Citing AI and teacher first steps

📝 Can you cite AI in classwork? Should you?

On the Ditch That Textbook blog, I recently did a deep dive into these questions …

Can student cite AI in classwork?

And if they can, should they?

Read the post here // Subscribe to the DTT email newsletter

Here are some of the main takeaways from the post …

• Major citation styles like APA, MLA, and Chicago have guidance on HOW to cite an AI assistant like ChatGPT. They don’t give as much about whether you should or not.

• In my opinion, ChatGPT is as much a “source” as Google is a source. You might find sources with it, but it isn’t a direct, authoritative source.

• You might cite AI as a source when showing an example of the output that AI creates when you ask it a question.

• Some AI assistants do better at citing their sources than others. Perplexity.ai and Microsoft Copilot are both very transparent about the sources of their information.

• Others are not so forthcoming. Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini wouldn’t provide direct sources — even if I asked directly. ChatGPT provided sources upon request but didn’t start with them.

What can we do? In the post, I suggest four practices we can implement with AI assistants and sources.

🗣 DISCUSSION BOARD: Student prompts

Back at the beginning of AI for Admins, Joseph Whittaker put a call out to the community:

I want to develop a bank of exceptionally useful prompts that can be used my students (and adapted where necessary) so AI can become a tutor and help them with their work and prompt them with ideas and questions....almost to become a personal learning assistant.

View the whole discussion here. (It’s not too add something!)

Here are some of the resources you shared:

• Jason Pelowski shared a set of “copy and paste” student prompt templates from Bill Ferriter.

• Jason also shared this paper by Ethan and Lilach Mollick: “Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts”

• Kim Brown shared Dan Fitzpatrick’s PREPARE framework for prompting AI.

Just today, I also added a comment about SchoolAI Spaces.

If you aren’t ready for students to prompt the AI themselves yet — or if they’re not old enough to use ChatGPT et al, this might be good …

I'm really impressed with SchoolAI's Spaces -- custom chatbots you can write for students. The teacher writes the instructions for the chatbot. Then they share a link to the chatbot with the students.

SchoolAI has several pre-made chatbots you can choose from, too.

SchoolAI: http://schoolai.com

SchoolAI Spaces: https://app.schoolai.com/discover

😱 Michelle Liga’s AI resource on Padlet

AI for Admins community member Michelle Liga has been busy!

She created this fantastic Padlet wall called “AI your teaching assistant” with categories like …

• What is artificial intelligence?

• Policy

• Pros

• Cons

• Free ebooks

• Prompt writing

• Tools to grade AI

• Large language model AI

• Teacher-facing AI

• Student-facing AI

… plus tons of resources and links. It really is a treasure trove!

Find it here. (And thanks again Michelle for sharing!)

🗓 This week’s discussion topic

Here’s this week’s new discussion topic (posted under Ways to Use AI in Education):

FYI: Hit reply to this email if you want to suggest a future discussion topic!

For teachers who are new to AI, what are some first steps they can take? What are some apps they can use as a good starting point?

Click here to view the Ways to Use AI in Education discussion board to reply.

🎙 Quote of the week

“The essence of a teacher is brains, heart, and humanity. I believe we’re always going to need that.”

— Matt Miller, AI for Educators

(Yes, I just quoted myself, sorry! Someone shared that quote from my book and I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it … but now I’m glad I did!)

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ Environmental impact of AI (via James Bedford on Twitter/X): A side of AI that I often forget. It takes a LOT of power to run AI, and it has environmental impacts.

2️⃣ Goodbye, Papers. Hello, AI-Powered Portfolios! (via The AI Edventure by Jason Gulya): I love this approach to collaborative academic work with AI. This could be a guiding model in lots of cases.

3️⃣ Back to School AI Guide: 46 Steps & Tools for Educators Exploring AI in 2024 (via theaieducator.io): Includes 10 back to school steps, 11 AI tools recommended by teachers, 8 ChatGPT levers to supercharge responses, and more.