Helping our Students Manage Technology and a Word on Chat GPT (AI)

Helping our Students Manage Technology and a Word on Chat GPT (AI)

MLC School has always been proud of our place as one of the first schools to introduce a one-to-one laptop program and over the years we have championed educating our students in how to use technology responsibly. However, as devices have become increasingly interconnected it has become far more challenging for the girls to disconnect from the multiple communication channels afforded by digital devices.

Instant messaging apps such as Apple Messenger are having an increasing impact on learning. While it is easy to say that students should simply close the app, the reality is the average teenager does not have this level of self-control. We know this because we are seeing it in classrooms. 

From Term 2 we will be trialling a new system that will block the Messenger app during school hours on all students’ laptops in Year 7 to Year 10. At this stage we will not be including Year 11 and Year 12 in the trial as we feel that that are demonstrating a more responsible approach to managing their digital connectivity.

Whilst on campus during school hours, students in Year 7 to Year 10 will not be able to access Messenger. It will reactivate after school hours and on weekends. We are also investigating options for a protocol for iPads in Year 4 to Year 6. School owned iPads used by students in Kindergarten to Year 3 will have Messenger turned off permanently.

In combination with the current school rule that phones should be in their lockers during class time, we believe these measures will assist the girls in remaining focused on their learning.

What is Chat GPT?

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, it is what is known as a Large Language Model and is trained on approximately 300 billion words. Its output is guided by human feedback in a form of reinforcement learning. This is what enables it to write text that reads as though it was written by a human. This form of artificial intelligence (AI) is not new, nor is it the only one of its kind. At the moment it is free but whether this will remain the case in the future is unknown. As with all technology it does have its limitations. The output is only as good as the prompts you input, equally its responses to concepts that are too recent will be limited as it can only draw on publicly available content. As the technology continues to evolve, I am sure these limitations will change.

So, what does this mean for education? All technology can be used with both positive and negative intent. While there are valid concerns about the use of this tool to produce work that is not the student’s own, there is a growing body of thought about how we can teach students to harness a technology such as this to support and challenge them in their learning. Rather than talking about how we block students from using tools to assist them in assessments, we should be discussing how we evolve assessment. Can the use of technology such as chat GPT be used to deepen our understanding of complex concepts and improve retention of the important facts?

As a staff we spent much time and discussion on Chat GPT as part of our professional learning program in Term 1, where we were guided by the provocations of David Caspari, CEO of Janison and a thought leader at the intersection of education, innovation and technology.

Already there are a multitude of ideas about how to use Chat GPT as part of learning and teaching. Some are teacher centred, for example producing sample essays to use in class discussions, generating discussion prompts that encourage students to think critically and solve problems, creating formative assessment questions that assist the teacher in checking for understanding and the list goes on. The student-centred ideas are equally diverse. Imagine preparing for a test and asking ChatGPT to create adaptive questions to test your understanding of a given topic. If you answer correctly, it gives you a more challenging question. It could be used for providing real time feedback on practice questions. Or, for the student that is practising a new concept taught in class that day for homework who just needs one more explanation this type of AI could be just what they need.

Do we have concerns that that the use of AI will lead to an increase in issues of academic honesty in the short term? No more so that we already do in relation to the use of external tutors or other online facilities. I am confident that MLC School students have a clear understanding of what academic honesty entails and that the deliberate engagement in these practices will have consequences; however, we will continue to develop this understanding in relation to the use of AI. Will this challenge us as educators to think about the nature of the tasks we set? Yes, it will, and this is a good thing.

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– Linda Emms
Head of Learning and Teaching