No AI Gods, No AI Masters — Civics of Technology
More on their open letter, Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia , and position piece, Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia , by Guest et al.
Business AI
How to use ChatGPT at university without cheating: ‘Now it’s more like a study partner’
The ubiquitous AI tool has a divisive effect on educators with some seeing it a boon and others a menace. So what should you know about where to draw the line between check and cheat?
How AI Simulations Match Up to Real Students—and Why It Matters
educators need to prompt AI carefully and use their own professional judgement when deciding if AI outputs match their students’ needs.
“The great advantage of the current technologies is that it is relatively easy to use, so anyone can access [them],” Kochmar said. “It’s just at this point, I would not trust the models out of the box to mimic students’ actual ability to solve tasks at a specific level.”
Professional Development for AI in Schools: A Three-Dimensional Approach
PD for GenAI isn't a "one and done" event - it needs to fit with teachers' existing disciplinary expertise and their deep, contextual understanding of what it means to teach.
Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia
Why critical thinking is key to using AI wisely – Alt Ed Austin
Returning guest writer Stephanie Simoes is the mind behind Critikid.com , a website that teaches critical thinking to children and teens through interactive courses, worksheets, and lesson plans. This article is meant to help educators (and parents) more effectively teach kids to use large lang
A Student’s Right to Refuse Generative AI
Elizabeth Palumbo, Syracuse University Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com I’m sitting at a desk in a college classroom in Upstate New York. It’s nearing the end of the fall semester of my seni…
I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.
During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.
AI Is the Cognitive Layer. Schools Still Think It’s a Study Tool.
A New World
Why critical thinking is key to using AI wisely – Alt Ed Austin
Returning guest writer Stephanie Simoes is the mind behind Critikid.com , a website that teaches critical thinking to children and teens through interactive courses, worksheets, and lesson plans. This article is meant to help educators (and parents) more effectively teach kids to use large lang
What Happened the Year I Banned AI
The first and most important move I made was providing every student with a 50-cent composition notebook that I sourced over multiple trips to office supply stores across the greater Dallas–Fort Worth area. Every day, my students and I engaged with our learning by writing in our notebooks. We reflected, brainstormed, and drafted everything by hand, which I learned through research has benefits I hadn’t previously considered.
The first and most important move I made was providing every student with a 50-cent composition notebook that I sourced over multiple trips to office supply stores across the greater Dallas–Fort Worth area. Every day, my students and I engaged with our learning by writing in our notebooks. We reflected, brainstormed, and drafted everything by hand, which I learned through research has benefits I hadn’t previously considered.
Blue Books Reimagined
Claire used blue books as a form of in-class journaling, reflection, and process-based practice writing. At the start of the semester, she distributed fresh blue books to her classes with an introductory prompt based on the learning outcomes of the class as a way to create a baseline for students’ writing, both to get to know the students as well as to learn more about their handwriting, thought process, and timed writing ability. Claire would then collect the books at the end of class. As the semester progressed, she would slowly increase the amount of writing. The prompts ranged from reading-based responses to creative musings to self-reflections. Scaffolding assignments, like annotated bibliographies, practice theses, short “they say/I say” essays, six sentence arguments, outlines, and free writing were conducted in class using blue books alongside creative poems, music video storyboarding, short story writing, and post-unit reflections based on the Taxonomy of Reflection. She then asked students to engage in the think-pair-share model where they would discuss their blue book answers with a partner, then either share out to the whole class or build upon incrementally larger sharing groups until the whole class had rejoined to discuss their ideas.
Will We Regret Ignoring Our Students' AI Safety, Just like the AI Luminaries?
one-third of teens are using AI for emotional support, with 71% having used AI chatbots. Perhaps most concerning, 26% of these young people report preferring chatbot conversations over speaking with real people, while 23% turn to these digital companions because they feel they have no one else to talk to.
What's In Your Statement?
Friendly reminder that there's an Syllabi AI Policy Repository
What I Mean When I Say Critical AI Literacy
To unpack this, we should first maybe unpack crticial, AI, and literacy. By critical, I mean this in multiple senses of the word. One is critical as in critical thinking, as in skepticism and quest…
Shifting My Thinking about AI in the Classroom
Bali defines literacy as “beyond the basic skill of how to use something...into the capacity to know when, where, and why to use it for a purpose, and, importantly, when NOT to use it.”
Why I Use AI Transparency Statements in My Classroom
Transparency Builds Trust Where AI Detectors Fall Short
AI in Education Podcast
Dan Bowen and Ray Fleming are experienced education renegades who have worked in many various educational institutions and educational companies across the world. They talk about Artificial Intelligence in Education - what it is, how it works, and the different ways it is being used. It's not too serious, or too technical, and is intended to be a good conversation.
Please note the views on the podcast are our own or those of our guests, and not of our respective employers (unless we say otherwise at the time!)
Teachers using AI for grading: Who’s grading the AI?
California schools are using more chatbots, and teachers are using them to grade papers and give students feedback.
Value of AI in Classrooms
A new survey conducted May 7-15, 2024 for the Walton Family Foundation shows that knowledge of and support for AI in education is growing amongst parents, teachers, K-12 students, and college students. More than 80% of each group saying it has had a positive impact on education.
The AI Teaching Revolution?
What Do Five Recent Studies Say About AI's Classroom Impact: A Nuanced Reality Emerges Nick Potkalitsky Dec 02, 2024 As we mark two years since ChatGPT's momentous launch in November 2022, a persistent claim continues to echo through academic circles: that there is "absolutely no evidence" suggestin
EEF: ChatGPT cuts lesson planning
The saved time did not come at the expense of quality, independent evaluation finds
Developing AI strategy for schools
How to create an AI strategy in school, including 6 areas to consider in your AI policy and 4 steps for implementation
ChatGPT cuts lesson planning
The saved time did not come at the expense of quality, independent evaluation finds
Generative AI Pushes Outcome Over Process
I really hate generative AI, because there are many reasons to hate it. It's abilities depend on stolen data; it uses so much electricity it...
AI-enabled Education Economic Case
AI course policy – M. Montenegro
AI literacy is the only way to a successful AI-human collaboration and AI-assisted education
Without AI literacy, the risks of AI will increase
More Schools Are Considering Education-Focused AI Tools. What’s the Best Way to Use Them?
A new report shows AI teaching assistants could be beneficial in the classroom — but may also bring invisible bias.
The End of Handwriting | WIRED
Students’ ability to outsource critical thinking to LLMs has left schools and universities scrambling to find ways to prevent plagiarism and cheating. Five semesters after ChatGPT changed education, Inside Higher Ed wrote in June, university professors are considering bringing back tests written longhand. Sales of “blue books”—those anxiety-inducing notebooks used for college exams—are ticking up, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Handwriting, in person, may soon become one of the few things a student can do to prove they’re not a bot.
Students’ ability to outsource critical thinking to LLMs has left schools and universities scrambling to find ways to prevent plagiarism and cheating. Five semesters after ChatGPT changed education, Inside Higher Ed wrote in June, university professors are considering bringing back tests written longhand. Sales of “blue books”—those anxiety-inducing notebooks used for college exams—are ticking up, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Handwriting, in person, may soon become one of the few things a student can do to prove they’re not a bot.