Wrangling Generative AI in your K-12 or Higher Education Classroom
Every year, I create fun, playful, and entertaining digital holiday greetings for colleagues and students. In December of 2022, I remember sitting at my desk the afternoon before leaving for holiday break and remembered that I had not done one for that holiday season. I felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All The Way, having forgotten to get that Turbo Man doll! Except, here was the twist -- I had NO IDEA what kind of holiday greeting to send to my colleagues and students, and to be quite honest, I just wanted to go home! So, I thought to myself, "Hey, self, why not try asking about that new ChatGPT thing? Maybe it will have a cool idea." So, that's exactly what I did! But then, I had an even BETTER idea! I fired up my favorite screen recorder at the time, and made THAT my holiday greeting. I recorded myself asking ChatGPT to create a holiday greeting for my colleagues, friends, and students to tell them how much I and the rest of the IT department appreciated them and wished them a wonderful holiday season.
I did it on a whim... I did it because I thought it would be fun (it was). I did it because I was desperate. I had no idea that between December of 2022 and March of 2023, I would be talking about ChatGPT in meetings and Teams calls more than any other subject. I had unwittingly introduced hundreds of people to this platform and its power and opened a can of worms at the same time. Sure, everyone had heard of generative AI. And it was coming whether I sent that digital holiday greeting or not. But the onslaught of ChatGPT and its companions like Gemini, CoPilot, and a myriad of others have shown us that our future will be rife with these tools - like it or not. So what should we do about it? Embrace it!
The Promise and Perils of Generative AI
Generative AI has inherent benefits and risks. There is no doubt about that. And there is nowhere this is more evident than in education. On one hand, it presents a powerful tool for personalized learning, content creation, and assisting educators in ways we could not have imagined just 5 years ago. These tools can help us great customized educational materials, provide real-time, customized, feedback and even lend a hand with grading and assessment (to a point). However, as with any great power, there comes great responsibility (sorry Spiderman). Generative AI can easily mimic human-like text, images, and media. This raises very real concerns over how we teach, how we assess, and how we know what our students are doing in the areas of academic honesty. As leaders in our respective schools or districts, we must educate ourselves in this area - what it is, what it isn't, what tools are out there, and what they can and cannot do.
Large Language Models and Their Impact on Education
Platforms such as ChatGPT and CoPilot have shown that they have amazing capabilities to understand the information we feed to them and then use that information to help us create new content, answer questions, and do incredible things. We are learning that creating novel content, training materials, worksheets, audio, video, and images are just the tip of the iceberg. These large learning models are capable of taking this information, ingesting it, and learning patterns and relationships, training themselves using other vast datasets so that they can help us reimagine ideas that we have. In this way, the current iteration of generative AI differs from previous disruptive technologies that we have seen in the past. The iPhone changed the way we communicated, but it did not help us rethink the way we made phone calls, it just changed where we could do it.
Harnessing this power is a true game-changer for teachers at all levels of education. Whether you are using ChatGPT, Gemini, or CoPilot, they can help administrators, teachers, and students with research, writing, and creative projects. They can help with summarizing entire bodies of work or a semester of assessments to help educators inform parents and students of progress (click here to see our previous BLOG post on this). As previously stated, this power is not without its risks. There is a significant risk to academic integrity with a tool that can simply bang out a 5-page essay on the religious undertones implicit in 17th-century America in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter in a convincing way (and ChatGPT CAN do it). More importantly, in spite of all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the AI-detection tools, none of them work to accurately detect AI-written content. Let me say it again in case you missed it. As of the writing of this article, there are no tools available that will reliably and consistently detect AI-written content. If you are using these and penalizing your students without doing any other consideration, please stop - you are doing them a disservice. Don't believe me? Here is an article from ARSTechnica based on what ChatGPT has to say on it, and here is some advice from MIT on the subject. There are many other research data points on this, as well.
Seriously, stop using them for that - no matter if you are an 8th grade ELA teacher or an adjunct instructor teaching a masters level course.
Reasons to Adopt Generative AI
We know the power is there to do great things with generative AI. Generative AI is ready for your school, district, or institution to use right now in a number of ways.
These include:
Create and build out a Chatbot to answer questions your studenst and parents have about different policies or courses.
Helping to collate and summarize datapoints such as enrollment, GPA, or student progress information.
Taking complex policy documents, asking AI to summarize and asses for potential improvement.
Analyzing school websites for regulatory compliance
Adoption Methods in Education
You cannot ignore generative AI. It is here, your students are using it, you need your faculty and staff to get on board, too! Here are some things to think about before you jump into adopting it on your campus.
Educate Students and Staff: Provide training and resources to help students and teachers understand the capabilities and limitations of Generative AI and the ethical implications of its use. Emphasize the importance of academic integrity and critical thinking.
Revise Assessment Methods: Consider ways to create GenAI-resistant assessment methods to reduce the potential for AI-generated results. This could include incorporating more open-ended, analytical, or project-based assignments that require critical thinking and creativity beyond what current AI models can produce, or simply having assignments done “off web.”
Develop Clear Policies: Establish clear policies and guidelines (under your AUP/ RUP) for the appropriate and responsible use of generative AI in our educational settings. These policies should outline expectations, consequences for misuse, and procedures for reporting and addressing incidents of academic dishonesty.
Foster a Culture of Integrity: Cultivate a culture of academic integrity within your school or district. Encourage open discussions about the ethical use of AI and promote responsible behavior while celebrating authentic learning and achievement.
It is clear that Generative AI offers a myriad of benefits to every organization, but it is just as clear that each organization needs to assess how it will be used and how it will be handled. Generative AI should be approached as a collaborator on your campus, not as a competitor. Your teachers and students will appreciate having a tool that will help them study and learn, and enable them to be better at what they do. When we, as educators, give them the tools they need to succeed in a thoughtful and purposeful manner, we keep them from weaponizing it. To do this, it is essential to jump in and strike before our students start using the tools to write papers for them. Before they learn that ChatGPT is their source of information. Let's teach them that it is there to help them reframe, not to create the actual frame and populate it.
So, let's navigate the generative AI revolution together and help this generation understand the value of authentic learning and genuine achievement while leveraging the technology tools available to them!
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