To Use or Not to Use AI (and Tech)

When I was in Grade 11, my sister in first-year university, she had a professor that was posting his slides online, and he expected students to print them out to bring to lectures. Doesn’t sound overly crazy to us now, maybe, though people would probably have a personal device to take with them to class so they could access the slides, instead of just printing them off. At the time, though, we didn’t have internet. We didn’t have a computer in our house until I was probably 10 or so? And we got internet when I was in my second semester of Grade 11. My parents figured we would probably need it moving forward, and it wasn’t overly convenient to always be sending my sister over to the neighbours to print off her slides, so there we were.

My first cell phone? I think that was also Grade 11, or it might have been Grade 12. I put together a solid argument that I should have one, now that I was driving and going out on my own, and my parents agreed. Not like there was much you could get up to with those old phones, so it was used, mostly, for checking in.

The next few years for me were wild. I discovered so much once we had the internet. Chat groups. MSN Messenger. I dabbled with fandom sites, and creative writing, and toyed with creating websites. Lissa Explains It All was one of my first bookmarked pages (and it’s still as blinding bright as it always was), and I had multiple GeoCities accounts. At the same time, I was graduating from an old Nokia phone, to the Motorola Razr, a Blackberry, and a few other iterations before my first iPhone. And all of it was a wildly steep learning curve, because the information processing class that I took in Grade 11 or thereabouts was all about typing. Which finger goes on which key, repeat 10,000 times. Type this line. Speed test.

That was it. I think we might have done a little with Word documents, but mostly so we knew where to do our typing.

I look at my kids, who are now 7 (almost 8, as I am being reminded daily) and 10, and they are growing up in a totally different world. I had a chat with my 10-year-old about formatting Word documents with an assignment she was just doing a couple weeks ago. We have iPads that the girls use, both for playing, but we’ve also got a Teach Your Monster to Read app on one, to help our youngest get caught up. We’ve got different games and streaming apps for when we travel, and they bring them along. We’ve got an old iPhone that we kept, and our oldest can use the Wi-Fi at home to text a select few relatives, whose contact information we put in for her. They have had access to these technologies since birth, and in watching us interact with them, and now in their own interactions, that’s just a part of their lives.

It’s a part of our lives.

With Taylor’s presentation this week, and with a lot of what Jennifer Casa-Todd was saying in her presentation, I don’t think I’m going to have much that’s really out there, or cutting edge to add to this discussion. Technology is here. It’s been here, it will continue to be here, and it is a part of our everyday lives. Whether we want to use it or not isn’t really the question, I don’t think – we are living in a society that has integrated it in so many ways, that I honestly feel like we are doing our children and our students a disservice if we are not teaching them safety, appropriate usage, and things to watch out for.

The newest addition to the world of tech is AI, and while a lot of people are digging their heels in, and calling for bans, I remember my Grandparents reacting the same way to computers and cell phones. Just saying. The speed at which it is being adopted into so many sites and apps is mind-boggling, and I honestly don’t think we can count on it going anywhere. The time to stop it has long passed, and now we’re left with learning how to use it appropriately. And, again, I think we are going to be doing our kids a disservice if we don’t start bringing it into our classrooms, and showing them all of the things that it can do.

Do I think my own kids need to know how to use AI yet? Not yet. I think my own kids still need to learn the basics of reading and writing before they’re introduced to aspects of Generative AI. But my high school students? I’m bringing in bits and pieces and showing them how to use AI to ask for feedback (not to have AI make changes for them). I show them how to use AI to help outline an argument (not to have AI write it for them). I’m showing them the fallacies that AI still creates, and the lack of depth that is in the writing when you consider voice. And are some kids going to try and take shortcuts? Absolutely. That was happening long before AI came onto the scene! Unless I go right back to pencil and paper for everything, that’s always going to be a risk. So I’m trying to come up with assignments where it’s harder for AI to create things for them. Or I’m changing my expectations. Focusing on process as much as product, for example.

I’m not pretending that I have this figured out, at all. But I’m firmly on board the “let’s teach them how to use it” train. And maybe part of it is because I don’t see that we have any other option? Maybe? But in using it myself, I also see glimmers of potential, and why wouldn’t we get our students in on that, if it’s going to be around from this point going forward?