this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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I am in full agreement that cell phones should not be out of the backpack or pocket unless there is an emergency or it’s lunch time / outside of class.
But for the love of critical thinking, also please ban the teachers from using ChatGPT to create their tests for them. I was appalled at finding out teachers at my kid’s school are doing that. While I support any tool (and funding!) that can make the lives and jobs of teachers easier, using a tool like ChatGPT is as irresponsible as telling kids to just Google it. And teachers/administrators should damn well know better.
Cool, so pay teachers more and give them ample time and resources to not need to cut corners.
Also using ChatGPT is fine, not checking the results after is not.
Agreed on the teachers getting more pay and time.
And I agree that checking for objective fact with respect to teaching and testing is necessary.
But…ChatGPT is not a credible source. So using it in the classroom is not exactly fine (outside of showing it as an example of a source that isn’t credible). It is in its infancy and any educator who uses it in the classroom and relies upon it is doing a considerable disservice to those they educate. That’s like teaching using Wikipedia. I get that it has information, many times accurate, but it should never be used as a source.
As a commentary…Far too often in this modern world people (not you, just a general sense of society) seem to see something that may be 50, or 75 percent accurate and claim it as fact. This is how entertainment news organizations function to get ratings. And if kids are to be taught critical thinking they must be taught how to discern what is or isn’t credible.
Otherwise we’re lost. And perhaps we already are.
You're only considering one narrow use of LLMs (which they're bad at). They're great for things like idea generation, formatting, restructuring text, and other uses.
For example, I tend to write at too high a writing level. I know this about myself, but it's still hard (with my ADHD) to remain mindful of that while also focusing on everything else that crowds my working memory when doing difficult work. I also know that I tend to focus more on what students can improve instead of what they did well.
So ChatGPT is a great tool for me to get a first pass of feedback for students. I can then copy/paste the parts I agree with for praise, then "turd sandwich" my suggestions for improvement in the middle. Or I can use ChatGPT to lower the writing level for me.
For tests, it's great to get it to generate a list of essay questions. You can feed GPT 4 up to 50 pages of text, too, so the content is usually really accurate if you actually know how to write good prompts.
I could go on. LLMs are a great tool, and teachers are professionals who (I hope) are using it appropriately. (Not just blindly copying/pasting like our students are... But that's a whole other topic.)
They may eventually be useful in this space. But for now, they are more work than they’re worth and completely discredited for proper fact-based research. And the teachers my kid has had who used it for testing resulted in completely wrong answers that the teacher didn’t bother to check.
Yes that is the teacher’s fault, but so is using it to generate a test in the first place.
I will die on this hill. LLMs of any kind right now are not something that should be trifled with in a critical thinking-based curriculum. In time, perhaps. But not yet, not when LLMs are so easily manipulated (whether trained on public data or private). The various implementations haven’t earned credible trust despite CEOs drooling over them.
It's a shame your child's teacher used the tool incorrectly. That was unprofessional of them.
If it helps, there are people like me running training sessions for educators to let them know what LLMs are (and are not) capable of. The main point I was pushing this year was that LLMs don't know or understand anything. "The I in LLM stands for Intelligence."
I like that last statement. I might steal it 🤣
Thanks for your insights.
There is no emergency that can't be handled by the adults of the school.
I can understand needing a phone for the commute, but at school it should stay in the bag turned off.
There are emergencies the adults at the school won't understand. This has happened a few times to my spouse, where the nurse/teachers kept brushing off issues they didn't understand, ranging from things like asthma to strep throat.
Otherwise, I agree that the phones should be put away during class.
I hear you. But my child will have a cell phone in case of a real emergency when the adults don't properly act. While I trust teachers rather implicitly, my experience with most school administrators is far less stellar. Also, a student calling 911 when the teacher is having a heart attack or some other life threatening event will save time and possibly their life.
Barring any emergency situations, my child's phone better be put away.
Our school had a buzzer, the office anawers the intercom, you tell them the emergency and they arrange everything. Cell phones really arent needed unless you are out on a field trip maybe
School shootings, intercom not working, teacher not available and student bleeding on the floor, etc, etc. There are numerous reasons for safety for the availability of a cell phone.
A dumb phone can do that without the damage caused by smart phones.
When did I mention the use of a smart phone?
Depends how they use chatgpt, if they use it tlfor content that can be troublesome, but here its being used as a format tool. You copy some previous test and ask it to reorder the numbered questions ( to precent class before giving the AACDBA series of answers) or use to copy paste in a large test and tell it to strip out every other quesotion, renumber and replace body text with double line spacing. For stuff like that it is a godsend.
Perhaps. I concede maybe it makes mundane tasks simpler and quicker.
But it should most definitely not be used for fact-based research and testing. Not yet and not until it is proven to produce only credible fact backed by credible sources.