I remember the last semester of year three how excited everyone in the class was about this buzzing new website that could do anything for you and turnitin wouldn’t even recognize it!! Could this be real?! We were all so excited because as university students who are also working, coaching, playing sports, taking music lessons, being human beings to any degree… this was going to open up so much more of our time!! After this, I went home for a family dinner and then my step-dad was at the other end of the table in absolute arms about how not okay this was for society and I genuinely felt like I was thrown into a real-life George Orwell story, you know the one!

“The internet is proving to be able to think on its own!!”

This was the great fear! If you could ask a question on a website and it could in real-time answer your question  by searching every aspect of the internet in seconds….. who could stop it?!

These were all great questions! But, is it that bad, really…?! Then I was sat there wondering if he was crazy or I was naive…

It has been a solid year or more since I was introduced to the idea of ChatGPT and I still have no answers in either direction. I know I am not afraid of it, but definitely still wonder if I should be.

As a student I remember being so pumped that my research would take a fraction of the time and then in class Katia had pointed out that if that was something we were excited about, we should understand that our students might also enjoy this freedom. And I do agree and also disagree. I feel that our students will also be human beings who are more than just students and will more than likely have very busy lives as well. I feel a lot like the old guys who shout “Back in MY day!!!” but I am starting to understand their reasoning for this viewpoint…. and that is definitely doing a lot of showing my age…. (something I didn’t know until this course’s blog posts was how fixated I am about my age… am I on the verge of a mid-life-crisis…!?!?)

However, as students before ChatGPT we had to do the physical leg work! And before the internet we had to thumb through books in a library and alphabetically search for things in Encyclopedias…..

WAIT!! Are AI platforms to kids today what the internet was to us back then…… whoooaaaa!! I bet any money that people my age now, when I was a teen would have been equally disgusted at how accessible information would be!

AI in the Classroom

Alright…. So now…. I feel like we just need a way to cite information that students have taken from ChatGPT. Just like how we had to learn how to make sure we did not claim someone else’s efforts as our own, we need a new way to allow our students to recognize that the info they grabbed from these platforms is not their own. Sure if can fast track the searching but the point of work is to use our brains to understand the new learning!

One really cool way to use AI is to help students understand what words and how to phrase things in a different voice. So, input their writing piece into ChatGPT and then ask it to change the voice to whatever you want! A passive, academic, slang, etc. and then the students can dissect what changed, where and why! How did those words in those orders cause the voice to change!! And then this can bloom into a super cool writing assignment and maybe the students can become their partner’s AI and change the voice! Big fan of trying and comparing!

What other ways could we use this writing assignment idea in the classroom?! I wonder how it could change for different skill levels. And students with exceptionalities! I think it would be very adaptable!