Post and discuss your response to the reflection question - Choose a concern about using AI and briefly analyze its negative aspects. Then, commit to how you will work with these possibilities.
I’m concerned about students cheating with AI. I can help minimize this concern by setting clear expectations for when students can and cannot use AI to help with their work.
If students aren’t held accountable for how, when and why they are using AI on assignments, then students can cheat, rely on AI too much and lose their crititical thinking skills. However, if teachers emphasize how and when it can be used on assignments, then students will know how to use AI appropriately. Students need to know it isn’t simply to answer questions, but they need to expand upon ideas and formulate their own thoughts on the topics. Teachers can design higher level questions/projects where students must use what they are learning from AI. Students can and should cite their AI sources. Rubrics and assignments should state how AI can be used and what happens if it is overly used.
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I think one way to help mitigate cheating is to show students how you can use AI as a tutor instead of a place to get answers. Students can ask AI questions that will help explain the topic to them so they can receive instruction and guidance that helps them learn.
Overreliance and loss of critical thinking - students may become overly dependent on AI solutions, which can diminish confidence in their problem-solving, critical thinking, and creative abilities. Resisting this dependence could look like diversifying the assessment types, incorporating project-based and oral assessments that emphasize on-the-spot thinking and problem-solving. This also provides an opportunity to demonstrate real-world applications of AI, by generating projects that requires the application of AI tools to solve.
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Plagiarism and academic dishonesty is a concern that I have. While AI can be a useful tool, it is my hope that students would use it to enhance their own ideas and develop them further, rather than utilize AI to construct their entire thought/project. To help with students sharing genuine ideas, teachers can work to create more in depth assessments that require thoughtful responses from students, as opposed to multiple choice, true/false, and fill in the blank assessments. While more involved assessments can require more time to grade, the involvement that students will have in generating responses and engaging with the material will provide for a more rich learning experience and could possibly reduce how frequently a teacher needs to assess if it is possible for students to demonstrate mastery of content in multiple areas through performance tasks, projects, and other alternate forms of assessment.
Plagiarism is a concern and, contrary to what many teachers believe, the plagiarism checkers often aren’t accurate. For essays that students might rely upon AI to write, I start with laptops closed, books open, and pen and paper. Students brainstorm, discuss, and draft entirely in class. Once I’ve checked off their draft, they can type the essay, but I have them attach my signed draft to the final work. I expect minor modifications, but the voice and general content should match. This forces me to follow the writing process more closely than I did in the past, which in the end, is a good thing. Student growth in writing has actually increased.
The overreliance and loss of critical thinking is a concern of using AI. I think that we’ll have to change what we’re asking of students. Instead of traditional research skills of finding information, students can quickly gather that information from AI. I think that we’ll have to ask our students to do more critical thinking about the information they can gather so quickly and include more project based learning. We’ll also have to continue teaching students to think critically about information they gather and the validity of what we can find on the internet, even with AI.
The negative aspects about plagiarism and academic dishonesty are the fact that we are told the AI detectors aren’t trustworthy. It makes it difficult to see whether or not a student has cheated. And with how AI is becoming now, you can program them to come back with answers written in age-appropriate responses. It’s easy enough to see when a kid who has horrible grammar turns in an essay that sounds like it was written by a college professor, but if they have learned how to make it sound like an appropriate-aged student, then all hope is lost on catching plagiarism from generative AI. Working with these possibilities is all about knowing your particular students and knowing what they are capable of. Also, limiting use of it to particular aspects of an assignment, but not allowing then to use it in the actual writing portion of an essay (although jury is out on if you’d be able to detect that now or not). I suppose you could minimize the negative aspects of using generative AI for these things by going through their work, knowing what they strengths and weaknesses are, and talking to the student about their submission.
Overreliance and loss of critical thinking is the thing I’m most concerned about with my students. The way I have been trying to minimize this from happening is basically asking students to rewrite sentences that do not sound like something they would write. I am having them replace “big” words and use common words they normally use in their day to day life.
I’ve voiced repeatedly that my greatest concern about AI is student overreliance on AI and subsequent loss of critical thinking. I enjoyed reading through the TeachAI guiding principles on Balance because it provided some mitigation strategies. The strategies I will rely on are grading processes and final artifacts rather than just final artifacts so that students have to demonstrate how their thinking began, evolved, and ended. It’s also important to remember that students WILL use AI, whether it’s allowed or not, so I loved how learning how to cite AI is a great mitigation strategy for promoting transparent AI use in educational creations.
A concern of mine is students being over reliant on these AI programs to do their work. Relying on AI all the time could diminish student’s ability to develop critical thinking skills that could be valuable in their future. I would limit the way students use programs like Chat GPT by providing guidelines for when they search. Depending on the assignment, students would have to follow certain criteria when using an AI program.
The concern I am choosing is accountability for students. Students do not automatically know how to use AI ethnically and may just want to use AI as a tool to get their assignments done quickly. We as teachers have the responsibility to hold our students accountable but we also have a responsibility to teach our students what we expect so we can hold them accountable. By setting the parameters, the students learn to work within the boundaries that are acceptable. In turn they can now hold themselves responsible and not just rely on the adults around them. This will be the best case scenario happens when students independently hold themselves accountable and are able to use AI tools responsibly and ethnically to improve the end results of their work.
Excessive dependence on AI tools can lead to a notable decline in students’ critical thinking abilities. When learners rely heavily on AI for information, analysis, or problem-solving, they may not engage with the material in a meaningful way. This dependence can create a passive learning atmosphere, where quick answers are favored over critical evaluation, creativity, and independent thought.
To tackle these challenges, it’s essential to develop an educational framework that promotes responsible AI use while enhancing critical thinking. By shifting the discussion about AI in education, we can harness its advantages while fostering an environment that supports deep learning, analytical skills, and intellectual curiosity. This balanced approach not only addresses the downsides of AI reliance but also equips students for a future where critical thinking is vital.
Plagiarism and academic dishonesty.
We all have those students who will use AI regardless of how many times we teach the importance of ethics, integrity and honesty. We will also have students who will be tempted to use AI a little, and gradually incorporate it into all of their writing assignments. Putting checkpoints and scaffolding into assignments can help limitate the ease of using AI at the last minute for students. Also having students create some kind of presentation from memory could be a good indicator of what they actually learned.
I think that my biggest fear with AI is the overreliance and loss of critical thinking. I fear this generation is losing their ability to problem solve without the use of AI and I fear with the use of AI it is only going to get worse. I think one way that I can try to circumvent this, is to utilize more graded in-class lessons and discussions. These assignments would be focused on student communication without the use of technology. I would also model for students students how to effectively use AI in their assignments to help improve their work not do their work.
The concern I have is plagiarism and academic dishonesty. I have taught third grade for close to 20 years and it is a hard concept to teach 8 and 9 year olds. Using AI in their writing will open up many doors to them. I worry that they don’t see the big picture in plagiarism and wonder at what age it becomes more meaningful and visible to them. I saw a 4th grader yesterday that was basically coping the entire paragraph off of the computer onto her paper. When I explained to her that this was plagiarism, she mentioned that she changed a few words to make it her own. I do like how the article had the section in it where it showed the different levels of permissible AI use in assignments. I think this would be valuable to go over with students and to refer back to it whenever they are doing a written assignment.
Overreliance and loss of critical thinking are something I worry about everyday. I see how politicians are trying to dumb down our curriculum by rewriting how we should teach, especially the content. My students MUST be critical thinkers, so they don’t get the “wool pulled over their eyes”, scammed or “pwned”. As Horace Mann once said, “A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated”.
While overreliance on AI can lead to a decline in critical thinking, it’s crucial to view AI as a tool that can enhance learning rather than replace it. I will equip students with the skills to critically evaluate AI-generated content and understand its limitations. I will also prioritize face-to-face interaction and collaborative learning to develop essential social and emotional skills. By promoting the responsible use of AI and emphasizing transparency, accountability, and fairness, I can harness the power of AI to enhance my students’ learning without compromising critical thinking and human connection.
My greatest concern with students using AI is overreliance and loss of critical thinking. I have already noticed my students having difficulty solving problems without technology. In my classroom, I think the first step is to have a discussion with students regarding this issue. Many of them just aren’t aware as they are so used to technology. Now that we are 1:1 and every student has a Chromebook, students do most of their learning via an LMS. I have tried to structure my class so that we do use technology often as a tool, but many days, we do not use the Chromebooks. Students have dialog with each other and write with pen and paper. Teaching my students critical thinking skills has also been important.