For decades, Walla Walla High School in Washington State’s wheat basket has kept an old red wooden barn on campus where students learn a time-honored farming skill: how to raising pigs and sheep.
Now, with the start of a new academic year, some school teachers are preparing to help students learn the latest digital skill: how to navigate AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
this month, Walla Walla Public Schools, which serves about 5,500 students, held a day-long workshop on AI chatbots, which can generate homework essays, fictional stories and other texts. About 100 local educators showed up at the high school for the event.
It’s an impressive turnaround for a district that blocked student access to ChatGPT on school devices just in February.
“I want the students to learn to use it,” said Yazmin Bahena, a dual language middle school social studies teacher. “They will grow up in a world where this is the norm.”
The media frenzy over chatbots last winter fired school districts and universities across the United States. The tools, trained on a vast database of digital texts, use artificial intelligence to produce written responses to user prompts. Bots do things freely.
Tech giants and billionaires promise that AI tools will revolutionize learning. Critics warn that bots are more likely to undermine education, flooding students with misinformation and facilitating widespread cheating.
Amid predictions of impending doom and gloom, some public schools have tried to hit the pause button to give administrators time to catch up. In December, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system, blocked ChatGPT on school Wi-Fi and district-owned student devices. Other districts soon followed suit, including New York City, the largest school system in the US.
But administrators quickly realized that bot bans were ineffective. For one thing, wealthy students who own smartphones or laptops can simply access ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by San Francisco’s OpenAI, or similar bots like Google’s Bard, at home.
“Kids with devices and unfiltered, unfettered connectivity at home already benefit from access to these tools,” said Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, in an interview this week. “Students who rely on district devices and connectivity are restricted.”
In May, schools let out in New York City a public mea culpa, saying the district is in too much of a hurry and will unblock ChatGPT. This week, Mr. Carvalho said Los Angeles schools are also making more permissive policies.
As schools reopen for the fall, educators and district leaders are grappling with complex questions posed by AI tools: What should writing assignments look like in an era when Can students use chatbots to generate prose for them? How can schools, teachers and students use bots effectively and creatively? Does it still count as cheating if a student asks a bot to do a rough draft that they then rewrite themselves?
Some large districts, including Milwaukee, still have ChatGPT blocks in place. Some districts like Newark Public Schools are testing specialized chatbots designed specifically for student instruction.
Other districts are embracing tools like ChatGPT as lesson planning aids for teachers — and as opportunities for students to learn how bots can create misinformation and mimic biases of man. Administrators say they’re just taking a practical view: Students will need to learn how to prompt chatbots to answer their questions, just as they learn to query search engines. like Google.
“The world our children are inheriting is going to be filled with AI and we need to make sure they are well equipped for it, both the benefits and the drawbacks,” Wade Smith, the superintendent of Walla Walla Public Schools, said in a recent interview. “Putting our heads behind the curtain or under the blankets and hoping it goes away is not true.”
Walla Walla offers a picture of one district’s impressive learning curve in AI this year. School administrators are trying to take advantage of the potential benefits of chatbots while working to tackle tough issues like cheating, misinformation and potential risks to student privacy.
In January, Keith Ross, the school district’s director of technology and information services, started hearing about ChatGPT. The district’s teachers are starting to notice some students submitting chatbot-generated homework as their own. One obvious tip: The chatbots produced quotes that were not in the novels assigned in class.
The district is also concerned about student privacy. ChatGPT and Bard require new users to provide personal data such as their email address and mobile number. But administrators don’t know how AI companies might use students’ account details or their text interactions with chatbots.
“We just don’t know enough about the technology,” said Mr. Ross, who blocked students’ access to ChatGPT in February. “We blocked it to give us some time to get up to speed on what it is and how we’re going to support teachers, and potentially students, in using it.”
The district formed an AI advisory committee with 15 administrators and teachers. The committee studied the potential benefits and challenges of enabling student access to AI chatbots and plans to provide more training on the tools for teachers.
“There are two main categories: using it to be more efficient and save time as a teacher,” said Carrie LaRoy, the district’s technology integration specialist, who helps oversee the committee, “but then how teach our students to use it responsibly and with honesty.”
At 8 a.m. Thursday, about 100 local teachers and principals filed into a glass-walled assembly hall at Wa-Hi, as the high school is known. They gave up a day off in late summer to test AI tools for lesson planning and student learning.
The workshop was led by Molly Brinkley, a regional technology trainer who works with 23 local school districts. Most of them blocked ChatGPT in the spring, he said.
Several workshop attendees described themselves as chatbot novices. Others said they came to pick up more advanced skills.
One of them was Beth Clearman, a veteran honors English teacher at a local middle school who wanted to create some literary games for the first day of class. So he asked ChatGPT to create a six-word “memoir” of famous literary characters.
The AI chatbot instantly produced descriptions like: “luxurious parties, unrequited love, green light” and “arrow aim, face of rebellion, Mockingjay’s fire.” said Ms. Clearman said he plans to ask students to match the characters’ names with their bios to the chatbot. (Spoiler alert: Jay Gatsby, Katniss Everdeen).
Originally scary to AI chatbots, Ms. Clearman that he plans to use ChatGPT “a lot!” with his writing students.
“I turned my whole way of thinking upside down,” he says.
Ms. Bahena, the dual language social studies teacher, found another potentially useful feature: lesson translation.
“I want to see how well it works in Spanish,” said Ms. Bahena. So she asked ChatGPT to create a Civil War quiz in English and Spanish for her eighth grade students. “It’s very good.”
But even enthusiastic teachers in Walla Walla say they worry that students may struggle to be critical enough of materials produced by chatbots.
“I worry that they might come to take it at face value,” said Shauna Millett, a high school English teacher.
For now, the district is encouraging teachers to embrace chatbots, including learning students with their perceived disabilities. Students 13 or older can also create ChatGPT accounts if they wish.
At the end of the workshop, Ms. Brinkley, the regional technology trainer, looked around the room, pleased to see that dozens of local educators were now comfortable conversing — if not fluently — with AI chatbots.
“I recommend that schools reconsider their bans,” he said, “if teachers receive training, families receive training and students receive training.”