This week’s big idea was focused on artificial intelligence and its presence in education. Artificial intelligence is a fascinating topic for me, as I am still unsure of its place in my life as a professional and how I would handle it in a classroom setting. AI is on the rise in schools and is not going to go away; therefore, a way to find out how we can develop a balance between AI-generated products and authentic work must be produced.
It was interesting to me at the beginning of the class when the word cloud from the Mentimeter was shown, and the words were contradicting; for example, both ‘helpful’ and ‘scary’ were shown. I think that this goes to show that many other people are still trying to figure out how AI belongs in their roles as professionals. While AI can be both scary and helpful, I think that it is something we can learn to use as a tool while still maintaining authenticity in our own work. There are so many different ways that AI can be used in education from generating text to pictures. Below is an image that I asked AI to generate, the prompt I gave was “generate an image that represents artificial intelligence”.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly growing, and there is still a lot that is still being learned. Something that was brought up in class about artificial intelligence was the environmental impact of it. I think that this is an important impact of artificial intelligence to consider watching out for, especially when we are trying to work towards decreasing climate change. I believe that teaching students to be aware of the impact that new technological advancements like artificial intelligence may have on the environment is important, especially as a social studies teacher candidate. In conclusion, there is still so much learning to be done to be able to support students through this exciting time of new technological innovations.