As the Generative Artificial Intelligence era builds, helping our students understand what it actually is, how it works and how they can use it authentically & ethically, becomes even more important.
For teachers, the first step in this process is understanding it ourselves. We can’t have those incidental conversations, or look for authentic integrations if we don’t have that knowledge ourselves - so this post is assuming that we do indeed understand how it all works.
With this in mind, I had a lot of fun developing these ideas with a lovely class of Year Four students (8 year olds) this week. Here is what I did:
*I started the session asking if anyone had heard of the words 'Generative Artificial Intelligence'. No one put their hand up. Then I asked, “Has anyone heard of Chat GPT?
Every hand went up. Not only had they heard of it, but they could tell me that it could make new pictures and it could do their sister’s homework. 😅 A few of them had used it with older siblings or with their parents
*So then we talked about the other models they might have heard of - Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, one student knew of Deepseek.
I showed them a very simplified flowchart of the process and we talked about how it worked. The idea I really wanted them to understand was that the LLM looks for patterns and makes predictions. I was actually surprised at how quickly they understood this idea.
We did do some ‘in the real world' practice first - I said a sentence like ‘The cat sat on the …..’ and we explored the most popular answer they thought of. I connected this to the LLM choosing the pattern it finds the most often.
*To connect this thinking authentically to the learning I turned to what they knew about belonging to a culture - their inquiry focus this term.
We discussed what ‘culture’ meant and shared some examples with each other before thinking about our own culture. Some students focused on their family while others focused on the culture of our school.
Each student decided on one thing that was important to them in their culture, or one thing they really like about their culture.
*The next stage was the fun stage. I had created a Padlet Sandbox earlier on. I opened the padlet and demonstrated how we write a prompt - we tell the generative AI what we want it to make.
I asked it to create a black and white colouring in picture of… and then asked the class to help me finish it. I wrote it on the page and discussed how important it is for us to be able to show people what our prompt was.
I opened the image generator, pasted in the prompt, and again, the students then helped me choose the image they liked the most. I added that to the slide.
*Each student then chose a slide in the sandbox by adding their name to it.
This step was a great digital citizenship activity. We talked about how if there was already a name on a slide you just went to another one. I won’t say it worked seamlessly 😉 but I was very impressed how well they coped with this step - especially for 8 year olds all working in the same file!
*Yes, there was some problem solving needed once they started writing their own prompts and generating their own images.
Some students had to refresh before it would generate an image. Some students had to choose different words before they could generate an image (great learning!) and some students had to persevere with the text tool. These moments were a fantastic opportunity to talk about being problem solvers.
*The final step, once they had their image, was to take a screenshot and airdrop it to me. I then compiled them all into a Keynote. This was then airdropped back to the students.
They now have a shared ‘Culture Keynote’ that they can use as a ‘settling’ activity after breaks. They can come in from morning tea or lunch, open their Keynote and use their Apple pencils to colour in.
Not only does this help them to remember to keep their pencils charged but they need to talk to each other to find out about their culture to know about what colours they should use, what else they might draw in the background and why it is special to them.
*The last thing I did, because this session was right before lunchtime, I asked them to tell me one thing they knew now, that they didn’t know before we started the session. Some of the most common statements were:
“I didn’t know AI made predictions.”
“I didn’t know AI doesn’t really read like we do.”
“I didn’t know AI doesn’t know everything”
The statements the students gave me made me realise how important these moments are. They won’t build this knowledge from a one-off session, but the more we find the authentic moments to weave these opportunities in, the better off our students are going to be.
How do you weave in authentic Generative AI literacy in your practice?
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