cHarles Darwin chatted with students about evolution, and elementary school students were reimagined as a cool car with their writing turned into images. Artificial intelligence is invading British schools in amazing ways.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson called for a “digital revolution” in January involving AI at schools, but it has already begun at locations such as Willowdown Elementary School in Bridgewater, Somerset.
Willowdown principal Matt Cave said his students will improve descriptive writing by supplying their work to AI clients and generating images.
“All of a sudden they’ve got all these pictures from different people’s descriptions, and they can discuss with their classmates whether it’s an image they expected to have in their readers’ heads,” Cave said.
According to Cave, the outcome was “glorious,” in contrast to “destiny and darkness” he heard from the school leader he was concerned about.
“We don’t want anyone to know of any potential dangers. We constantly emphasize to our kids, but it will be a tool that they will have to use everything for the rest of their lives,” Cave said.
“At Bridgwater, Hinkley Point is being built. The new nuclear power plant, Gravity, is a large gigafactory of batteries at Jaguar Land Rover. It’s all a high-tech company and kids need to know this to continue hiring locally.”
Marina Wyatt, the science director for Key Stage 3 at Furze Platt Senior School in Maidenhead, said the use of AI, which can help students engage in discussions, including Virtual Charles Darwin, would be helpful.
“I encourage AI before taking classes. Imagine you’re Charles Darwin. Imagine there are students in the science class who are interested in your experiences from around the world.
“At the prompt, I will respond as Charles Darwin and tell you to stay in that role, and it works, and it came up with some great things.
“Children who often don’t have the opportunity to participate for any reason were obsessed with this and were asking crazy questions,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt was able to screen Darwin’s chatgpt answers to student questions before performing aloud to the class, avoiding inaccuracy and bias.
Wyatt said students are not given direct access to use AI while schools develop policies for their use, including parental consent and data security.
Daisy Christodoulou, Head of Education No more markingscompanies adapting technology for classroom assessments said they are concerned about the impact of AI and large-scale language models (LLM) on how students learn.
“The first and most fundamental problem are the fundamental principles of cognitive science. Learning is not performance,” said Christodleu.
“What this means is that the basic basic skills and knowledge required to become an expert LLMS user, or in fact, modern technology is often the least acquired by tinkering with the technology.
“Many adults find LLMS useful to understand production volumes because they already have basic literacy, computing power and background knowledge. Twenty years ago, we heard a lot of hype about how you didn’t need to know anything because you could look it up on Google. It’s wrong and puts you at risk of repeating errors with LLMS.”
Emma Darcy, Technology Director for Learning Denby High School At Luton, the uses and pitfalls of AI were taught in the weekly “digital character” class of seventh grade students.
“I didn’t want to wait for official guidance to come out because I knew I had to talk to staff and students after ChatGpt exploded two years ago,” Darcy said.
However, the school has leveraged Canva Graphic Design software to enable controlled use of AI in some cases.
“We did a big school-wide project about presenting positive images of Luton and helped students to use Canva to generate images of cars representing the Luton and Luton community,” Darcy said.
“But what we were actually teaching was language and literacy skills. What we didn’t do is send students directly to LLM. We need to do it with clear learning goals and objectives.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
