Considering Age Appropriate AI

Greetings and Welcome to another Potentially Useful episode of the TCAPSLoop Podcast. Danelle's leveled up after her successful quest through MACUL 2024 and will guide us into the exciting realm of Developmentally Appropriate AI in Education. We know our youngest learners must develop the necessary critical thinking skills to navigate a landscape where AI will be ubiquitous. So, gear-up, fellow ed-tech explorers, as we embark on a journey through bytes, and building blocks.

Moment of Zen: There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. - Anais Nin

 

The Rundown:

Thoughts on Access vs. Exposure in regards to AI in schools

Generative AI has potential benefits for education and risks that must be thoughtfully managed.

 

Early Elementary - Bite sized digital citizenship, scaffolding to big ideas

• AI is not a human
• “Peek under the hood” to see how these things work
• Critical Thinking 
  • AI hallucinations
  • AI created images
• Slow down and self reflect AND Seek facts and evidence (5 core dispositions of digital citizenship)
• Not directly on AI systems - under 13

 

Later Elementary

• Problem solvers, if we aren’t careful, they will learn to rely on this kind of tech rather than solving their own problems
• Ask ChatGPT questions, but the teacher is always in the drivers seat.
• Spend a LOT of time thinking critically about the answers
• Not directly on AI systems - under 13

 

Middle School 

• CAUTION! “Over 13? Let’s get them on AI!” Developmentally what do we know about middle school brains?  They lack impulse control. Set guardrails and limits. 
• Exercises in which students ask a generative AI chatbot to answer a question or write an essay and then critique it—looking for factual errors, etc.
• “It should be used as a tool to complement and challenge the critical-thinking skills that come online at this age,” 

 

High School

• High school students are fast becoming sophisticated users of programs like ChatGPT.
• Teachers may feel their main duty at this stage is to police students and make sure they’re not using ChatGPT, Photomath, and similar technologies to do their assignments. But experts say that educators have a more important role to play: primarily, to teach students the limitations of the technology. The text and images created by generative AI programs, for example, can be plagued with biases, stereotypes, and inaccuracies.
• “Exercise your natural suspicions. Doubt the machine. Don’t take answers at face value”
• AI is an important component of their education, but it still needs boundaries and guidance. 
• AI Literacy Lessons for Grades 6–12 | Common Sense Education

 

Tech Tool of the Week

AI Literacy Lessons for Grades 6–12 | Common Sense Education

 

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Hosts: Danelle Brostrom, Larry Burden

Um and Ramble Editing: Larry Burden

 

Cover art created with help from Adobe Fir