Embracing AI in Education: Navigating Risks and Empowering Students
For the past 12 months, I’ve been having discussions with school leaders about students' use of AI.
One of the most common responses I get is that it’s too risky to push students onto AI. We should “watch and wait”.
I completely understand this response.
After all, as educators, we have a duty of care over our students. We know relatively little about how AI will play out in education, and, if we’re honest, encouraging students to use AI can seem like a risky bet.
It’s true, there is some level of risk in training our students to use AI.
Training students to use AI is risky. Not training them is far riskier.
AI is not like the calculator.
When evaluating technological change in schools, I fear that many leaders are drawing on old paradigms. They picture the disruption of the calculator or the laptop. With both of these technologies we had time to weigh the pros and cons, form a strategic plan, then progress towards implementation when the time was right.
This framework simply isn’t applicable to AI.
Why? One word: cost.
Early calculators cost thousandsof dollars. As did early computers.
Early AI is free.
The first student who brought a calculator into her maths class would have caused a stir. The first person to bring a laptop to school would have raised more than a few eyebrows.
Chances are you didn’t realise when the first student in your class used AI.
Put simply, AI is free, ubiquitous, inbuilt into many programs students were already using (think Notion, Grammarly, and many search engines), and hard to detect.
At this point, if your students have access to the internet, you have to assume they are using AI.
What should we teach them?
If our students are using AI, we want them to use it in a way that displays integrity and advances their learning.
We should be teaching them:
How to prompt.
Where their data goes when they use an AI tool.
How to adjust the reading level of a text forthemselves.
How they can use AI to create tests and practiceknowledge retrieval.
How to evaluate the impact of AI tools on theirown thinking and understanding.
How to think about learning and writing in theage of AI.
Appropriate and inappropriate AI uses.
I’m convinced that, while student use of AI is out of our control, how well they use it is completely within our control.
Conclusion
In summary, yes. Training our students to use AI is risky. As educators, we are usually risk averse, and so we can let this risk dissuade us from up-skilling our students with AI.
However, the reality is that there is no risk free situation.
We either take the risks of training students to use AI, or we take the risks of them using AI in a way that lacks integrity and wisdom.
I know which risk I’ll be taking.
Until next week,
Happy Teaching!
Paul Matthews
