Pointing the Classroom toward the Future

My students and I were absolutely fascinated last week when he heard about the story about the winner of an art contest not being a human artist, but rather an artificial one. The concept brought some meaningful discussion into what art truly is, and glanced toward our class inquiry about what "truth" is. This bell ringer discussion truly got me thinking even deeper about how I have been using AI to enhance the history classroom experience, and how I could potentially use AI tools in the future as this evolving technology becomes more accessible to the masses.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) examination of online AI tools that can be implemented into the classroom tomorrow.

AI Artist

As the bell ringer above eludes to, AI image generation has been an incredibly subversive way to create totally unique (and at times strikingly beautiful) works.

Using a tool like DALL-E 2, or the mini-equivalent through a site like Craiyon.com, students and teachers alike can put their imagination on full display by creating images based on a simple prompt being input.

This was generated when I typed in "George Washington is batman." It's certainly not perfect, but it generates quite a funny image, which demonstrates the power of this site to produce meaningful visuals that can aid in student understanding and more creative student work.

This can be taken into the realm of SEL with students creating a prompt to describe how they are feeling with the help of a Mood Meter.

In the English classroom, students can use this tool to story board a chapter of the novel they are currently reading. This opens the door to producing art that would have otherwise have been closed for students who feel as if they are not “good enough“ to draw.

Make it Clear

This is one of my new favorites for this year. Do you ever find the near perfect picture/map/political cartoon/diagram on Google images that shows off an essential concept, only to realize that it is far too small to show with any fidelity on the projector? This happens to me far too often. Even after reverse-image searching the picture, some original images, high resolution just cannot be found. And frankly, I just don't have the time to do this for every perfect photo I find.

Img Upscaler is my go to as the best free site that will take an image and upscale it to 4x as large. This tool works particularly well with images with illustrated images with less detail than a more elaborate photograph. The obvious downside to Img Upscaler is that you are limited to 10 images per week. Like any forward thinking consumer bombarded with YouTube ads, I have a VPN which comes in handy to get around this.

You're Now the Best Impressionist

One of the more difficult things to do in teaching the early years of American history is getting students to recognize that people in the past were, in fact, just people. One of the methods I have found to deepen students historical empathy is by using AI generated speech of historical figures using a sampling of their voices in real life.

In application, I have to modify many historical documents for my students, most of which are written and not spoken. Instead of putting on my best JFK impression, and read Kennedy’s letter to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I can have Kennedy read it himself. It's one small way to help history come alive.

Students themselves can use these tools to fuel their own creativity. When creating a video presentation, students can borrow the voices of hundreds to deepen the quality of their work. Can you imagine students using the voices of their favorite YouTuber when creating a mock pitch in their business course? The possibility for student innovation is endless.

"Deep Nostalgia"

Similar to the speech generator mentioned above, pictures can also become "alive" through the assistance of AI and machine learning with the tool "Deep Nostalgia" from MyHeritage.

It is obviously not perfect, but can add some much needed depth to abstract visual aids of historical characters. One of the things my students struggle with the most initially is remembering that people within history are something greater and less fallible than people today, and perhaps this tool can assist in breaking down that notion. Regardless, it's a cool site to bring historical photos to life.

The "Thing" Translator

With a steady influx of students learning English as a second language heading into American schools over the last 10 years, the need for more efficient language learning tools is absolutely essential.

Thing Translator can help pick up the slack as a quick and efficient way for students to obtain words of everyday objects. As the camera on their phone or school-issued iPad crosses the path of an everyday object, it will show the name of the object in the target language. This can be effectively used to help students rapidly obtain meaningful survival English both inside and outside the classroom.

Students Are Now Experts

Wolfram|Alpha is an old-school computational tool that can hook students and teachers up with the quick answers to complex scientific, mathematical, and language-based questions that can be written in natural language.

Though this tool serves to provide answers rather than show work (on the free tier), but can help students significantly in determining the correct answer to a problem, and checking their work for accuracy. For the paid versions, students can use W|A to follow a step-by-step instructions on how the problem was solved, and even skip the step by step in order to try working it out on their own.

Clearly this presents a scary reality for teachers in that it can lead to increased cheating, but I think this ultimately serves as a fabulous tool to support student work.

Trepidatious Excitement

In all, these tools make me excited for what is to come for the classroom, but leaves some apparent vulnerabilities to the modern day classroom. Student's use of certain AI tools can potentially mitigate students learning in the modern classroom.

The greatest question that we, as educators, need to reflect on is: How can transform these potential disadvantages into teachable moments in the classroom?

For example, imagine a student in a photography class submits an AI generated photo as their summative assignment. The photo possesses all of the compositional elements studied in that unit (rule of thirds, cropping, negative space, etc). Instead of promptly failing the student for not submitting their own photo, I think the question that needs to cross teachers minds is: Does the students understand why this is a good photo?

If the students is able to defend the AI photo using the precise terms from the unit, can we say that the student has sufficiently demonstrated mastery of the topic?

Food for thought.

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