Publisher's Synopsis
Book Introduction:
As a high school teacher navigating through this explosion of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) everywhere, I have started to contemplate what our country's education level will look like in the next 10 years. Students are using AI everyday to complete their assignments in school. Soon, I feel, our students will not know the actual information they are turning in assignments on, but they will certainly know how to program AI to create their assignments for them. I recently took an AI course as part of professional development for my school district and I discovered several different programs that will create a real-nice slide presentation on any topic, in 2 minutes time. So, asking students to put together a Google Slide or Power Point presentation to demonstrate their knowledge about a particular topic is not a worthwhile assignment for the classroom any longer in the new era of Artificial Intelligence. We, the educators of the new A.I. generation, are going to have to use different techniques for classroom assignments than we have in previous years. We will need to utilize assignments that can't be easily completed by A.I. alone and will require student demonstration of the knowledge obtained in order to create successful students in our classroom.The projects in this book require active research, critical thinking, and creativity, making them resistant to AI-generated shortcuts. They also encourage students to engage deeply with the complex issues surrounding the various topics in this book while providing assignment options for all types of learners. Most of the assignments are individual assignments, however, I have also included an assortment of whole-class projects as well. An assortment of rubric styles is also utilized throughout the different chapters.
The individual projects are listed in the form of "Choice Boards" that you can make copies of and present to the students in paper form or you can upload to a flash drive and then to your course webpage, Canvas module or Google classroom. The choice boards are arranged in a 3x3 chart, like a tic tac toe board.
One consideration might be to have students complete 3 assignments in a row on the choice board and that is all of their physical work for that unit, since this will be actual work that they can't have A.I. complete in 5 minutes.
These assignments require students to dive deep into a topic and produce something of quality, while at the same time, giving students some "choice" in what they study and what assignments they complete and turn in.
I believe it will take high expectations and possibly some tough grading the first few weeks for students to come to the realization that they can no longer turn in an assignment that took them 3 minutes to program A.I to do for them and pass this class. These assignments will necessitate the actual learning of the material in order to be successful. This, in turn, should help with district, county and state test scores.
I hope that these projects help to keep your students learning & connected to the content that you are so passionate about and maybe even ignite a spark within them to dive deeper into an area of interest that they discover through your course.
Peace and Blessings,
Stacey Alters
