Pro D-AI in the classroom
The biggest thing I took away from this professional development session is that we need to teach kids to keep their hands on the wheel when it comes to AI use. AI is an amazing tool for our students, it gives them the ability to have a 24/7 tutor/learning partner that can help a student outline an idea or explain a confusing concept in five different ways. The downside however is that it’s very tempting for kids to just let the AI do all the heavy lifting. If they skip all of the struggle of actually writing or thinking through a problem, they aren’t really learning. These tools also aren’t perfect yet, and can hallucinate and make things up all the time, so if a student isn’t paying attention, they end up turning in total nonsense and end up further behind than before.
The session also discussed the fact that these tools aren’t neutral and are prone to the biases seen everywhere on the internet as that is where it draws a majority of its learning from. A cool positive here is that it’s a great way to get students talking about ethics and digital citizenship in a way that actually feels relevant to them. It’s an eye-opening activity for them to realize that even technology has a bias. The negative, though, is that AI models are trained on the internet, which is full of historical and cultural biases. If kids just take what the AI says at face value it can lead to the appearance of harmful biases into their own work even though it may have been unintended. Knowing this knowledge, we as teachers have to teach them about the biases present within these tools, and how to scrutinize both their own prompts as well as the responses to ensure we are not propagating harmful ideologies.
Finally, AI is forcing us as teachers to change how we grade, which is both a blessing and a curse. The good news is that it’s pushing us toward more authentic work such as focusing on a student’s in class rough drafts, their verbal explanations, or how their ideas evolved over a week. The downsides for grading however is that we still don’t have a definitive answer as to what to do if a student uses/turns in AI created work There’s a stressful arms race with AI detectors that don’t work half the time, and that can really mess up the trust we’ve built with our students if we’re constantly scrutinizing their work and questioning if its their own thoughts/ideas.
A video showing the positives of embracing AI in the classroom