After much thought, I am going to deep-dive into AI. It makes perfect sense. Everyday, my ‘X’ (I prefer Twitter, but oh well…) is bombarded by developments in the field and its just hard to keep up. Posts such as ‘Your ultimate guide to ChatGPT’ or ‘The only ChatGPT cheat sheet you will need’ are flooding my page, I assume its mainly to get views and likes/follows. I suppose its has quick solutions if you know the tools already but there is a lot more to AI integration in everyday teaching than just ChatGPT. AI has been used by Google since some time in its search (Yes, when it is suggesting you what to type, that’s AI). Towards the end of last year, while I was teaching Recommender systems to my Year 9 Computing class, we discussed a range of platforms already implementing it (and rather successfully). Spotify (for suggested listening) and Google (for products and search engine) were looked closely in detail and we discussed the pros and cons of such systems. On one hand, its useful to know what’s trending out there and on the other hand, you are being fed with whatever the algorithm creates for you missing out on other content. Dilemma’s of the current decade eh!
While Large Language Models (LLM’s) are the current talk of town, the staggering rate at which companies are propping up in this area is astounding. I had recently signed up to be a tester on an image generator called Leonardo.ai which now boasts a fairly impressive lineup of drawing engines, texture generators and what not! On the left is me experimenting with their recent addition – Realtime Gen, which generates imagery as you type. Its of course, still in its infancy stage as you will spot ol Mickey with 4 hands at some point!
And then you have ChatGPT (currently GPT4 for paid users has data updated to April 2023). ChatGPT can create all sorts of content for you and with a plus subscription you could create your own GPT now. With just a free account, you can still, with relative ease solve complex questions, create essays and complete projects. This is great for students when regulated. This is also great for teachers as we can create custom content for our classroom, generate resources and activities with the appropriate prompts (yes, prompt engineering is a real thing! ).
What does that all mean for teachers and how does the usual classroom teacher deal with all this technology in front of the student? What are the plans and policies in place for acceptable use of AI in the classroom? Have you considered it already and if yes, how well is it working?
The reasoning behind byte sized AI for teachers is to assist busy teachers with some suggestions and guidelines to use AI constructively in the classroom as it has become part of our daily lives.
My next step is to create a simple AI guide for students to discuss when is it ok to use and in what fashion. Something as simple as a traffic light system with three colours to denote when its ok to use (green), use with caution or limited use (orange) and zero use (red ) would be a good start. Students need to still be able to explain their work to me, whether they have used AI or not and so they would need to do the necessary reading themselves, concise the content and explain in their own words. I believe getting them started early in ethical use of AI is part of the DigiTech teachers profile and we will need to embrace and enjoy the journey.