In 2024, education will adopt AI, but slowly

Key points:

In education, we tend to move pretty slowly when it comes to adopting new technologies, and that pattern won't change with artificial intelligence (ai). Next year, early adopters will continue to play with new ai tools to see how they can be used in education. They will have some surprising successes (and some failures) as they illuminate the path forward and the rest of us endlessly discuss the potential uses and abuses of ai in our classrooms.

Here's a little bit about why we'll have to wrestle with ai, the barriers we'll face in adopting it next year, and some resources to help educators start exploring ai.

Why teachers need to catch up with students

Students are already becoming familiar with ai tools, so teachers need to help them discover all the ways these tools can benefit their learning in a safe and supportive way.

ai tools also have great potential to automate much of the heavy lifting in teaching. I have colleagues who have used ai tools to create rubrics and provide feedback on rubrics they had already created. ai can be helpful in creating lesson plans, assessment tools, presentations, seating charts, or letters to your students' families for back-to-school night. Putting ai to work on administrative tasks will free up time to focus on supporting students.

Privacy and Cheating Concerns

Right now, the biggest barrier to the adoption of ai tools is the fact that many schools simply cannot download or access them due to privacy concerns. In New York, where I work, 2-D Education Law imposes restrictions on schools' ability to use software that takes personally identifiable information.

Here and in other states with similar laws, until ai tools that comply with those laws become more available, teachers may have to use their own ai tools on their own computers while showing students what They are doing. Some educational software is beginning to integrate artificial intelligence tools for student use, such as canva graphic design suite and features like that could be another avenue for teachers to safely and legally support student practice with ai.

While it is important to safeguard students' personally identifiable information, some bans on ai in the classroom have nothing to do with that and focus more on ai as a bad academic resource or as a means to take shortcuts or make mistakes. cheating openly. These bans are similar to previous bans on tools like Wikipedia, YouTube or calculators.

Wikipedia may be a poor academic source in itself because anyone can edit it, but it is a great place for a student to learn the basics about a topic, along with a list of sources for further reading. YouTube may be the largest collection of instructional videos on the planet, and contrary to the insistence of every teacher in the 1980s, today you carry a calculator everywhere in your pocket. As with ai, we're not really afraid of the tools themselves, but rather what we imagine students will do with them. The answer, then, is not to ban the tools, but to teach students appropriate ways to use them.

Concerns that students will cheat with ai don't seem that different to me than concerns that they would copy from the encyclopedia. Everyone looks for the ai ​​version of Turnitin, but the best way to prevent students from cheating with a tool is to introduce them to it. As soon as your teacher is using something, it won't be right anymore, so you're already halfway there.

Give your students a short writing assignment and give ChatGPT the same, then have your students compare them and talk about the differences. Ask if it really seems like an efficient way to get information, since you have to read it, examine it, and revise it anyway. Then talk about more legitimate ways you could use it. ai tools are great for creating a table of contents or an outline to help ideas flow. They can also provide helpful comments and suggestions for your review. There are many different ways to incorporate ai tools into the writing process, and as long as students have a lot of discussion about the differences between writing something themselves and having software do it, they are all potential learning opportunities.

Starting the conversation

The best way for teachers to get started with ai is to simply play with it. I was a little nervous about taking the plunge, but you can use it for low-risk personal matters at first if it makes you more comfortable. Ask him or her to provide you with a travel itinerary for a vacation you're taking or to plan a romantic dinner for an upcoming anniversary. If you're really stumped, simply ask an ai tool for a list of fun and useful ways to use ai, and then try out a few of your favorites.

I would give the same advice to administrators. Just jump in and start playing on your own time, then present a tool at a teacher meeting and have fun. We all need to be on the same page and use the same language, so get some experience with ai tools until you know the meaning of phrases like “machine learning” and “generative model” inside and out before you ideate. a plan to introduce these tools to students.

Once teachers introduce ai tools into the classroom, it is important to focus on the process, not the product. ai still gets facts wrong all the time. Hallucinates information that never existed. You may be prone to prejudice and discrimination, cannot understand emotions, and are incapable of being creative. Students will need digital citizenship skills, along with traditional soft skills such as critical thinking, to critique the outcomes of these systems. Instead of focusing on the product that ai offers us, the tasks related to these tools should focus on the research process for them. How are the facts verified? How might the results of this tool be affected by the samples it was trained on?

Simply starting a conversation about ai in a professional learning community can go a long way in spreading good ideas. Virtually any educational technology organization today offers resources to help teachers learn about ai as well. ai” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>ISTE has several resources., including books, handouts, and an entire class. I participate in a podcast called ai-cafe/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Coffee ai, presented by BAM Radio, where we talk about a host of topics related to ai in education. Even looking at your own state's standards to see how ai is incorporated into them could be revealing.

If you haven't already, don't be afraid to get your toes wet in the new year. artificial intelligence has the potential to change the world and, if we allow it, to improve education. We just have to dive in and prepare to support our students.