Teaching our children to use AI
Back in my day the idea of artificial intelligence was completely wack-a-doodle!!!
Not to date myself - but in the 3rd grade Mrs. Damerelle had us do a time capsule writing and I was pretty damn sure that 20 years later when I opened my writing up we’d be in flying cars - I predicted it. That would have been in 2003. (Yes - I was in 3rd grade in 1983. But see how wise I am.) AND now it’s 🤯 41 years later…gulp…and no flying cars.🫤
However, today we can have a computer generated intelligent program write our text for us - I didn’t see that coming in the third grade.🤯 Luckily, we still have to be smart enough to write the question and to give enough information to the prompt so that it’s on point. It’s not doing ALL thinking for us.
I admit to using it now and then to help me generate ideas. Especially when I’m creating and my juices just aren’t flowing. Once a few ideas pop in front of me on the screen I am usually off to the races. AND I know that it has been extremely useful to certain areas of business and industry for years. So - I’m not against it. In this new solo role as a Parenting Coach and author - it gives me a sense of camaraderie. No - it’s not actually a person - but it can feel like I have someone helping me, someone (something?) on my team. 💪
The question comes to mind - how do we teach our kids to interact with this new technology and use it for good not evil. 😉 Teachers are going to have to accept that many kids are going to rely on this technology to write papers and so need to get ahead of it and teach them HOW they want them to interact with it and what expectation are.
Your kids can think of chatGPT or whatever program they are using as a more interactive “ask google” platform. For me - again dating myself - when we did research we went to the library and looked up our topic in an encyclopedia. It was up to us to change the wording so that we weren’t plagiarizing. Pretty obvious if we were.
Your kids can use AI as a great way to organize their thoughts, help to understand the thesis of a book, and even understand math problems. It’s really pretty great and has infinite possibilities. The biggest thing for our kids is going to be:
Learning to ask a good question and set up a good prompt
Questioning and digging deeper in other sources to check for accuracy
Taking the information and making it their own rather than sound like it was computer generated
“BUT really this is for older kids only, right? My child is only (insert age) and doesn’t need to know anything about this.”
No, no, no. Their time is coming and if you start to guide them now then when it comes time to actually use AI they’ll have a better understanding and know how to interact with it…as apposed to looking like they used it to “cheat” or not complete the assignment themselves.
Introduce AI to them in a fun way. Write a book together using your child's creativity and AI’s quick thinking. Print it and have your child illustrate it.
Practice using good questions. AI is most useful when answering open ended questions. Teaching our kids how to ask really good broad and deep questions is a great skill to have. Most kids ask very simple questions so starting to deepen that well will only help them as they navigate more difficult work in school and to have better conversations with people.
Homework help. Let AI help your child with their homework. It’s especially useful for math. You must give it a good prompt - say something like, “I am a 2nd grader who is struggling to understand how to find the area of a room. The room is 42 feet by 16 feet. Can you explain in very simple terms how to do this?” Make sure AI knows this is an area of struggle, you can even say, “teach me like I’m a kindergartener.” This can help you and your child if you are stuck on a problem. There are even some AI programs that you can upload the homework sheet and ask AI to help you do it.
Talk to your child about how to question information being given and how to “fact check.” (Multiple sources ring any bells?)
Talk to your child about what plagiarism means and how to use AI and avoid copying instead using it for a guide or idea generator.
AI is GREAT for helping a child come up with an outline for a research paper. It’s also great for examples of thesis statements - because those are hard! The more a child sees these - the better. ✨ My favorite - your child can take their typed work and copy and paste it into AI to check for spelling and grammar errors if that is allowable. If your kiddo had a hard time organizing thoughts - AI is a perfect aide.
If you had asked me just a few years ago my thoughts on AI I would have been scared that we would lose intelligence and that personal touch. It’s hard to know when reading an article if it was AI generated or actually generated from someone's own thoughts. I don’t like that. BUT there also could have been a whole host of issue with the flying cars too - so who am I to judge. 🤷♀️
Changes come, in this case AI and not flying cars, and the best thing we can do for our kids is to help them interact in an appropriate and intelligent way so that they don’t succumb to allowing a robot to write all their papers for them. Taking charge and teaching them how to use it while they are young is going to make it all easier as they get older.
Teaching our kids to ask deeper questions, challenge information, and adapt information to work for them…these are all higher level thinking skills. ✨
You got this!!! 🫶
