AI as a tool in the classroom
As we have all experienced through discussion in this class AI is an amazing tool for us as developing teachers. The only problem that occurs with the use of AI is how easily students are able to abuse the power they have. When using AI, you have the ability to generate things in a matter of seconds, students can use this power to skip doing assignments all together just by typing in a simple prompt and having the computer doing the work. In my eyes I believe AI is great, we need to be able to educate our students on proper use and misuse of AI because of this power balance that they have. As a future educator I do not have a Problem with the use of AI, I have a problem with the way it is being used. If a student was to submit a paper completely generated by AI, we would have some major problems however if A student used AI to help them find new words, come up with ideas, or even do a spell/grammar check I would not care. My goal is to make these tools available, so for my blog post today I wanted to look a little into a program called Grammarly. Grammarly is a tool that people can use to help them write papers, within this program there is a built in AI tool that helps improve clarity, grammar, pupation and even style. Out of all the AI tools I found I feel that this is the program most suited towards helping students.
After trying Grammarly out, I realized how helpful it could be in a classroom setting. As a teacher we could use it to quickly check assignments for proper spelling and grammar, which would greatly cut the time it takes to mark mass amounts of papers allowing us to spend more time teaching and planning and less time scrambling. For students, with proper educating, the program can be used as a sort of personal writing tutor. Students will be able to write their paper on this program and have it suggest changes to better suite the flow of the paper. This program is not meant to be a “do it for me” piece of tech but rather an extension of teaching. It provides feedback based on each students writing skills which can help them understand mistakes and find new ways to fix them. This form of individualized feedback can help students learn in ways we may not have been able to while helping the rest of the class try to figure things out. The suggestions given by Grammarly are as stated, they are suggestions, they are not necessarily the best change for your writing, so it allows students to really think about what fits best in their paper. The help that Grammarly provides not only helps with writing skills but also allows our students to further develop a deeper understanding of language, word choices, sentence structure and overall communication skills.
The biggest challenge we face with all AI is ensuring our students do not become too reliant on it. Like I said at the start, AI is an amazing tool that can help us in many different ways, however there is definitely a power balance that needs to be understood by the students before they can effectively use the program. While Grammarly is an amazing tool for catching errors, students need to be able to develop their own sense of editing skills to further develop their own understanding of writing. Ai isn’t your personal tool for writing papers, you aren’t supposed to rely on it to create everything for you. AI is supposed to work hand and hand with you in order to help you develop skills and see things you may have never understood before. As future educators we need to take all risks into consideration when we allow the use of AI in the classroom, we need to be mindful of the way students use these programs and ensure that we do not let things go too far.
The process of bring an AI program like Grammarly into the classroom has the potential to change the way we teach and learn. AI tools are some of the most useful things to be developed especially when integrated properly. It is essential for us to understand that these tools are ultimately supplements to our learning and are not meant to completely take over our workload. As we continue to watch the evolution of AI, there will be a never-ending wave of new things to learn and understand, these new pieces of technology are amazing at helping us develop more engaging, personalized, and efficient learning environments. It is now our job to understand how to use these tools in an effective way that helps our students without halting their development.
2 thoughts on “AI as a tool in the classroom”
Hi,
I also feel the same way about the use of AI in my future classroom! I plan on making my expectations using AI very clear and set ground rules right off the beginning. I will take the time to go through some of the expectations and how these tools can be used to help them and not do their work. Is there a way that you plan to make sure that your students are using AI properly? If you do I’d love to hear about it!
I honestly think the best way to make sure students are using it properly is to just walk them through it and teach them all the different ways to use it in an ethical and educational way. If we just give free access to our students we will never be able to limit the way they are using it but by slowly introducing it into the classroom piece by piece students will gain a good understanding with proper use and misuse.