Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup.

Some Ideas for Using ChatGPT in Middle and High School Classes (Edutopia)

Seems like everyone is criticizing ChatGPT these days. School districts have banned its use in classrooms. Users of the AI writing program have been labeled cheaters. But, according to Edutopia, there are important skills writers can practice if they are allowed to use Chat GPT. Among these skills are:

Prompt dissection – For example, “In a social studies classroom, students might craft a prompt about a topic they’ve been considering and then examine the machine’s response in forensic detail. This may involve a sentence-by-sentence dissection of what the AI has written.”

Find the biases – “As a variation on the above, students create prompts across a variety of related topics, then evaluate them looking for themes of inaccuracy.”

Spot the computer essay – “For a playful exercise, share two or three pieces of human writing from the past year or two and slip in an example from ChatGPT, and have students discuss what makes these examples human – or decidedly not. Nuance, passion, and, perhaps, even fallibility will be clues that students can investigate.”

ChatGPT Cheating: What to Do When It Happens (EducationWeek)

See what I mean. The same week Edutopia shares ideas on how to train students to use AI in a positive way, another media outlet labels Chat GPT a cheating machine.

According to EducationWeek,

“What’s the best way for educators to handle this high-tech form of plagiarism? Here are six tips drawn from educators and experts, including a handy guide created by CommonLit and Quill, two education technology nonprofits focused on building students’ literacy skills:

Make your expectations very clear

Talk to students about AI in general and Chat GPT in particular

If students use ChatGPT for an assignment, they must attribute what material they used from it

Ask students directly if they used ChatGPT

Don’t rely on ChatGPT detectors alone to determine if there was cheating

Make it clear why learning to write on your own is important

I’m afraid we will look back at this list a few years from now and just smile, thinking about how little we knew at the time about how to use AI for our own learning.

74 Interview: Morgan State’s Daryl Scott on Ron DeSantis, White Guilt and How Florida’s AP Clash is ‘Erasing History’ (The 74)

According to The 74,

“Daryl Scott, a professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University and self-described ‘anti-public intellectual,’ sees enough blame to go around. While lacerating the College Board for acquiescing to [Governor Ron] DeSantis’s criticism and revising its product, he sees the rising GOP star as an opportunist exploiting white anxieties to build his political brand.”

Daryl Scott: “I happen to have been part of the redesign of AP U.S. History, which recognized a whole lot of things that the Right now calls problematic. So maybe we should just stop for a second to see what they’re calling problematic. Half of critical race theory has to do with optimism versus pessimism about the present and future of race in America. The pessimism started in the 1950’s, with people like Derrick Bell saying that things weren’t going fast enough: ‘These obstacles are here! We thought we were going to dismantle the structure of white supremacy and usher in equality, and it didn’t happen. Will it ever happen? Maybe not.”

As a trained historian, we’re on a slippery slope right now when it comes to accurately portraying the history of our country. Like most things these days, history has become over-politicized, whereby people have started to ignore facts in a way that makes our future seem dim.

Why Are We So Afraid of AI? (The Washington Post)

According to Shira Ovide, writing in The Washington Post this week,

“Tech companies are more excited than kids on Christmas about AI. Most people aren’t so thrilled.”

“New surveys about public attitudes toward artificial intelligence taught me two things:

First, the more AI becomes a reality, the less confidence we have that AI will be an unqualified win for humanity.

And second, we don’t always recognize the pedestrian uses of AI in our lives – including in filtering out email spam or recommending new songs – and that may make us overlook both the risks and benefits of the technology.”

Like I’ve written before, AI is not going away. It seems we have two choices.

One choice is to make like an ostrich and stick our head in the sand and hope AI goes away and never comes back.

That doesn’t seem like much of a choice.

The second choice is to embrace the change introduced by AI, especially when it comes to training our young learners how to use it (including ChatGPT) to better their lives and ours.

Substitute Teachers Deserve More Respect (EducationWeek)

Yes they do, and I don’t have to share the rest of this story with you.

Why? Because you know this story, and how it ends.

Why? Because this story has repeated itself as long as I’ve been around public education – and probably longer.

It’s one of those repeated maladies that appears every five years inside our public media.

A malady that is never addressed and therefore never fixed.

It’s one of those repeated indicators that our present system is broken and can’t be fixed.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be back Monday. SVB