Week 9:

This week we continued our discussion on AI and the effect it has on education and the teaching landscape. We specifically explored strategies that teachers can employ to teach the ethical and productive use of AI and talked about how the reliance on ChatGPT by students also creates challenges for teachers in regards to plagiarism and this is something teachers are going to have to be very mindful of when marking assignments. Since content produced by ChatGPT may be difficult for plagiarism detection tools to identify, teachers are going to have to be diligent with the types of assignments that are assigned, in order to combat plagiarism. As I prepare to become a teacher and run my own classroom, I think it is possible to create a balance between integrating technologies and reverting to old fashioned methods such as writing on pen and paper. For example, I can see myself assigning work in the classroom that involves students writing paragraphs by hand and submitting work not using a computer. In class, we discussed how educators should have an idea on the type of voice used in writing by their students. If teachers suspect that students have not completed their work and used an AI tool like ChatGPT, they can compare other work done by the students to see if they carry the same tone and writing style. As well, in more extreme cases, if the educator is not confident with the work a student produced, they can ask the student to share the version history of the document. Since programs like Microsoft Word and Google Docs keep track of all the changes made to a document, it would be easy to see if a student used an AI tool to generate their work or not. However, while it is good to know that such strategies exist, I hope that I do not have to become dependent on this method to determine if students used AI tools or not. I think asking a student to share their version history of the document may be necessary in some cases but I also feel like it is quite invasive and creates a level of distrust between the teacher and the student. The student would probably feel as though the teacher doesn’t believe them and this can affect relationships between students and teachers and cause issues in the classroom.