Embracing AI in the Classroom
Over 3 days in a face-to-face professional development, a team of educators and researchers (including myself) led an AI capacity-building workshop and facilitated the development of lessons for students that involved the use or creation of AI technologies. In a previous article about AI, I mentioned how most schools will be caught by surprise by how advanced AI has become and what it means for the classroom. This school will not only be ready, but will be co-facilitating the use of AI in lessons and will encourage students to build and use AI. The school is called the Darunsikkhalai School for Innovative Learning (Bangkok) and from my experience and observation is the most innovative school on the planet. Sounds like a bold statement, but let me explain.
I have written about this school before in a previous article and have visited several times to learn more and collaborate on projects. The secret to their success is having a strong pedagogical foundation that drives the purpose of every action in the school. The school’s leaders are passionate about Project Based Learning and have devised a schedule where every student participates in 3 three-month long projects each academic year. The pedagogical approach for these projects are rooted in Constructionism, Compassionate Systems and Mindfulness.
“AI is a tool for learning, just like a calculator is tool for math. We shouldn’t be afraid of AI, we should use it to our advantage.” -DSIL Language Teacher
The above quote came from a primary English language teacher who plans to use an AI assistive writing technology called Quillbot where he will ask students to co-author articles with the help of AI as a means to improve student writing ability.
Other teachers in the school plan to use AI in different ways. The Fablab (makerspace) teachers plan to conduct an in-depth unit of study in AI where students will design and test their own projects using Micro:bit circuit boards with a software that collects sensor data from the circuit board, which is used to train an AI model based on movements and gestures.
Thai Performing Arts teachers will use a pose-detection AI to help students learn to accurately dance a Thai traditional dance drama called Khon. Students will perform the dance moves while the AI provides feedback.
Trigonometry teachers will us AI image-recognition tools to determine the correct shape of triangles to help students see the correlation of angles and degrees. Students will use Teachable Machine to train their own models and compare against the ability of traditional triangle measuring tools.
Journalism teachers will ask students to research information from multiple search engines to determine how bias affects search results. In the process, students will learn about how AI bias affects other areas of AI as well.
Language Development teachers will use an interactive AI technology called Talk to Books to help students with their research skills. Along the way, they will study how to discern between real and fake media.
These are just a few of the ideas that teachers came up with over the 3 day workshop. Teachers at the school were encouraged to look at AI from multiple perspectives and spent time with researchers to iron out the details of their lessons.
The 3 day workshop was part of an ongoing collaboration between the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab (Columbia University) and the Learning Invention Lab (Chiang Mai University) to support DSIL in their mission of being a leading innovation school. Reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to bring this type of learning to your school!
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Mark William Barnett is a PhD Researcher, studying how children and adults learn from interacting with AI, and more importantly, what can they learn about themselves while using AI. Mark lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand and is set to complete his PhD at Chiang Mai University in 2024 studying in the legacy of Seymour Papert on the topic of AI Neural Syntonicity. He spent 20 years in the education space working at International Schools as a Design and Technology teacher and provides consultant services for makerspaces, design thinking, constructionism, robotics and AI.
