I’m updating how I facilitate creating a classroom AI policy with my 6th grade Math and Science students. Things have changed since I first wrote about this process.
I start with the following slideshow presented with Pear Deck so that all students can interact with the interactive slides. Slides 12 through 21 were taken and adapted from Prodigy Learning’s Minecraft Education AI Ready Skills series. The rest were made by me but some show tools that I found elsewhere and did not create myself. I have been using and re-purposing ideas and items created by others long before AI came into the picture, so this is not new and not an AI thing. AI is another tool that I can get ideas and ready-made materials from.
When we get to slide 23 students look at the following timeline of AI use from fully AI with little to no thinking at the top all the way to zero technology and fully human at the bottom. Students have a green thumbs up and a red thumbs down. In their small groups they discuss each scenario and decide where the cutoff should be by putting their thumbs down on the scenario is too much AI and not enough human and the thumbs up on the scenario that will work for students learning in a classroom.
Once students finalize their choices, I go over with the whole class, hearing from students, and guiding them through determining which scenarios are not just okay for classroom use but conducive to learning and thinking critically – using your brain and engaging in productive struggle (keeping the cognitive demand on the human). Here’s a photo of the results from one class and my notes on the whiteboard from our discussion:
I keep reminding my students that the AI should always be sandwiched between the human (H-AI-H taken from the WA State AI Policy for schools). AI use starts with the human, for us it could be a problem we need to solve or a project we are working on. The human can consult or use AI to augment their skills and knowledge or as a tutor to learn more or understand the concepts. Research is another way we can use AI to help during a project as well as a thought partner to bounce ideas off of and even get more ideas. Then we end with the human especially to verify information provided by the AI, checking for possible hallucinations and biases, and making the end product our own.
Here are the results from both classes, which ended up pretty similar:
In both classes, many students thought it okay to them write a draft, AI write a draft and then the student takes the best AI ideas to their draft. I pushed back on that with one question, “what if the AI’s draft is considerably better than the student’s draft?” In both classes students thought about it and agreed that it’s too tempting in that position to use most if not all of the AI generated draft. I shared with students that I’ve seen some students write a brief and loosely organized draft needing AI to make it better, thereby doing very little of the heavy lifting. That is exactly what we need to avoid when learning and when working at being better thinkers and using writing to organize our thoughts and communicate them clearly.
Once we agreed on ways that we can use AI in Math and Science, which included students doing most of the writing of the first and final drafts, I have students electronically “sign” a Google Form agreement:
I also shared with students, and added to the Google Form above, the following image that I heard about from the Mark Cuban Foundation AI Teacher Bootcamp from Vera Cubero (get her Canva template here):
This sets the stage and provides us guidelines that we can revisit whenever students use AI in class. It provides us with ground rules, but the real work begins when students start to use AI. That is when they get to practice using AI to augment what they can do while they continue to think, wrestle, struggle, write, re-write, and learn.
So far as we get ready to start December, students have been provided AI chatbots to that can help them with Math and give them practice problems. These bots have been mostly optional. I will write about those in my next post.
We also completed an activity where students practiced prompting an AI to generate images for a class book. I will share how that went in another post.
