Reflection #2 – Week 3

In this class we learned a lot about AI and other technologies as found in a classroom. The class started off with a presentation from Darcy Mcnee who is the district leader for curriculum and innovation in Saanich School District, SD63. Her presentation was very engaging and talked about the incorporation of technology in classrooms, as well as what schools in the Saanich school district are doing during the rise of AI. Darcy started off by talking about how every school in the district has a section on their website with information about digital literacy and also talked about how there are training modules and quizzes available to help teach people about security awareness. Some schools in the school district are integrating technology into various subjects through the use of green screens (putting the students ‘into’ the situation or diarama) which is proving to help students with their creativity and writing skills because they are able to situate themselves into what they are learning better. Something cool that she mentioned was that some teachers include videogames into their lessons because they know students enjoy participating in them. So, they will have seeds created in Minecraft that students and teachers can join which is where they end up conducting the lesson. Darcy also brought up that they use Read & Write that students can use for various things like simplifying webpages, creating vocabulary lists, and the more common uses like editing and reading a document that they created. As for AI in the classrooms, she said that it is innevitable that students will use it or at least come across it, which means that a teacher’s responsibility now is to educate and prepare students for AI rather than trying to ban it. AI has gotten to the point where you can’t avoid it anymore. She also said that they try to put up posters in secondary schools with information about AI to spread awareness.

After Darcy’s presentation, we talked more about AI, mainly the different types, and concerns associated with it. There have been 3 types of AI created over time: reactive (face ID and voice assistant), predictive (creation of preference, trying to fill in what comes next), and generative (newly created text, images, content). Next, we learned about the many concerns associated with the rise of AI, the top concerns being ethical concerns, job displacement, data privacy and security, and the potential for inaccuracies up to 76% of the time. We were also briefly told about a website called GPTZero that may benefit some teachers, especially those in middle school and high school. This website allows you to input a piece of writing and it will identify any potential AI usage within that writing. I went onto the website to look into it more where I decided to paste the first part of this paragraph into it to see how it works. From what I found, it will tell you how much it believes the piece is written by AI, how much it’s written by an actual human, and how much it’s a mix of being written by both AI and a human. All of this is given in percentages. I think that this has the potential to be a very useful tool in most cases, unless there is someone who happens to be very good at writing and can form sentences super well. I’ve attached a screenshot of what the website appears as below. Overall, this session was very interesting and relevant as a future teacher.