While in high school English teacher Kelly Gibson first met ChatGPT in December, and the anxiety started quickly. While the internet rejoice in of chatbots superficially sophisticated answer Before the user prompt, many educators were less interested. If someone could ask ChatGPT to “write 300 words about what the green light means in The great Gatsby,” what will stop students from giving homework to bots? Speculation surrounds a new era of rampant cheating and even the death knell for essays, or education itself. Gibson said: “I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly what I teach.’
But amid confusion, some enterprising teachers see ChatGPT as an opportunity to redesign learning—and what they invent could shape the future of the classroom. Gibson is one of them. After her initial anxiety subsided, she spent her winter break tinkering with ChatGPT and figuring out how to incorporate it into her lessons. She can ask the child to create text with the bot and then edit the text herself to find bugs in the chatbot or improve its writing style. Gibson, who has taught for 25 years, likens it to more familiar technology tools that enhance rather than replace learning and critical thinking. “I don’t know how to do that well yet, but I want AI chatbots to become computers for writing,” she said.
Gibson’s view of ChatGPT as a teaching tool, not a perfect cheat, makes an important point: ChatGPT is not as intelligent as a human, although it is capable of producing text-like People. It is a statistical machine that can sometimes revive or create falsehood and often need further guidance and editing to get things on track.
Despite those limitations, Gibson also believes it’s her responsibility to bring ChatGPT into the classroom. She teaches in a low-income, rural, predominantly white area of Oregon. If only students who already have access to internet-connected devices at home can experience bots, it could expand the reach. digital device and further disadvantage for students who do not have access. So, Gibson figured she could turn ChatGPT into a teachable moment for all of her students, to use educator parlance.
Other educators dismissing the apocalypse in education claim that ChatGPT may not disrupt education at all, but draws attention to how the system has been disrupted. “Another way of thinking about this is not how do you find new forms of assessment, but what are our priorities in further education at the moment? And maybe they’re a bit broken,” said Alex Taylor, who studies and teaches human-computer interaction at City, University of London.
Taylor said the bot prompted discussions with colleagues about the future of testing and evaluation. If a series of actual questions in a test can be answered by a chatbot, is the quiz a worthwhile learning measure? In Taylor’s view, the kinds of rote questions that chatbots can answer don’t promote the kind of learning that helps his students become better thinkers. “I think we’ve done that sometimes,” he said. “We were like, ‘How can we test people to meet some performance level or some metrics?’ While, in fact, education should be a much more expansive idea.”
