Last Updated on September 18, 2024 by Sarah McCubbin
As you’ve likely heard, artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a big buzzword in technology over the past few years, with many technologists and pundits expecting it to transform virtually all industries and touch nearly every aspect of our lives. In this post we’ll explore what that means for educators and homeschoolers in particular.
Below is a guest post written by Suneel Gupta, a US born citizen who began studying 9/11 in earnest in 2004. As a software developer with over a decade of experience in machine learning, he believes that an educated citizenry is necessary for a well-functioning, free society.
Table of Contents
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
To ensure we’re on the same page, artificial intelligence can simply be thought of as software applications that engage in what appear to be human-like cognition. As such, they are capable of non-deterministic, creative output; while we normally think of computers as doing processes that can clearly be evaluated as right or wrong — i.e. we can ask a calculator to do 2 + 2, and we know if it is functioning properly it will tell us 4 .
We can ask artificial intelligence applications to do work that is creative and non-deterministic. Examples can be showing an AI application a picture and asking it to describe it, or asking it to explain the US Constitution using Harry Potter and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as metaphors.
Dangers of AI in Education
First, many educators have warned against the use of artificial intelligence, with some schools going so far as to ban its usage. Their concerns are legitimate: as Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania has noted on his blog, artificial intelligence can be a real challenge for educators in that it has made cheating on homework a fairly trivial task.
Students (and human beings in general) often dislike challenging tasks, and as output from AI applications is often indistinguishable from human output, it is all too tempting for students to cheat on their work. As Professor Mollick notes, the ease of cheating coupled with the widespread prevalence of AI usage amongst students hinders the ability of homework to serve as a useful tool in helping students learn. However, Mollick notes the issue of technology-enabled cheating is not a new development:
One of the first uses of any new technology has always been to get help with homework. A study of thousands of students at Rutgers found that when they did their homework in 2008, it improved test grades for 86% of them (see, homework really does help!), but homework only helped 45% of students in 2017. Why? The rise of the Internet. By 2017, a majority of students were copying internet answers, rather than doing the work themselves.
As such, educators may benefit from focusing on ensuring that artificial intelligence, like its technological predecessors, does not serve as a substitute for critical thinking — and does not impair routines, like homework, designed specifically to reinforce learning and cultivate critical thinking.
More concretely, those who (like myself) support mastery learning — the idea that students must master a subject before going on to the next topic — should ensure artificial intelligence does not impede skill mastery. If you don’t like the idea of young children using calculators to do simple arithmetic, you may not want to allow students to use artificial intelligence for essay writing or math problems — at least not until they have demonstrated clear mastery of the subjects at hand.
Once they have developed mastery, students may find artificial intelligence to be like a better version of a calculator: a tool that helps them take on bigger, more complex challenges — which in turn will empower them with the ability do more, and thus ultimately fulfill more of their goals and ambitions in life.
Beneficial Uses of Artificial Intelligence In Education For Teachers
As for positive use cases of artificial intelligence, I think it is often important that the instructor start with it before the student does. Just as how it is highly advantageous for a teacher to have mastery of a given subject to teach it, so too is it advantageous for a teacher to use artificial intelligence him/herself in order to understand how best to incorporate it into their educational environment. Professor Mollick states it quite directly:
So how can leaders start to think about the rapidly advancing nature of AI? The first thing they should do is use it. No amount of reading and research can substitute for spending 10 hours or so with a frontier model, learning what it can do.
Personally, at the time of this writing — an important caveat given the rapid rate of change occurring in the field of artificial intelligence — I would recommend Claude as the AI application to use. If you can spare $20 a month, I would strongly recommend using the premium subscription for Claude as well; it is vastly superior to the free option, and will likely save you more than $20 worth of your time per month. If the premium option is not in the budget, though, the free option is still worth it — and take solace in knowing that unlike in many other aspects of life, prices for AI products and services are actually falling.
Using AI as a Teaching Aide
One of the easiest ways to derive immediate value from AI as an educator is in thinking of the AI application as a teaching aide. A scenario I’ve personally faced multiple times, which I doubt is a rarity, is in trying to review one of my elementary-aged children’s math work while their toddler sibling is engaged in random acts of destruction and while I am trying to prepare dinner. Aside from the toddler, no one is enjoying this scenario!
Here’s an example of how AI can help. My son completed his assignment, and rather than reviewing it myself, I simply took a picture and shared it with Claude, asking it to review and identify any errors.
The picture I sent to Claude:
Claude’s reply:
If appropriate for you and your child, you can even have them submit the results for grading directly to Claude, and can even ask Claude to provide helpful instruction for incorrect answers. My son gets better at math, I get to focus on dinner, and the toddler gets to destroy things. Everyone wins! Sort of!
AI as a Curriculum Creator
Once you’ve started using AI to evaluate assignments, using it to create assignments and curriculum is the next easy step. Claude validated my son has a solid understanding of place value – but can my son contextualize it in word problems? My son may lament his state of affairs — living life under a tyrannical regime that subjects him to daily math assignments — so let’s try to make it a little more enjoyable for him by creating math word problems that reference Harry Potter, which he loves.
Note the prompt — the instructions I gave to Claude; this is where educators can really show their creativity in creating personalized curriculum for their student. Personalized curriculums are valuable for all students and educators, but especially those who are atypical in some way. For instance, if you have a 6 year old who can read at a 12 year old’s level, but you do not want him/her reading typical novels for a 12 year old (which may focus on topics that are more appropriate for children entering adolescence) you can simply ask Claude for some help. Here is a prompt I gave to Claude in this regard:
Please create a reading assignment for a 6 year old child that is reading at 12 year old level. In other words, the reading should be intellectually challenging for a 12 year old, but should deal with subject matters that are appropriate for a 6 year old. Your story should reference unicorns and princesses, which this 6 year old in particular enjoys.
You can view the story Claude created here, and the questions for the assignment here.
Hopefully, the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in education have been made somewhat apparent here. This field is still just in its infancy, though adoption is occurring rapidly and progress is continuing at a breathtaking rate. Using and paying attention to developments in artificial intelligence will help you understand how you can maximize its benefits and minimize its dangers for you and your family.
Suneel Gupta is a US born citizen who began studying 9/11 in earnest in 2004. A software developer with over a decade of experience in machine learning, Gupta developed Pallas to help him with his own efforts in researching history, and out of the belief that an educated citizenry is necessary for a well-functioning, free society. When he’s not working on Pallas, he’s playing guitar, basketball, reading, or spending time with his family.
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