Welcome to Teacher's AIed!

Welcome to Teacher’s AIed (pronounced Teacher’s Aide).

We curate knowledge for educators about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of AI and K12 education.

We’d love for you to join us.

Each week we will engage in conversations on using AI in K12 education in ways that benefit all stakeholders, including educators, administrators, content creators, researchers, parents, and, most importantly, students.

We will present our research and expertise on AI tools, including those intentionally created for educational settings and ones that can be co-opted for educational settings.

And we will facilitate conversations about AI's purpose, use, and intention in the rapidly evolving K12 sector.

We’re excited that you’ll take this journey with us. In the coming months, expect opportunities to authentically engage with us and other community members about AI. Thanks for being here with us.

In today’s piece, we will discuss the purpose behind our work and how we conceptualize AI's role in student learning.

There has been a lot of chatter about preventing cheating using AI tools. For us, this chatter is like that chatter in the early 2000s when researchers were concerned about spellcheckers ruining students’ ability to spell. One researcher went as far as to say, “grammar and spelling software will never approach the complexity of the human mind.”

However, I challenge you to find a prolific writer today who doesn’t use some kind of spell checker. As a writer, my AI spell checker is an essential tool that helps me write quickly and succinctly.

We don’t punish students for using spell checkers. We teach students to use the skills they learned in grammar and spelling lessons to leverage spell checkers to share their thoughts in writing authentically.

Today, we want you to consider whether using AI is cheating or yet another tool to support creating an even better society.

I had a conversation with ChatGPT to help me unpack this idea – the idea that it can be used to deepen how we encourage students to engage in their own learning.

First, I asked ChatGPT what the purpose of education is:

The key point to highlight here is the last line that “ultimately the purpose of education is to empower individuals and societies to overcome challenges, achieve their goals and lead fulfilling lives.”

Through this lens, we can imagine ways that ChatGPT supports educators in facilitating the empowerment of their students to become better humans, which creates better societies.

With this in mind, we need to do a better job of teaching students how to use these tools rather than explaining why they should not use them.

If we see education as a means of empowering students to lead more fruitful lives, we should teach them how to navigate their learning context to make better decisions and achieve their ultimate goals.

Before students are given the keys to the metaphorical AI kingdom, they should have the tools to evaluate ChatGPT’s claims against their own understanding of the world and determine which nuggets of gold to take from the kingdom and which are fool’s gold.

For example, when writing this piece, I already had well-formed ideas of the purpose of education from studying Friere, Aristotle, Friedman, and other prominent educational theorists. What could have taken me an hour to write, ChatGPT was able to write in a few seconds. I have the skills to read its output and identify which ideas broadly came from Friere (promoting equality and social justice), which came from Aristotle (leading productive lives), and which came from Friedman (promoting economic development).

Understanding what I was looking for helped me determine if I could use ChatGPT’s answer about the purpose of education. When entering the AI Kingdom, I knew what gold looked like; I knew what I should take and leave behind.

Educators and parents have a big task: How do we teach students to know what they are looking for when mining for gold knowledge nuggets? The educator's role is to train students to mine, read treasure maps, and, most importantly, mine real gold nuggets, not fool’s gold.

At Teacher’s AIed, we’ll be on that journey with you, plotting the metaphorical maps to the AI Kingdom to ensure our students have the tools to explore the kingdom well.