3.2 Teaching With AI — The AI-Enhanced Classroom: Redefining Teaching and Learning

Guiding Questions

What is the importance of teaching with AI?
What are some methods of teaching with AI tools in the classroom?
What are some tools available for teaching with AI?

Not only can AI tools be used to help you prepare for your lessons, they can also be great resources to include in those lessons. This lesson will cover how you can teach with AI to make lessons more engaging and help students develop the skills they will need to thrive in a world with AI.

Some key ways to teach with AI

Gamification: AI can be used to create educational games and simulations that engage students and make learning fun.
1. You can turn your lesson content into games using tools like edpuzzle and nearpod, making learning more fun and interactive. With Scratch, students can even create their own games based on class content.
Virtual and Augmented Reality: AI can be used to create virtual and augmented reality experiences that immerse students in a subject and make it more interactive and engaging.
1. One of the most common applications for this technology is virtual field trips. AR and VR can take students all over the world and to different time periods. Google Expeditions is free and has a wealth of different options and also has career shadowing VR. Other apps and websites with VR and AR field trips and experiences, some free and some fee-based, will be linked along with this module and the list will be continually updated as new products are released.
2.  There are also AR and VR apps that target specific subject areas, like math, science, and history. Links are included in the resources section of this module, but Photomath, Veative, and Nearpod are just a few examples of VR and AR apps designed for students and teachers.
Language translation and practice: AI can be used to translate text, making learning materials accessible to students who speak different languages. It can also be used to make language learning more fun and interactive.
1. Lesson materials, feedback, and readings can be quickly translated using chatbots, making them a helpful tool for both teachers and students.
2.  Using chatbots for language practice can be a great in-class activity or assigned for homework where students turn in their conversations.
3.  There are also several apps out there for helping students learn English. Lillypad and Buddy.ai are just two examples of tools that employ AI to help students learn and practice English.

Chatbots

Now we will dive deeper into the various ways that you can teach with ChatGPT and other chatbots.

First, students can use them independently to get extra help
1. Chat bots can act like personal tutors by answering questions that students are confused about, helping them explore new topics of interest, and getting instant feedback on their work. Other platforms have similar functions, targeted specifically for educational use, like Cognii, which has a tutoring chat function and Socrat.ai which has a study buddy function (note: Socrat.ai is owned by Pedagogy.Cloud) .
2.  Perplexity.ai and Bing chat are great ways for students to quickly learn about a topic from chatbots that cite their sources. This way, students are left with a list of websites where they can learn more, fact check, or conduct research for an assignment.
3.  Students can also use them to brainstorm and combat writers block. Sometimes, one of the toughest challenges is a blank page. Chatbots can help get them started if they are stuck.
4.  Students can also use chatbots to get instant feedback on their work. You may consider encouraging your students to put a piece of writing or other assignment into a chatbot at a particular stage to give them constructive feedback when planning next steps, revising, or turning it in. This is a great way to use AI for personalization as well. You can instruct students who tend to struggle with grammar, tone, flow, or word choice to ask for feedback based on areas where they tend to struggle.
5.  Note: if you are allowing students to use AI to help with writing or other work, you should decide if and how students should cite AI as a source and clearly communicate those guidelines.
Teachers can use them to teach key skills
1. Chatbots can be used to teach critical thinking by asking students to critique, fact check, and verify outputs. This skill can then lead to an important discussion on misinformation, media literacy, and the limitations of AI. We will dive deeper into this type of activity during the lesson on AI through a critical lens in module 5.
2.  Chat bots can be a great resource to teach debate and argumentation skills. With teacher prompts or guidelines, students can debate with chatbots to improve their argumentation skills. Socrat.ai has a “debate-a-bot” function designed for this type of activity (note: Socrat.ai is owned by Pedagogy.Cloud).
3.  Teaching the importance of asking good questions. Because the quality of a chatbot’s response depends on the quality of the question asked, using chatbots can be a great way to teach students the skills involved in asking the right questions.
Add AI to commonly used activities
1. “Think-pair-share” can become Think-pair-chatbot-pair-share”. This gives students an additional layer of feedback to challenge their thinking.
2.  Have a Socratic dialogue with a chatbot. The bot will ask intuitive questions that will deepen students thinking on a topic and allow for a more self-directed learning experience than a teacher-led discussion. Socrat.ai is designed specifically for this type of activity (note: Socrat.ai is owned by Pedagogy.Cloud).
3.  Class debates. One key application of improving argumentation skills discussed earlier is helping students prepare for live in-class debates. In addition to acting as a debate parter, chatbots can suggest potential arguments and counterarguments to strengthen their argument and prepare for what their opponent might say.
Bring subject content to life
1. A subject like history can be made more interactive through a chat bot that allows students to have conversations historical figures. Hellohistory.ai and Socrat.ai allow students to talk with people you may be studying in class. And while it may seem only applicable to use in history classes, the content includes figures from across fields, so students can talk to scientists, mathematicians, authors, political figures, and many others (note: Socrat.ai is owned by Pedagogy.Cloud).

Conclusion

By encouraging students to use AI tools in the classroom, you can guide them on using those tools responsibly and ethically. It’s also a great opportunity to make real-world connections to the skills that they are building when using AI. The ideas suggested in this lesson represent just some of the possibilities for incorporating AI into your lessons, but we hope that they will help you brainstorm how AI might fit into your classes.

Here are some final tips for teaching with AI:

First, it can be helpful for students to have a basic understanding of how the technology works and what it can, and can’t, do. For example, if you’re planing on using ChatGPT, explain that it get its information from massive amounts of data on the internet, so there may be errors or facts that need verifying.
Second, make real-world connections. Remember that the ultimate purpose of teaching with AI is to make students comfortable with the technology that they will likely be using for working, communicating, and engaging with their communities in the future.
Lastly, discuss the issues of AI with students. If this technology if going to be part of their lives, then they should understand its inherent issues of bias, safety and security, misinformation, and other concerns.

Key Takeaways

Teaching with AI will help students learn important AI-related skills
AI can be used to create new activities or used alongside common classroom activities
Make sure to connect the use of AI in the classroom to the real world and discuss the potential downsides of the technology with students.