From Chalkboards to GPTs — a case for GPTs in education.
Whenever I think or talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and education, I have to reminisce about my secondary school history teacher. She was a fantastic teacher, and whenever she was lecturing (which probably won’t pass today’s ideas of activated teaching), I would listen, take notes, and learn a lot about the topic we were discussing. She was on the verge of retiring and stayed for an extra year to teach our class in our final year.
The only issue we didn’t see eye-to-eye was technology; she was from a previous generation of teachers (those who used chalkboards), and I was the nerdy tech student. She didn’t like Wikipedia as she didn’t consider it a source — she was probably right by the 2013 standards of Wikipedia. She didn’t use the SMART board in class, PowerPoint was out of the picture (not that she needed it), and whenever we had to do an assignment, she’d refer to encyclopaedias.
Now that I’m teaching myself, I realise that the emergence of AI and GPTs is similar to the rise of the internet in the early 2000s and 2010s. The simple challenge lies in teaching students how to benefit from them, which starts with the most difficult challenge: changing teachers’ minds.
