How to Effectively Use Generative AI in Education
Overview:
Recent research from the OECD explores the practical implications of generative AI within educational settings. The findings highlight the distinct contrasts between how teachers utilise these tools for professional development, and how students interact with them during independent study versus formal assessment environments.
My Notes:
The results outlined here are interesting, albeit unsurprising: teachers are successfully using generative AI to improve their own practice, while students leaning on AI perform better in class and on homework, but worse in exams when that scaffolding is removed.
This raises a critical pedagogical question: when and how do we teach students to use generative AI for genuine learning rather than as a crutch? A sensible starting point is teaching them to frame their prompts with explicit context. For instance, "I am a Year 8 student in an English secondary school; help me understand binary addition." We should be providing, or helping students create, custom GPTs, Gems, or Agent Skills that automatically encode this context into every prompt.
The ability to do such things is already in Google Classroom, but often blocked by school policies despite the GDPR friendly deployments; elsewhere, AI in general is mistrusted and blocked, and moving anything forward as a teacher who wants to leverage the government edicts to use AI to reduce workload and improve T&L for SEND children (among others), is an exercise in administration frustration.
As educators, we need to get in front of this, so we can show our students how useful and enriching these extra learning tools can be. Or we can stick our heads in the sand, and be surprised in a few years' time when we're vilified (again) for not teaching what the future workforce needs.