AI Symposium Schedule
8:30 a.m. Breakfast - 215 Penfield
9:00 a.m. Opening remarks
Session 1: Unlock Your Writing Potential with AI
Time: 9:30 - 9:50
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
Presenter: Allison Ayotte
In this workshop, we'll explore the AI tool Pi, demonstrating its capabilities in brainstorming, refining ideas, and polishing written communication for various professional tasks. Join us to learn how incorporating AI into your workflow can help you overcome writing hurdles, allowing you to focus on the essential aspects of your work.
Session 2: AI for Teaching & Research
Time: 9:30 - 9:50
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenter: Mohammad Tajvarpour
In this session, I will explore how a range of generative AI tools including text-to-text, text-to-image, and text-to-voice, can be effectively integrated into both teaching and research practices. We’ll look at innovative strategies for creating more engaging content, practical approaches to incorporating AI into course design, and evolving methods for addressing academic integrity, including plagiarism detection. The session will offer both conceptual insights and hands-on ideas for leveraging AI to enrich the educational experience.
Session 3: AI use by staff
Time: 10:00 - 10:50
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenters: Terrain Garvis, Nicole Decker, and Nora Covington
A panel of staff members will discuss how generative AI can improve the efficiency of their work support of the college's mission.
Session 4: Lightning session (short presentations)
Time: 10:00 - 10:50
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
- Topic 1: Designing a program logo with AI
Presenter 1: Mamta Saxena
HDV 400 is a capstone course in which students plan, design, and evaluate a prevention program focused on a social issue of their choice. One of the course assignments involves creating a thoughtful logo for their prevention program. The logo should be unbiased, memorable, unique, meaningful, and relevant to their cause. Since many students are not skilled illustrators, they often use simple drawings to convey the mission and goals of their programs. AI can assist them in creating more complex images that effectively represent their ideas. The session will include information on initial thoughts, prompts, revised prompts, and the sample final logos created by five groups (n=9). - Topic 2: ChatGPT for Library Research
Presenter: Nicole Westerdahl
ChatGPT and other generative AI models are infamous for producing fake sources and incorrect information, but they can still support library research and help students develop their information literacy skills. Learn how to use these tools to search more effectively while avoiding their pitfalls. - Topic 3: Integrating AI in a chemistry classroom
Presenter: Manish Singh
I will share a few ways I'm experimenting with bringing AI into my classroom to enhance teaching and learning. I'll also reflect on some interesting conversations I've had with students about how they are using AI in learning. - Topic 4: Writing Literary Analysis Essays with ChatGPT - Friend or Foe???
Presenter: Sarah Fleming
See how this Methods instructor supports pre-service teacher candidates to engage with AI for lesson design and writing instruction in ethical, creative, and effective ways.
Session 5 : Trust Issues: Information Literacy & AI
Time: 11:00 - 11:50
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
Presenters: Emily Mitchell and Morgan Bond
Regardless of whether you resist asking ChatGPT and its ilk to answer fact-based questions, you and your students still likely run into generative AI information sources at the top of your Google results, in “academic” AI search tools like Consensus, in chatbots, and even in some library databases. SUNY’s gen ed core competency of Information Literacy requires that we prepare students to “evaluate information from a variety of sources with an awareness of authority, validity, bias, and origin”; this session will address what that can look like in the context of AI-generated information sources.
Session 6: Course AI policies
Time: 11:00 - 11:50
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenters: Peter Ghazarian / Paul Tomascak
Generative AI tools can enhance learning and support students in their academic endeavors. However, it is essential to maintain academic integrity and ensure that the primary work reflects the student’s own understanding and efforts. Any use of AI tools should enhance student learning without substituting the essential effort and creativity expected in their assignments. This session will also address recent updates in the college’s academic integrity policies.
Session 7: AI and Student Professional Writing
Time: 1:00 - 1:20
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
Presenters: Lyn Blanchfield, Ryan Stiles, and Stephanie Pritchard
This session will briefly address the benefits and problems of using AI for student professional writing: specifically resumes, CVs, cover letters, and essays for graduate school applications and post-graduate fellowship applications. Various ways that students can use AI appropriately will be discussed as well as in what circumstances AI should not be used.
Session 8: AI-Integrated Course Activity using the TILT Framework
Time: 1:30 - 1:50
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
Presenter: Genevieve Alorbi
In this AI-integrated course activity, the TILT framework is used to support transparency, active engagement, critical reflection, and inclusive learning. In a structured investigation, students are asked to apply the human capital model to real career data. They have to alternate between manual analysis and AI-assisted analysis and critically reflect on the AI’s role and accuracy.
Session 9: Using ChatGPT with Teacher Candidates
Time: 1:00 - 1:50
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenter: Jed Locquiao
Over the course and the end of the session, participants will:
(a) review basic terms and features of ChatGPT;
(b) review current best practices/themes around use of ChatGPT as instructional tool (e.g., prompting as generation, as evaluation, as extension, as modeling, etc.) ;
(c) and identify and explain opportunities to apply ChatGPT in the context of transition planning by special education teacher candidates.
Session 10: Centaur or Cyborg? My relationship w/AI
Time: 2:00 - 2:50
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
Presenter: Carlo Cuccaro
This interactive session will explore practical ways I’ve integrated AI tools—especially ChatGPT—into both in-person and online teaching. I’ll share real-world examples from my own courses, including ice breakers, in-class prompts, assessment design, course revisions, and strategies for encouraging student use of AI. My journey spans simple enhancements to more complex applications—with results ranging from surprisingly disappointing to unexpectedly transformative.
Session 11: Student AI Use Beyond the Classroom
Time: 2:00 - 2:20
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenter: Kaija Hoyt
This presentation will demonstrate how one student uses AI tools for outside of class support across disciplines and for her student organizations.
Session 12: Is AI Killing Good Writing?
Time: 2:30 - 2:50
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenter: Abbey Kilpatrick
As the capabilities of generative AI grow, so do the ways students are able to use it for academic purposes, in both honest and dishonest ways. There is an increasing requirement for professors to be on the lookout for students who are submitting assignments that are either partially or completely written by AI. Alongside this also comes another problem—students whose work is being flagged as being AI-generated by professors or by plagiarism checkers because they exhibit exceptional writing abilities.
Session 13: Alumni Panel
Time: 3:00 - 3:50
Location: 123 Penfield / remote access
Presenters: TBD
Session 14: Beyond Convenience: AI-Enhanced Learning
Time: 3:00 - 3:20
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenter: Harrison Yang
As generative AI tools like ChatGPT gain traction in higher education, we are debating their potential to deepen learning — and not just make it easier. Drawing on graduate courses on digital media design (for creative learning) and portfolio development (for reflective practice), this study examines how AI-augmented assignments might foster critical thinking among pre- and in-service teachers.
Session 15: Using AI to Write Copy for Graphic Design
Time: 3:30 - 3:50
Location: Library Classroom 215 / remote access
Presenter: Woody Leslie. While text copy is undoubtedly an essential part of any design, writing it is not always the responsibility of a graphic designer, not to mention how long good writing takes—especially if it isn't the main focus of a class. I have adapted generative AI into many of my class projects to create written copy, and allow my graphic design students to focus on the more essential skills (for these classes at least) of design & layout.