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‘Is this an appropriate use of AI or not?

’: teachers say classrooms are now AI testing labs


In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, high school teacher Vicki Davis has been rethinking every
single assignment she gives her students. Davis, a computer science teacher at Sherwood Christian Academy,
was well-positioned to be an early adopter of the technology. She’s also the IT director at the school and
helped put together an AI policy in March: the school opted to allow the use of AI tools for specific projects
so long as students discussed it with their teachers and cited the tool. In Davis’s mind, there were good and
bad uses of AI, and ignoring its growing popularity was not going to help students unlock the productive uses
or understand its dangers.
AI can produce images of the pope in a bomber jacket and answer nearly any math problem, so what could it
do for students? Educators like her played with the tools and tried to understand how they work, what the
utility could be – for teachers and students alike – and, perhaps most pressingly, how the software could be
misused. Some took drastic measures, going so far as to abandon homework assignments as long as the
technology was accessible. In Davis’s senior level class, she prohibited the use of chatbots to code because
until recently the College Board, which administers standardized tests like the SAT, didn’t permit AI
assistance for programming. But she has changed an annual project she assigns to incorporate AI into the
process. Her goal is to show students how they can use their own knowledge and research on a topic to help
them better supervise AI.
Teachers who spoke to the Guardian say their primary concern is helping students begin to use AI without
enabling cheating. Looming over their futuristic lessons is a fear that an overreliance on these new tools
could exacerbate the loss of learning many students suffered during the pandemic. Students had only
returned to in-person instruction after two remote years when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and many were
still struggling with the huge hit to their ability to learn or engage in school at all.
After a summer spent experimenting with AI, there’s little consensus among teachers on how to address its
use in schools. Many educators in a nearly 370,000-person Facebook group called “ChatGPT for teachers”
argue the widespread use of AI chatbots is inevitable and eagerly discuss the best ways to use these tools to
make their jobs more efficient and help their students learn. Other teachers the Guardian spoke to suggested
student use of the tools be banned until they learn more about the technology behind it.Still, others have
focused largely on mitigating any AI-aided cheating; some have stopped assigning homework entirely, opting
instead to have their students do supervised work in class. .
But all those the Guardian spoke to agree: regardless of where you land on its use, teachers everywhere are
grappling with how to stay on top of constantly evolving generative AI tools.Shindel, a government teacher
at a 3,300-student high school in Maryland, said : “There needs to be some kind of concerted, systemic
effort. She doesn’t believe teachers and policymakers know enough about how chatbots collect student’s
personal information – or how to prevent cheating – to allow students to use it. He also worries the tools
could exacerbate the lack of student engagement caused by remote learning.
Though they may be in the minority, other schools have made progress establishing AI policies. Little Falls
high school in Minnesota decided to ban the use of AI tools entirely in an addendum to the school-wide
cheating policy. Davis’s class policy allows certain tools to be used but requires students to seek permission
and review the links the AI cites as sources.
Dozens of AI apps targeting students have cropped up in the past few years. Photomath, where Users can
upload a picture of a math problem , and the app will give them the answer with explanations. But several
teachers said students began using it during the pandemic to cheat or, at the very least, replace the
“productive struggle” that results in learning. Inevitably, students who relied on Photomath during the
pandemic struggled when they returned to the classroom, several teachers said. But there are also tools being
built to refuse to just give students the answer. Khanmigo, an AI tutor being piloted by educational non-profit
Khan Academy, is trained instead to ask questions that nudge students to better understand the material.
When the Guardian asked Khanmigo a basic question the chatbot responded: “I can’t provide direct answers
or solutions to coding problems.”The AI tutor kept providing guidance onhow to solve it until it finally
provided four multiple-choice options. By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian (31/10/2023)

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