Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

Reasons to be CHEERFUL Kit Betts-Masters considers the implications that AI may have for what we think of as ‘digital literacy’, and imagines what the best case scenario for an AI-driven classroommight look like... A I is in everything now. It’s helpful, but also fallible. Right now, it’s inmy PDF reading software and probably in yours too. If you’re aWindows user, get used to seeing that Copilot button everywhere. When the final report of the government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) landed inmy inbox, I asked an AI assistant to ‘ Showme all the references to artificial intelligence ’. It duly produced a neat list of relevant quotations. Acting on a hunch, I then performed a CTRL+F search of the document for myself. Up popped some further mentions that the assistant had apparently skipped – including a key line about ‘ The rise of artificial intelligence’ having the potential to reshape the way we work. It was a small moment, but one that captured something important – that AI can be lazy, and essentially ‘give up’ when it thinks it’s done enough to satisfy the user. It seems that our understanding of ‘digital literacy’ now has to include checking the machine, not just asking it clever questions. Your‘trusted sidekick’ Generative AI has moved from being a relative novelty, to being pitched as a trusted sidekick in almost every digital task. Students will still need those traditional IT skills, however (if ‘find in document’ can be considered as such), and they’ll need to develop an appreciation for AI’s limitations, even if the systems they end up working with are more capable than the ones we use today. Yes, changing the way we work can be daunting, but it can also be exciting. My position is that students and adults alike should see AI as a tool for increasing quality , rather than simply saving time . If an AI can differentiate a set of questions at an individual level, accurately gauge the knowledge and skills of each student and create individually-tailored lesson resources for them, why wouldn’t we use that? Inmy writing, I use AI as a kind of ‘critical friend’. I’ll first produce an initial draft inmy own words, then ask an AI model what I’ve missed, how the structure could be clearer and whether any parts are confusing. I’ll ignore some of its suggestions, act on others and then rewrite portions of the draft to ensure it still sounds like me. That’s the habit I want my students to develop – not ‘ Write this for me ’, but ‘ Help me check this and make it better ’. The students in question will need to be equipped for a world of work in which they won’t be writing ‘one-size-fits-all’ documents, but rather working with knowledge, within certain legal and procedural frameworks. Setting the tone For many, a big part of AI’s appeal is its promise to complete inminutes work that used to take hours. Having very quickly reached the point where AI can present us with useful summaries tailored to different contexts, the challenge now is that of managing truth . We need to knowwhat the AI’s database contains, and whether we can be confident that the outputs the AI gives us are accurate and useful, rather than what the machine supposes sounds right, or thinks we will want to hear. The aforementioned CAR highlights the widespread concern that young people aren’t developing adequate skills in digital literacy, despite employers reporting a shortage of such skills. Recent advances in AI, notes the report, make it essential that students understand howAI works, are aware of its capabilities and limitations, and can learn how to use it without “Students andadults should seeAI as a tool for increasing quality, rather than simply saving time” 52 teachwire.net/secondary