AI 101 for Teachers: Demystifying AI for Educators

foreign [Music] welcome to session two of the AI 101 for teachers professional learning series in the last session you were introduced to Ai and learned about the potential uses for AI and education in this session we are going to pull the curtain back and learn more about what large language models are and how we can use them to perform common teacher tasks like creating formative assessments or writing an email to a parent leveraging AI for these time-consuming tasks will give you more time for the tasks that really matter most like engaging with your students let's get started foreign I hope you're all as excited as we are to dive into the fascinating world of generative AI my name is Amanda I am a former High School teacher and digital learning specialist I now work as a member of the professional learning team at code. org and I'm Tiffany an elementary and middle school stem teacher the potential of generative Ai and education truly excites me but I'm not alone in this enthusiasm let's hear what other Educators say about ai's role in education AI is going to be everywhere as a teacher it's going to give me new resources I'm looking forward in encouraging the kids to seek out AI enhancement and to use what they can find expand beyond the classroom I already actively encourage them to reach out beyond the scope of the class to learn what they can on their own and this is just another tool for doing that I hope AI can make my job better in helping me do things that you know might be something I put off to the end or it's really hard for me to do or hard to find time for doing some of these things and I think if we use our tools appropriately they can really give you time back the one thing that we could do that's a total disservice to our kids and to education is to say hey this is a scary thing that we don't want to talk about but it's like out here and it's like a thing we don't know a whole lot about instead it's like hey we do know a lot about AI this is what we know and this is how it's developed and teaching our kids like hey ai's not a scary thing but we do need to understand how AI works because those kids who are our youngest Learners right now are going to be the students and the adults of tomorrow they're going to be helping to develop this technology to make sure that it stays safe and Equitable and all of those things for our future to make sure that it is a technology that is evolving for good artificial intelligence is going to help us understand our students better as much as we don't like testing and as much as we don't like evaluating our students we have to do it but what AI can do is it processes that information is it's going to give us a new insight into our students foreign [Music] telligence also known as AI is a technology that imitates human intelligence performing tasks like understanding language recognizing patterns and making decisions ranging from specific systems like recommending movies to Advanced forms that generate content or predict outcomes ai's rapidly evolving technology enables machines to learn adapt and perform human-like tasks often more efficiently AI has been integrated into our lives already many of the Technologies we comfortably use in school and at home use ai ai is widespread some examples you may have seen before include self-driving cars Siri or Alexa speech to text Google translate Snapchat filters and the list goes on while there are many different types of AI all of which are useful and fascinating we know the type that is weighing most heavily on Educators Minds at the current moment generative AI generative AI is a type of AI that uses patterns from existing content to create new content such as new text or new images in this video we will focus on generative AI we'll use four guiding principles to understand the best ways to interact with AI and in particular generative AIS like chat GPT for educators you can think of using AI for Education like your own personal teaching assistant AI makes mistakes although teaching assistants are generally trustworthy they can make mistakes even though AI is run off of powerful algorithms those algorithms can't always tell fact from fiction or recognize the meaning of a complex question AI needs your guidance teaching assistance can't do everything on their own generally the more information you give image generators large language models and other AI systems the more the results will reflect what you were seeking your input to the system will make or break its usefulness AI systems have limitations AI systems have guardrails in place to prevent misuse for example chat GPT won't help you carry out an illegal plot and the image generator mid-journey won't create graphic content Beyond these guardrails systems also have actions that can't perform for example as of August 2023 chat GPT can't interpret images a is changing just like a teaching assistant will learn over time AI systems are becoming more sophisticated capable and Adept at understanding and addressing human needs what works today with AI may work differently tomorrow chat box like Chad gbt are based on a new type of AI technology that's called large language models so instead of a typical neural network which trains on a specific task like how to recognize faces or images a large language model is trained on the largest amount of information possible such as everything available on the internet training to then be able to generate completely new information like to write essays or poems have conversations or even write code the possibilities seem endless but how does this work and what are its shortcomings let's Dive In while a chat bot built on a large language model may seem magical it works based on some really simple ideas in fact most of the magic of AI is based on very simple math concepts from statistics applied billions of times using fast computers the AI uses probabilities to predict the text that you wanted to produce based on all the previous texts that it has been trained on suppose that we want to train a large language model to read every play written by William Shakespeare so that it could write new plays in the same style we'd start with all the texts from Shakespeare's plays stored letter by letter in a sequence next we'd analyze each letter to see what letter is most likely to come next after an eye the next most likely letters that show up in Shakespeare plays are s or n after an s T C or h and so on this creates a table of probabilities with just this we can try to generate new writing we've entered a new era of large language models Advanced large language models are now widely available as interactive chat Bots they can easily perform simple and complex tasks that you as the user can benefit from remember however that it is important to always scrutinize the output as you would any resource from the internet here are a few examples of some chat Bots that have gained notoriety in the recent past note that all of this information is current as of the publishing of this video but AI is rapidly shifting field and some of this information may be out of date by the time you watch the recording chatgpt is a large language model chat bot from openai it has undergone multiple versions gbt4 is the newest and most powerful version yet chat GPT 3. 5 is currently available for free released by Google bard is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of the Lambda large language model with a few minor differences it functions much like chat GPT Bing AI created by Microsoft is built on the same technology as chat GPT but it has the added benefit of being connected to the internet and can access up-to-date information chatgpt and Bard are not and cannot access anything after 2021 which is the database it was trained on although we will primarily be focusing on generating new texts using large language models it is important to note that there are also generative AI tools that create other types of Novel outputs such as images tools like dolly or mid-journey are capable of creating images that nobody has ever seen before prompting an image generator is similar to prompting a text generator if you've tried one of these chat box you might realize that you won't always receive the right information from the large language model at first users are fine-tuning their skills of prompt engineering to get the most out of large language models prompt engineering refers to creating and tweaking prompts pumps to reach a desired output you could think of this like the process of clarifying a point to a friend in a conversation sometimes it's useful to add more information and specificity to be understood AI is pretty cool and has a lot of capabilities but how does AI fit into your life as an educator well we know that there are average teacher in the United States where it's 50 hours per week of the 50 hours a teacher Works per week in the U.

S administrative tasks take up over 50 percent of teachers time leaving only 49 of their time for student interaction although these numbers differ from country to Country teachers across the globe are spending a tremendous amount of time on Preparation grading feedback and administrative tasks tasks where the teacher doesn't directly interact with students so consider AI to be your teaching assistant an AI teaching assistant can help cut down the time and mental effort you spend on these administrative types of tasks as well as both student learning and surprising ways it can suggest creative activity ideas draft parent emails write-up notes in up your design game for lesson materials ultimately a teaching assistant doesn't just help teachers but students as well as teachers increasingly shoulder more burdens AI can improve their ability to reach all students and students in their own terms if we wanted to fully harness its potential of AI tools we need to allow our new teaching assistants to help out in the learning process using AI as part of your workflow may be intimidating at first so let's first start by acknowledging the very real concerns Educators and people generally have about AI in the classroom cheating issues such as plagiarism unfair advantages and loss of critical thinking content issues like misinformation and AI fiction and student safety issues such as data privacy and misuse the idea we want to share with you today is that AI is akin to the calculator or the internet a completely game-changing tool that will transform education whether we are ready for it or not ultimately we will leave students behind if we don't prepare them for the future of education and the future of work we're not here to say that responding to this AI craze is easy because we know this is a significant challenge for teachers let's reframe each concern one by one cheating AI has the potential to enhance students learning when used with care and clear guidelines in place content with strong safeguards and an emphasis on critical thinking students can learn to evaluate AI tools responses with an eye for misinformation student safety like with all online tools of which students use many proper safeguards can help protect student data I know that doesn't address all of your concerns but throughout this video series we're going to continue to break down Ai and provide you with additional resources to take your learning to the next level now let's get back to using AI as a teaching assistant [Music] all right now we're here with my colleague Sherry we're going to explore examples of how we can use generative AI Sherry do you have any examples how you would use chat GPT I really would like to send an email to a parent that is concerned about their child's grade regarding the reading challenge that we have here at school they're being required the students are being required to read books throughout the year and meet a reading goal of certain page count and their child's a reluctant reader and they don't really know what to do and they're asking me for suggestions and um do you think that gbt would be something that I could use to help me with that yes Chachi PT would be great for that what are your initial thoughts when you start writing your emails the first thing I think would be asking it if the books that their child is reluctant to read is there anything the suggestions on types of books of reading levels you can just tell chat gbt what you're trying to do okay um write me an email reply to a student's parent about the book challenge and recommendations oh oh wow so it looks like it could be a little bit better um I think that I need to be a little bit more specific on the grade level because it just said student and it's giving me things that are a little lower but also maybe not in the genre that maybe the student likes so do you think that maybe like we could fix the parameters or how to narrow it down yeah I think the more specifics you give it like the gray level the genre then chat GPT would be able to help you out a little bit further with your email wow I really like how it has customized what we told it it now says Dear parent I hope this email finds you well thank you for getting in touch regarding the book Challenge and recommendations for your 10th grade student so that's what I asked it to do um I'm delighted to assist in suggesting some captivity and mystery novels that I believe will ignite their imagination and contribute to the reading experience so that's really good that it kind of inserted that that new aspect that new customization here are the books that it suggested now instead The Westing Game genuine fraud one of us is lying truly devious and a study in Charlotte and then it goes on to say I encourage your student to reach out with their thoughts questions and insights so I really like what it has customized for me this time around okay I'm glad you like what Chachi PC came up with but the nice thing about chat you PPT is it's the starting point so do you agree with everything that the email suggested or would you make any edits to it um this new version the the customization that it has given me for a 10th grader now with the mystery genres looks I think so much better because it's actually giving me books that um are I think a better choice and I do like that the tone at the beginning it says that I want to extend my appreciation for your student's participation it's got words like dedication in it so the tone I think is really good um and I like the length of it maybe at the very end I wouldn't have three paragraphs but you know I think that's the beauty of it I can kind of mix and match and pick and choose what I want to use but um I think it's a great jumping off point for us um The Westing Game though the book that is listed first that was suggested I probably wouldn't include that even though it's a better choice of books overall the five that it gave the Westing Game is too low it's not a high school level book it's a middle school level book so I probably take that out and maybe change a little bit of the length but the tone of it is exactly what I was looking for yeah Chachi PT can revise and edit to whatever you would like so if you want to change the length of it if you want to change the style or the formality of it you can just ask it to change it so why don't you go ahead and give it a try Okay um rewrite for shorter length and take off The Westing Game improve opening paragraph okay let me see what it does I hope you're well okay it still looks good here are three engaging mystery novels so they kind of cut it down because it was a little wordy at the beginning and then they took out The Westing Game but it looks like they took out one other one as well so originally we had five choices and now there's three but one of the ones they took out was the one I wanted to take out so I'm curious why it wouldn't take out just one of the suggestions that I gave well if you notice if you if you use chat GPT you can go above and it saves all the prior emails so if there is something from a previous email you like you can just cut and paste it into your final email okay great I wasn't even thinking about that so that's great to have that suggestion this is just one example of how to work with AI to generate and then revise content we recommend that you pause the video here and try generating your own guardian or parent email using chat GPT if you need help creating an account check out these login instructions [Music] do you have any lesson plans that you are thinking about writing right now I think so I think I could think of something right now my students are learning about the Greek gods and goddesses and I'm always struggling to come up with ways to incorporate lessons that aren't the same thing I've done every single year so um I guess I'll just start by typing in the prompt box all right um let's see develop a research based writing assignment on the Greek gods and goddesses all right it says assignment choose one Greek god or goddess to research write a two to three page research paper about your chosen daughter goddess your paper should include the following it goes on to list what it needs to include and then even gives a grading rubric tips for researching Greek gods and goddesses this is pretty great yeah and it was great there any of you also add more specific keywords like lesson plan it will even break it down even further for you so you can see the exact lesson plan and probably still give you some of that same information okay um make it a lesson plan I didn't say that before make it a lesson plan for three days oh wow look it says here's a lesson plan for three days on Greek gods and goddesses day one it gives me five different tasks for the students to do day two it gives me tasks day three even gives me assessment suggestions and differentiation because I mean you know that there's different learning styles so it gives me one that talks about a longer research paper or it could be ones that who are wanting a challenge it could be a lesser known god or goddess and um I mean this has given me some really good suggestions this is just one example of how to work with AI to generate and then revise content we recommend that you pause the video here and try generating your own lesson plan using either chat gbt or bard [Music] yeah so one thing I love being for is because it's up to date and it's connected to the Internet so I can go on there I can prompt my students to go on there and get up-to-date information and I can give it specifics about what I'm looking for is there anything currently that you're looking for yeah with us coming back to school just being out of the summer time one of the things that our students are required to do is read a chosen book for them over the summer and they just got finished reading a book about a young boy who helped solve a mystery involving art Heist at the National Gallery Museum in DC and I would love for them to make an actual real world connection because these things do happen all over the world including here in the United States and specifically at the Isabella or Stewart Gardner Museum one of the things that they really connected on when they read the book was just how is it that people steal such Priceless works of art but also what is it about those works of art and artists and things like that and I would love to use this to dive deeper and for them to make those connections yeah I know it can definitely help you with that especially if you want the students to go to specific places you can make it be able to give you a formative assessment so you can type in specifics about what you want them to look for on the website okay um what I would really like is for them to have an assessment to look at this website from the Museum's website and try to really show me that they've walked away understanding what it is that I want them to understand about the artwork about the artists about the time period the value of the work etc so let me see what I can get it to tell us so I think I'm going to write the uh create a five question quiz based on the context of the website since it's linked to the internet I think that it should be able to do this okay so you can be more specific with you see that it didn't give you the website so when you type in your questions specifically type in the website along with what formative assessment you want it to give you and then it will give it will link the formative assessment with the website and give you the information you're looking for okay great um I just redid it and it says thank you for the link I see it's about the 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that was stolen in Boston so it says here are five questions and it goes on to give me those five questions and that really does help but actually I think I want it to be where maybe there's some multiple choice instead of just some short answer so let me tell it make it 50 percent multiple choice based great so now it's taken those questions and it's turning into a multiple choice based question so that's what I was hoping rather than be just completely short answer only problem is it didn't give me an answer key so with most teachers one in the end so the nice thing also you can extend it if you see five questions uh maybe for one class or one student may only need to research and do five questions you can also tell it to give you ten questions 20 questions and you can split it like you did 50 multiple choice some open-ended questions so I'm fill in the blanks but like you were saying most teachers want an answer key with it so go ahead and type in and try to get the answer key for what you just looked up answer key needed great look now it's giving me the answer key so this is perfect and now like you said I can extend it I can change the dynamic of the quiz if I wanted to go from true false or even maybe just a couple of short answers and only a couple of the multiple choice so this is great I love that it's linked to the website that I want them to look at without me having to go through and filter the entire content on the website so it does give you the answer key but just since it is coming from the internet you always need to go through yourself and check for accuracy just to make sure that it's giving you all the correct information and answers of course of course yeah so the multiple choice like you were saying you can do true or false you can do a lot of different options but if you want to do an extension for your students you can also ask it to maybe do some Hands-On activities or something like that so why don't we try to see okay um let's see creative ways to incorporate information wonderful so here it's telling me that some ways to incorporate the information would be they could create a crossword puzzle using key terms or information from the text they could write a short story where they pretend to be maybe one of the characters in the artwork or it could be they create their own artwork a song a poem they could even create a game so these are some great suggestions because I hadn't even thought about creating a crossword puzzle using the information that they learned about and were assessed about in the first place so now they can apply that information and you can always take it one step further for your creative students that want to write a song or a poem like the option there so what would you ask the website to do if you wanted a student to create a song I think I would want them to create a song using the artwork or the information from this website as their inspiration so let me see if I can get it to write an example song so I can show them what it's like or what it should look like when it's finished and done so create a song about the information learned from the website says here's a song I came up with based on the information from the website it does it has a verse one A Chorus a verse two A Chorus and I'm reading the lyrics and it's about the artwork stolen from the Isabella Gardner Museum so this is this is exactly like the information that they would have learned about the art Heist and the artwork itself we recommend that you pause here and try out developing formative assessment questions using chat gbt Bard or Bing we know that was a lot and I'm sure you still have questions about how to use AI to act as your own teaching assistant we put together a resource for educators to craft strong prompts to get the most out of the AI tool of your choice take a few minutes to review the document and try out some of the prompts bonus points if you try out the same prompt in different tools in this session we focus on AI as a tool for performing teacher tasks some of you might be wondering hey if I can use this to make my job easier what are my students going to do with it in the next session we are going to focus on ways that teachers can use AI to enhance the learning experience as opposed to detracting from it we will be joined by DrEthan Mullick a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Drlilac Malik who works on interactive pedagogy and AI research at the Wharton School they will help us explore the possibilities of AI for student learning visit the AI 101 for teachers website at co. org AI 101 to sign up for Early Access and to explore additional resources from code.