This week in class, we focused on the topic of GenAI, what it is, how it has evolved, as well as its positive and negative impacts. There was lots of discussion around how GenAI may be used by students and educators, and how it may be beneficial but also harmful. We were also giving many resources on how to effectively engage with GenAI programs to improve the outputs.
I plan to teach the younger elementary grades (K-3) primarily. I can see how GenAI could be beneficial for me as a teacher when creating lesson plans. It could be helpful to formulate my ideas in actual lessons and organize complex ideas into simpler concepts that are easy to teach to young kids. However, I would be reluctant to rely on GenAI for my lesson plans, as I feel it could lead to a lack of genuineness and could cause me to stop using my critical thinking skills as much as I should. I think for GenAI to be used appropriately by teachers, it is used to help format and organize ideas for lessons rather than fully creating lesson plans, resources, assessment tools, etc. I also think it is important for teachers who choose to use GenAI do research on the program they chose and learn how to use it properly. When it comes to students using AI as of right now, I do not see a place for it in the grades I want to teach. A main goal of teaching young grades is teaching them how to be good humans who positively add to society, and to do that, they have to explore and learn freely and on their own.
I think a huge issue with GenAI is the environmental impacts it is causing and the lack of education people have on this topic. I myself feel there is more I can learn about the topic, so I found sources online to help me understand the issue more. I found this great article that provided recent statistics and facts about the environmental impacts of GenAI.
I also found a recent article made by the United Nations Environment Assembly discussing the problems AI is causing for the environment and what we can do about it. An interesting point brought up at the beginning of this article is how AI is thought to be able to help solve some of the biggest environmental issues the world faces, but we cannot ignore the negative impacts on the environment using AI.
I will not ignore the fact that I have used GenAI before and probably will use it again as it has become large enough it feel unavoidable and can be found as very useful, however, I am committed to continue to learn about the negative impacts it has and how we can help mitigate those issues and ethically use AI for good reasons.
A good read, Brynn. Yes, you likely already have a pretty good idea about what you want to design for you class, but why not ask GenAI to add suggestions? I find that my annoying companion, Grammarly, is causing me to write more succinctly and accurately, just to avoid seeing it ‘jump in my face’.