AI presents both opportunities and challenges for teachers; however, in a CEA workshop titled Tumbling Down the AI Rabbit Hole, Manchester teachers Rachel Discko and Chelsea Gordon stressed that teachers who don’t take advantage of AI are missing out on tools that can save them time, reduce paperwork, and advance equity for students.
“You cannot, in this day and age, have an equitable learning environment without technology,” Discko, a technology integration specialist at Manchester High School (pictured at right), told educators attending a session at CEA’s Early Career Educator Conference. “I’ve talked to teachers who say, ‘I’m going to go back to paper,’ but I say they’re going to miss so much. We have so much power with technology to move toward evening the playing field.”
As examples, Discko explained that teachers can use ChatGPT to generate a list of potential accommodations for the IEP of a child with a specific disability and can also use AI tools to differentiate content. A business teacher colleague of Discko’s found an article from a high-level magazine but wasn’t sure their students would understand it. Discko recommended using AI to write a simplified version of the article at students’ grade level.
A workshop attendee who teaches in a self-contained classroom of sixth through eighth graders explained that she has eighth graders who read at a kindergarten level but want to be able to do what their peers are doing. “They don’t want to read something that looks babyish. This is game changing,” she said.
While it’s appropriate in certain contexts for secondary students to use AI themselves for projects, Gordon (pictured at left in the photo above), the technology integration specialist at Bennet Academy, a fifth- and sixth-grade school, said that for teachers of all grade levels AI can be an important helper.
“AI is your teaching assistant, your helper—not your do it for you,” she said. “You have teachers who are burning out, and we need to figure out how can we help them. This is how. Rather than spending hours to create a sub plan, AI can do it for you.”
Discko said that AI does create concerns, especially for secondary teachers, when it comes to cheating. “It pushes us to create deeper, more collaborative tasks, not quick questions kids can answer in two seconds from their phones. If we’re asking more critical thinking tasks, it’s harder for students to cheat. It takes more time in class, but it’s also more impactful.”
She added, “Our focus used to be on mastery of content. Now students still need to understand the content, but it’s more about mastery of the interpretation and utilization of the content.”
How AI can help
In addition to mainstream AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Copilot, Discko and Gordon recommended teachers check out AI tools especially tailored to educators. Some they recommend include the question generator Question Well; Eduaide for creating lesson plans and other teaching resources; Magic School for lesson plans, differentiation, assessments, and more; Diffit for “just right” instructional materials; and Curipod to quickly create engaging interactive learning activities.
A tool like ChatGPT that draws from a more generic database won’t understand a prompt asking it to create a decodable text with CVC words, but some of the education AI tools will be able to follow that prompt, Gordon said.
Discko and Gordon said that some of the additional ways educators are using AI include the following.
- Personalization of learning
- Increasing the quality and quantity of feedback
- Assessing students’ world language levels
- Creating writing samples that look like a student sample that contains mistakes but eliminate problems associated with sharing real student work that contains errors
- Making rubrics
- Creating sub plans, as well as simple quizzes and jokes
- Creating SBAC practice problems
- Writing customizable stories—for example, a story for early elementary students about listening in the classroom where information about the protagonist, setting, and other details can be customized
- Reviewing essay assignments by putting them into ChatGPT to see what it generates and how adjustments can be made to essay prompts so students can’t simply copy and paste what AI generates
“Our English language teachers are loving the tools I send out, especially those where they can adjust the language or level really quickly,” Discko said.
“Our students at the high school are really into stickers, and we have a Cricut and designed stickers in Canva,” she said. “I took all the stickers I had and translated them in Canva to all the languages spoken by our students. Then I had higher-level English language students verify the translations. Some of the phrasing was wrong, and in Arabic the characters were smooshed together. I was amazed at how many languages Canva has. I still needed a human to look at the text and verify it, but that allowed me to engage upper-level EL students.”
Discko added, “We had a new student who speaks French. He was so excited to see the sticker in French. Now we have a contest for students to submit their own stickers.”
“Canva isn’t an AI program, but it has AI built in,” Gordon said. “Eventually every program will be like that, so it’s essential that we understand AI.”
Warnings
“Never ever put any kind of identifying info, student or otherwise, into an AI program,” Discko cautioned. She added that AI can be wrong and does invent facts, which is why it’s always essential to review anything AI creates before sharing it with others.
“It’s super important that you get to know your students’ voice,” Discko continued. “That’s one thing ChatGPT can’t do, it can’t write something personal to your students. If you know who your students are and who they are as writers that’s an important way to battle cheating. It might mean doing in-class writing so you know students’ voice.”
Unfortunately, most AI detectors for plagiarism don’t work well and will flag things inappropriately, the teachers said.
“We need to make sure students know what they’re signing up for when they log into AI programs and what’s the responsible way to use them,” Discko said. “If we don’t expose them to AI and teach them about it, they’re going to go off to college where they do have access and they’re going to use it and misuse it.”
“This isn’t going away, we have to learn how to work with AI,” Gordon said.
“Teachers panicked when hand-held calculators came out,” Discko added. “Math teachers already had to make that shift so that it’s not about producing the right answer but about making sure students have that mathematical understanding that they can apply to the next class. We’re going to have to shift to the thinking process not the product.”
