More than a year after ChatGPT was released, students and teachers in RCMS are trying to figure out the best ways to use it.
According to study.com, as of Feb. 1, 20% of American teachers don’t know anything about ChatGPT.
Some teachers at RCMS said that so far, they have used it for short interactive activities or teaching resources. Many teachers have been very concerned about ChatGPT’s reliability, so they didn’t use it often. Many teachers generally disapprove of using ChatGPT for projects or assignments.
“It is our job as teachers to teach you how to use it and how to use it to prove your point and communicate with others,” said Mrs. Pamela Konde, a history teacher for the All Stars team.
Mrs. Konde said ChatGPT is too easy to just copy-paste from and end up doing nothing. She said it is not always right because it just pulls up an algorithm and pieces words, commonly found close to each other, together.
“I’m surprised it’s ever right,” Mrs. Konde said.
She said it isn’t up-to-date on recent events and isn’t a reliable source.
Ms. Allen also said students shouldn’t use ChatGPT as a source of information because it is often inaccurate and gives wrong information. She doesn’t use it to teach. Mrs. Konde also doesn’t use ChatGPT to teach because it is often very broad and unhelpful.
Teachers said they can tell immediately if their students have used ChatGPT for their entire assignment in school, partly because it won’t be detailed. According to study.com, 26% of teachers have caught students cheating using ChatGPT.
Mrs. Konde said teachers are focusing on teaching their students Portrait of a Graduate (POG) skills that will help students later in life.
Ms. Allen said all of the teachers in our school were informed on how to use ChatGPT properly on in November by Ms. Megan Carr, RCMS school-based technology specialist. She said teachers get to decide if they should discuss ChatGPT and other AI with students.
Some students have no idea what is possible with ChatGPT.
“If they don’t have anything to do and they’re bored they can just talk with ChatGPT or ChatGPT can give them work to do,” says Rithvica Menderkar Hari Shankar, 12, on the Legacy team in seventh grade.
Seventh-grader Tejesh Vaddi, 12, from Champions believes that ChatGPT should be unblocked. He thinks that if Open AI develops a feature for ChatGPT where it can limit the student’s access, students can use it for brainstorming.
Seventh-graders Sanjana Gorthy, 12, of All Stars and Oviya Vimalkumar, 12, of Dream Team occasionally use it for outside of school math, but have seen it is not very good with arithmetic computations. This is confirmed by Yue Dong, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California Riverside.
Ms. Allen says, “I think the best takeaway is that we have a lot of access to technology, to resources. I think we just have to use it in a good way.”
