As artificial intelligence tools become more prevalent in education, teachers are faced with the challenge of deciding which tools to use and how best to incorporate them into their teaching. A good place to start is by teaching media literacy and computer science, according to Dana Thompson, director of IT for the Oak Park Unified School District, and Katherine Reznicek, director of educational technology for the Ventura County Office of Education. .
At the annual CITE conference in San Diego on Tuesday, Thompson and Reznicek led a session on combining AI tools with these subjects to prepare students for the future.
“If you don’t understand the basics of media literacy and the basics of computer science, you can’t use AI,” Reznicek said. “These need to be part of that journey, not just some cool tool that lets you compose an email in 30 seconds instead of two minutes.”
As of this year, California requires schools to teach AI literacy and has updated curriculum for each subject to reflect this mandate. Some schools have chosen to limit student interaction with AI tools, often due to data privacy concerns, but many AI tools that do not require a login can still be educational. Thompson said.
“Even at the entry-level level, you can teach students about AI without actually having them log into the AI,” Thompson says. “We can teach you skills about how to look at things critically, evaluate things, and ask questions.”
Reznicek said media literacy, which includes understanding media credibility and perspectives in different situations, is critical in the context of AI.
A practical way to teach these skills is the website Which Face Is Real?, which challenges users to distinguish between real images of human faces and AI-generated images. Reznicek said the exercise encourages critical thinking about media credibility and the intentions behind it.
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Gender Shades, a research project suitable for older students, finds that AI tools misgender images of people of color more often than white faces, and how AI perpetuates bias. is shown.
Other AI tools can help students understand computer science. Computer science is the study of computers, algorithmic processes, and their impact on society, the presenters explained.
AI tools can also help integrate computer science concepts into general education. This could also help California, which ranks low in computer science education. According to the nonprofit Computer Science for California, only 5 percent of California high school students take computer science classes.
For example, we use Google’s Quick, Draw! AI to guess what you’re drawing. This activity provides an easy and potentially fun way to demonstrate how AI recognizes patterns and generates new ideas from input, in this case a database of millions of drawings.
A more complex way to show students how AI models are trained is Teachable Machine. It allows users to train their own AI models to recognize different types of images, sounds, and poses.
Thompson and Reznicek also cited the MagicSchool Song Generator as a versatile and popular tool among students for generating music based on a specific style or topic.
For school IT leaders, supporting California’s AI literacy education mandate can mean sharing expertise with teachers where it’s needed most. Thompson said that while many educators are concerned about data privacy, they often don’t have a firm understanding of what the actual risks and regulations are, so IT leaders who are familiar with these issues , said it could be helpful by recommending one or two vetted AI resources. Even if the school district has not yet developed comprehensive guidelines regarding AI.
She added that these tools provide experiential learning opportunities in subjects that go nowhere.
“Our students, even the youngest, need these skills,” Thompson said.
