When I consider my own position on AI’s role in education, I definitely find myself sitting somewhere in the middle. I love how AI can be used by teachers to remove some of the time-consuming labour that is attached to generating content and reporting. I also believe that teachers need to be careful when using AI to create content and think critically about what they are including in their class design.
When it comes to student use of AI, we talked about the difficulty of avoiding it and detecting AI in our students’ work. I think that trying to teach students how to use AI responsibly, without letting it do all of the critical thinking for them, is extremely important. Teachers could model how they might use it to spark ideas or complete mundane tasks. Teachers should also explain the dangers of copyright and misinformation as much as possible to students.
Another idea is to include AI in assignments and ask students to work with it as a way of ensuring students are not using AI as a crutch to do the thinking for them. In an English class, we could potentially ask students to use AI to generate an argumentative essay about the novel we read, and then ask students to write a paragraph explaining if they agree with what AI came up with, why or why not? Students could also write about ways they could improve the essay written by AI.