While some of the nation’s largest school districts, from New York City to LA, temporarily banned the use of chatbots like ‘ChatGPT’ due to concerns about cheating, certain local school districts are embracing this technology.
Worcester Public School leaders are actively training teachers to incorporate this new tool into their lesson plans for the upcoming school year.
Sarah Kyriazis, the head of Technology in Digital Learning for Worcester Public Schools, believes that ignoring Artificial Intelligence would be a disservice to students. “It’s already in their pockets, and we want to teach them the skills and future-ready abilities to embrace it and use it safely”, Kyriazis emphasized.
Kyriazis points out that students now more than ever need critical thinking skills to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake online. This skill is being actively taught in the classroom. Wesley Wildman, an AI and Ethics professor at Boston University, supports this approach. He has been studying the rapidly changing technology landscape and suggests that school districts should find expert help to effectively integrate AI into their curricula.
According to Wildman, AI will undoubtedly be a part of every student’s future job, making it essential to teach them skills like ‘prompt engineering’, enabling them to get the best results from AI tools to enhance their assignments. Wildman himself has already begun implementing AI in assignments with his students at Boston University.
The educational approach he suggests involves three stages: using generative AI to produce a project, critically evaluating it, and then creating a genuinely new project based on that critique. This methodology encourages students to dive deeper and create something unique beyond what technology can generate.
Wildman also recommends that teachers consider incorporating more hand-written essays or exams, oral exams, and spontaneous testing without the use of electronic devices. These approaches are designed to challenge students to achieve higher levels of excellence than current standards demand.
The US Department of Education is actively working on developing national guidelines for safely implementing Artificial Intelligence in the classroom. In May, the department released a 70-page paper containing insights and recommendations, as they progress toward establishing concrete standards for AI integration in education.
