AI @ LI

AI is everywhere these days. It has taken over our newsfeeds and advertising. More and more we find it incorporated into our devices, into our daily lives. It is a transformative technology, perhaps the most transformative ever, one that at times amazes and delights us, at other times frightens and threatens us. 

And over the last two years, it’s made its way into our schools.

There comes that moment for a teacher, that sinking feeling, when they realize the student paper they’re reading is AI generated. It usually doesn’t take long—often only a sentence or two—to recognize that bland competence so characteristic of ChatGPT writing or, if the student has been clever enough to instruct the AI not to make it “too perfect,” the carefully spaced errors that themselves feel, well, artificial. 

It’s a problem that most teachers—English teachers, especially—have become all too familiar with, a problem that has infiltrated all higher levels of education, including even our most elite colleges and universities, and one that has given AI somewhat of a bad reputation. 

While it’s a genuine concern and something we educators are struggling to adapt to, it’s not the whole story about AI. In fact, over the last couple of years many of us who work in the classroom have been excited to see its potential as a powerful productivity tool for developing curriculum and materials and as a tool that can help students enhance their own work in legitimate and creative ways.

My first brush with AI came soon after the release of ChatGPT. Like a kid with a new toy, I started experimenting with a range of different tasks and prompts and got a kick out of the novelty of its ability to craft sonnets or opine on just about any topic—or hallucinate fake information, including very realistic quotes from poets like Wordsworth and Blake that had me double checking my anthologies. 

But I had my first productive experience with ChatGPT when the next J Term rolled around, and I found myself working to devise a plan for a new class I was teaching about the art of telling folktales. 

It put together a fairly decent three-week plan, a good starting point, though I only ended up incorporating a few of its suggestions and made a lot of changes. Last autumn, our Dean of Academics, Terha Steen, led a professional development workshop for the whole faculty in preparation for this year’s J Term. We spent part of a day developing prompts to create more dynamic lesson plans, a range of different styles of course descriptions, and even more engaging course titles for our three-week classes. It was remarkable to notice how much it had advanced in a year.

A strong prompt is key. The better the prompt—the more precise, the more detailed—the more useful the response. 

I discovered the value of this during my first major use of AI for the classroom last August. Due to a sudden faculty departure, I was asked to pick up a new course—Profession Based Writing, an English class designed for students enrolled in various programs in the Career and Technical Education Department at LI. The inherited materials were slim and didn’t quite fit what I was looking for. More importantly, I had never taught the course before, didn’t have a background in the content, and wasn’t really sure what direction to go in.

So I turned to ChatGPT and set to work crafting a prompt, explaining what the class was (including the official course description from the catalog), who it was designed for, how often and for how long the class would meet, my own academic background, the range of units I was interested in incorporating, and a host of other details. By the time I was done, my prompt ran a full single-spaced page just over 400 words long. I copied and pasted it into Chat, hit enter, and held my breath.

Within a minute (maybe two), I had a complete sixteen week curriculum with a scope and sequence of subjects and suggested activities organized week-by-week, day-by-day, along with project rubrics and a suggested syllabus. It was eye-opening in its clarity and thoroughness, in how closely it meshed with my prompt’s details. 

Equally important, its reply concluded with offers for further, more detailed options and follow-up questions covering aspects of the course I hadn’t considered. I took it up on its offers, and what began was almost a dialogue of sorts as the “two of us” delved deeper into development, fine-tuning the projects, fleshing out the first couple of units, and creating a slew of supporting materials, from informational handouts to practice worksheets tailored to my students’ backgrounds. What would have normally taken me days, maybe weeks—time I didn’t really have—I completed in an hour or two. For the rest of the semester, Chat was there to help me through the remaining units, adjusting the content as my own needs changed. It felt like more than having a tool; it felt like having a partner. Teaching the class again for a different group this semester, I’m still utilizing it to go back and refine material I used last fall.

Land and Resource Management instructor Ryan O’Malley, an experienced forester currently in his first year teaching at LI, has had similar success using AI in developing his program.

“I’ve really leaned into the ‘Projects’ function [a paid feature] for my work in developing my curriculum,” he explained. “I started by uploading the school’s course catalog, along with a host of other files related to my program.” 

Tractor safety manuals, AOE and Tech Ed Guidance for Education documents, Vermont Proficiency Standards for CTE programs, unmanned aircraft knowledge supplements (for his drone operations unit), FAA FAQs—it all went into ChatGPT, which used the range of documents to help inform and construct a detailed curriculum map. 

As for accuracy?

“It’s good,” he assured me. “But I always read through it twice and double check its work to make sure. I’m careful with the prompts and will ask it to read back to me what I’m asking for to make sure we’re on the same page.

“In my program, I have four hours a day of instruction time to fill,” he added. “That’s a long time for one class. I need so much material, and AI has been a godsend just in helping organize both my brain and my curriculum.”

O’Malley also uses it to develop protocols covering different aspects of the job—detailed lists of instructions covering everything from organizing teaching time and duties to handling student discipline and parent communications.

Much of this, including using AI to code out protocols, O’Malley has worked out on his own, driven in large part by his own interest and passion for the new tools. “It’s kind of the Wild West for AI right now,” he said. “The most important thing for anyone nervous about AI is to just go for it, to not be afraid to make mistakes and experiment as much as you can.”

Fellow CTE instructor Josh Auerbach, who teaches Graphic Design and is also a first-year instructor at LI, has similarly embraced AI at a high level.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with it, exploring it in part through courses offered by various companies and services,” said Auerbach, who now has multiple AI certifications from Google, Canva, and Adobe.

“Recently, I’ve become interested in Magic School AI, which is serving as a conduit for a lot of my programming. It’s great for creating a standardized repository of unit and lesson plans that I can call upon later, since other platforms can come and go.”

Auerbach has found Google’s AI tools especially helpful. 

“I love the predefined options offered through the Gemini section of Google Classroom,” he said. “For example, I can have the AI watch a YouTube video and generate quiz questions to check student comprehension. It saves a lot of time.”

Auerbach has used Gemini for a host of other tasks—from creating templates for lesson plans he’s developing in his education classes to building a language library with its Notebook LM feature to even using the audio overview tool to generate complete podcasts (voiced by AI personas) from content he’s uploaded. 

“I’m still working out how to create assessments that can track students’ sequential and cumulative learning over time,” he said. “I think that will be especially useful as a teacher.”

But AI isn’t just a good planning and productivity tool for teachers, and it’s not just a way for students to cheat on assignments. Auerbach’s students have also been making use of the technology in structured ways to improve their work and tap into their own creativity. 

“I’ve had students use AI in several fun ways this year. In my Adobe Creative Cloud course, they created generative backgrounds for presentations, starting with a still photo and having the AI turn it into a short video clip that looks as if it was shot in real life. In Digital Photography, we had fun creating cartoon versions of real people and incorporating them into ‘Where’s Waldo’ style scenes, all generated with AI.”

Though there are always concerns about the ethics of generative AI and the boundaries of fair use are evolving, there is a democratizing aspect to the technology.

“Kids who don’t have natural artistic abilities but who are still creative can use AI to do creative work. Canva is especially designed for non-creators for this purpose.”

This will be especially helpful as Auerbach’s program shifts next year from Graphic Design to a new title and focus—Digital Media and Web Technologies.

Auerbach isn’t the only teacher who’s taking advantage of this aspect of AI. 

“Last year I had students use AI to create images for a Hinduism storyboard project,” said Social Studies teacher Nikki Berry. “They drew a host of random elements from a hat—different Hindu castes, different gods and goddesses and religious symbols, etc., and then had to write a story showing two life cycles in Hinduism using the items they selected. Since many of the Hindu gods have multiple arms, legs, and heads and can hard to illustrate, they created all the images for their stories using AI. It took the pressure off of them trying to draw and put the emphasis on the stories they told and the quality of the prompts that they gave in order to get the outputs they were looking for.”

Across the hall, English teacher Taylore Aussiker has her students use AI in a similar way on their literary projects.

“As we read Shakespeare’s The Tempest in class, each student follows a different character arc. After we finish, students go to ChatGPT and, drawing from their analysis, plug in descriptions of their character and ask the AI to generate an image based on how it would portray the character in a modern context. They typically need to follow up with additional prompts to revise the image. The final results are pretty amazing. They then create a poster using the image and include a write-up that justifies their prompt.”

Aussiker has been using the activity with her sophomores for the last three years and has noted the technology’s evolution.

“The first year the results were, frankly, terrible. You had hands with too many fingers and eyes in weird places. Last year was light years better. This year, it was actually kind of scary how good the portraits were.”

As much as the English teacher in me despises the use of AI in writing, I’ve discovered it does have its place. Which brings me back to my Profession Based Writing class, where I taught my students how to use AI—not to generate their work for them, but to polish it. For certain kinds of writing tasks—those that call upon critical thinking or creativity—AI is a terrible tool that stunts development. But when it comes to pure communication, particularly in the workplace or everyday life, it can be a valuable tool. 

Through the first few weeks of class, we focus on learning how to compose professional texts, emails, memos, and business letters—the kinds of communications they’ll need to use both in their work and their personal lives. As students build their final portfolios, as well as in our follow-up unit on cover letters and resumes, students write their first drafts then craft a prompt asking the AI to help polish their final drafts. The results are striking in their level of professionalism and not only show students how AI can be a tool that enhances their work rather than replace it but also aligns with how the technology is being adopted in the modern workplace.

Like all new technologies, AI can be used for good or ill. As an educator it’s easy to focus on the ill, so it’s been heartening to see more and more the technology’s benefits. And the more I see, the more I begin to imagine what else it can offer. I have the feeling we’re only just beginning to realize its potential.