In an increasingly digital world, educators are recognizing the importance of integrating AI tools into the classroom. With the integration of AI, Responding to diverse learning needs, Accelerate data-driven decision makingand spur class discussion. Utilizing AI in the classroom can enhance education while preparing students. A future where AI is essential to the workforce. It is essential for educators to take advantage of professional development (PD) opportunities to advance their understanding of how AI can be used to enhance the classroom experience.
istyou It acts as a digital hub offering top-level professional learning courses designed to help educators develop the fundamental skills to teach and learn in a digital world. Edsage recently spoke with Chelsea McClelland, her third-year social studies teacher at the university. Lawrence North High School Indianapolis resident who recently completed the ISTE U course Exploring Artificial Intelligence for Educators.
EdSurge: Why did you decide to take the ISTE U AI course? What were your goals?
McClelland: One of the things that interested me about the ISTE U course was that I didn’t know much about the use of AI. I knew about ChatGPT from reading articles online, but I didn’t know how it worked. I was worried that my students would use this to write all their essays. And initially our school blocked its use. I think all educators were concerned.
I was at a crossroads. We didn’t want students to use it because we didn’t want academic fraud, but we also knew this technology wasn’t going away. I thought it was very important to take the course because unless you learn how to use it effectively and the content, you won’t be able to convey that to your students. If we don’t learn about AI, we’ll be doing them a disservice.
What elements of the course structure and content were particularly effective in facilitating learning about AI?
The instructor was really supportive. The course seemed to be more focused on my accomplishments – learning and applying the material – rather than meeting deadlines. I liked that the course was asynchronous and self-paced. I love participating in live PD and collaborating with other educators across the country, but it’s really hard to do that every week.
In the ISTE U course, I was able to chat regularly with my classmates through posts and replies. I could connect with educators, but I didn’t need to be connected to the network. , especially considering different time zones and school start dates. My school started in early July, so I completed the course in the first few weeks of the school year. I appreciated having the flexibility to say that the first week back to school was very busy and I didn’t have time in the evenings. I’m going to just sit down and do this when I’m planning my lesson on Sunday.
I really liked how every module started with a fun use of AI. ChatGPT doesn’t just write essays or MagicSchool AI creates lesson plans. One of my favorite activities was prompting different generative art AI bots to generate completely different designs. Even AI tools trained using the same information can produce unique results. This later became a major discussion point with the students.
Another great example from this course was an entire lesson on deepfakes, which create audio and video of situations that never actually happened. As a government teacher, I teach about political elections, so I’m really excited to be able to apply what I’ve learned in the classroom. This will help educate students on how to spot deepfakes and discuss their possible implications.
The core of what I learned in this course, which has been extremely helpful in my approach to AI and how to use it in the classroom, is that there is so much more to learn. As educators, we often think that it’s bad for students to use her ChatGPT and they won’t learn anything. But we can’t bash students for not knowing how to use it properly if we ourselves don’t know how to use it properly. We need to teach them in what situations to use AI and how to do it in an academically honest way.
Can you share a specific example of how you have integrated AI concepts and tools into your educational practice as a result of taking this course?
I work in a school with a growing multilingual population, and AI has been extremely helpful in scaffolding resources to make them more accessible to students. Especially in social studies classrooms with a lot of primary sources, it can be difficult to figure out how to break down the language so that English learners can access the same content but not lose academic vocabulary.
In a recent government class, we used AI to collect background information on past political parties. After students understood the basic points, they discussed how those parties were integrated into modern political parties.
We have also had class discussions about how AI works and how it is trained using information from the internet. This creates a conversation about what problems might arise. I ask my students: “Can we train AI with bad information?” What can we do about it? ” Discuss how you should not blindly trust AI. Rather, it can be used as a baseline for building knowledge. I think of this as a level of classification. AI gives us a basic understanding, but then students need to analyze and create from there.
What advice can you give to other educators who want to learn more about integrating AI into their classrooms?
There’s no need to fear AI. There seems to be concern that AI will replace teachers. AI can teach kids content, but it doesn’t tell them how to apply it. That is our job as teachers. Our roles are changing a bit, but for the better. Nowadays, you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of time teaching baseline information. In return, we can do more projects, participate more in class discussions, and help students apply the information.
I encourage teachers to find online communities. I follow several edtech accounts that offer ideas on using AI in the classroom and tailoring the ideas to different classes. This doesn’t mean redoing all the lessons. Try integrating AI tools to review some lessons from each unit. You don’t have to completely change what you’re doing to expose students to AI.
AI will become an even more integral part of the workforce. If we as educators are going to prepare our students for college and the world of work, we need to responsibly train our students to use AI tools.
