Three students huddle around a computer in a classroom at Eric Graves Memorial Junior High in Dartmouth, N.S., as David Waugh gestures to an AI-generated image of a sweatshirt created for a home ec assignment.
It’s a scene relatively new in Halifax-area classrooms as teachers like Waugh begin to embrace the growing technology while weighing the ethics of using chatbots and other AI tools to shape young minds.
“The issue is that going forward, it’s going to be here anyways,” said Waugh. “So we need to figure out how to adapt to it.”
To that end, the Halifax Regional Centre for Education has developed guidelines on the use of AI — artificial intelligence — in the classroom based on input from teachers in the district.
Their stated aim is “to ensure that AI technologies are integrated into education for both students and teachers in an ethical, safe, and inclusive manner.”
That includes things like not putting personal information into AI tools, monitoring students so they aren’t exposed to harmful content, and disclosing when artificial intelligence has been used for school projects.
A change in attitude
Waugh said the guidelines come at a time when perceptions of AI use among teachers are shifting, noting “attitudes have changed massively” in the past couple of years.
He pointed to ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot with a seemingly unending list of functions, from mimicking human conversations to drafting emails to writing computer code. Waugh said ChatGPT was once considered “the cheating machine,” but educators have begun to see the advantages of using AI for fact-checking or research, for example. In one Halifax classroom, AI was used to generate images based on students’ poetry.
Another factor in AI’s adoption has been the need to educate students on its responsible use amid concerns about the loss of critical thinking skills, said Waugh.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, suggests on its website that students use the tool for academic “grunt work,” like formatting citations in an essay, freeing up time for the creative process.
Waugh’s students are adapting to the change, using the technology in their classwork. James Hathaway, a Grade 7 student, said using AI lets him focus on his academic strengths.
“I find it very useful,” he said. “For example, I’m not very good at drawing, so having image generation is a very big win.”
He said it’s a good thing that the limitations of the technology, such as illegible words in images, mean he still has to be critical of what it produces.
School boards and universities around the world have had mixed reactions to the use of AI. While some encourage its use, others have considered bans or blocked AI apps on school devices out of concern over plagiarism and misinformation.
Chris Cocek, a member of the technology integration team for the Halifax school district, said that’s not the way forward.
“We can’t ignore that artificial intelligence is here. It’s quickly embedded itself within our society at large,” said Cocek, whose team trains teachers on how to use AI responsibly. “We need to have these conversations with our students so that they’re informed users.”
Necessary in a changing world
Johanathan Woodworth teaches about technology integration in Mount Saint Vincent University’s faculty of education. He believes the potential benefits of AI for education are very high, but so are the risks, even beyond the classroom.
“I’m afraid of atrophying skills that we need to have,” he said, citing the fear that AI will replace some mental functions, such as relationship building and emotional intelligence.
The best possible outcome of AI use in schools, said Woodworth, is increasing students’ productivity while allowing educators to highlight the human qualities that set them apart from AI.
Taking advantage of technology mustn’t come at the expense of the “human element” in classrooms, he said.
“Teachers have to be open-minded about integrating these tools, but also teachers have to be taught how to integrate these tools, how to critically analyze these tools.”
He said the same goes for students.
“If we don’t, people are just going to take the easy way out,” he said.
