Immersed in the realm of artificial intelligence, Scott Nichols, PHS government teacher and adviser for Junior State of America, encourages the creative and responsible use of the technology in classrooms.
“I’ve used AI to help me with creating engaging lessons for students,” Nichols said. “It just helps me be a little bit more creative with the kinds of activities that we do.”
The rise of AI has led to controversy over the role of new technology in the classrooms and the future of education. Many want bans on AI in an educational setting, but instead of pushing the technology away, Nichols wants to implement it into daily lessons.
“With any kind of technology that comes about, we’ve adapted. It’s not going away, it’s only going to be used more,” Nichols said. “I think it’s important that we embrace it to some extent. The school district is working on creating policies for student use of AI in the classroom.”
Nichols said that Artificial Intellegence such as Chat GPT helps boost his creativity when creating engaging lessons for his classes.
“It’s helped me. I haven’t thought of myself as being a creative person,” Nichols said. “It has really helped me think outside the box and just get ideas. I get ideas, then tweak it and change it to what I really need.”
Nichols presents slideshows to other teachers at PHS on how to use AI to help create lessons that focus more on students.
“Most of the teachers have come back and shown me what they’ve done,” Nichols said. “I’ve done some professional development for teachers with showing off some of the lessons that I have created with AI, and they really liked it. Several of them have gone to create new activities.”
Embracing AI has opened doors for multiple beneficial school habits like studying.
“Be careful not to make it do your thinking for you,” Nichols said. ” You want to make sure that it just helps you be creative, find those outlets and new ways to look at information. It’s a great way to get ideas and even study some topics.”
Other teachers at PHS speak on how AI has benefited the classroom environment.
“I think it allows more creativity for the teacher,” on-level government teacher Rod McCall said. “That way you, as a student, can learn better. It is well known that a lecture format does not work well for learning. The more interaction you have, the greater your depth of knowledge will be.”
McCall said the technology is only advancing.
“It is a tool that is not going anywhere,” McCall said. “It’s the next level of Google. Google is a keyword search. You can ask Google on your phone to do a keyword search on the internet. It made searching for information so much easier. Well, this (AI) is the next level.”
McCall believes being able to dig deeper with AI is a great skill to have.
“I’m not talking about the ‘write me a paper’ kind of AI. That’s lazy and cheating,” McCall said. “But, when you can actually use AI to help you in whatever career you head towards, you’ll be head and shoulders above other candidates for jobs.”
Students at PHS have diverse opinions on AI in the future.
“I think it benefits a lot of people if you want a quick response but not getting answers,” senior Mia Solt said. “But for someone who’s going into animation, people have been speculating that it could potentially reach a point where it could take over entire technology industries.”
