According to the Microsoft and LinkedIn Report, "AI at Work is Here...May 2024", 75% of knowledge workers globally use AI. This is almost double what it was the previous November. Also noted in this report, 66% of employers would not hire someone without AI skills, and 71% of employers are more likely to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced one without them. In examining the pace of with AI, I agree with Peter Diamandis, who said, "We can expect to experience more progress in the next decade than the previous 100 years combined."
To ensure that we do not create a new "AI Divide", we must ensure that we are preparing our students to be employable citizens in a highly competitive job market when the graduate. For today's students, that means that they must leave us AI Literate. What does this mean? According to ChatGPT, "AI Literacy is the foundational knowledge and skills needed to understand, interact with, and critically evaluate artificial intelligence systems." So, as educators, where do we start?
The answer is with ourselves. We must become AI literate before we ever consider introducing it to our students. If we don't understand how AI works, how to interact with it effectively and efficiently, and if we don't understand the concerns and considerations with partnering with AI, we can't teach it to our students. There are several resources that I would recommend you spend some time with before considering introducing your students to AI. I have listed them here:
AI for Education - Teacher resources found under "Resource Hub"
Webinars
Prompt Library
Downloadable Resources
Blog
Curriculum to Use with Students
Once you have familiarized yourself with AI, it is important to understand what AI tools your students can legally use based on their age. The vast majority of AI products are for people 18 and over. Some AI tools that have been developed explicitly for educational use are allowed for students 13 and over, typically with parental permission. Where can you find this information? Age restrictions on any digital platforms/websites will be found under the Terms of Use. If you don't feel like taking the time to read through that, a simple Google search will generally tell you what the age restrictions are for the given tool.
Here's a quick list of AI tools and websites that students 13 and over may have access to:
The next step is to introduce it to your students. This will look different depending on what grade level you teach. North Carolina, a leader in pioneering AI education has these recommendations for an AI Literacy Timeline:
If you're hesitant about bringing AI into the classroom, you can start with non-digital activities that expose students to the idea and implications of using AI. A great way to do this is with "Snapshots". You can access a set of cards for grades 6-12 for free at aiedu.org. You can see an examples by subject of these task cards below:
When you're ready to for the next level of AI, consider using pre-made resources to save yourself time and effort. I have curated a list of ready to go lessons and materials for you here:
AI & Cheating
I would be remiss if I didn't address the elephant in the room. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've heard educators say they won't use AI, or allow their students to use AI because they'll only use it for cheating. However, this issue is a philosophical one, not a technological one. According to a 2023 Standford University study, 60-70% of students cheated after ChatGPT became widely available. Would you like to guess how many students cheated before ChatGPT? Astonishingly, 60-70%. What this says to me is that where there is will there is a way, and cheaters are going to cheat.
So, how do we address the ethical use of AI? Talk with your students. Have the difficult conversations about the potential of misuse of AI. Collaborate with AI to design process over product type assignments. Requiring students to submit outlines, rough drafts, and notes can help. Requiring personal reflections and anecdotes, incorporating more oral presentations and projects, and create assignments that require evaluative thinking. These are what are typically referred to as "AI resistant" assignments. Funny enough, collaborating with AI can help you design these!
I also want to pass along a note of caution. If you are using an AI Detector to try to determine if a student has cheated, PLEASE STOP! They are not accurate and are only becoming less so with the advent of new AI tools and more tech savvy students. AI detectors return a high number of false positives, meaning they say there has been AI use when there really hasn't been. There is a gross lack of transparency on how these tools actually work, and they are especially discriminatory towards non-native English speakers. If you consider how AI works (predicting the next word based on its training data set and user prompting), and that the vast majority of data it was trained on is in English, students who may have a different speech pattern will be flagged at much higher rates than students who speak and write English well. Many colleges and universities are banning the use of these detectors, and OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, abandoned their attempts at creating one.
If you are teacher learning about AI and you have questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can leave a question in the comment box below or connect with me on any of my social media channels. Be sure to check back soon for the final post in this AI series.
AI Series:
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AI Disclaimer: Blog post title and some images created in collaboration with ChatGPT.
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