Originally, when I heard we were going to be learning more about AI in the course, I was really hoping it was about former NBA player Allen Iverson… However, I have come to learn well that Graduate Studies is all about PRACTICE, and Allen Iverson aka “AI” was not about that!
I have now spent the past week learning from all of you through your awesome discord chat posts and discussions to help me wrap my head around this topic because, to be honest, listening and watching Dr Couros during Tuesday’s lecture made me feel… not so smart. As someone who normally feels quite comfortable around technology, this new topic has been a challenge for me, in an extremely rewarding and powerful way.
First of all, rather than productively plan and create my blog for this week, I stayed up on Tuesday night until after midnight trying my hand at ChatGPT (in only a professional manner, of course…)
We created grade 7 social studies unit plans for “our” life partner, we learned about world history, we planned holidays, we created funny stories about our friends and family and sent them via snapchat. And the list goes on and on! *When I say we, I mean it, btw*
Throughout the week, I reflected upon the times I wished I had technology that would have saved me hours upon hours of preparation or tedious work. I perused https://www.futuretools.io/ for a few hours and found many cool opportunities for how to save time, and be more creative to support students educational experiences moving forward.
Having remembered the time I taught myself how to use Photoshop to create an abundance of logos, fonts, etc, I moved on to https://designs.ai/logomaker/start and allowed AI technology to do this for me. This was too much fun, and will be very helpful in the future when planning out projects that require creative slogans and logos, for entrepreneurial purposes, or even just for school swag.
I believe this is going to be one of the opportunities where high school educators can learn from their students, as I have with many technological adventures over the past decade. From the academic perspective, it will be imperative for us to work with students to better understand how AI technologies, although cool and exciting, may not be the answer to all their problems, but rather than avenue in supporting their academic journey. It seems as though there are more and more ways that teachers are using AI to positively enhance learning and stop the possible forms of cheating that have been exposed so far.
For example, I used https://gptzero.me/ to try and detect forms of plagiarism. The program efficiently detected forms of plagiarism in my students’ work. I tried to put one of my graduate papers through the test, and thankfully, I did not cheat!
I am excited and scared to see what else we are exposed to this semester! What a whirlwind so far, but very excited to move forward learning more and more about how our careers can change for the better through the use of tech.