Sue Beer M.A., B.A (Hons) Cert Ed. MSET – Director / Co founder of Ai Tutor Training.
Is AI a Trivial Tool or a Powerful Force for the Future?
How important is AI to us in our daily lives? We have managed very well without it until now, so why is it being hailed as something we suddenly can’t live without? AI is becoming increasingly essential to UK culture and especially within the culture of the classroom. Some teachers are still hanging on to the old fashioned notion that AI is just an unnecessary but entertaining frippery to most students at best and at worst, it is a cheating tool that will cause everyone a headache.
To test this theory, I asked Chat GPT to tell me about the topics that it is most frequently asked for. It ranked its greatest number of hits as being around the ‘help me understand/explain/write something’ issue. Especially, with regard to formal writing and clarity. It seems that even after having had 11 years of education, most people still lack the confidence or vocabulary to explain complex ideas or problematic issues. This can certainly be said of most FE students.
Following closely behind the ‘help me explain’ request, Chat GPT is asked to assist with CV creation and the rewriting of things so that they sound more professional but still human. I can promise you that this article is entirely my own work but Chat GPT did own up to assisting students so they can ‘use AI without getting found out’. Another popular request, after all, but still very low down the list. I had not expected it to be used so heavily for so many professional or academic matters.
I thought its hit list would hinge around trivia, so I pressed it further, because I also enjoy a bit of trivial knowledge. Pop culture and facts, history and animal facts and word meanings and origins are its top trivia hits. So, it again demonstrates our thirst for factual knowledge and an innate curiosity about the world around us. We may each be picking up enough trivia to form a one person pub quiz team, but the bottom line is that we are constantly learning from it and most of us are not just messing about, producing pictures of giraffes crossed with mice.
I am reliably informed by Perplexity Pro that my own use of its platform pivots around questions relating to the development and use of language, alongside music and cultural fact checking. Here, I think it may be referring to those 3am insomniac questions, such as did Thomas Hardy’s cat really eat his brain?! I don’t really need to know the answer and neither do you, but it is still a matter of curiosity and a talking point for some!
It would be awful to think that this was this the only reason why AI was created and developed. If it were true, what a waste of a wonderful tool it would be. Yet we are curious creatures and we do want to know about ourselves and the world around us. This is why AI is second to none. With its instance responses, AI helps us learn as individuals. We can explore our own interests in our own time and there is nothing it doesn’t have an answer for. So, it naturally feeds brilliantly into a classroom or a 1-1 setting as a terrific learning tool for the more serious stuff. Which raises the questions of stewardship, control and trust. Can teachers trust their students not to use AI for their own academic misconduct? Probably not, in all honesty!
So there has to be a degree of supervision and control over its use. While there are AI tools out there to sniff out plagiarism from as far away as the nearest satellite, it is ultimately the human element of the partnership that will be the final arbitrator as to whether it is the student’s own work or not. After all, we know our students, the language they are likely to use and the level of their learning ability. We can direct them towards a more responsible, beneficial use of AI that will satisfy their curious minds and turn their learning into an individualised experience with a challenge level that is entirely suited to their own skill set. If they are being taught brilliantly well, why would they need to cheat?
Critics of AI express concerns around who holds the power and who benefits the most from it. In the microcosm of the classroom, the teacher should hold the power of the toolkit and the students should be benefiting the most from the teacher’s directed use of it. Similarly, society as a macrocosm, is given whatever the investors and decision makers decide to focus on but what are the benefits to us? We need to question what AI gets built and why, who controls it and who benefits the most?
Why is Elon Musk pouring money into superfluous luxuries such as space travel and dancing robots, when investment might be better spent on sustainable food growth or climate control? This is the power of investment shaping humanity on a public scale. If Musk calls pauses or regulates development, is it really for public safety, or is it to bring new investors on board? AI developers argue that it is best for us that they control regulation because it is they, the experts, who know what they are doing.
Yet space travel and dancing robots are surely not the necessity that drives invention? Or might they turn out to be a global developments that lead to serendipitous outcomes, accidentally or otherwise? There is already a plethora of spin off platforms that are freely available to change the face of teaching and learning. Many teachers, tutors, trainers and TAs are using AI to show their students and tutees how to improve their explanations when essay writing, or how to use AI to develop and improve on existing engineering designs, to create fresh and amazing practical tools for the future.
AI Platforms such as Eduaide.ai, Canva or Teachmate.ai support learners right across the board, and these are just three of the many useful tools now being employed in the classroom. Eduaide is an adaptive teacher with a mass of resources logged in its metaphorical brain. It can keep up with the pace of any student’s level of ability and offer fresh challenges, moment by moment. Canva enables students to unleash their creative minds when they produce professional looking presentations or original artistic designs. Teachmate differentiates for SEND/EAL students, offering inclusive, strong support with visual or linguistic scaffolds. So, even perhaps unwittingly, the Elon Musks of this world can’t be all bad, whatever opinions we may hold about the focus of their investments.
So, whether you are an educator in primary, secondary or tertiary education, it would be foolish not to stay ahead of the learning curve. You are the inventor of your own classroom experience. You have AI as a powerful tool to help you generate engaging, exciting, differentiated lesson plans from within the often dull remit of the curriculum. Why do so many teachers still continue to rehash the same old lesson plans, year in, year out? Yes, we are short of time, and yes, the old plans work and they get the required results, but surely it is time to let AI take some of the strain and reinvent our classroom experience?
You can reduce your planning and marking time with our AI Enabled Inspired Planning, Smart Marking CPD Courses and free up the academic potential of your students at the same time. You will gain a fresh perspective on teaching your beloved subject and your students may well see you with fresh eyes, too! And in case you are wondering what really happened to Thomas Hardy’s brain, it was removed for scientific study then accidentally destroyed. Happily, not by his cat. Chat GPT did assist me at this point in the writing of this blog, but what’s the harm in a little bit of trivia now and then?
