Dear Parents:
AI is a reality, and we cannot avoid talking about it – and the students cannot avoid using it.
Please have a look at the article below and plan to have a conversation with your child. I believe that AI can be used to support learning; we just want to make sure it does not REPLACE learning. Our teachers will also be discussing this in class.
My teen was caught using ChatGPT to write an essay, but I’m proud of him
“As a teacher myself, the sooner we learn to adapt and experiment with this technology, the better.”
When my kids started back at school this year, they returned to a brave new world that included access to ChatGPT.
The free artificial intelligence (AI) software has changed online business already, with many embracing the technology to reduce their copywriting costs.
Of course, teenagers, the subsection of our population who are most inclined to take the easiest course of action in any given scenario, are early adopters.
We can hardly blame them.
“It seems ridiculous to expect that kids wouldn’t use it”
A teacher myself, it horrifies me to see my child “write” an essay using artificial intelligence and not his own, but when the technology exists, it seems ridiculous to expect that kids will not seek it out and experiment with it.
I was surprised to discover that in using this technology my child was more engaged with his learning than he’d ever been before. He could actually answer the question that the class had been asked – “Which has a better system of government; Australia or Spain?”
If he’d had to research and write this essay, I suspect he wouldn’t have put enough time or effort into it to write a compelling argument; with quotes and examples that demonstrated his understanding of the task and the themes the class was exploring.
But the end result of having ChatGPT available was positive. His knowledge may not be as deep as someone who’d gone down the rabbit hole of researching themselves, but he had made a decision on the issue, he knew what he was talking about, and I was suitably impressed.
ChatGPT can’t write in someone else’s voice so that’s where our students, who try to pass off AI-generated essays as their own, will come undone.
Good teachers know their students; we know how they write, the expressions they use, which words they misspell and whether they usually structure their work cohesively to form a measured argument.
When a student submits work without a typo, without a single grammatical error and without their own cadence and usual turn of phrase, we know to look more carefully.
My son’s teacher realised his essay wasn’t his
Ultimately, of course, my son’s teacher realised that the essay he turned in was not ‘his own work’ and there were consequences for blatantly flouting school expectations.
Teachers are going to have to adapt to this new technology just like we did when the internet became mainstream, and kids could all of a sudden Google the answers to every single question they were asked.
ChatGPT is already being used by teachers to help with the writing of reports and being compared to the comment banks which have long been a staple of the report writing process.
Any parent of twins (like me) knows that the copy-and-paste function of reports is used regularly by time-poor teachers, even in the most elite of schools.
Parents will likely welcome a more tailored assessment of their child’s progress. The crucial element will be knowing how to use the technology.
If teachers can learn how to feed ChatGPT enough accurate information to create effective lesson plans, test questions, inspiring writing prompts, fun classroom games and class reports, then why wouldn’t we employ this new technology?
Award-winning entrepreneur and digital educator, Kate Toon, says: “I FIRMLY believe that ChatGPT will become another tool in our copywriting armoury – and that there will always be a place for good writers, who build solid client relationships.”
“The sooner we adapt to it, the better we’ll all be”
The same applies to teachers and students. Those students who can craft beautiful, flowing, engaging sentences will always stand out from the informative yet cookie-cutter prose that ChatGPT spits out.
Already, novelists have played with the technology, asking Chat GPT to write novels for them, giving it instructions to make the work more descriptive, to give their characters more oomph, make their plots more dramatic, etc, but the end product, while passable, is not satisfying for them as creators or for their readers.
When I was a graduate teacher in the 1990s, there was a lot of doomsday talk that ‘one-day’ computers would take over our jobs and there would be no need for teachers.
The pandemic has shown us that teachers are essential in schools. The next part of our journey as educators includes ChatGPT. So, the sooner we learn about it, adapt to using it as a tool, and start teaching young people how to use it effectively, the better we’ll all be.
The only other solution to the AI conundrum that I can come up with at this stage is to return to handwritten assessments. And no one will thank us for that.
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