One of my favorite ways I’ve used AI this year had nothing to do with work, presentations, or saving time. It was documenting our trip to Scotland.

I’ve always liked the idea of keeping a travel journal. The problem is that I’m probably never going to sit down and write several paragraphs about every day of a trip. Then you get home, life gets busy again, and suddenly all those little details that made the trip memorable start to disappear.

After we returned from Scotland, I decided to see if ChatGPT could help me actually document the trip while I could still remember most of those details. I basically worked my way through the trip one day at a time and talked through what we did. I wasn’t trying to make it sound good or dictate a finished story. I was dumping my memories into ChatGPT and letting it help me organize them.

I talked about where we went, what we ate, what was funny, what I thought about the golf courses, and the random things that I knew we would laugh about later. That included our first bacon roll, playing the New Course at St Andrews, Rose’s favorite latte in Edinburgh, playing the Himalayas putting course, visiting a castle used in Monty Python, and plenty of details from the golf courses we played.

ChatGPT helped me take all of that and organize it into a journal without losing the way I would actually tell the story. There were times when the writing started sounding too much like a travel article and not enough like me, so I would tell ChatGPT that and we would adjust it. I wanted fewer dramatic descriptions, fewer unnecessary paragraph breaks, and more of the details I would actually tell someone if they asked me about the trip.

As we built the journal, the project grew. I had tracked our daily step counts during the trip, so we added those. We kept golf stats. I even added some completely unnecessary but important statistics, like the number of bacon rolls I ate and my success rate trying to split the G on a Guinness. By the time we had worked through the entire trip, I realized I had enough content to turn it into an actual book, so I moved over to Canva and started designing it.

That is where the project really started coming together for me. I could pair the stories from each day with our photos and build something that felt like a real keepsake from the trip. The golf courses, castles, pubs, cities, and all the random moments now had the story that went along with the pictures instead of just being another 500 photos sitting in my camera roll.

The whole process has also changed how I’m thinking about documenting future trips. Instead of waiting until I get home, I can spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day talking through what happened while everything is still fresh. I don’t have to sit in a hotel room and try to write a polished journal entry. I can just talk about the day, capture the details, and worry about turning it into something later.

I also think there is a really practical connection here for educators. Think about how many things happen during a school year that we intend to document and never do. A teacher could talk through what happened during a lesson while driving home and later use those thoughts to reflect on what worked and what they would change. An administrator could capture thoughts after a classroom walkthrough, a meeting, or a school event and use AI to help organize those observations. A teacher could even document a major classroom project throughout the process and eventually turn those reflections, student work, and photos into something that tells the story of the learning.

The point isn’t to have AI write the reflection for you. The reflection still needs to come from you. AI can help capture it, ask follow-up questions, organize what you said, and eventually help turn those scattered thoughts into something useful. That could be a professional reflection, evidence for an evaluation, a recap for families, a portfolio of student learning, or simply a record of something you want to remember.

For me, this is another example of what I mean when I talk about using AI as a thought partner. ChatGPT didn’t create any of these memories or tell me what the trip meant. It helped me organize my own thoughts, pull out details I might have otherwise forgotten, and turn a bunch of memories into something our family can actually keep.

There are hundreds of pictures from Scotland sitting on my phone, and I’m glad I have them. But years from now, I think having the stories that go with those pictures is going to be even more valuable. AI simply made it realistic for me to actually document them.