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Course: AI for education > Unit 2
Lesson 2: AI in the classroom: Promising practices- A new chapter in education
- Setting realistic expectations
- Don't ban AI-powered chatbots
- Learning with AI: Promising practices for students
- Teaching with AI: Emerging practices for teachers
- Teaching with AI: More inspiration for teachers
- The writing process, redefined in the Age of AI
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Teaching with AI: Emerging practices for teachers
Teaching with AI: Emerging practices for teachers
What are some of the benefits and challenges of using AI in the classroom?
Teachers all over the world are wondering how to respond to the rise of AI, and a few things seem pretty clear at this point:
- Large Language Model chatbots and other AI-powered resources aren’t going away. They will just become more accessible and available.
- They’re going to sound more like humans as time goes on.
- There will be no way to detect the use of AI in texts that students submit.
Given these facts, what are the implications for our classrooms?
We’ve been keeping up on developments, and some interesting practices have been emerging that we believe hold promise for authentic AI-powered education:
Ideas for AI-assisted writing instruction
These are wild times! What should we do?
Much as the calculator called into question the need for students to learn arithmetic, AI-powered chatbots are forcing educators to re-think the skills they should be teaching students to help them communicate effectively in written language.
Here are some ideas to consider:
Explain your thinking/Explain your AI collaboration:
For specific writing assignments, try telling students that they are free to use AI, but make an essential part of the final grade a detailed explanation of exactly how they used the AI to generate the final product. Include all prompts and a narrative of how they evaluated and worked with the AI’s responses.
Generate and evaluate thesis statements:
As a classroom activity, work with the AI to generate a variety of thesis statements. Ask students to evaluate them. You can try asking the AI to list the strengths and weaknesses of each of its ideas!
Next, work with the students to improve the thesis, or make it more insightful or interesting. What makes a thesis interesting or insightful?
This might work especially well for writing prompts about more recently published material, which the AI is less likely to have in its training data. This will help to ensure that the AI's output will be full of opportunities for improvement.
Ask the AI to generate a five-paragraph essay: Ask the class to identify and explain what the AI did:
- Identify the claims in each topic sentence
- Identify the supporting evidence
- Identify transitions
- Analyze the introduction and conclusion—how repetitive are they? Is that good or bad? How could they be improved?
- Observe and discuss how formulaic each paragraph is
Now, make it human. Add dimension, add richness, add insight and voice.
How should I talk to an AI?
For more ideas about how to communicate effectively for an AI-powered bot, check out Learning with AI: Promising practices for students in the first unit of this course.
We hope these ideas inspire you!
Want to join the conversation?
Do you have an example of how to do this? "Explain your thinking/Explain your AI collaboration: For specific writing assignments, try telling students that they are free to use AI, but make an essential part of the final grade a detailed explanation of exactly how they used the AI to generate the final product. Include all prompts and a narrative of how they evaluated and worked with the AI’s responses."(3 votes)
I asked Anthropic's Claude AI to answer this for us: Here is an example of how a student could explain their AI collaboration on a writing assignment:
"For this essay assignment on the causes of the Civil War, I utilized an AI assistant called Claude to help generate ideas and provide feedback on my drafts.
To come up with an initial thesis statement and outline, I prompted Claude with the following: 'Please suggest a potential thesis statement and detailed outline for an essay examining the key factors that led to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.'
Claude provided a suggested thesis and outline focusing on the economic, political, and social differences between the North and South. I reviewed its suggestions and decided to use the general framework it provided but modified the thesis to put more emphasis on the issue of slavery.
For the first draft, I wrote the introduction and first body paragraph on my own, then prompted Claude to generate a draft of the second body paragraph on the role of states' rights. I carefully reviewed what it wrote, keeping some phrases and sentences but doing heavy editing to match my own writing style and ensure accuracy.
For the third body paragraph on the issue of slavery, I wrote a rough draft myself first and then asked Claude to suggest additions and improvements. It proposed some more specific examples and statistics to back up my points, which I incorporated.
Finally, for the conclusion paragraph I prompted Claude to summarize the main arguments and tie everything together. I did have to edit its draft conclusion substantially to match the rest of the essay, but it gave me a good starting point.
Overall, Claude was a useful tool for generating ideas and draft text which I could then critically evaluate and edit to produce my own original essay. I tried to use its suggestions judiciously, while taking care to maintain my own voice and argument throughout the writing process. Please let me know if you need any clarification on how I utilized Claude's AI capabilities to assist in writing this essay."(5 votes)
“There will be no way to detect the use of AI in texts that students submit.“
Then other students can create tools which recognises texts(2 votes)
What about a character from the Revolutionary War who is just trying make ends meet so that he can provide for his family. That is who I want to hear from on this historical journey.(1 vote)