An AI Story about Moving from Reluctance Towards Thoughtful Use

“Students have appreciated my transparency as I reinforce that we are learning about these together and some tools may be very helpful for some tasks, and not very helpful for other tasks.“

– Drew Polly

Initial Reluctance

In higher education, the use of Generative AI (GAI) continues to escalate as it is embedded now in web browsers and more GAI tools continue to be developed. Despite having a background in educational technology I have been intentionally slow to dive into use and adoption of GAI tools. First, as a creature of habit I have systems and processes in place for organization, scheduling, and my own productivity. Second, I personally just prefer to use my own words and thoughts without assistance or help from a GAI tool. For example, while colleagues and friends have used ChatGPT to produce feedback on assignments or draft an email to a student about their attendance, I prefer just to create that from scratch, albeit it takes longer to do so. 

Despite my reluctance, however, as an individual who teaches and supports current and future elementary school teachers I did lurk from a distance about what teachers and educational leaders said about GAI tools. Many teachers and colleagues from graduate school who keep up with and research the use of new, emerging technologies started sharing about tools that they were using. Still, though, I was unsure about if GAI tools could help me with projects that I do frequently- look for new teaching ideas for my in-person and online courses, grade papers, read research articles to design and think about future research projects, and create math resources for elementary school students to use as part of my service and outreach. My interest was peaked but I was reluctant to jump in the pool. 

Exploring GAI Tools  

My first encounter with GAI was through Chat GPT for fun with prompts such as, “give me a low-carb recipe to make with shrimp and vegetables” and “how would I explain daylight savings to my second grade children.” It was nice, convenient, and overall helpful. With all of the teachers posting online about how they were starting to use GAI tools to help plan and curate resources I did get curious and start to dabble more. 

Through my own exploration I learned firsthand about the importance of entering specific prompts and follow-up questions. For example, I asked Magic School to create a worksheet about 3rd grade multiplication. After it gave me a worksheet I fine tuned my search by asking for “worksheet about 3rd grade multiplication word problems.” My final search was “worksheet about 3rd grade multiplication word problems using numbers 5 or less.” While I, personally, have created things from scratch before, it was nice to be able to efficiently get a worksheet that matched my prompts. In education there have been calls for teachers to examine, analyze, and then modify resources curated online with GAI tools. 

One class activity where my UNC Charlotte experienced and learned about this firsthand was while exploring lesson plans. As juniors in their first semester in their Elementary Education course work for their major they had access to professionally created open educational resources and also access to Magic School AI and Chat GPT to examine lessons and ideas for lessons about three-digit subtraction (numbers up to 999). Students thinking that the GAI tools were going to create amazing ideas boiling over with creativity were completely underwhelmed. Examples of comments included, “this is such a boring lesson,” “this is all that it gives me,” and “who would want to do this activity.” 

We then explored Magic School together and found a Choice Board tool that is a specialized part of the website.  Choice boards are lists of activities that an instructor or teacher can give students to work on some or all of them. Teachers can also specify which ones on the choice board must be done and which ones are optional. The choice board tool provided more hands-on and engaging activities, but the catch was that these activities were vague such as “make a bingo card with subtraction problems on it and play bingo.”  Together we learned quickly that the GAI tools provided us with a starting point for ideas, but that we are responsible for fleshing out those ideas or modifying them so they can be used in teaching. 

One last note that we also learned collaboratively was that different tools can be helpful depending on the use. Notebook LM synthesizes information in multiple documents and can provide the synthesis in written paragraphs, bulleted lists, or as an audio file which sounds like a narrated podcast. Students have started to upload readings in there and listen to the audio synthesis to get the gist of the articles before reading it more thoroughly. Another one that my students were drawn to towards finals was QuizGecko which creates flashcards and practice activities based on information that you upload; multiple students used that to study for two classes that had exams that included a lot of content. 

All in all, GAI tools have potential and with reluctance and caveats I am using them more frequently in my courses here at UNC Charlotte. Students have appreciated my transparency as I reinforce that we are learning about these together and some tools may be very helpful for some tasks, and not very helpful for other tasks.