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Jamestown Public Schools Technology Integration Specialist Jason Kathman speaks to JPS board members.
P-J photo by Michael Zabrodsky
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Artificial intelligence is having its day in the limelight.
It seems AI is everywhere.
And it is.
AI has found its way into almost everything including schools.
So school districts can either be on the right side or the wrong side of AI.
Jamestown Public Schools have chosen to be on the right side. JPS is embracing AI, and looking to make it work for the district’s administrators, teachers, and students.
JPS Technology Integration Specialists Jason Kathman, and Jeff Kresge recently gave a presentation on AI to the JPS Board of Education, and the possible implementation within the district.
They want to use AI as a resource, and not have AI be a deficit.
Kathman noted that people who use Siri, Alexa, and Grammarly, for example, are already using AI. People who also use ChatGPT, which went public in November 2022, are engaging with an AI application, Kathman said.
“It’s a large language model of a chatbot that you pretty much converse with,” Kathman said of ChatGPT. “So you put in a prompt, and instead of spitting out websites for you to go find your own answer, you put in a prompt and it gives you the answer. Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes it’s wrong, but it gives you an answer, and you can ask it to edit it to answer.”
It has already been proven that applications like ChatGPT can write almost anything, and the fear lingers that it may put aspiring authors out of work as well as be used as a tool by students for writing assignments. There are also apps for solving math equations that students also can use.
The rub is how many students, on their own, are learning the process of writing or the process of solving a math equation.
During professional development sessions, Kathman, and Kresge met with some district teachers to help them embrace AI. And the response, Kathman said, has been positive.
AI now can be used to help teachers plan lessons, and make teaching tasks easier. Some teaching tasks include assessments and questioning, gaining feedback, resource creation, creating hands-on assignments, and creating slide presentations. These tasks also may help with student engagement, Kathman said.
By using the Magic School application, Kathman, and Kresge demonstrated how to create a lesson plan for a ninth grade history class.
Kathman said while the application works well, it can generate a plan that may be sub-par.
So, the app can generate 80 percent of the work. And now the 20 percent of the important work of personalizing that plan for class gets done, Kathman added.
Although negativity does surround AI, Kathman noted that students can use and embrace AI when learning questioning skills.
“So when we talk about students, we talk about skills – questioning skills, those prompting skills. How do we get exactly what it is that we want, and how can we word that? That’s a great skill that we can be teaching,” Kathman said.
Kresge added that students need to be thinking about their target goals, but more importantly, how did they arrive at their target goals?
“How do I get there? No longer are we grading the target, but the ‘how did I get there?’ That process is going to become very important because we’re going to need to train those kids how to get to that target now, because computers can do the target. But how do we get there? What are the steps? What are the procedures that those kids need to take? That’s going to be real thinking,” Kresge said.