Here are some simple ways Sarah Connell Sanders, a teacher writing in the Worcester (Mass) Magazine, is using artificial intelligence to go beyond disruption and strive for sustained innovations in her classroom.
“AI can provide dozens of alternative suggestions for writing lesson plans and save an awful lot of time. Tools such as ‘Magic Bus’ allow me to refine and improve my practice in a sustainable way. For instance, I recently introduced a ‘Library Clue Hunt’ to English classes using a series of rhyming riddles hidden in significant books throughout the library. Creating the interconnected riddles would have taken me hours of planning on my own, but with the help of ‘Magic School,’ I had my new and engaging clue hunt up and running before you could say “dismantle.”
“I have long used poetry as a means of teaching students about mood and tone in literature. This year, one of my students suggested copying and pasting an original poem into an AI image generator. Without fail, the images expressed a clear tone that corresponded with the poem it had derived from. My objective for the lesson remained the same, but AI provided a new pathway for students to arrive at the goal.
“My seventh-graders quickly became enamored with the AI image generator discussed above; however, we found that it had limitations. When given certain prompts like ‘honors student’ or ‘juvenile delinquent’ the resulting images revealed harmful stereotypes. This led to a discussion on bias in AI and our eventual discovery of a tool called ‘Teachable Machine.’ ‘Teachable Machine’ allows students to create their own machine learning models, diversifying AI. One student trained her computer to recognize different chess pieces. Another trained her computer, with incredible accuracy, to determine if a book was fiction or nonfiction, based on its cover. My favorite was a boy who trained his computer to recognize a solitary figure in the frame as ‘lonely’ and multiple figures standing together as ‘homies.’ Students weren’t just using AI, they were transforming it in real-time.
“My class doesn’t need more disruptions; we need sustained innovation. I believe AI can provide that momentum and help us to dismantle, redesign, and transform education as we know it. This is only the “
Worcester (Mass) Magazine
