This week’s seminar was a survey about online image and graphic creation. I have dabbled in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator (see below for a graphic I made about chemistry in Illustrator), but have found both of these programs to be very difficult to learn how to use well, and it takes hours upon hours to make a piece that looks polished enough for professional (including classroom) use. I also am not super interested in digital art, at least not interested enough to want to spend hours designing my own material rather than borrowing (with proper attribution!) someone else’s material for future class content.

The piece I have showed below which I made in Illustrator, Creating Science, took me two weeks to finish! It is certainly not a time efficient process when you have a million other things on the go as a teacher.

“Creating Science” by me (2022) in Illustrator.

Due to this disinterest in spending hours creating my own content, Microsoft Designer and the AI Image generation software via Microsoft Edge is very intriguing. I can give the computer a specific prompt of exactly what I am needing, and within seconds it spits out something that is at least relatively close to what I was expecting. A bonus with Microsoft Designer is that the materials are editable in Word, Powerpoint, or other Office Suite apps, making seamless. I can already imagine using this software to create art for powerpoint presentations, worksheets, posters for my classroom, or additional infographic style handouts for my students.

Of course, AI comes with its own controversy and is not inherently equitable as of yet, which is something to consider when using items generated by it. Questions of fair use are what come to mind – what if AI takes pieces of something another artist has already made before? It is “fed” by content that has been created by other humans in the past. Should I give credit, then? And if I should, how would I go about doing that? Is using AI tools in my classroom taking away from me supporting local or global artists and teachers? That is also a consideration I should be making, and I believe it is important that I do continue to support other teachers by purchasing content from places like TeachersPayTeachers in addition to AI generated materials whenever possible. There is still something hugely valuable about human created art; there are elements that I still believe a machine just can’t do the same.

That aside, I asked Microsoft Designer to make me a chemistry related poster for my classroom, and it did come up with some good ideas (attached below). I don’t see these being used “as is” but I could definitely use both as a starting place and build them into great visuals for my classroom.