Blogging and Cultivating Genuine Connections in an AI-Driven World with Angela Watson

Angela Watson is a productivity and mindset specialist, author, and motivational speaker for educators. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and has a masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction, along with eleven years of classroom teaching experience and over a decade of experience as an instructional coach.  Angela is best known for the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek program, which has supported nearly 60,000 teachers, coaches, and administrators in maximizing their contractual time so they’re not working endlessly on nights and weekends. She’s also maintained the website now known as TruthforTeachers.com for nearly 20 years, publishing articles, books, courses, curriculum, and professional development services. Her Truth for Teachers podcast has over 7 million downloads and offers free biweekly encouragement to make teaching more effective, efficient, and enjoyable.

Unlock the secrets to thriving in the digital age with our very own blogging and AI whisperer, Angela Watson. With a treasure trove of experience spanning over two decades, Angela takes us on a voyage from her early website days to the latest in leveraging SEO and email lists for driving traffic. Aspiring teacherpreneurs, prepare to be inspired by her journey and learn how to harness the power of artificial intelligence to elevate your TpT business to new heights while keeping your content as authentic as a hand-written thank-you card.

Have you ever wondered how to stand out in a sea of AI-generated content? This episode is your compass, guiding you towards creating impactful educational materials with a human touch. I share my personal strategy of collaborating with a collective of classroom teachers, ensuring every piece of advice rings true to the classroom experience. 

As we sail towards the future of content creation, let's talk shop about moving beyond Teachers Pay Teachers and charting your own course with independent platforms like Shopify. Discover how to craft resources with the complexity and creativity that AI can't replicate, leverage AI for tasks it excels at, and keep the spark of innovation alive in your educational offerings. Whether you're navigating the waters of SEO or personalizing content to build trust with your audience, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to make waves as a teacherpreneur in the vast ocean of the digital world. And a special thanks to Angela Watson for sharing her invaluable insights and lighting the way.

Angela's Website: Truth for Teachers
https://truthforteachers.com/

Angela's Podcast: Truth for Teachers
https://truthforteachers.com/podcast/
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/angela-watsons-truth-for-teachers/id954139712
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1KICZW01ohDN9jlkclrQew

Angela Watson's Teachers Pay Teachers Store
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Angela-Watson

Angela's YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJFNO_fq1zGMK_sw0jof_DQ

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the rebranded teacher podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on teachers, pay teachers and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPD businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Speaker 1: 0:21

We are taking a little break from our coaching and calls because I want to talk about something that is newly of interest to me and that is blogging, and I know a lot of you guys are listening and you're probably thinking one of two things. First of all, since when did Lauren become interested in blogging? Because I've always said that blogging is not my thing. And, second of all, you're just now interested in blogging because blogging has been around forever. In fact, today's guest has been blogging for over 20 years, and she's going to be sharing a lot of valuable blogging information with us, including how to use AI to help you with your blogging and some other tips for AI inside of your TPD business. But here recently, blogging has been something that, with the introduction of AI, has started to seem a little bit more attainable to me, like something that's a little bit more doable, and so I'm really excited to have today's guest, angela Watson from Truth for Teachers, here to share her experience with both blogging and utilizing AI or chat GPT inside of her business.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Angela, for those of you who don't know, she's kind of an icon in the teacher community. She's the author of the 40 hour teacher work week and, of course, the host of the podcast Truth for Teachers, and I'm so excited that she's here and I can't wait for you guys to meet Angela. Hey, angela, how are you? I'm great, lauren, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm so excited to talk to you about blogging, firstly, because you're my type of person. It's like you specialize in helping people get things done efficiently and effectively, so I'm really excited because blogging has always been something that's really daunting to me, so I'm excited to have this conversation with you for selfish reasons. So you want to start by just telling everyone a little bit about yourself, who you are, and a little bit about your teacher business journey.

Speaker 2: 2:01

Sure, so my website is TruthforTeacherscom and I started it, the original iteration of it. It wasn't called that, but I first started in 2003. So I've been blogging now for 20 years. I was actually before blogs were a thing. It was actually just a website that I had to HTML code myself back in the day. Yeah, so I've been steady through this whole evolution of blogging, of social media, of podcasting. I've now been podcasting since 2015, which is Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers podcast, and I feel like my journey has just sort of evolved really organically.

Speaker 2: 2:38

I was in the classroom for 11 years and I started publishing books and doing teacher workshops and things like that based on my ideas, and I really loved it. So I moved into instructional coaching, which is what I've been doing for like the last 12 years. So, yeah, my job basically now is just supporting teachers, creating resources for them. I've been selling on teachers, pay teachers since 2012. I have six books. I have a number of courses, including the 40 hour teacher work week. So just lots and lots of things that I've built over time, and it's just really cool to see what are the new opportunities to serve teachers and create awesome things.

Speaker 1: 3:15

I love that. So you mentioned that you've had your blog for over 20 years now, which is absolutely incredible. Can you tell us a little bit about, like, what role has that played in growing your business? Like, how has the blog helped your business to flourish?

Speaker 2: 3:32

So I'll speak to two parts of that. One is about how it helped me back in the day and then one about what I think would be relevant for folks now, because it's going to be a totally different ballgame if you didn't start back 20 years ago. So for me it was absolutely pivotal because, again, this was before social media and so and really there weren't even that many teacher websites yet, because it was actually before blogs, so there were really only a handful of us sharing our ideas online. So I've been there sort of since the very beginning and so for me it's been absolutely pivotal and I'm really grateful for that, because I learned early to compile all of my resources in one place, and that's one of the problems that I have with social media now is, like you know, you post something and then it's gone and it's not easily searchable. So if I remember that someone shared something really incredible on Instagram and I go back to the feed, I've got to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll to try to find it and may have been in their stories. Now it's gone or wait. Did I see it on Facebook or was it on TikTok? So having everything in the website, I feel like is super important. So for me, it is truly the cornerstone of everything that I've done in terms of how I think it fits.

Speaker 2: 4:36

Now, it's mostly for SEO purposes. Seo is huge because there are still a lot of teachers who are searching for things online searching for ideas, searching for articles and resources and things and so the SEO for a website is really, really important. So that's how most people are finding things. Now, you know, with social media, so much of it is pay to play. If I share a link to my article on my Facebook page, I've got like 160,000 followers. It might go out to 800 people. You know they're not going to see it and they want the content.

Speaker 2: 5:06

So I really rely on my email list to drive traffic to the blog and I rely on SEO and I rely on people sharing, and that really has always been my philosophy since the very beginning is just create awesome stuff, right, stuff that is super helpful for teachers and speaks directly to their needs, and they will share it for me rather than me having to always try to figure out how am I going to get the word out? Because I'm a creator, I'm a writer. I'm not a person who really enjoys marketing. I don't really enjoy social media very much. You know like I'm kind of over it at this point. I just want to make stuff, and that's really what my focus is, and I feel like blogging allows me to do that.

Speaker 1: 5:41

So before we get into some the meat of what we're going to be talking about today because we're talking about AI and using AI as a tool when blogging hearing you talk my initial thought would be that you would be very much anti AI. Can you talk to me about how you felt when you started to see like the artificial intelligence, like chat, GPT people starting to use that to write their blogs and to use that for writing their marketing materials and for speaking to their audience when it first came out, having done this by yourself for all these years, Like what were your first thoughts when that came out? Nothing is ever going to be the same.

Speaker 2: 6:19

This just turned online business upside down, and I'm not a person who says that. Very often, like you know, there's a lot of trends that come and go, and that's that's one of the advantages of having been in this game for a long time, as I've seen things that people felt like you absolutely had to do and, turns out, you did not absolutely have to do it. In half those things don't even exist anymore. But when I saw chat GPT come out last fall, I was like this is a game changer and this is only going to get more powerful and more ubiquitous, and it's something that students are certainly going to be using, whether we want them to use it or not, and so, therefore, teachers need to learn how to use it. So, actually, you know, I have, obviously, I have, you know, reservations and concerns. There's a lot of things that we don't know. There's certainly copyright issues that we need to think about. There's bias issues. There's definitely some, you know, some things that we need to be aware of. It's not this perfect, ideal platform that is, you know, only going to bring positive things. It's going to, you know, like everything else online, I feel like there's both benefits, and then there's drawbacks and there's positive effects and then there's absolutely disastrous things. So I don't try to paint it as something that I think is all good or all bad. Like a lot of technology, it's how it's used.

Speaker 2: 7:20

But personally, when I first heard about it and realized that this was something that was just going to get more powerful, I was really excited, because writing is difficult and tedious and anything that can make that easier, make the research easier, I'm all about it.

Speaker 2: 7:35

So you know that's something that I really wanted to. I have a VA and a project manager, so there's three people in our team and I told my VA right away like we definitely like we want to get on this, and she's like I'm so glad you feel that way. She was like I was afraid you know that you were basically going to try to replace me with AI. I'm like no way. Like I want you to learn how to use this. I want this to make your job easier and more effective and efficient, and you know we can just sort of guide each other through it. And that's what we've been doing over this past year is, you know, finding little tips and tricks that make it easier and kind of using that behind the scenes to help us produce the things that we make you know more quickly and, I think, also better quality, because it's surfacing ideas that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. I love that.

Speaker 1: 8:15

So I love the fact that you first of all embrace that. You know you embrace this change and I think that that's something that a lot of us have a hard time doing, myself included where something comes in, it's new, it's different, it's not familiar to us. And it's kind of scary a little bit when something like this comes into play, because it's like okay, now I'm competing not just against other human beings, I'm competing against artificial intelligence, and where is this going to go? What does this mean for me and for the status quo? So I love that. I love your take on that.

Speaker 1: 8:44

Can you share a little bit about how you use AI to help you blog? Like, how are you using it? Because this, to me, blogging, seemed like something that I would never do and I've gone on record many times saying I'm never going to blog because it's just not my thing, I don't enjoy it. And when this hit the scene, I was like okay, I feel like this might be doable for me and my business. Like I feel like this might be something that I could actually make blogging attainable for me. So I would love to hear how you're using this with your blogging.

Speaker 2: 9:13

I think that AI has helped produce a ton of really low quality content that's all over the web now. I mean, I've even seen now on Amazon that people are using AI to write and publish books. In like a day, a current event will happen and the next day there's a whole like 300 page book on it that's completely written by AI. So I think in the coming years it's going to become more and more of a problem that we have. We already have too much information right. There's already too many resources and a lot of what is surfacing in search is low quality because, you know, google search has really declined over the last few years in terms of what you're seeing in the results. You're getting a lot of paid search things that are relevant ads, I mean, it's just it's it's becoming more difficult to find good quality content, which is really, you know, a shame and, I think, a mark against the search engines companies who have the ability to surface the best quality information and choose not to in order to profit themselves. So when I'm thinking about blogging, I think about do I have something important, interesting, unique to share on this topic? I'm not going to post just a post and one thing that I started doing, actually about two years ago, was I created a writer's collective, and this was especially important to me, since I've been out of the classroom for a while, as I really want to amplify the work of classroom teachers. I think that my role is important because I can see the forest in the trees being outside of it and obviously I have a lot more time to focus on something like this. But I really want to center the work of the people who are in the classrooms right now. So I have a writer's collective. These are paid writers who are in the classroom and they're sharing their ideas and what's working for them. So that really helps a lot, and then that way I feel like I can continually produce new content without feeling like I have to keep coming up with stuff myself. Another thing that I do is I because I have the podcast and I have an article for each podcast is I will bring on experts. So if there's something that I want to talk about but I don't feel like I know that much about, instead of spending all these hours researching it, I'll bring on someone else and then use that as the basis of my post. So that's one way that I've sort of thought about making sure that what I'm saying is actually valuable, is not trying to produce too much.

Speaker 2: 11:17

I don't know of any teacher in this day and age who is saying I wish I had more information, I wish there had more things to read, I wish I had more articles to comb through. I wish she would email me every single day with something else that I need to do, like no one's saying that anymore. It's.

Speaker 2: 11:33

The landscape has totally shifted to the point where people really need tools to help them cut through all of the noise. So I try to be really intentional about not adding to that noise, not posting just to post, and to make sure that what I am creating is SEO friendly, so people can find it. It's well organized and it's in depth, because I want people to feel like, okay, now that I've read this article, I don't need to look for anything else. I've got all the information I need. I know what my next steps are. I see a free download that I can get from this. I see maybe a paid product if I want to learn more, or a book that if I want to learn more, and that way they're not hunting all over the internet trying to find what they need. I try to make things as comprehensive as possible, and AI has definitely helped with that, because it just makes the writing process faster.

Speaker 1: 12:16

So when we're talking about, you have this writer's collective. You have a group of teachers who are sharing their ideas. Are they writing the blog posts or are they sending you ideas and information Like how is that working? How are you going from I've got these ideas or I've got this information, whether from having a guest expert on the podcast or maybe it's coming in from these teachers, to it's a complete blog post with the help of AI? How is that working?

Speaker 2: 12:42

So with the writer's collective, we don't specifically use AI. It's possible some of them use AI to help them write their posts. It's not really part of that process. What they do is we have a cadre of writers and once a quarter, basically, they can pitch, pitch an article proposal. They pitch a couple of different topics. I choose one and then they submit it by the end of the month and because these are really skilled writers and master teachers, I do very, very little editing.

Speaker 2: 13:06

I really don't touch it much. You know my team goes over it to make sure there's no typos or anything like that, but I really wanted to be in their voice. I don't like to standardize people's writing or people's teaching for that matter. I really like people to be able to do things in their own style. So, yeah, so that's a pretty independent process in terms of my own articles. I may or may not use AI. A lot of what I write is from my own experience. It's sort of from the heart, but I have actually been using it more in sort of like the resource centered articles. So, for example, like curriculum, right now I have a curriculum line called finding flow solutions which I sell on TPT and then I also sell on Shopify, so I just recently started a Shopify store, which I know is something that you're super interested into and you just got yours going right.

Speaker 1: 13:49

I just got mine going like last month. Yeah, this was my first full month and I'm quite pleased yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:53

I think this was my first full month too, like it's a very new process. It's a big learning curve, right.

Speaker 1: 13:58

It is. It is a big learning curve, but I found like once, once it's up, it's pretty, pretty easy to manage?

Speaker 2: 14:04

Yep, I'm finding the same thing too, so yeah, so I really wanted to do that for this new curriculum line, because, well, that's a whole nother topic with teachers pay teachers and you've talked about some of this stuff before on your podcast. You know some of the pros and cons of selling there, but it's a curriculum line that is designed to help particularly secondary teachers, teach students how to focus their attention and manage their time. So it's something that you know. It's a very in depth resource, and I suppose that's maybe another angle of AI to consider is making sure that we're not making things that teachers can easily replicate on their own. If they can just type that prompt into chat GPT and get it themselves, then we're kind of wasting our time, right. So this is something that is much more complex, something that takes, you know, many, many hours to create, and it really does help with the research. So, with chat GPT which, by the way, I feel like is is the best tool out there I've tried other ones, I've tried Bard and a couple of you know a similar type of tools, and chat GPT blows them all out of the water, in my opinion, in terms of the quality of response that you get and what I've seen is that sometimes you get much better results than others. People will say you know AI. Experts will say it has to do a lot with the prompts and with training it over time. But I've just found it's just better at certain tasks than others. The more professional and stiff you need something to sound, the better. So, for example, I had one of the first tasks we had it do was write a letter to administrators that teachers can give their principles to convince them to buy the 40 hour teacher work week for them. So it was supposed to outline all the benefits of the course and explain you know why the principal should invest in this. Chat GPT is fantastic with things like that, like business-y kind of letters. It sounds like very formal. I was really pleased with that output. We made some minor tweaks to it and then made it available as a Google doc for teachers to just copy and paste and then they can do what they want to. So chat GPT was great for that.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Trying to have it brainstorm classroom activities for a blog post for me was a total bust. Like I just it was generic, it was bland. No matter how much I tweaked the prompts, I just felt like it wasn't good at that. So experimentation, I think, is really key in trying to figure out what it's helpful with, but I have found that it's very helpful with TPT, product creation in terms of researching. So this is a lot of information I'm giving. I know I'll give you.

Speaker 2: 16:13

I'll give you one one example of this. So there's a there's a unit that I just did on energy and stress management for kids to help them come to class with enough energy to fully participate, but not so much energy that they're sort of like bouncing off the walls, right, and the kids it's still so. One of the things that that they're learning through this unit is about all the different factors that impact your energy levels. So I knew which things I wanted to talk about, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything. So, before chat with GPT, what I would have done was a Google search about factors that impact your energy levels. I would have clicked around to like 20 different low quality articles that are all saying the same thing, because half of them have been copied off of another site and you can't even tell what the original source was. Like you know who which one of these copied from which, like, because they're all just recycling the same information in very, again, generic and bland ways, and then I would have had to synthesize it and then I would have had to, you know, reword everything and make sure that I'm not plagiarizing, make sure that I'm making the information my own. Think about how I'm going to cite the sources, what needs to be cited, you know, what is general information and doesn't have to. That's extremely time consuming. So because of chat GPT, I just typed in you know, write 500 words for teams on the different factors that impact energy levels, and just bam, bam, bam, bam bullet points. You know, easy to read stuff that I hadn't really thought to include. Super, super helpful. So it helps, I feel, like, a lot with the research.

Speaker 2: 17:32

I don't necessarily use a lot of what it writes, although sometimes I do. One of my concerns is that we don't really know what the source is. So even if I fact check it, I still especially if it's a resource that I'm selling I want to be really careful that I'm not accidentally selling someone else's writing. So I'm very cautious about that. But it was helpful for researching. It made me more confident that I was not leaving out something important because I knew it had scraped the entire web looking for information on this topic, and these were the things that had apparently been coming up over and over again on the most authoritative sites, and so it enabled me to make that lesson in a fraction of the time that I would have you know, without chat GBT, if I'd had to research on my own. So I actually like it better for researching than for writing. Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 1: 18:14

I've loved it for trying to find different ideas and fill in gaps, like what you're talking about. Like, a lot of times you know I'll have it write 10, give me 10 ideas and really only one of them sparks anything. But it takes so little time to do that that that one good idea can be really, really helpful for helping you get that third point in your blog post or you know something like that. So I've loved it for ideas. I've found the same thing, though, to be true with. It makes everything so formal, which is really nice if you're trying to be formal, like, for example, we did teacher seller summit, you know, back in June, and when I was writing the about teacher seller summit, like what is it about? Like I gave it.

Speaker 1: 18:53

Like this is, this is what's included, like this is what. And it wrote out this full like email for me, like an email marketing, and of course you know you go in, you tweak, you change things. It felt very professional, which was the polished professional you know, feel that I was going for for that newsletter. But at the same time, I've had it try to write blog posts for me before and I'm like yeah, no, this isn't. This isn't quite cutting it Like take this informal email and turn it into a little bit longer for blog post, and it's like using you know 12th grade language where I might want it to use you know an eighth grade language or something like that, something a little bit more informal. So I totally feel you on that. What are some things that you would just say I wouldn't do this with AI, like in terms of blogging? Like this is one thing that I would just completely steer clear of doing.

Speaker 2: 19:38

You know, I feel like it's a really individual process. I actually can't think of any hard and fast rules, particularly with how quickly things are changing. I would just say be really mindful of you know where the sources are coming from, and I believe that this is something that open AI is working on is being more transparent about where the information is coming from and definitely double check for bias and check for fake information as well, because chat GBT and other AI tools have been known to just make up information. So, for example, one time I heard about an author who had chat GBT write a bio for her and it credited her with a book she didn't write, so it just. I guess there was someone with a similar name who wrote the book or something.

Speaker 2: 20:16

So you you definitely have to watch what's there for sure.

Speaker 1: 20:20

One of the other questions that I was going to ask you but I think you've already answered it is about basic blogging rules that you might want to know before just relying on AI.

Speaker 1: 20:30

And one of the things that you said earlier about writing content that teachers need, or writing content that's actually beneficial and helpful for your audience, is key, because then you don't have to worry with the marketing quite as much, because teachers are going to share it or your audience is going to share it, they're going to love it versus just how do I, you know, get a post out there? Because I think that that's sort of the temptation, at least with me with having chat GBT is I can put a post out so fast, you know, like I could. Just if I just want to create a blog post, just to have it written, I can create one really quickly, but is that blog post necessarily going to be helpful? You know is another story. Do you have any other thoughts on things to keep in mind before or, instead of just relying on AI, I think the personalized touch is what makes it more human.

Speaker 2: 21:23

The cool thing with chat GBT is you can ask it to write in the style of someone and because I have 20 years worth of content on the web, I can say write an article about X, y and Z in the style of Angela Watson. It tries to mimic me. It does a decent job. It sounds like a little less stiff, it sounds a little more like my voice, but it's never going to be totally my voice. I think for me, the best articles that I find are the one where they're clearly written from the heart, where a person has shared their thoughts, their feelings, their little tips and tricks for things they share stories about.

Speaker 2: 21:56

I tried this and it was a disaster. And then I tried that and this worked so much better. Ai at this point can't do that. I'm really hesitant to make really any blanket statements about AI, because it has improved so much, even over the past year, that when we talk about its limitations, well, ai could never replicate a human. It may be able to. I really can't speak to that, but I know that it could never be completely me, or at least I hope it could never be completely me. The more that I can add in my own personal perspective, I think makes a big difference.

Speaker 2: 22:25

Also, coming up with something that is a little more comprehensive is important because, as I said, search is so bad it's so difficult to find good sources that I like to think that if people come to truth4teacherscom it feels like a sigh of relief to them. There's no ads, there's no pop-ups, there's no videos playing in the bottom right-hand corner. It's just all solid material that actual humans have done, if not all the vast majority of, and personally fact-trunk and added images and made it a really pleasant and hopefully trustworthy reading experience. They feel like they can actually trust that resource, because I feel like that's one of the most difficult things to find online is what is a source that I can actually trust? I guess that would be.

Speaker 2: 23:07

My piece of advice for folks is to really think about what is the focus of your blog Is it a specific subject area or aspect of teaching and make it a reputable source where people feel like I could share this with my administrators. I could share this with my colleagues and trust that the stuff they find is going to be professional, it's going to be helpful, it's going to be comprehensive and they don't have to go all over the web, they don't have to scroll through a TikTok feed, they don't have to try to remember which platform they saw a good idea on. It's all on this one site that's super easy to navigate and that you have control over. No one can take that away from me. This is my content that I own and it's mine to use in whatever way I want to. I feel like that's a really, really powerful thing, as more and more people are only using social media and not really having a website base.

Speaker 2: 23:54

If it's something that you already have, I would say keep it up for sure and focus on the SEO, because that's probably going to be the main way people find it. If you don't have one yet, consider creating something that doesn't have to have a thousand articles, because, again, people don't need more information. They need good information and they need it to be easy to access. If you can just create, let's say, five articles with the top questions that you get, or three articles that are directly related to your products, your products meet those needs and you can explain all your different strategies and then link to the product below. Even something like that, I feel like, is a more authoritative source than a lot of the bland generic AI generated bot farm type of stuff that we see on the internet. Having that real person behind the site and really thinking of it as a reference point for teachers, I think is what can set your blog apart in 2023 and 2024. I love it.

Speaker 1: 24:47

I love it. So you talked about how you've used AI for blogging and for research. Are there any other ways that you've used it to help benefit your business?

Speaker 2: 24:57

Yeah, I mean my team tends to go to chat GPT as sort of a starting point for a lot of different tasks. Like you were mentioning, for the teacher seller summit, we had a summit last summer, the 40 hour teacher workweek online summit, and it was individual teachers sharing their best time, saving tips, just like 15, 20 minute sessions. So there were a ton of sessions. There were like 35 sessions and I was like, oh my gosh, like writing a summary of each of these is going to take forever, because that's copywriting in the sense of, like you know, you're writing marketing copy, which is that's a whole nother type of writing. So I was like, how are we going to do this? So I told my VA. I said, see what chat GPT can come up with. I don't know if it's going to be good at this or not, and it was just like you found it was phenomenal actually at really like creating enticing short copy that you know made people want to click and really describe what it was. My VA had to do some fact checking for sure. Like it included some things that weren't there. It missed some things, but I would say it did probably 90% of that task that would have otherwise taken us, I would say at least 10 hours. I think it took more, like two. So I'd like to just try it out and just see, and if it's not really helpful with that task, that's okay, because, like you said, it's not like it takes a long time Talking about, like you know, five minutes and chat GPT and you're just like, okay, forget it. That really wasn't that big of a waste considering that it may be able to save you hours. So that would be.

Speaker 2: 26:11

My advice is just, you know anything that you need to have done, try it out and see, and you can also play around with the generative AI for images and videos, which you know I'm not done a lot with, but I've heard those are getting even better. And for my Shopify store, actually, the main image in the store was AI generated. My web developer did that. He put in something about like a peaceful looking modern classroom and it's just this beautiful photo that, like you know, it's just, it's really cool. It looks like a real photo, but it's a completely AI generated image. So there's just some neat stuff that I think is going to be easier and easier to do and you know, just seeing where it can save you time and you know, if it doesn't work, at least it can be sort of a starting point for you to just jump off and kind of go from there. I love it.

Speaker 1: 26:54

I love it. Well, I have some fun questions for you, if you want to, if you want to do some fun ones, let's do it. Favorite podcast? I mean, we have your podcast right, so we definitely we're going to have to plug that at the end. But apart from your own podcast, what's one of your favorite podcasts to listen to?

Speaker 2: 27:08

Oh my, gosh, I'd listen to so many podcasts. Do you want, like, a general podcast or do you want a teaching podcast?

Speaker 1: 27:15

Any podcast, fun podcast anything. Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 2: 27:20

Well for education. I really like Elena Aguilar's bright morning podcast. She and she's really great with instructional coaching and, just you know, really speaking to the whole teacher and the whole student. I just love the way she shows up in the world to her podcast is really awesome. Beyond that, I am currently listening to a podcast called sold out, which is about the housing crisis, and that's a really interesting one too. Also just listened to great vine, which is about the book band pushback in great vine, texas. That's phenomenal. It's a six part series. I would definitely recommend that to everyone listening great vine, as well as NBC news first podcast before that, which was Southlake, and that was about the CRT bands. So those are really really good ones. That are, you know, related to education, but not specifically for teachers.

Speaker 1: 28:03

I love it I love it.

Speaker 2: 28:04

Favorite way to relax Hiking, being outside nature. Favorite show to binge watch currently. I just finished watching Grey's Anatomy, which I'd never seen when it was on, so I just binge like all the seasons. And I also just watched Schitt's Creek for like the fourth binge through. That's just, that's just comfort TV for me. I love it.

Speaker 1: 28:25

Your hand at a gift card to your favorite restaurant. Where are you going and what are you ordering?

Speaker 2: 28:30

Oh my, God, why are these the hardest questions?

Speaker 1: 28:33

I know, but they're so fun. I love to eat, so anything about food I mean a favorite restaurant.

Speaker 2: 28:39

We live in Brooklyn and there's so many good restaurants there, but there's a little Italian place in our neighborhood that is amazing that I would probably go to before any place sells. What's next for you and your business, angela? So I'm working on finding full solutions, the curriculum line that I talked about, getting this Shopify store up and going, same as you, trying to figure out all the little ins and outs and cool things that you can do with Shopify. And, yeah, I'm really into creating resources. Right now, I feel like I can either create or market. It's really hard for me to do both at the same time, even though I think that's probably what I should be doing is like create something, market it, create something, market it. No, I like to batch and I just get into a flow with something and I like to just lose myself at it, and the creation part is the most fun for me. So that's my big focus really is for 2024 is creation. So that's exciting and energizing and fun and, yeah, I'm really excited about it.

Speaker 1: 29:32

I love it. Well, where can everyone find you? They want to connect with you.

Speaker 2: 29:35

So truth for teacherscom is. That's the home base, as we've talked about, so you can find the links to all my social media there my podcast, my courses, books, everything at truth for teacherscom.

Speaker 1: 29:45

I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here today, Angela, and for sharing your wisdom and your knowledge with us. I sure appreciate it. I know I have a lot of people in my membership who are really excited about this podcast. I told them I was like, yeah, Angela Watson's coming in. They're like I love her. They were so excited, that's wonderful.

Speaker 2: 30:00

Yes, Thanks for having me and thanks for what you do on this podcast you really like. Have highlighted some awesome strategies for teacherpreneurs, and you know people who want to serve teachers in different ways, so I've learned a lot from listening from you and also from your guests. Oh well, thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 30:15

You have a great day. Yeah, you too. Thanks so much for being here. If you want to connect with Angela or learn more from her, you'll find links below to her website and to her podcast so you can connect with her. As always, I'm here every week, so I'm going to see you right back here on the podcast. Next week. I put out weekly content for teacher entrepreneurs helping you grow your business in a way that's purposeful and sustainable.