AI Is Coming to My Classroom. I Have No Idea What to Do.
Generative AI is going to transform school — but how?
As a teacher who assigns a lot of writing, I haven’t been all that troubled by the rise of AI thus far.
My assignments are specific enough to my class that the AIs don’t do a very good job with them, and I don’t think most of my students (who are pretty motivated) will settle for the mediocre grade that a ChatGPT essay would earn them. It’s been pretty easy, I think, to catch the kids who have used an AI in violation of the academic honesty rules (the AI-written essays are the ones that read like they’ve been composed by a boring robot who has never been in my classroom).
But I’m worried about next year, and the year after that. Over the last few months, there’s been a steady accretion of AI-based services. First, it was ChatGPT, then imitators like Google Bard. Next, generative AI started showing up in various apps and services; Notion and Grammarly now push their AI features on me every time I use them.
By the time we get back into school in the fall, AI will likely be fully integrated into the main-line apps that we use most often in school — Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Google Search, and the like. Every time a student sits down to write something, they will likely be asked — do…
