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Like many teachers since the public release of ChatGPT, I’ve encountered frustration. For a lot of us, it has felt as though we are spending more of our time as graders determining whether a student completed an assignment with or without AI than we are actually providing meaningful feedback. The number of hours I have committed to consulting AI-checkers and poring over Google Doc version histories is far more than I ever would have predicted or hoped.
Detecting cheating was a fairly straightforward task when ChatGPT was publicly released in November 2022. Most students who decided to use generative AI to cheat on one of my assigned essays would do so by plugging my prompt into ChatGPT or Google Gemini, watching the AI generate a complete essay in moments, and then lazily pasting the text into their Google Doc. On more than one occasion, a student accidentally pasted their prompt request into the document.
As time went by, though, the cheaters adapted. Realizing the incriminating nature of pasting large chunks of text, they would use multiple browser windows to look at their AI-generated prompts on one half of their computer screen and use the other half to take dictation in lieu of writing out ideas of their own.
I’m in my fifteenth year of teaching high school, and by now I have a pretty good nose for sniffing out inauthentic work. But proving it isn’t always easy, and gathering the necessary evidence takes up a lot of my time. Not to mention that generative AI is so easy to use and becoming so sophisticated that students can use it for virtually any assignment, not just the end-of-the-unit essays and projects. It got to the point that whenever I assigned anything new–comprehension questions, reflection prompts, even personal narrative assignments for crying out loud–I would brace myself for the imminent and disheartening detective work I knew would follow.
That’s when I figured out a way to use technology to fight back.
Not through AI-checkers, as that technology still has some time before its reliability is
guaranteed. Instead, I decided to follow the lead of Kai Cenat.
If you have no idea who Kai Cenat is, that’s probably a good thing. I would be wary of most educational professionals over 30 who are highly invested in the goings-on of Kai Cenat. But chances are, your students know about him. And Mr. Beast. And IShowSpeed. Maybe Logan Paul, too, but he might already be too old for your K-12 students. (Sorry, Logan. Happens to the best of us.)
Point is, these streamers are wildly popular for people too young to vote, which means that their audiences are very familiar with streamers’ preferred method of communication: recording video of themselves off a smartphone.
About halfway through my unit on The Great Gatsby, I started asking students to provide video responses of their reactions to the latest read chapter. As I reviewed their responses, I had a feeling that I cannot recall the last time I felt.
I was having fun grading.
Some reactions may have been more insightful than others, and the production value of the videos will not cause any worry for Mr. Cenat over losing followers anytime soon. Nevertheless, what I was seeing in these video responses was personality and authenticity–two things you never get from reading AI-generated content.
The braver students volunteered to have their videos shown on my classroom projector. It led to some laughs, but it also created so many opportunities for me to pause the videos so that the group could have a deeper discussion about a great point their classmate made in their recording. As we did more of these assignments, more of the students wanted their videos shown in class. The class clowns had fun with questionable (albeit entertaining) editing choices.
I welcomed all of it. It made English class fun again for the students and for me.
It’s more about having fun, though, when it comes to teaching students about effective virtual communication. While most of my students won’t become English majors, the vast majority of them will find themselves applying for a job that requires them to do so virtually. Today’s generation of job applicants are already being asked to conduct live video interviews in addition to submitting pre-recorded video responses. When teachers give their students opportunities to record their thoughts on video, we offer them a chance to communicate effectively in a modern medium, which has always been a hallmark of English Language Arts.
I still assign my students literary analysis essays, journal prompts, in-class presentations, and reading comprehension questions. Plenty of my students still use generative AI to some extent to complete these assignments, which is just something we educators have to deal with for the time being. But on the bright side, I have at least one way for students to share their ideas in a way that they are less likely to ask AI to do all the thinking for them.
This post is exclusively published on eduexpertisehub.com
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