Weekly Reflection – Topic 6

Hello everyone! Today for the Pro-D sessions, I attended the one called Student AI Literacy Lessons K-12. It was quite helpful overall and there are definitely a couple things from it that I would like to discuss. The first is a quote I wrote down that the woman running the seminar said: “AI is just another tool, there is nothing inherently good or bad, it is how we use it and show our students how to use it.” I wanted to expand more on this idea because I thought it was very interesting. I know people have their own opinions of the benefits and downfalls of AI and the harm that it does but it truly is just a tool. Obviously we hope to make it more environmentally friendly and sustainable but it does already exist and students will use it regardless, so why not show them how to use it ethically and responsibly? I found a little blog article online that discusses 10 ways to use AI ethically in your teaching and how to share that with students, if anyone is interested in that. I personally believe that AI can be a very useful tool for many different things in education, like summarizing, lesson plan ideas, formatting, activity ideas, rubrics, and many more. But of course this is not what students will be using it for so it is important that we teach them how it can be helpful and how it can be dangerous. This seminar was very useful because it provided resources for AI lesson plans to teach students from K-12. I think seminars and resources like this will become increasingly more important for educators in order to not have anyone in the dark about the issues that we will face with AI in classrooms.

Here are two more screenshots I took from the slide deck during this presentation that just relate to the policies they were talking about in relation to teaching AI in the classroom. The woman running the seminar had discussed a policy that was starting to be implemented where teachers had to teach one lesson about AI per month throughout the school year, other than in December, March, and June. I would like to discuss some pros and cons of this type of policy being implemented in the classroom. I think a pro would be that it will help keep all teachers and students educated on an equal level so that nobody has a disadvantage. It will also help teachers become more aware of when students are using AI and they are not supposed to be because all teachers need to be able to look out for that when they are marking. However, on the other side of things, I think one lesson per month may be overkill. I believe everyone should be very well educated on AI of course, but spending an entire class on it every single month seems like slightly too much. I am especially thinking about this in the sense of upper level science classes where it is not extremely likely that many students will be using AI because it is a lot more difficult. Taking away one whole class per month that could be spent on the actual curriculum for upper year science classes just seems like too much in the year. Furthermore, all of those kids are older and understand concepts like AI better anyways so I do not think they need as much education on it as grade 9’s or 10’s, for example. Those are just my thoughts! I can definitely see how some people in other subjects could find it useful having more classes on AI!