Artificial Intelligence

    Have you ever seen the Disney Channel Original Movie, Smart House? For those of you who aren't familiar, the plot follows a teen boy, his family, and their brand new, fully loaded, smart house. The brand new house wouldn't be complete without PAT, the family's very own AI entity. At first, life is great, but everything starts to take a turn for the worse when PAT begins to take control of the family's lives, causing lots of challenges in the house.

Image Source: Tenor 

    When I first started learning about the concept of artificial intelligence, or AI, my brain immediately kicked up the memory of me watching "Smart House" in my childhood living room, thinking about how bad life would be if the robots of the future took over everything, just because they could! However, as AI has become more developed and prevalent in today's society, there are many practical uses for this kind of technology. Prior to this exploration, my knowledge and use of AI was very minimal. At least, my intentional use! Without even knowing it, I have used forms of AI when using Google Maps, exploring new recommended songs on Spotify, and even when driving my car with Mazda's break assist technology. In the school setting, many teachers are starting to use AI more and more to create lesson plans, as a way to increase productivity, and in various activities with students. 

To determine if beginning to use AI powered platforms are right for me and my students, I decided to test out a few tools that wouldn't be overly difficult to integrate into my lesson structure or with current technology tools already in our routine. For this exploration, I focused primarily on ChatGPT and Canva's Magic Studio. 

ChatGPT- ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence bot that is designed to give detailed information based on user input. When first visiting the website page, you are prompted to ask the server a question- you can also select different categories, such as "summarize text", "get advice", "help me write", "brainstorm", "surprise me", "make a plan", and "code". To see what the server would give me, I gave it the following prompt: "Please generate a 5th grade level passage with literal comprehension questions". Below is a screenshot of what ChatGPT was able to provide:

 Image Source: Personal Screenshot taken by author

After receiving this from ChatGPT, I had to admit I was pleasantly surprised! I feel like this tool could be game changing for me in terms of creating goal work for my students to complete to measure their competence with IEP goals. I feel like this is a task that is usually challenging and time consuming for me. Using this tool, it took less than 30 seconds for me to have a reading passage at a specific grade level with a specific form of comprehension questions given to me. This tool could also be very helpful when I need ideas for specific topics to cover in the new AV Club I was asked to start with one of my colleagues. I definitely plan on continuing to use ChatGPT to help with the more mundane and time consuming tasks at my job in the future.

Canva Magic Studio- Canva is a platform that I use regularly. In my school, there has been an increase in teachers attempting to have students use Canva to complete various assignments because of the great features the platform possesses. While I haven't tried to have students complete assignments via Canva yet, some of my general education counterparts had their 6th grade students use the AI features in Magic Studio to generate an illustration based on their descriptive essays when teaching Alice in Wonderland. Feeling inspired, I tried to use Magic Studio to help me generate a poster for our upcoming Family Night event happening in November. The results were... interesting, to say the least. Check them out below! While I probably wouldn't use this feature again, I'm glad I gave it a shot. Maybe there are some tips or tricks I can learn from my colleagues if I ever wanted to attempt making an AI generated poster again. For now, I'll stick to my big chart paper and poster markers!

Image Source: Screenshot of poster generated through AI image generator app via Canva

Key Takeaways

While my results were somewhat of a mixed bag, I appreciated the opportunity to explore. I feel like there are definitely positives to using this kind of technology, but it can cause more work than needed in some cases. As this kind of technology continues to progress, I will be interested to see how it is used to improve education.