It is no doubt that we are currently living in a world of GenAI. Sometimes it is terrifying to think about- as the talk of the town these days is what jobs need to be carried out by human beings and what jobs can easily be replaced by GenAI. I try not to think about it as much, and then some big name director makes a movie or TV show that involves an AI world takeover and then it’s a terrifying thought again. But, in the teaching profession— something that hopefully will require human beings to do for a long time— GenAI can be helpful and a hinderance, depending on how you look at it. This week in class we talked about how GenAI can be applied and its implications. The main thing when talking about AI is remembering that the information puts out isn’t always reliable and correct. It is always important to fact check anything, but especially important if using GenAI.
From a student perspective, GenAI is a quick ressource for studying, writing papers, “reading” texts, and completing assignments. We talked about certain types of assignments like short essays, reading summaries, multiple-choice quizzes that can easily be completed with the use of GenAI, and for the most part, the output is quite high-quality. But on the other hand, other kinds of assignments like personal reflections, interviews, critical analysis are more difficult to run through GenAI without running into problems with the output.
On top of all of that we discussed the ethical considerations when it comes to the use of GenAI; data privacy, generational access, and most interestingly- environmental impacts that GenAI plays. The most surprising of conversations came when talking about how much water a single GenAI prompt uses. Something I assume most don’t think about when asking GenAI to complete their assignments for them.
As mentioned above, we talked about the major limitations of AI being its reliability, or lack there of. From an educator perspective, asking GenAI to generate lesson plans can be very helpful, however, going over each lesson plan in detail to make sure the information given is correct and reliable could double your time spent on one single lesson plan. While I think it could be a good place to start- for example if you have ideas about what you want to accomplish within a lesson or a unit, but maybe you dont know in what order or what order is best to present the ideas, running your lesson plan through GenAI could be useful in that sense, as it provides rational as to why it should be done a certain way, but it all depends on what you provide GenAI. There is also little personality within it, therefore leaving empty spaces within the lesson plans, especially if the educator follows it to a T.
I asked MicrosoftCoPilot to generate a Middle School PHE 8 lesson plan: can you create a 1 hour lesson plan for PHE 8 that includes learning the muscles of the body both on paper but also using them in a physical sense
CoPilot provided me with a lesson plan that includes physical movement and on-paper learning of the muscles- just like I asked. It also provided me with learning goals as well as success criteria (I.e, what does it mean to be successful?). Overall, this plan isn’t terrible. It is a good, organized structure for a lesson plan, and includes everything that I asked, as well as teacher prompts to give the students to increase their thinking. The major parts that are missing in this lesson plan though, are the teachers roles and student roles, what are they supposed to be doing and how or why. As well as what the students should be able to demonstrate and know. The lesson plan template that UVIC provides us as teachings in training is a bit more in depth than others, so I can see this being an honest mistake, but overall, It is a good place to start, but it will require adding and tweaking lots of things if I were to use it for real.