– Hi, everyone, I’m Niya Bond, the faculty developer here at OneHE, and I’m glad to be back with you today for my “Tea and Teaching Tips” series. Today, we’re going to talk about AI in the classroom, and I wanna give a quick caveat that my approach to AI in this video and in the classrooms that I engage with is to think of it as a complimentary tool and not a combative one.

Now, I teach a lot of writing intense courses across the English, business communications, communications in writing curriculum. I’m going to be sharing my experiences in an online writing classroom, but really, these tips can be used in other disciplines as well. So, my first tip starts at the beginning of what we would do in a writing classroom, which is brainstorming. We can use AI with our students to brainstorm. We can ask AI generators to think of topics that students might be able to investigate and then use for a project. For example, in one of my writing courses, it’s argument writing, students have to come up with an argumentative-based writing topic. And the topic that they choose can really make or break their final project because not every topic is conducive to controversy and argument writing. And so we can, either individually or as an entire class, prompt AI to tell us some argumentative topics. We may ask for a series of five and we can analyse those topics in their strengths for an argumentative project. So at the beginning of any assignment process, if ideas need to be generated, AI can be turned to in those instances to really start the conversation and get critical thinking skills going.

So, after we’ve got that initial brainstorming done, we might move into later parts of the project. Again, with an argument writing essay, that might mean collecting scholarly sources and research evidence. Now, as you may know, some academic articles are very dense and complicated, especially for introductory writers, and that’s the population that I’m often teaching. Still, we need to learn how to work with these sources, understand what they’re saying, and then synthesise some of their ideas in with our own. And so, we can use AI to help make sense of these dense, complicated texts by asking them to provide us with a summary.

Now, a caveat to learners is, AI doesn’t always get it right. So it’s important that they do the reading as well. But it is useful to input information into AI and ask it to condense it and provide a little clarity. And again, it’s a place where you can have a conversation with students about how this is a tool, how it’s not perfect, but how it can supplement and compliment what we’re doing in the classroom.

So we’ve talked about how we might use AI at the beginning of an assignment or a process, we’ve talked about how we might use it in the middle, and now I’d like to suggest that we can encourage students to use it at the end of a project, presentation, assignment, whatever you’re doing in your classroom that AI is capable of complimenting. And so this is a chance where students can self-reflect and think critically about the project or assignment that they’re working on. And they can ask AI to help them polish it to help them make sentences better, in some cases, to make presentation slides better. Again, it’s thinking about their design and presentation choices.

And so AI offers an opportunity, after something has been created, to go back and really think about those creative choices and determine if they are the most effective choices, or if there’s still room for growth and opportunity to improve. The idea is that you can use AI with students at any part of the process of any project, it’s just a means of getting creative with how you wanna break a project up into parts and then help AI encourage self-reflection, critical thinking, and creativity even around whatever you’re doing in the classroom. Thanks so much for being here today for “Tea and Teaching.” I hope these three tips for using AI in the classroom are useful, and I’ll see you next time.