Teaching and Learning with AI

Paper and pencil can create more barriers to demonstrating understanding than it removes. Technology provides students with lots of accessibility tools, like voice typing, screen readers, magnification, and translation services. It supports students with a variety of learning disabilities. Removing access to these supports can exacerbate problems for these students, who are likely already marginalized.

Resourceful students can still find ways to access the tools you’re trying to avoid. They’ll access the internet and AI tools on their phones under their desks (or in a restroom stall). They’ll text their friends. As long as teachers have discouraged students from things they deem “cheating,” students have been finding ways to use them.

Paper and pencil slow down the feedback loop. Digital work lets students work and submit from anywhere. It gives teachers instant access—even while the student is still working—to provide immediate feedback. Paper work means students have to turn it in in-person and wait to receive it back in-person to get feedback.

It’s not very authentic to their future. This is an activity seen through today glasses. Blocking out the internet and these growing AI tools isn’t the kind of work they’ll do when they reach the workforce. It’s not the kind of work we do as adults, either.

Students can discuss the AI content itself—what makes sense and what doesn’t.

Students can discuss how AI content transfers to other content areas

Students can compare and contrast the AI-content as it regenerates.

Teachers can generate socratic discussion questions with AI

Students can develop debate points

Students can utilize AI-generated content to discuss solutions

AI can be a part of the think-pair-share routine

Educator Krista Fancha shared, “A student loaded a social entrepreneurship project from last year and asked ChatGPT to find everything wrong with the solution. It did. He used the list of flaws to redesign the project and built a new prototype designed to connect grandparents and their grandchildren. Amazing!”

Educator Jen Giffen shared: "Give a writing prompt to an AI assistant. It could be a different writing prompt than you’ll give your students. Then, read the essay the bot creates for you. Next, give the students the rubric you use to grade their writing, and ask them to grade the response from the AI assistant. This helps students to be reflective about the grading process—and about their own writing process. When students get grades on their own work, it’s easy to take it personally—or to dismiss it because it makes them feel like they’ve messed up. But when they critique the work of a bot that doesn’t have feelings, it eliminates a lot of those emotions."

Educator Alona Fyshe explained it this way: “I used it to get a better definition of intentionality. I asked it to explain it to me like I was 5 and it was slightly better than how I had been trying to explain it.” PROMPT TIP: You can give an AI assistant a definition from a textbook or a definition you commonly use yourself. Then, ask it to improve it, to make it easier to understand, or to provide an analogy.

Educator Brittany Ferguson did this to help differentiate reading materials for her students. Here’s how she explained it: “I used it today to create leveled text sets: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with our science and social studies unit using the essential knowledge. Literally saved hours and hours of resource curation.”