5 things you should know about AI in the classroom

Key points:

By now we hear the term “artificial intelligence” more than a few times a day. But despite stereotypical science fiction depictions of ai, it has a legitimate place in today’s classrooms.

Innovative educators and students are finding new ways to integrate ai into teaching and learning every day. Teachers can spend more one-on-one time with students when they use ai to quickly complete tedious tasks. Students, on the other hand, learn to critically evaluate information and learn about biases when analyzing information from generative ai sources.

Here are five ways educators are incorporating ai into classrooms right now:

1. This English teacher created a project-based scenario: the students were lawyers at a law firm and the teacher is their client, which gives them this challenge: She is thinking about investing in ChatGPT. Based on their understanding and the research they would conduct during The crucible unit, should I do it? What would be the implications? The advantages and disadvantages? Typically, at the end of a unit on The Crucible, he asks students to test various characters and support their ideas with plenty of original evidence. This time, I wanted you to test ChatGPT as well. What are your strengths and opportunities, your weaknesses and threats?

2. These Florida teachers are using ai to prioritize student-centered activities: Each student needs something slightly different to learn well. When we have tools as teachers that allow us to meet those individualized needs and support the whole student, we know that learning improves. We can now use ai to personalize activities that support mental health, give students more ownership over their own learning, and even provide more individualized and responsive tutoring. Your students are likely to see ai emerge in their classrooms this year in ways that put them in the driver’s seat and help make learning feel targeted precisely to them, their needs, and their interests.

3. This educator makes the case that ChatGPT is now part of learning and teachers should accept it, with some conditions: It’s time for educators to treat ChatGPT as an unreliable partner in all tasks and provide a way for students to allow us know how much help they received. He specifies a disrespectful partner because there is no way to know where ChatGPT got its information from for a single response. It uses a mathematical model of probable words, not research. It is basically autofill on steroids. ChatGPT is like a classmate who has read a lot and has a lot of confidence in everything he says, but doesn’t remember exactly where he got the information from. It could be an academic journal or a conspiracy website. And this is how we should treat it: a partner who sounds like they know what they’re talking about but still need to be verified.

4. A higher education faculty member offers information on how to determine whether generative ai has been used in assignments: Instructors at all levels should consider certain criteria to help them determine whether text-based presentations were generated by students or by ai. Lack of personal experiences or generalized examples are a potential sign of ai-generated writing; For example, “My family went to the beach in the car” is more likely to be generated by ai than “Mom, Betty, and Rose went to the beach.” 3^third Street beach for swimming. » Teachers should look for unusual or complete phrases that a student would not normally use; A high school student talking about a gap in her school records could be a sign that the document was generated by ai.

5. This school leader uses artificial intelligence to help students learn history by having realistic conversations with technological versions of Socrates, Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King. Students can learn about gravity by chatting with an ai-powered version of Sir Isaac Newton. They can learn about the art of Frida Kahlo and World War II by chatting with a teenage version of Anne Frank. This level of commitment was unheard of until now.

Laura Ascione is the editorial director of eSchool Media. She graduated from the prestigious Philip Merrill School of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

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