[00:00:00] Patti Firth: So I'm sure you have heard about Chat GPT by this point in time. In fact, probably some of your students have already tried to use it to turn in an assignment for you. And if you're like many teachers, you're probably wondering how this is going to change teaching and learning in the classroom, whether we should completely avoid it, completely embrace it, or find something in between.
[00:00:25] Today's video, I want to talk all about how we can harness and use Chat GPT to teach our students how to improve their writing without plagiarizing their work.
[00:00:36] Welcome to the Ignite Your Teaching Video podcast, a show to inspire teachers to level up how they teach using simple systems and time saving tools for their classrooms. I'm your host, Patti Firth, mom of three, wife and a teacher who has spent the last ten years transforming my love of teaching into helping other teachers learn how to fit it all together through innovative resources and solutions for elementary classrooms over at madlylearning.com. So, are you ready to ignite your teaching?
[00:01:08] So the reality is that Chat GPT is probably not going anywhere anytime soon and is only going to get better and stronger, and more AI tools are going to come into the market that are going to allow students to generate and write different content that they could use in school.
[00:01:25] So as teachers, we're going to need to learn how to live with it, just like we learned how to live with phones coming in the classroom, the Internet coming in the classroom, and the removal of textbooks and all resources in our classrooms.
[00:01:39] We will learn how to adapt. And sometimes I think that when we are encountering this new kind of technology, at first we want to push back against it and say, absolutely not. We are going to revert back to everything, pencil and paper, because it's the only way I can ensure that students are actually authentically writing their work.
[00:01:59] Now I have to think back to the COVID era when we were all working remotely. I look at Chat GPT as really an assistant to our students. It is no different than when we had students who would have parents that would write or rewrite their entire project or whole work and then pass that off as their children's.
[00:02:20] I remember one of my first years teaching the school I was with for grade grade four when we still taught Medieval Times. In grade four, they had an epic castle building project that students looked forward to every time they got into grade four. Now, I knew ahead of time that parents took this project at this school very seriously. So I didn't quite know what to expect, but I knew that it was going to be this big, involved process. So it was the day that students had to bring in their projects. And I had some beautifully created castles. One was expertly tiled with leftover tiles. It was very clear that parents did this assignment and that it was something that parents did the assignment with children.
[00:03:08] Now that disadvantaged it disadvantaged some of the children in my class that didn't have parents that were available because they were busy or didn't have the belief that the parents should be doing the work. So I had some students bring in shoebox castles as well, and that's okay. So if I think of Chat GPT as being accessible to everyone, some students have very involved parents that can help them edit and correct and provide feedback all of the time on their homework assignments, in their projects that get sent home, whereas other students don't.
[00:03:43] And Chat GPT can be thought of as an equalizer here, where everybody has access to this help and support. So how do we learn how to harness it? And how do we learn how to up level our assignments? Because the reality is that Chat GPT is good. But it is not a replacement for a human writer. So what can we do as teachers that is going to help us to use Chat GPT and teach our students how to use Chat GPT responsibly in the classroom and learning environment? The first thing we need to cover is the concept of Plagiarism.
[00:04:20] In Plagiarism in a world of AI, the reality is if you put text into an AI tool, put a prompt into an AI tool and it generates a text for you. If you are using this for academic purposes and you hand in something that AI generated and you did not write authentically, that is the same as copying things off of Wikipedia.
[00:04:42] So it is a form of plagiarism and we need to make sure that students understand that chat GPT is a tool to help you. But you cannot simply just copy and paste the text that you get from chat GPT and pass it off as your own authentic writing.
[00:04:58] Can you use help and support from this tool? Absolutely. But we cannot simply just pass off an AI writing tool as our own. So we need to teach students about this, teach them about how we use it. The same way I teach my students about how to use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great source to start, but we have to verify all of the information that's on there. It's a great time to just scroll down to the bottom and click some of the links that they can give you.
[00:05:29] The reality is that we need to teach students how to responsibly use chat GPT and not in a way that we just say avoid it completely. Because the reality is that this is going to be in their world. It's already in the business world, it is already teaching people how to do things faster and more efficiently. So if it's in the world now and the business world is embracing it and the workforce is embracing it, we need to teach our students how to use it and use it effectively.
[00:06:00] Now, in the classroom, one of the ways we can embed chat GPT into our lessons is by looking at the steps of the writing process and how chat GPT and other AI writing tools can be used to help students to support what it is they want to do. For instance, we have all had students that are sitting their desk stuck going, I don't know what to write about, or I don't have any ideas. This is a great opportunity to use chat GPT and think about a topic that interests them.
[00:06:30] So if they are interested in Minecraft, have them use chat GPT to generate a prompt about different types of writing that they could use for chat GPT that they could use to write about Minecraft. Now, in order to do this, the student is going to have to understand the different forms of writing that they could write about. They also have to understand how to input the prompt so that chat GPT will generate something in response.
[00:06:56] But if you had a student, say you are a grade five student, you want to write about Minecraft, provide five examples of titles of stories that you could write about about Minecraft, and provide examples of an adventure story, a nonfiction report, an essay, a newspaper article, and science fiction story.
[00:07:25] Chat GPT will then generate the responses for that student and give them a whole host of different types of stories, fiction or nonfiction texts that they could write that would all be about the topic they're interested in. This might just be enough to help students get an idea and start running. And working with it. Within my Ignited literacy program, a big component is that students have the opportunity to engage in creative writing every single day.
[00:07:58] Whether they are writing a fiction or a nonfiction text. Students are responsible for coming up with an idea that interests them and following it through the writing process to write a draft of something that is meaningful and important to them. Using Chat GPT to help them brainstorm those ideas is a good step for those students who are stuck. Some students won't need that, but it's a great equalizing tool to help differentiate for the students that do.
[00:08:25] One of the things that Chat GPT is not so great at is creative writing, especially when you're asking it to write stories. It will certainly generate a story, or really the kind of the story frame and outline it will generate a story.
[00:08:40] However, there is many problems with the stories that are often generated for Chat GPT. One of the issues that it often encounters is logical problems. There are often times where when you generate a story, you ask Chat GPT to generate an entire creative writing story that there will be some logical problems within the story.
[00:09:02] For example, I asked Chat GPT to generate a story for me about students who were learning to follow the rules, and it had to be set outside at a park. So Chat GPT generated a story for me. However, the students, it was set in the summertime, yet they were still sledding down a hill.
[00:09:24] So if I hadn't caught that, if I had been a student and had just copied and pasted that, there would have been some problems. Chat GPT won't necessarily recognize some of those logical problems, which is why you need a human to go through it and improve it. Was it a great story? Not really. Was it decent? It was okay, but it was something that I can use to improve. Going forward, I can take that as a frame and look at looking how to improve that story overall.
[00:09:56] So if we think about that writing process and how our students can use Chat GPT, it can help them come up with problems, it can help them come up with solutions, different events that happen in their story, especially if their outline or their frames.
[00:10:12] If come up with an idea from a list on Chat GPT and they organize it and come up with an organizer frame. If they enter that frame into Chat GPT, so they say my characters are this, my problem is this, my solution is this and here are my events. Ask Chat GPT to improve upon that. Ask them to add more details to that information to create a more robust outline of the story. Chat GPT will be able to offer some suggestions and improvements to the student's story to make it even better.
[00:10:50] This is a great tool that allows students to kind of get some feedback on their story using an AI tool. So that it's not just a teacher or a peer that can provide feedback, but we can also use AI tools to help provide and generate more information for students to get them to have an idea of what they could be adding to their story.
[00:11:15] We also have to recognize here that Chat GPT is only as good as the prompt that students are going to put in to the tool. So there is some critical thinking and understanding that has to be put in place in order to generate an output that would be good enough to be able to hand into us.
[00:11:33] So we have to recognize that there is some thinking that is happening. It's not just simply cheating just by opening up the program using Chat GPT and thinking that using it is just opening it up and using it for any part of the writing process is cheating doesn't make sense any longer.
[00:11:52] We can use AI tools to help provide us feedback, to help give us ideas, to help us take that first step to improve what we've already written and to make things better. This is how we need to embrace Chat GPT with our students. It is not a replacement for your own writing, but it is a tool that can help you to come up with ideas, to improve your ideas and improve your work and to give you suggestions that you may not have thought about.
[00:12:21] Now, some of the things that we can do to figure out whether students have been using chat GPT to plagiarize a large component of their work. The reality is that we ask students to engage in writing, say in subject areas, or to write their ideas down to answer questions and submit that for our assessment is because we're using writing as a form to assess knowledge and understanding, thinking and application and their ability to communicate their ideas.
[00:12:51] So in that instance we can ask them to submit a written report, but we can also ask them to conference with us and explain orally what their understanding is. We have all had students do oral presentations in front of the room and have no sweet clue what they're talking about.
[00:13:10] That's a good indication that probably mum and dad or somebody else has helped them or they have just copied and pasted the text from the internet. Chat GPT is no different. We can tell as teachers, just like we can tell when a parent or it's been copied off the internet. We can tell when a student has done that during an oral presentation. And we will also be able to tell that a student has done that during with chat GPT. If the student completely and totally understands what it is they're talking about and they've used chat GPT. We should be assuming that the student has a good grasp of understanding and they've used Chat GPT as a tool to help improve their ideas and understanding. Because in order to use Chat GPT you do have to have some knowledge.
[00:13:56] Now, there will be students that will just simply copy and paste some things and have no real understanding and we know who those students are and we know what that looks like. But asking them to engage in an oral presentation or an oral conference to help justify and explain their ideas and their understanding is a good check and balance for us. To make sure student truly does understand what they've written, when they can defend their arguments, when they can tell you about what they said, when they can explain to you what things mean, what the research means, what the words that they've used inside their text. When they can have that.
[00:14:34] When they show knowledge and understanding, when they have the ability to apply what they've learned in their research to sharing with you their new knowledge, that's a good indication that the student knows what they're doing and that we should mark what they know. Not necessarily just mark a product they've produced. Remember, products are a method in which we use to assess students knowledge. So if a student can demonstrate that they understand it, we should be less concerned whether or not they have used Chat GPT. As long as the understanding and knowledge is there, that's good too.
[00:15:11] The other reality is that we have to realize that Chat GPT may be a great tool or even bing search with Chat GPT enabled will be a great tool to help students research. We have all been there where students will go to Google and type a question like they want to have a conversation with Google, I'm not understanding. That's not how Google works. Except with AI tools, that's exactly how it works now. Students can ask an AI tool a question and then get the response in their research. Just like Wikipedia. We want to make sure that they are going to verify that source with a second and third resource. But it's a great start. It gives them a background information, especially when we can ask the AI tool to please explain this concept to a fifth grader, to a fourth grader. The AI tool will simplify the language for that student so that research becomes much more accessible.
[00:16:11] If we have students using AI tools to research, we can even have them copy the AI text. They ask a question, they can copy the AI text and use that in a research document so the teacher can see what the AI tool generated for research based on what your student actually writes in the end. So we can have them using the AI tool to form research, actually copying the text over and citing it so it's not considered plagiarism, so they know what we've done. But this is a great opportunity for students to be able to access information and have the AI tool simplify this down so that it's easy to be understood by our students and their reading level.
[00:16:55] This is something that is not really great when students are just let loose on the internet, sometimes with trying to find examples, because a lot of the times the text is written at such a level that students cannot understand it. So when we ask the AI tool to write it to a student, that makes sense, we ask our students to understand it. We ask our students to use it as research tool. It's another great opportunity for students to have things more accessible and have learning more accessible to them at their level.
[00:17:32] Now, another thing that Chat GPT is not so good at is voice. Now, unless you train Chat GPT to understand your voice, which would mean you would need a large amount of writing samples on the internet, you would need or a large YouTube channel with your voice, then Chat GPT is going to have a very difficult time analyzing your own student's voice.
[00:17:55] So there are opportunities if you had a website, if you're an adult who has a website or a YouTube channel, you can have Chat GPT analyze your voice and then train it how to write like you. However, our students don't have that access to the same amount of content that allows Chat GPT to analyze it.
[00:18:14] Therefore, students are going to have a difficult time having their voice analyzed by Chat GPT. And Chat GPT will often then write in a very robotic toneless type of writing. We can use and teach students voice and also get to know students voice in their own writing.
[00:18:35] The more they write for us, the better it is we are able to understand who they are as writers and what they sound like when they write with ignited literacy, because they are writing so much. By about January, I get a really good understanding of who my students are and what they sound like when they write.
[00:18:55] To the extent that there's a lot of times I don't even need to look at the name on the front of the book in order to understand who wrote it, because I can recognize their style, I recognize their tone, I recognize their voice in their writing.
[00:19:08] Chat GPT is not going to recognize that. So if you notice that there is a huge disconnect between what your students are writing and what they're submitting and they don't have the understanding when you're conferencing with them, then we need to have a bigger conversation with that student about how to appropriately use AI tools in an authentic way.
[00:19:29] So when we focus on developing student voice, when we focus on getting students to write more often, more creatively. With things that they're passionate about. We are going to then get students to realize just how important voice is and a unique voice is important. So we don't want them copying Chat GPT because that is not going to really authentically sound like them.
[00:19:54] Now sometimes as teachers, we also are just going to have to really critically look at the kinds of assignments that we are assigning to our students to make sure that they're not easily hackable by an AI tool. There are a lot of AI tools out there that can help our students to write and to produce content. If we are simply asking knowledge and understanding questions, it's probably pretty easy for a student to use Chat GPT to assist them in answering those questions. So we really need to look a little bit deeper at what we are assessing.
[00:20:32] Chat GPT is not so great at matching logical understandings that it's not so great at critical thought, opinions, emotions, research and analysis, especially if it's on a current event because it's not connected to the internet. Although Chat GPT with their Bing inclusion is, it's also not great at real world problem solving. It often will get things wrong or have bias in it that is easily detectable. It also cannot really write about a personal connection or an experience and it often has some logical inconsistencies within its writing.
[00:21:18] So when we think about what it is that we're asking our students to do and what it is we're asking our students to write and complete, the reality is that if we're asking our students to engage in higher order critical thinking tasks where we're asking them to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, draw conclusions, compare and contrast, include their opinions, all of those types of tasks, which would be larger writing tasks.
[00:21:48] Chat GPT is going to have a much harder time to get a legitimate response, especially if we're asking them to read the story and provide your analysis. Well, if the story is a printed out piece of paper and not something they can easily access, chat GPT is going to have a very difficult time writing a prompt like that because it doesn't have access to the actual original text that the student is responding to nor is it able to really analyze something. It can't read and it can't provide personal opinions. So it's not going to really be able to help a student give an opinion piece or to compare and contrast two different articles that you had students compare, or two texts that you had students compare.
[00:22:39] So it's important as teachers that we really critically think about what it is we're asking students to do and ask if there's another way that we can assess student understanding. That's not always going to be writing.
[00:22:50] If you can hack it with an AI tool, then maybe we need to come up with a different way that we can get students to share their learning and understanding with us. We don't necessarily have to sit through 30 oral presentations one on one, but we can have students take their devices, turn the camera on their face, and have them write and have them explain to us orally and submit that video response. It doesn't always have to be writing. They can submit an audio response if you're using OneNote. They can record their voice and submit that instead of having an answer written.
[00:23:28] We really need to be thinking that this is an opportunity for us to push ourselves, to push our assessment practices. Some of us sometimes we got into a bad habit or got into a rut during COVID because there really wasn't anything we could do other than pencil and paper tasks or tech tasks where students could literally just use tech to answer all of their questions. The reality is that we need to go back and we need to push ourselves to try different types of assessment techniques, different strategies and different ways in which we can assess students knowledge, understanding, thinking, application and communication skills.