Welcome back to school teachers! Hard to believe it is time to gear up for another year already. This year comes with even more things to worry about because Artificial Intelligence is no longer something we can ignore. To start the year off right, here are a few tips and tricks to think about from the start:
- Traffic Light Assignments – consider assigning a traffic light color to each assignment. A Green Light assignment means the students have free reign on when and how they use AI. A yellow light means they can use AI but only within the parameters you set. A red light means no AI under any circumstances. I heard about this idea from AJ Julianni. Check out his blog post, “The Traffic Light Protocol: A Simple Way to Manage the AI Classroom” for more.
- AI Checklist – make a Checklist that has all the ways you think a student might be allowed to use AI in your class. Include and “Other” in case your list is not exhaustive (mine definitely wasn’t). Include a paragraph at the end that says something like “The above checked items are the only ways AI was used in this assignment” with a space for the date and signature. Then, have the students submit the Checklist with every assignment they use AI. This way, not only do they make it easier for you, but if you find they used it in ways they didn’t disclose, now you are dealing with cheating and lying.
- Include something in your Syllabus – decide if you are going to be vague or super specific. For example, “Use of AI is up to the teacher’s discretion and assignment specific” vs. “AI may be used on longer assignments, however, you may not use more than two sentences in a row.”
- Be careful with detectors – if you do use a detector, the advice is to use more than one. If you do get a result that a student used more AI then acceptable, try to also gather corroborating data. For example, talk to the kid about their paper. Do they know the definitions of all the words, do they remember a summary of what they wrote, etc. Also, I have heard some teachers say that they have pasted a kid’s paper into ChatGPT and asked if it wrote it. This sounded awesome, so I tested it with something that I wrote. Unfortunately, ChatGPT tried to take credit for my work!
