AImpactEd Summit: Teachers Need Preparation for AI Advances

According to a recent study from Goldman Sachs, two-thirds of all U.S. jobs could be affected by automation in the coming years as artificial intelligence continues to advance. With AI tools like ChatGPT becoming more ubiquitous in K-12 schools and universities, educators are starting to take a closer look at how to make the most out of AI classroom tools to enhance instruction and reduce workload, and to familiarize students with emerging technologies, according to Dan Fitzpatrick, a digital strategist and author of a book on the subject, The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education.

In a keynote address at the AImpactEd Summit Monday organized by the professional learning community Actionable Innovations Global, Fitzpatrick said teachers must try to prepare for how AI will impact education in the years to come in order to help better prepare students for a changing workforce, where digital skills will be essential.

“I think we’re at that phase of the roller coaster where the roller coaster has just left the station and we haven’t got to the first loop yet. We’re still just chugging along on that first stretch,” he said. “We’re getting a glimpse of what’s coming … We’re living in the start of a new era, and what that means, we don’t fully know yet.”

According to Fitzpatrick, AI tools such as ChatGPT and those used for grading and lesson planning are soon to be essential parts of every teacher’s ed-tech toolkit. Noting that GPT-4 is trained on hundreds of billions of words, he said AI programs can not only help reduce teachers’ workloads and “optimize the current system,” which is struggling without enough new teachers, but could also transform and “shape the foundations of the system.”
“There’s a desperate need to optimize what we’re already doing [in classrooms] in order to relieve some of that pressure on the people who work within our schools, colleges and universities. We have schools that are optimized and engineered for efficiency so much that they’re essentially factories for churning out students to pass exams … [AI is] going to bring a new way of how we learn, essentially,” he said. “The power of using tools like this comes from the fact that it has access to so much information, pretty much instantaneously, whereas the human brain can’t have access to that much information instantaneously.”

When it comes to preparing for how AI will change the educational landscape amid rapid advances to the technology, Fitzpatrick said to expect the unexpected. However, he said, educators can plan on making more use of AI tools as they improve for more classroom applications.

“We’re playing around with prototypes of this technology, and it’s happening already. The job market is changing,” he said. “I think the place of the teacher and the pedagogical knowledge of the teacher is still vitally important. It’s going to be about collaboration with these tools.”