. . . and I was okay with that. But I realize that I was missing out.
July makes six years since I retired. I am still involved in education issues and will continue to do so. But I realized that I don't have to "keep up" with the new technologies like I tried to do when I was a principal.
When Chat GPT came out, I was intrigued. There was chatter on social media, I read blogs and articles about it, and I heard from others that it could make work for teachers easier. Given guidance, ChatGTP could write lesson plans, emails, letters of recommendations, and so much more. It seemed that the possibilities were endless.
I also read comments from teachers who said that Chat GPT was banned in their class or their school. "We don't want students cheating," was the common theme. And yet, I thought, we have always had some form of "cheating." What about Cliff's Notes? Was that cheating? What about kids Googling to get answers to questions? Can we ban students from using the Internet to get answers to questions?
I know that AI and ChatGPT weren’t going away in education. But I wasn’t sure how to use it as a retiree. So I didn’t.
Recently, my husband and I were the opening speakers at the first National Kidney Foundation of Hawai`i summit. We shared our personal story about our son Jarand. This was my first experience listening to speakers and panelists discussing medical issues, and while much of the information was over my head, I realized that the medical field is no different from the educational system I was a part of for so many years. One of the panelists shared this challenge that they needed to work together on these health issues that impact our communities, and then he added, “And AI is here to stay.”
AI is here to stay. It got me thinking. Alexa is an AI tool, and we’ve grown to rely on her to let us know what the weather will be like the next day and whether we’ll be able to golf or not. If we have a question, we ask Alexa. We get our answer quicker than if we Googled it. She can tell jokes, play our favorite music, tell us when an Amazon package will arrive, and do a myriad of other tasks that we haven’t even explored yet.
So this morning, I was determined to learn more about ChatGPT’s capabilities. I typed this question on the free website: How could a principal use ChatGPT? In a few seconds, I got an answer: A principal could use ChatGPT for various tasks such as drafting announcements, creating educational materials, generating ideas for school events or initiatives, providing personalized feedback to students or staff, and even offering virtual tutoring or homework help.
That was quick! I asked a follow-up: Show me examples of how ChatGPT can help me to generate ideas for a school event to showcase student use AI. (Note that I accidentally eliminated the word “of” between use and AI.) Here’s the response: Certainly! Here are a few ideas for school events to showcase students’ use of AI, and they shared 7 ideas ranging from a showcase to an art showcase to AI in sports. I continued to ask follow-up questions about helping teachers and other principals learn more about AI, and the answers came almost instantaneously with a variety of ideas. The whole process took less than 5 minutes; I was impressed! I was also hooked.
I started asking all kinds of questions just to see what kinds of responses I could get. The responses were so much faster than I get when I Google those kinds of questions. And with Google, I had to search to see which ones were relevant.
That got me thinking about the role of ChatGPT or AI in education. We want students to be complex thinkers, not just regurgitators of information. That means that teachers need to ask higher level thinking questions or do projects where students apply what they know to address current issues. I asked ChatGPT questions about cheating, and here are the responses:
