AI This Morning

Published: 2025-01-31 4:40 PM

Category: Teaching | Tags: ai, artifical intelligence, llm, chatgpt, gemini

Quick note: I'm going to use AI synonymoulsy with large-language model applications through this whole post. They're not the same thing and artificial intelligence, as a field of study, has much more interesting applications that are generally ignored in the vernacular, particularly in education.

This morning, I attended some professional development that focused on artificial intelligence (ie, chatbots) in education. I ended up posting to Mastodon...a lot...

I've played both roles in this situation. I was an instructional technology coach for many years, so I understand the position the presenters and planners are in. I think, two years back in the classroom now, I have more complex thoughts on that time in my career that will show up in another post. This time, I was the classroom teacher who needed some presenters to tell me about the promise of AI.

The day was bookended with normal edtech hand waving, pretty much textbook - we started off with the "calculator moment" slide which reminded us all that calculators scared the hell out of teachers back in the day. That moved into a reminder that "AI is here to stay, so you're better off just using it" main talking point. It was tech-heavy, focusing on the tools and what they can do and the promise they hold to "change everything." The end of the day sounded like a chance to talk about more of the big picture implications, but those questions and points were either deflected ("We're not here to tell people what to do") or ignored as valid concerns for a teacher ("Yes, the environmental stuff is bad, but it helps with so many things.")

On the whole, sessions led by technology-first folks were all about efficiency, working more productively, and offloading the hard tasks like building assignments, valid assessments, and leaving thoughtful comments for students on report cards and IEPs.

Do not get me started on that last sentence.

All of the ideas shared were low impact and reduced the inflection points of human interaction we should have in our classrooms in the name of efficiency. If you can't talk to every student every day, have a chatbot tutor them til they get it right. Have students paste their story into the bot to get feedback instead of having students pair off and read each other's stories. At one point, when trying to demonstrate how easy it was to get started, a presenter said, "If you're good at talking with people, you'll be good talking with AI."

We go to school so we can work together. We build connections, we share ideas, we challenge...most of today glossed over what we lose as a result of diving in just so we're not "left behind."

All that said, my middle block was led by a split role collegaue. They teach and help with implementation. Their session began by acknowledging the difficult questions of ethical use and not just in the context of cheating. We talked about intellectual property theft, the damages caused to individuals and creatives, the damage to the environment...all of that before starting a discussion about what we've heard or seen with AI in the classroom.

Rather than assuming we need to be taught, they invided us to dialog before moving into a branching workshop where each of those concerns was addressed. There was not ulterior motive and they were prepared with complementary lines of inquiry. They planned it like a teacher and, while I don't agree 100% with their perspective, I felt invited to consider ideas.

I know I'm biased going in, but this was a real eye-opener for me since I've purposefully removed myself from edtech over the last couple of years. I'm discouraged by the overall tone of the day but I'm hoping that we can start to model what we want our students to do, especially when we're in group learning situations.