AI in Education

Without a doubt Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new hot thing in town. However, it is raising much concern in the field of education. Should students be able to use AI tools such as ChatGPT? Should teachers be able to use ChatGPT? Should educators be teaching students on using ChatGPT?

Before I dive too deep into this controversial topic, I do want to tell you about my personal experience about using AI. Last spring, the University of Regina began to really crack down on students using AI. There were many emails sent out reiterating the details of academic integrity. Many professors, at least in my experience, flat out told students if they were caught using sites like ChatGPT, it could result in being kicked out of university for an extended period of time. While this was happening, my ENGL 110 professor was literally teaching us how to write academic papers using AI. You can see how contradicting this was. He taught us how to properly prompt and navigate the app, putting great emphasis on the fact that the material produced is still our thoughts and ideas. He just expressed how much more efficient the app truly is, also highlighting the pros and cons of using it.

To this day, I use ChatGPT an enormous amount. In my opinion, ChatGPT is just a much more efficient search engine than things like Google, which in my opinion is a form of AI anyways. Finishing up my pre-internship a couple of weeks ago, I can honestly say I used ChatGPT almost everyday. It can produce material such as unit/lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, exit slip, etc. in seconds, saving me hours planning on my own time. In addition, it assisted me with talking points, asking essential questions, and even possible responses that children that age are likely to respond with. This was especially useful for when talking about touchy/sensitive topics. I find that AI is almost how the internet was viewed when it first came out. Many people thought the internet was going to break the education system. But, as we can see now, the internet is an efficient and import tool that we use everyday in our classrooms. I believe that is what we will see AI being for us in a few years.

So, if teachers are allowed to use it to improve their practices, should we be allowing and/or encouraging students to do the same? Like my English professor taught me, if we do teach our students about the app, we must make sure we are teaching them how to use it properly, not losing their critical thinking strategies. This means we need to be showing them how to keep their main ideology on a topic while using AI. We must remember, AI is a tool to ASSIST one with a task, NOT to do it for them.

One issue I do see arising in the near future is the potential for copyright infringements. Because AI grabs things from all over the internet, it will be tough to know if the app is plagiarizing sections from published articles. This could lead to huge liability problems.

What do you all think about AI? Should we allow students to use it? Should you be able to use it as a teacher? Let me know below!

Zach