How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom

如何在课堂中鼓励更明智的 AI 使用方式

This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. 本文摘自《麻省理工科技评论》的限时通讯《让 AI 发挥作用》（Making AI Work），该栏目旨在探讨如何将大语言模型（LLM）应用于各行各业。如需订阅，请点击此处。

Chatbots took many schools by surprise upon their release a few years ago. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or spin up an essay in seconds. Of course, teachers can often tell when a student is using AI—models make mistakes that most humans don’t, and some teachers say that AI-generated text has simple giveaways like too many em dashes. 几年前，聊天机器人的问世让许多学校措手不及。学生们手机里突然多了一个“魔法”应用，几乎能回答任何家庭作业问题，或在几秒钟内生成一篇论文。当然，老师们通常能看出学生是否使用了 AI——模型会犯人类通常不会犯的错误，一些老师还指出，AI 生成的文本有一些明显的特征，比如使用了过多的破折号。

Nevertheless, the generative AI boom increased the burden on teachers, who were already working long hours to plan lessons, make homework assignments, and grade exams, and now needed to adapt to a new technology. For many, it still feels like there’s no clear path forward. Organizations ranging from OpenAI to UNESCO encourage AI use in the classroom, but many teachers feel confused about how exactly to handle it. 尽管如此，生成式 AI 的热潮加重了教师的负担。他们本已需要长时间工作来备课、布置作业和批改试卷，现在又必须适应一项新技术。对许多人来说，前路依然模糊不清。从 OpenAI 到联合国教科文组织，各方机构都在鼓励在课堂上使用 AI，但许多教师对于究竟该如何应对感到困惑。

Case study

案例研究

Cheshire Academy is a private boarding and day school in Connecticut with about 400 students in grades 9 through 12. Administrators there don’t force instructors to use AI at all, though the school’s librarian and technology coordinator George Aiello claims the “vast majority” of instructors use it in some way. The educators there are trying a patchwork of programs, including general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity as well as more specialized tools like MagicSchool, an AI-powered platform meant specifically for educators. 柴郡学院（Cheshire Academy）是位于康涅狄格州的一所私立寄宿兼走读学校，拥有约 400 名 9 至 12 年级的学生。校方并未强制教师使用 AI，但该校的图书管理员兼技术协调员 George Aiello 表示，“绝大多数”教师都在以某种方式使用它。那里的教育工作者正在尝试各种程序的组合，包括 ChatGPT 和 Perplexity 等通用聊天机器人，以及 MagicSchool 等专门为教育工作者设计的 AI 平台。

That patchwork approach is partly because the school, on the advice of consultants, opted to train its staff on general techniques for how to use AI instead of prescribing certain tech. The staff training covered topics like how to craft useful prompts but also stressed the technology’s limits, highlighting its potential for generating incorrect and biased responses. 这种“拼凑式”的方法部分是因为学校采纳了顾问的建议，选择对教职员工进行 AI 通用使用技巧的培训，而不是指定某种特定技术。员工培训涵盖了如何编写有效的提示词（prompts）等主题，同时也强调了该技术的局限性，重点指出了其生成错误和偏见内容的可能性。

Now, teachers there often use generative AI to prepare class materials. This means asking the AI of their choice for help with planning lessons or creating grading rubrics. Some even want to use it to help them give feedback to students, though concerns over quality, personalization, and privacy have prevented any of them from doing that just yet. 现在，那里的教师经常使用生成式 AI 来准备课堂材料。这意味着他们会向自己选择的 AI 寻求帮助，以规划课程或创建评分标准。有些人甚至希望利用它来帮助提供学生反馈，但由于对质量、个性化和隐私的担忧，目前还没有人这样做。

Others, like Miriam Przybyla-Baum, who teaches French, don’t use AI themselves but do address it with their teaching. Przybyla-Baum says she doesn’t really need AI’s help since she’s built up plenty of classroom materials across nearly 30 years of teaching. But she started seeing students try to use AI-powered tools like Google Translate to take shortcuts on their assignments years before ChatGPT’s launch. She’s developed a system to make students reflect on how AI can and can’t teach language skills. 其他人，比如法语老师 Miriam Przybyla-Baum，虽然自己不使用 AI，但会在教学中涉及这一话题。Przybyla-Baum 说，由于她近 30 年的教学生涯积累了大量的课堂材料，她并不真正需要 AI 的帮助。但在 ChatGPT 发布前几年，她就开始发现学生试图使用 Google 翻译等 AI 工具在作业上走捷径。她开发了一套系统，让学生反思 AI 在教授语言技能方面的局限性。

In one assignment, students let a large language model (LLM) edit their homework. Then, they go through the edits and decide which ones were correct and which ones removed their voice. In another, she has students anonymously grade each other’s AI-assisted assignments, making annotations as to which parts they think are AI-assisted. 在一项作业中，学生让大语言模型（LLM）修改他们的家庭作业。然后，他们检查这些修改，判断哪些是正确的，哪些抹杀了他们个人的表达风格。在另一项作业中，她让学生匿名批改彼此的 AI 辅助作业，并标注出他们认为哪些部分是由 AI 辅助完成的。

Cheshire Academy is continuing to experiment with how AI can be harnessed productively in the classroom. The school is piloting a program in which students create media and lead discussions regarding healthy AI use. This program, which they call a “Student AI Council,” aims to push students to reflect on how AI should and shouldn’t be used to benefit the community around them. 柴郡学院正在继续探索如何将 AI 有效地应用于课堂。学校正在试点一个项目，让学生创作媒体内容并引导关于“健康使用 AI”的讨论。这个被称为“学生 AI 理事会”的项目，旨在推动学生反思如何正确使用 AI 以造福周围的社区。

The academy as a whole has since adopted similar techniques to those Przybyla-Baum introduced to make students reflect on their own use of AI. Assignments are now labelled like traffic lights, with green meaning AI is fully allowed and red banning any AI use. Yellow, then, lets the teacher permit some tools while banning the rest, like allowing students to use spell-check but not message a chatbot. 此后，整个学院采用了与 Przybyla-Baum 引入的类似技术，让学生反思自己对 AI 的使用。现在的作业像交通信号灯一样被标记：绿色表示完全允许使用 AI，红色表示禁止使用任何 AI。黄色则允许教师在准许某些工具的同时禁用其他工具，例如允许学生使用拼写检查，但不允许向聊天机器人发送消息。

The tool

工具

As generative AI was becoming mainstream, Cheshire Academy previewed MagicSchool to its staff. For many, MagicSchool’s main strength seems to lie in the sheer amount of offerings it provides in one package. It can generate questions and assignments of all kinds, from quizzes to worksheets, across many subjects and grade levels. It has a specialized grading rubric generator, which outputs a ready-to-go table that teachers can use to score assignments. It can make presentations and lesson plans and administrative reports, too. 随着生成式 AI 成为主流，柴郡学院向教职员工介绍了 MagicSchool。对许多人来说，MagicSchool 的主要优势似乎在于它在一个软件包中提供了海量的功能。它可以生成各种问题和作业，从测验到练习册，涵盖多个学科和年级。它拥有专门的评分标准生成器，可以输出教师可直接用于评分的现成表格。它还可以制作演示文稿、教案和行政报告。

All of this is done through a single platform where educators enter specific prompts tailored for each task. For example, to make an assignment, a teacher can specify the students’ grade level, number of questions, the types of questions (such as multiple choice or short answer), and more, and include documents to align the questions with. 所有这些操作都在一个平台上完成，教育工作者只需输入针对每项任务定制的特定提示词。例如，为了制作一份作业，教师可以指定学生的年级、题目数量、题目类型（如选择题或简答题）等，并上传文档以确保题目与教学内容对齐。

Not every teacher feels comfortable using LLMs to generate student-facing text, whether because they don’t think an AI can produce effective teaching materials or helpful feedback, or because they’re concerned about accuracy. MagicSchool, which has free and paid versions, does offer tools on its platform for other tasks like lesson planning. If teachers want unlimited access and complete records in the system, though, they need to pay just under $100 per year for an individual plan. 并非每位教师都乐于使用 LLM 来生成面向学生的文本，原因要么是他们认为 AI 无法产生有效的教学材料或有益的反馈，要么是担心其准确性。MagicSchool 提供免费和付费版本，其平台确实为备课等其他任务提供了工具。不过，如果教师希望获得无限访问权限和系统内的完整记录，则需要支付每年不到 100 美元的个人计划费用。

Alternatively, many of the general-purpose generative AI tools (think the chatbots on offer from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and more) seem suited to administrative tasks, as well, attested by the fact that many of the teachers at Cheshire Academy use those instead. Some of these companies are even rolling out features tailored for schools, to mixed results. 此外，许多通用生成式 AI 工具（如 Anthropic、Google、OpenAI 等提供的聊天机器人）似乎也适用于行政任务，柴郡学院的许多教师转而使用这些工具就证明了这一点。其中一些公司甚至正在推出专为学校定制的功能，但效果参差不齐。

How to apply this

如何应用

Meet students where they’re at. Students will be tempted to try AI, and there’s no way to entirely police this for take-home assignments. The internet and social media can spread a lot of misinformation as to what AI can and can’t do, and it’s critical to counter these narratives and teach healthy strategies and relationships. Model best practices. AI 从学生的实际情况出发。学生们难免会尝试使用 AI，对于带回家的作业，根本无法完全监管。互联网和社交媒体可能会传播大量关于 AI 功能的误导性信息，因此反驳这些叙述并教授健康的策略和关系至关重要。树立最佳实践榜样。AI