AI is another part of the new technology world that I have been hesitant to jump into.  Honestly, I’m usually quite hesitant of any new app or “thing”, but once I get into it, I’m all in, lol.  This week I was excited to be challenged to try some of these sites and see what they are all about.

I thought it would be fun to first check out ChatGPT as this is a site that I have heard about in the education world.  This is the definition it spit out.

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, refers to the field of computer science that focuses on creating machines or software systems capable of performing tasks that would typically require human intelligence. These tasks include learning from experience (machine learning), understanding language (natural language processing), recognizing patterns (computer vision), and making decisions or predictions.

AI can be classified into two types:

1. Narrow AI (Weak AI): This type of AI is designed to perform a specific task, such as speech recognition, image classification, or playing chess. It’s highly specialized and doesn’t possess general intelligence.
2. General AI (Strong AI): This is the hypothetical AI that would have the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in a way that is indistinguishable from human cognition. General AI can reason, solve complex problems, and make decisions across different contexts.

In practice today, most AI applications fall under Narrow AI, and they are used in various industries like healthcare, finance, entertainment, transportation, and more. Examples include virtual assistants (like Siri and Alexa), autonomous vehicles, recommendation systems, and medical diagnostic tools.

I do think that ChatGPT can be a useful tool when writing papers.  It helps to generate ideas or get started on a writing project.  I don’t agree with using the whole paper that it spits out and handing it in as your own, but I do think you could use it as a stepping stone.  I often struggle with knowing how to start a paper and I think if I could put my ideas in and it would give me an example, I could create my own opening without copying it.  I think if we teach kids how to use this as another learning tool vs a “cheating” tool it could be a great feature to bring into our classrooms.

The next one that sparked my attention was Microsoft Copilot.  We have been talking about Microsoft Lens to use with students that have reading struggles, so I wanted to check out copilot to see what it has to offer.  I started off by asking the provinces in Canada, which it listed and then it asked if there was a province I wanted to learn more about so I put in Saskatchewan, which it gave me information about, then I asked it about elementary schools in Regina and it gave me another list of schools.  I think this could be a super useful tool in classrooms also, its not much different than asking google questions.  One of the concerns that I thought about was how true is the information and if there is a way to trace it back to something.  But when asking google, not everything is legit there either and last week in class we discussed how to realize if information is fake or not.  So maybe asking AI would be better, if we think that all the information they give is accurate.

I took a look at the video Math Problems GPT-40, I think this could also be an awesome tool for math strugglers.  Again not to cheat, but to see another way that it could be done.  Math seems to be a subject that success can be dependent on how it is taught and not everyone’s teaching style is compatible with students.  This would give students another way to see it that might work better for them.

(1) Math problems with GPT-4o – YouTube

Next I thought it would be fun to try Animated Drawings with my son.  I got him to draw a character and then uploaded it and let him play around with it.  He loves reading graphic novels so this was right up his alley.  I think this would be a super cool tool to use in Art.  Each student could create their own character and animate them.  I have posted his character that he drew and how we animated him. (I couldn’t get our video to upload)

Overall I think that AI can be taught as a useful tool to use in our classrooms for projects, and reality is I believe that’s the way our techy world is headed.  Like everything else I think if we embrace this new thing and take the time and educate students the proper ways to use these tools they will be a welcome addition.