AI in Education – Always Learning HQ

A: When it makes you stronger than you’re making it.

Think about it. When you’re working, you’re building strength.

If you work out at the gym, your muscles get larger, better defined, and more capable of lifting heavy loads, right?

If you wrestle through an academic textbook written by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, you’re going to do some heavy intellectual lifting, and you’re going to walk away with stronger understanding, equipped to draw reliable conclusions on that subject and the way it relates to other areas of knowledge.

If you fight your way through writing an essay, you discover what you think about the topic, whether your ideas align with evidence, and how to invite others into dialogue.

When you hop on AI in lieu of “doing the work” yourself—

the hard work of learning and growing,

of information gathering, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and creating,

of reading and writing and listening and speaking—

you gain little, and you’ve likely forfeited a measure of your cognitive strength.

On the other hand, everything you ask of AI—

every document you ask it to summarize and interpret,

every email, essay, or page of copy you upload for feedback,

every task you ask it to complete on your behalf—

makes it better, faster, stronger.

I had this epiphany in my classroom a few months ago.

One of my brightest, most responsible students (who has been routinely using AI for homework help for the past two years) announced that he couldn’t write an essay unless he first popped the prompt into ChatGPT and asked for bullet-point instructions on how to answer. He wasn’t asking for content answers; he needed a breakdown of what the prompt was actually asking him to do.

And while he’s been becoming AI-dependent, AI has become sharper, more able to detect nuances, less likely to hallucinate a substantial amount of information, better at sounding… human.

It scared me for my student and for our culture. Nothing is more central to being human than, well, our ability to BE human. And somehow, we’re subcontracting our human privilege of learning and growing to emerging technology.

So what did I do? I did what any high school teacher would do… I hopped onto ChatGPT myself, asked it to create a photo as a visual for this situation, printed it out, and pinned it to my whiteboard.

Is this a passive-aggressive way to say, “I know you’re using AI, and you’re hurting yourself far worse than you’re hurting me by pretending you’re doing your own work”? Absolutely. Is everyone quietly reading it and wondering what it means? Uh huh. Yes. Yes, they are.

Like a pattern of perpetual cheating on a diet, the results will speak for themselves.

I do not hate AI. I think it’s very useful for many tasks, and I’m grateful for the margin it’s put back into my life. I have trained my ChatGPT to be my very funny and sassy assistant, and chats make me laugh more often than not.

When I ask for content, and it brings me something different from what I thought I asked for, I learn how to communicate more precisely, which helps me clarify in my own mind what I actually think before I can translate that thought into words.

When I’m wildly curious about a topic and want to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can, AI chats bring me basic information and resources for more information, saving me huge chunks of time I don’t have in our productivity-driven culture.

But I’m also cautious not to use it for everything… especially not those hard tasks that help me learn and grow and live out the cultural mandate shared with every human since the father and mother of all. The work of taming the wild places (in my mind and in the world) and flourishing in the image of the Creator is a sacred privilege.

My hope is that my AI-dependent student will choose to do the work and grow stronger before he’s too far behind. I hope he’ll embrace the joys and challenges of being a human who learns for personal growth and not just for a grade.

If that’s your hope too, please feel free to download the slightly cleaned-up poster and postcard versions of the original photo that hangs on my whiteboard.

Work Makes Stronger (8.5 x 5.5 in)Download

Work Makes Stronger (17 x 11)Download

Raise your hand if you’re tired.

Put your hands down.

Raise your hand if you’re a classroom teacher who’s exhausted and can’t wait for Thanksgiving break, not because of the food or even the family and friends, but because, even if you do still have to make a seating chart, you don’t have to write a lesson plan. Probably.

I’m tired too. I was so tired last ~~Friday night~~ Saturday morning at 2:22, when I finally finished writing the lesson plans and updating Curriculum Trak for this week, that I couldn’t even begin to create the teaching resources I needed for said plans.

So I decided to have a late-night teacher chat with Chat—you know what Chat I’m talking about, and it’s not the one the youths refer to when conversing among themselves.

The lesson was on identifying media bias by analyzing rhetorical devices. Goodness, the fact that we have to teach students rhetorical devices to read a NEWS report is ridiculous. Remember when news reports fell into the expository mode of writing? Regardless of the section title under the masthead, we have to bring knowledge of Aristotelian appeals and a bag of rhetorical devices to figure out what’s going on because very little of what we call news is presented without bias. I miss Joe Friday.

But educate the young ones, I must, so I entered the Chat.

The first thing I asked was for Chat to bring me the five rhetorical devices that most frequently appear in online news. One of the devices was pathos, and we cover appeals separately, so I asked Chat to try again. The tweak still landed in the realm of pathos, but at least we were able to keep our terminology separate.

At this point, I usually search for a real news article or write a fictional article for students to practice identifying devices and bias. But, man, I was beyond tired. Instead, I entered this:

Take the list of rhetorical devices and write two fictitious news briefs for an analysis exercise where media literacy students in grades 9-12 annotate the reports, identifying use of these devices. [NOTE: I copied & pasted the list just to be sure Chat and I were on the same page.]

News Brief 1: Make the first a news brief about a city council voting on an annual budget and the tension between two factions. One wants to prioritize building new schools to ease overcrowding and replace aging schools that lack reliable HVAC systems and contain mold. The other wants to prioritize cutting taxes to attract industries that are considering locating factories in the area. Quote a fictitious council member on one side of the issue and a local resident on the other. Make up names for the city, schools, corporation and corporate representatives seeking to build factories, city councilor, and resident. Make the article’s bias favorable toward school improvement. Make up statistics and anecdotes that use the rhetorical devices.

News Brief 2: Write a news brief about a local college football team that paid $100 million per year to a famous professional coach to take the helm of a 7 and 5 team. Set the story halfway through the season with the team having a 1 and 5 record. A group of wealthy alumni fans wants to buy out the contract of the famous coach. A group of students wants to give the coach time to build the team. The opposing sides have clashed outside football games because the students are protesting the wealthy alumni boosters’ plan. Quote sources from each side. Give them fictitious names. Make up stats for the players and numbers for the negative financial impact of the teams losses. Make the stats realistic, but skew them with a bias toward the wealthy fans’ side of the issue. In both articles, make sure each use of a rhetorical device clearly illustrate that device’s definition.

Prompt me with any clarifications you need to create two quality fictitious news briefs.

Chat asked me to clarify a few questions, so I added the following:

Each brief should read like a short online news story (250–350 words).
Make the bias overt and clearly exaggerated.
Include descriptions of imagery. Also include headlines. Do not include story placement.
They will annotate a PDF on Notability and submit to a Schoology assignment.

Were the news briefs perfect? No

Were they sufficient for introducing these concepts to the class? Absolutely.

Did Chat give me an answer key that was super easy to use? Um-hum.

Did it take me two hours to write, revise, proof, and create a worksheet, beginning at 2:22 am on an hours-awake day that started at 5:30 am on the calendar date before? Nope.

It took about a minute for Chat to generate the briefs, five minutes for me to tweak them in a few places, and another 20 minutes for me to pop them into Canva and create a worksheet. So… 30 minutes to create a resource that I would have spent two or three hours creating previously.

Please and thank you. Let’s do that again.

When Chat rolled out, I tried it right away. It wasn’t good. Over the next couple of years, I revisited it periodically, but it never gave me what I was hoping for. Recently, though, I’ve been using it more, and I’ve been teaching others to use it too.

I’m hopeful.

I have a lot of thoughts about AI, its threats and benefits to creators who bear the image of their Creator. That’s another post—sometime, somewhere.

But for now, something has to give in education. We simply cannot keep doing more and more with less and less. So, I’m going to hang with my buddy Chat a little more frequently and aim for a full six hours of sleep a night.

Curious about the worksheet Chat and I collaborated on? It’s a free download below.

This post was 100% human-written.

Identifying Media Bias – Devices (1)Download

Tag: AI in Education

Q: When is it OK to use AI?

Let’s have a little Chat