an end all be all. And anything that you take from them should be looked at with a grain of salt, right? You cannot trust that the research that is giving you is accurate. You can not trust that it is citing works from the textbook that you thought it was because it said it did. Chat, GBT and Google bar are both known for hallucinations, which is basically just fabricating any response that it wants, because it thinks that you'll appreciate it. So a lot of times, if it does try and cite something, the citation is very wrong. And it's really easy to figure out because it'll be a clickable link, and you click on it and it goes nowhere. If that happens, it just made up that citation. Do not trust it. Go over to Google, type in the name of that article and see if you can actually find that article. If so, look at the article and find where it might have come from whatever the response was that chat GPT gave you. And I understand, you know, there's a lot of potential new terms that you're hearing right now, like hallucinations, and I'm saying chat GPT all over again, what the heck does GPT even mean? I'm just not going over that because it's too much. And this kind of all ties back to my response a few moments ago, about why we need to get on board with playing around with AI seeing how it can support us the potential dangers of AI, and start learning about it so that we can actually have a say, in how AI support OTs, rather than letting other people who know nothing about occupational therapy, dictating how AI can support occupational therapy practitioners. All right. So no AI cannot do your job. But AI can certainly help you do your job. And that's the fun part now that we're gonna dive into. All right, it is time to discuss artificial intelligence and evaluations. If you know me, you know that evaluations are something I actually enjoy. Not everyone does. But I do. And I have a list here of several ways that we can use artificial intelligence to help us with our evaluations. By helping us I mean, it could help us save more time, it could potentially help us to create better evaluations.
Jayson Davies
It can also help with interpreting our own thoughts and helping us better understand what we think we know. And potentially embedding research into our interpretations. So here's a few specific ideas that you can use right now to support yourself with evaluations using artificial intelligence. Starting with the very first part of any evaluation is collecting an occupational profile. I don't know about you, some people use different formats for collecting information for an occupational profile. If you have followed me, you probably heard me talk about the occupational profile for school based occupational therapy that I have that you can get by checking out the blog post or just subscribing to our email list. And another way that I've also collected occupational profile information is by using a form, whether this is a Google form or a Microsoft form, whatever it might be, you can send this form out to a teacher or to a parent or to both and collect information back on it. Well, once you have this form, whether or not it's a Google form, a Microsoft form, or even a handwritten form, potentially if you're using the right AI software, you could provide this information to the AI, again, using a pseudonym. So you're taking out the student's actual name, actual birthday, stuff like that, but you can use the general information to help you with developing an occupational profile, you can essentially tell it pi this is the information that I have collected from the parent from previous IEPs from the teacher, even from the student themselves. Please help to create an occupational profile, be sure to include this, this and this and it will sure enough, go ahead and provide you with an occupational profile. As I mentioned earlier, you are going to have to probably cut and paste and edit and make changes to it. But it is a starting point. Once you have done that enough times, you know, maybe you've done it 510 times, you're going to start to see a template emerge. And you're going to start to see how everything you say impacts the way that it gives you the occupational profile that you want or don't want, and you're going to make changes. And then you're going to start to see that a template emerges. And you can even ask the AI to create you an occupational profile template, which then you can give back to the AI and say, use this data, and the template that I'm providing you to create me an occupational profile. I know it's mind blown, we're going to have to do some YouTube videos on how to make this actually happen, what it looks like. But that is the first way that you can begin to use AI to support you in your evaluations. Another way that you can use AI in your evaluations is to help with comparing assessment results, you could tell the AI, Hey, Johnny scored, average, below average and average on the bot to and on the end fun, he scored in this range, this range in this range. Please help me to understand what this might mean. Now you got to be careful, because with assessments I have tested it, it is not right with assessments, it doesn't fully understand all the different assessment pieces right now. It thinks that it can great assessments, but it really can't. But it can start to help you with interpreting what it might mean, if a student is scoring average on this test, but below average on this test data it can start to do, I would be willing to bet a lot of money that very, very soon. Pearson And WPS all the publishers of all those evaluations that we use, they are going to start embedding AI into their scoring methods, they already have a lot of their tests being scored online. And can you just imagine when you punch in the raw data, it's not only going to give you a table, but it's also going to give you a narrative about what those scores actually mean. And then you'll be able to go in and add everything that you observed into that narrative to really build out a round picture. So now that you have used AI, potentially to help develop an occupational profile, now that you have provided your own observations into it, because AI can't do that, yet, that's a whole nother discussion. And now that you've also gotten some data in there, now you can basically give the AI all that information to help with potential interpretations. You can ask it for themes, you could say, Hey, I'm thinking this, does that make sense? And it might help you. I'm not saying you have to use what it gives you. I'm saying that it could potentially help you in the sense that it might give you ideas that you would not have otherwise thought about. Again, you got to take everything with a grain of salt here, but it can potentially help you. You can also ask for any additional support. Hey, based upon this occupational profile AI based upon these observations in this evaluation data, is there something that I should consider? Are there accommodations that I might want to look into? Are there specific types of therapy or different materials that I might want to consider? Is there any research related to occupational therapy and school based OT and Down syndrome that might help me to better understand where to go next? These are all the things that you can ask AI for support with. And then as you get to the end of your evaluation, you can even ask it to help you with justifying services or justifying not recommending services. I feel like I'm gonna say this 100 more times during this podcast, take it all with a grain of salt, do not just copy and paste, make sure that you're reading it, breaking it down, fully understanding it fully deciding to yourself, hey, does this make sense? Does it not make sense, does 10% Or to 60% of it makes sense. But these can help you potentially make your process a little bit faster. Not the first time, not the fifth time, probably not even the 10th time. But once you start to understand and create this process for using AI and incorporating it into your evaluation system, it may be able to help you. Again, I'm gonna say this multiple times throughout the podcast, do not use real names, do not use real birthdays, make sure you're using pseudonyms. I'm sure there are other ways to incorporate this into evaluations. In fact, I know that there are new programs coming out. I'm not going to throw out any names right now. But there are programs that are being developed and are available online right now to help with evaluations. But this is a way what I've talked about so far. This is a way that you can do it without using a program. There are probably programs out there in fact, again, I know there are that might make this process even more simple. but I'm not gonna throw those names out because I haven't tested them, I haven't vetted them, I haven't used them. So I'm just going to leave them off for now. Alright, now that we have our evaluation done, whether we used AI for assistance, or we did it the old traditional way, on our own, typed it up 10 pages, whatever it might be, without AI, that's okay, too. But once we have that evaluation, now, we can potentially use artificial intelligence to help us with planning and writing the IEP as well as a treatment plan. So here's what I mean by that. Every IEP consists of four main components that occupational therapy practitioners have to fill in, right, you have the present levels of performance, you have the new goals, the new services and the accommodations. And from my playing around with artificial intelligence, I have figured out that for three pieces for three of those pieces, you can use AI to help you, you can use it to help you with the present levels of performance, you can use it to help you actually create goals for the student, you can't really use it to help you determine services that is very much a unique area unique aspect to both yourself as the OT practitioner, and also the IEP team. And then you can also help or it can help you with the idea of incorporating accommodations. So let's start with the present levels of performance here. One way that you can use AI for the present levels of performance. And this is different, or this varies, I should say, based upon how your IEP system works and whether or not you have one giant space where you put in all your present levels. Or if it's broken down into sections, like insert fine motor skills here, insert sensory stuff here. But you can go in to, you can go into chat GPT, and say, I have this student pseudonym is blank, ages blank. These are some of his strains, these are some of his concerns. These are things that I want to make sure to include in the present levels. And then you can say, create me an IEP present levels of performance based on this information. And what it's going to do is it's going to take that information, and it's going to kind of turn it into a nice pretty present level of performance. You can even a step further here, little pro tip, I
Jayson Davies
guess you can say, hey, here's my data, turn this into a strengths based present level of performance, turn this into a deficit based present level of performance. Not that you would use that, but I'm just giving you examples, you can then say, okay, let's expand upon it, here's a little bit more information incorporate that. Or let's make it shorter. Let's make this specific to fine motor skills and create a second one that is specific to sensory processing skills. So there you go. Now you have just developed present levels of performance. And yes, you put all the data in, you told the AI chatbot exactly what your student is able to do what they can't do, and then chant GPT just made it look pretty for you in essence, right? That's pretty cool. If you agree with that. If not, maybe not. But now that you have crafted your present level of performance within chat GPT you can continue from there. And what I mean by that is you can then say, okay, chat, GPT, you have Johnny's goal. And now I want to create an executive functioning goal for Johnny that revolves around the need for organizational skills so that he remembers to turn in his homework, please chat GPT right for me. Yes, I am one of those people that talk to an AI bot and uses formalities such as please. But anyways, chat GPT, please write me three to five goals around executive functioning and organizing of schoolwork. And it will do that it's going to write you out three to five potential goals that you can choose from or that you can adapt, you can say, hey, check your pte. I don't like the way that you did that. Can you change it to this way? Can you make a strength space? Can you make the criteria 80% instead of 90%? Can you make it in four out of five trials instead of three consecutive trials, whatever it might be, but you can play around with the goals that it creates a draft for you. You can even scratch it and say, hey, those all stink, please give me five new ones. And just be creative. What might the student need from here on? Give me five new goals. And it'll do just that. This is not replacing you. This is asking for help. This would be similar to going to an occupational therapy mentor and saying, Hey, I need help crafting a goal for this student. Here's his present levels. Here's the areas that I think we need to work on. Do you have any guidance and that OT mentor saying I think I have some ideas? Try these and then you kind of having a conversation back and forth saying I'm not sure. So I hope this resonates with you because you can continue on from there either. and right, once you have the present levels of performance, once you have now developed a goal or two, by the way, you can even say, hey, chat GPT, let's make this a collaborative goal. And I want to collaborate with the teacher on this, how might we collaborate together? It'll help you with that? Well, once you have that, then you can say, alright, chat up team, are there any accommodations that I might want to consider in the classroom to help the student meet this goal. And this is kind of key, because remember, this whole conversation is one conversation with Chatrapati. We started potentially with the present levels of performance, or you might have even started with the evaluation. So chat GPT knows everything to this point, except the student's name, the student's date of birth, the student's social security number, and any other identifiable information like maybe even the school that you are at, but it has created a picture for the student, it has helped you to create an IEP for this student. And it's going to continue to help you so long as you keep texting with it in the same chat feed. Now, if you've played around with AI a little bit, you kind of are probably understanding where I'm coming from and how this would look. If you've never been inside of chat GPT or interacted with an AI chat bot, I get it, it's hard to understand. But once you get in and play around with it, you can see that it remembers everything that you have said within that one chat thread. If you open up a new trap thread, it's like having a new conversation with a brand new person who never read your plot. Never read your evaluation doesn't know the goals. But if you remain in the same chat thread, it's going to continue to remember what student you're talking about. Albeit it doesn't know the student's name. But it's going to understand all the things that you've done before. And therefore when you ask a future questions, it's going to relate back to the evaluation and back to all the other pieces that you've already done there. So now you can potentially use it to help you with developing a treatment plan. You could ask it to help you write a daily note by giving it the raw data and kind of saying, Hey, turn this into a soap note. You could ask it to create progress notes based upon all the data that is collected over the last three months because you put in data after every single session, you could say, Hey, turn this into a pretty progress note that incorporates this, be sure to say thank you to the parents at the end of the progress monitoring note whatever it might be, you can say use this template that you have developed to create a progress note, you could say, hey, I need to take data on this goal about organizing homework, can you help me create a data sheet? To do that I want the teacher to be able to quickly respond to this data sheet each morning, when the student does or does not turn in homework. All of this is possible with AI. But it takes an occupational therapy lens in order to make this possible in the way that occupational therapy needs. You have to be the one to prompt it, you have to be the one to say, Hey, I gave you a prompt, I see why you did what you did. But that wasn't right, let's change it up. Make it longer, make it shorter, add more detail, take away that detail. Make a strength base, all that stuff, you know, even down to if you want it to use person first language or if you want it to use identity, first language, those are things that you can tell the Chatbot what to do and how to act. And it's going to begin to mirror the way that you want it to respond, it's going to start to learn that you want neurodiverse language included that you want strengths based language included that you want to use identity first language, it's going to start learning that. And you know what's interesting, as I mentioned, right, if you open up a new chat thread, you can change all that. If you wanted to, you could absolutely change that. Or in Chachi PT, you can go into the settings if you have the paid version and say, Hey, I'm a strength based OT and everything that you apply to me, I want you to think about from a neurodiverse perspective, then it will know that about you. So it's going to give you information based upon kind of how it thinks you want to react, which I know to an extent is a little scary, because at what point are we saying give me what I want instead of giving me what is actually accurate. But we can also tell it, we want you to be accurate. Provide me with the research around this site, whatever you're giving me if it's research based, and if and when you realize that the chat bot is hallucinating. You can tell it you can say hey, that's not real. I clicked on the link that you gave me and it took me nowhere. It will actually you know, admit that it made a mistake and it'll ask you to saying hey, let's try this again. Let's give me another prompt. Let's see where we can go from here. All right, well, that can kind of took us through everything from evaluations, IEP planning, and writing, and straight through documentation. And now I want to talk about something that I think is really cool to think about. And I haven't really done yet. But I can see so many occupational therapy practitioners using AI as an intervention tool, not just to support our own productivity organization or whatnot, but to actually use the AI as an intervention tool. And even as an accommodation tool. Here's an example how many of us have gotten to the point where we almost want to give up with teaching a student to type because their typing is legible. But it takes them so long to go back and edit that we don't think it's really useful. Well, now AI, we could say, Hey, this is what my student typed, fix the grammar and spelling. And it can do that. And we can teach a student to do that. In fact, there are now chrome add ons that you can embed AI with. So you could just highlight the text and say, Hey, this drop down fix spelling and grammar, and it will fix that for them. I can only imagine speech to text improving with the use of AI. Imagine being able to use a common app that occupational therapy practitioners use, like snap type, where you take a picture and it just like brings the written document into an app so that the student can type or use the iPad, whatever to write on the right on the page. Imagine if you could take a picture of a worksheet and differentiate the worksheet just by saying, hey app make this more difficult. And I want to work on visual perceptual skills. So turn everything red and blue or use high contrast or something like that. That is where we are headed with AI being able to support us as occupational therapy practitioners. As I mentioned, I don't have any experience right now using AI in intervention. But that is not keeping me from being super interested in it.
Jayson Davies
I think that there are so many ways that OT practitioners can support students in using AI. And I think AI is basically the next universal design for learning. I think AI is going to level a lot of playing fields, because so long as you can figure out how to prompt AI. Or if someone can create an app that makes it so easy for people to use. It's going to bring knowledge available to everyone, just like Google did 30 years ago, gosh, is that long ago. But yeah, just like Google did. AI is going to support so many students. And I cannot wait to see how occupational therapy practitioners are going to use it. And you can bet when I start learning about how people are using it, you'll hear about it here on this podcast. So stay tuned, that's going to be fun. All right, the last area that I just want to say really quickly that AI can support occupational therapy practitioners is in an area that often goes unmanaged. And just to be honest, is completely forgotten. And that is actually the management of the occupational therapy program. I think that AI is going to start being able to help us with scheduling more efficiently. I think it's going to help us be more organized is going to help us to better evaluate and understand our caseload and our workloads is going to help us to provide data to our administrators to say, hey, look, OT is supporting our students or OTs supporting all the students in these classes. But it's not really supporting students in these classes. Here's how we might be able to improve OT services, all those things that we probably should be doing as an OT department and aren't doing AI can make it easier and can make it quicker. And to make it actually time efficient to get done. Right now to do some of those things will still take a lot of work because you have to provide the data to something like chat up at first. But in the future, I can see AI programs out there that really help school based occupational therapy practitioners, as well as all the SLPs PTS teachers, everyone that we work with, to better understand what is working and what is not working. And I mentioned it before, it's also going to help us to better implement research. We can ask it a question based upon research and it can give us an answer. We don't necessarily have to go looking for the research. So we could potentially reach out to there's one app called consensus and we can say, hey, give me ideas for using RTI as a school based occupational therapy practitioner based on research and it scours the research for RtI and school based AR T and will provide you with responses. So again, we are at the very beginning of the ah it's amazing. Yes It is scary to some extent because it can do so much. But I think that we need to, if not lean into it, we need to at least be familiar with it. In order to make sure that when push comes to shove, occupational therapy practitioners can stand up and say, Hey, I know AI, and this is how I'm using AI. And if AI were to disappear, it would be good or bad. And if AI were to continue, it would be good or bad, we need to be able to say, and see both sides of it, so that we can have an opinion on it when it matters. Right now, a OTA doesn't really have guidance on AI intervention. Neither does NBC OT as far as I know, but you know what, maybe they should. And we need to be the ones to kind of start figuring out what that should look like. So go over to open AI. And that's the founder of chat GPT. By the way, just play around with it. Just play around, ask it silly, dumb questions that have nothing to do with OD, but just play around with it. And then at some point, you'll start to feel a little comfortable. And you can ask it a question about OT, you can ask it what is school based OT? What is the research on weighted This is si applicable to school base are two questions that you want to ask and never get the answer that you're hoping for. Ask that to judge EBT and see what it says. You might be surprised you might find it a fun and might be a little game for you. But it's definitely something that I think everyone, all OT practitioners need to at least understand a little bit and need to kind of get in there, play with it, and find out what they like and what they don't like about it. All right, well, I hope you are excited to learn a little bit more about AI we are definitely going to have some more episodes here on the OT school have podcasts about AI. And if you like that If you enjoy that if you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to leave us a review on Apple podcasts or over on Spotify. Think they have something but let us know. Let us know give us a five star review and let us know what type of topics you want to hear on the OT schoolhouse podcasts. Really appreciate you listening in today. Wherever you're listening in from whether it's your car in between school one and school three. Or if you're just on your way home or at the gym. I really appreciate you tuning in. And yeah, I hope you enjoy this episode and I look forward to talking more about OT and AI with you in the future. Have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you next time on OT school health podcast.
Amazing Narrator
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