With the explosion of AI tools in recent years, a new challenge has emerged in student writing: is it truly their work? In the South Shore area, this issue has even made headlines, prompting teachers and districts to closely examine best practices. I believe AI can be a powerful tool and a valuable scaffold in the writing process, but we’ll need to find the right balance between authentic student writing and writing supported—or generated—by AI. In the meantime, I’ve been helping teachers develop strategies to prevent inappropriate AI use while we all learn the best ways to incorporate AI into the writing process with students.

Accurate 💯

One important thing to demonstrate about generative AI tools is that they’re not always accurate. These language models source information from the internet, and as we all know, there’s a lot of incorrect—and sometimes harmful—content out there! For a quick example, try asking your favorite AI tool for a list of vegetables—you might be surprised by the mistakes.

Even when using AI to assist with writing, it’s crucial to include the human element and do your research. Generative AI can also carry biases, which is another critical factor to keep in mind when using these tools.

Tips 💡

Writing Tech Tips 💡 in the time of AI by Erin Fisher

Closing Thoughts

I’ve heard about some powerful ways AI has been integrated into the writing process with students, and I’m excited to see how we’ll continue to use these incredible tools in the future. Stay tuned for more posts on THAT! What an exciting time to be in education!

Are you using generative AI tools throughout the writing process? I’d love to hear it! Throw me a line 🐟🐟🎣 Thanks for reading 💙

Take care,

oFIShally yours,

Erin Fisher 🐟🐟🐟

With the FISH sound right in the word, I would be remiss if I didn’t make a long-overdue post about Artificial Intelligence and the explosion it’s had on Edtech, and education overall, over the past few weeks. Personally, I am very excited about all the hype and new tools popping up, as I see it as a HUGE opportunity for us to move in a new direction as educators.

👀 Check out an Example

A new site that came onto the scene is the reason for all the recent chatter. AI is not new, and in fact you can read about many of the ways we’ve been using it here, but ChatGPT is new and has made quite the splash.

🤔 How will AI improve Education?

Well, according to ChatGPT, an AI tool:

There are several ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) can improve education:

1. Personalized learning: AI can be used to tailor the learning experience to the individual needs and abilities of each student. For example, AI-powered learning platforms can track a student’s progress and adjust the content and difficulty level accordingly.
2. Improved efficiency: AI can help automate certain tasks, such as grading assignments or providing feedback, which can free up teachers to focus on more important tasks, such as engaging with students and providing support.
3. Enhanced accessibility: AI can make education more accessible to people with disabilities or learning challenges by providing alternative ways of interacting with course material, such as through voice or touch.
4. Greater scalability: AI can enable educators to reach more students, both in physical classrooms and online, by allowing for more efficient and effective delivery of course material.
5. Enhanced learning experiences: AI can be used to create interactive, engaging, and immersive learning experiences, such as simulations and virtual reality environments, that can help students better understand complex concepts and ideas.

Overall, AI has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of education by providing personalized, scalable, and engaging learning experiences.

🤖 AI is here to stay, where do I go from here?

In my own graduate course I teach, my final project is for my students to persuade their administration or a colleague to use a Blended Learning approach in the classroom. I give students a variety of ways to do this, however, one option is an essay.  I realized, my prompt could easily be entered into an AI tool such as ChatGPT, CaktusAI, or Magic Write in Canva and then students could just turn it in.  How can I alter this….

Connect to Personal Experiences 💜

I quickly added to my prompt. It now reads, “Using examples and strategies from your own classroom experience, as well as resources used throughout the course, persuade your administrator or colleague to implement a Blended Learning model.”  If a student chooses the essay option, he/she/they will still need to cite personal experiences.  This could be applied to other areas as well; for instance, you can do a compare and contrast piece between a central character and the student’s life. Connecting the content to the student’s own experience also optimizes relevance and authenticity (a UDL guideline for recruiting interest!).

Offer Options where Students Create 🖌

This one may get a little tricky, as Canva is also putting out a new feature in Canva Docs that will use AI to convert your written document (where you can use AI to write it), into a presentation complete with visuals. However, it does NOT have to be only a slide deck!  You could have students record a podcast, perform a skit, create a video, draw, sculpt, sing, etc! You can get more ideas on my presentation here about various (digital) ways students can show knowledge.  Have students give a live demonstration in class; it could be to the whole class, a small group, or just you. Photomath may be able to complete math homework for a student, but if you take a small group and have students work out problems with you in class – that cannot be AI’ed.

Discussion and Debate 🗣

There are standards where students ARE REQUIRED to write, and it may not be appropriate for the standard to connect to personal experience.  In this instance, have students discuss with you their writing. Have them debate or defend their stance or ideas with you or with peers. Discussion in itself is a powerful tool, and if a student truly understands the material they’ve written about (or the AI wrote for them), then he/she/they should be able to discuss it at length. Possibly count the discussion component as part of the grade (if you’re grading the assignment).

Tips and Tricks

Draftback 📝

Although plagiarism checkers such as Turnitin and Googles Originality Reports cannot catch AI written responses, one tool that may help, just a tad, is the Draftback extension.  This extension would allow you to see if a student copies and pastes an entire chunk of writing from another source, such as an AI site. See how that tool works below.

Version History 📜

Another useful google feature that could assist you in looking over student work is Google’s version history. This can give you a very detailed timeline of work being completed, both in Google Docs and Google Slides.

In Closing

AI cannot write me a blog post with a whole bunch of fish puns and examples of how I’ve personally used technology to assist in education.  It cannot create customized, quick, videos of quickly showing a skill. It cannot replicate my experiences that I use to connect with students, and I think this is where we need to go as educators. It is a very exciting time and I cannot WAIT to see where this takes us!

Thanks for the read! 💙

oFISHally (not artiFISHally) Yours,

Erin Fisher 🐟🐟🐟