In this episode Amanda reflects on her journey with AI chatbots since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. She shares her mixed feelings about the impact of AI in education, discussing initial excitement and later deep concerns. The episode covers her efforts to integrate ChatGPT into her classroom last school year and how she handled the pervasive cheating issues she encountered in her English classroom. Amanda also reveals plans to delve deeper into the downsides of AI in future episodes, so stay tuned!
00:00 Introduction and Initial Thoughts on AI
00:40 The Impact of AI on Education
02:34 Personal Reflections and Experiences Using AI in the Classroom
09:58 Teaching Ethics and Responsible AI Use
16:18 Challenges and Consequences of AI in the Classroom
21:35 Conclusion and Upcoming Topics
Previous AI Series from 2022:
7 Ways Chatgpt Will Impact Education Positively
Transcript:
Amanda: [00:00:00] I wrote a series of blog posts and recorded podcast episodes to go with them back when Chachi BT had just been released in November of 2022. The series included a discussion of the following topics, how to talk to students about chat, GPT seven Ways. Chat GPT will impact students positively and my best ideas to prevent chatting, cheating with chat GPT.
I’m proud to say that these blog posts are still relevant and helpful in 2025. But three years after AI chatbots were introduced to the world, my feelings about AI have shifted. I no longer feel so positive and upbeat about ai, and there are many reasons for that. I am angry about AI chatbots. [00:01:00] The way that they have just taken over our day-to-day lives at school and at home.
I’m angry how no forethought has ever been given to its impact on schools and children, but this is how it’s always been. I’ve been a teacher for 16 years, and as I recount all the new technology that is rolled out during that timeframe, I realized there was no forethought before any of it. No thought of children or schools.
No thought about the ways cell phones or YouTube or Google or other social media platforms would impact schools and children. Quite to the contrary, all the positives of new technology were eventually incorporated into school systems through Chromebook carts and Google Classroom. It’s become crystal clear to me that the [00:02:00] people of the United States embrace whatever is new, convenient, entertaining, or trendy.
I’m not judging you or people in the United States about this. I mean, I am one of those people. I am, uh. What they call a geriatric millennial. To me, this means I’m part of the generation that has witnessed the internet revolution from the very onset. So much incredibly unprecedented advancement has taken place since I was born in 1982.
I love technology and always have, but as time has progressed and I’ve gotten older, and I think maybe wiser, I see more clearly than ever. This love of convenience has terrible and unavoidable consequences. As you can see, this is quite a significant change of heart. As someone who has been paying a paying [00:03:00] customer of open AI for the last three years, I actually canceled my subscription about a month ago.
In this new series that is coming out on this podcast, uh, about ai, I’d like to talk about what happened during the course of the last three years for me as a teacher, a former teacher, actually, I quit teaching at the end of last school year as an online entrepreneur who’s been selling curriculum and resources for over a decade now.
And as a parent of an 11-year-old. I want to use this platform that I have my podcast to inform and speak up. On behalf of kids, their parents and educators. The final episode in this series will include my thoughts and ideas about how we can protect children and schools from the many downsides of AI chatbots.
So stay tuned for that. Welcome to The Empowered Students [00:04:00] Now podcast. Podcast. Equity, neurodiversity, mindfulness, and student engagement. There’s a lot that needs to change in our education system. The good news is teachers have the power to make these changes. Now,
in part one, I’m gonna talk about the perspective that I have about ai, um, from the perspective of a teacher. For me, having access to chat GPT was incredibly helpful and exciting as a high school English teacher, I know many English teachers did not feel the same kind of excitement I did when chat GPT was first rolled out, but.
I don’t consider myself a normal English teacher, though I am a neurodivergent English teacher, and I’ve embraced [00:05:00] that. I’ve embraced my differences, and I’ve always known that I was a different kind of teacher, just really because of the way that kids, uh, react to me in the classroom. You know, they, they always seem.
Surprised by the way that I behave sometimes. Um, and, and by my energy. I have a DHD, which means a lot of things. One of them being that I get really excited about new tools and things that I’m interested in and that I can engage my students with. Actually, student engagement, just that topic is an A DHD hyper fixation or a special interest for me.
Getting students motivated, curious, and interested about the topics I was teaching was a thrill I chased as a teacher. It made my job job fun and interesting, and I think it’s what has made me such an effective [00:06:00] teacher all these years. I think a lot of teachers with A DHD can relate. I get bored easily, so I get it when kids get bored easily too.
Especially if you know someone is talking about or wants me to listen to a topic, I don’t really think is that. Interesting or important, right? So I’m really, I’m really, uh, able to relate to kids and, and really able to see when they’re bored and to kind of pivot when that happens. And I’ve always cared deeply about student engagement.
Using technology in the classroom is what did the trick tech in the classroom has also been a huge, um, just special interest for me, just like student engagement. Technology equals engagement for a lot of students. The majority of kids I know love technology, so whenever I could, I incorporated tech tools that made learning fun.
Like Kahoot or [00:07:00] just having students create websites using Google sites or just, you know, a YouTube video, uh, to get students engaged or having students create their own videos. So when Chat GPT rolled out, I was definitely. Really eager to see how it might benefit my students in my classroom and my teaching practice.
So I began playing around with the tool and then paying for it pretty quickly thereafter. 20 bucks a month. And it was really awesome chat. GPT helped me differentiate and accommodate lessons and assignments more easily for students who needed it. Uh, I created like chapter summaries of books to give to students who are falling behind in our class novel.
I. Prompted chat GPT to give me like sentence stems and outlines and vocabulary flashcards for students. [00:08:00] And one day I had the bright idea to use chat GPT to help give my students feedback on their writing. The feedback was so detailed and comprehensive. It wasn’t like the brief feedback I was usually forced to give due to lack of time and the massive number of papers I had to read and give feedback on.
I was amazed at how easily the bot could provide so much thorough feedback to my students. I thought, for sure this feature could help my students write better, but after doing this, once something felt off about it. Because the process required, I paste what my students had written into the input box of chat, GBT, and as I did this, each time I wondered, is this plagiarism of my students’ writing?
After attempting this for one assignment, I stopped, [00:09:00] it felt wrong. Somehow I kept using. Chat, CPT. For other things though, I used it to create like punny supply signs to hang in my classroom or to create like fun classroom job names. And I even got ideas for how to teach ethics. Uh, when using ai, I was in love with just the different uses of chat GPT.
It was helping me become a better teacher. And back when I first started experimenting with its features, I felt like. What is, there’s nothing like bad about this. This is great, you know, um, and I, I didn’t wanna be a hypocrite like I was using chat GPT responsibly. So shouldn’t I model for students how to do so too, thus?
Began my attempt to teach [00:10:00] students how to use chat GPT ethically. So at the beginning of the 20 24, 20 25 school year, I told students that this year they were going to learn how to use AI ethically. I stood in front of my classes and said, this technology is here to stay, so we better learn how to use it responsibly, right.
I started this impromptu unit on ethics and AI with a discussion. I asked students to come up with ideas for how AI might be used for school responsibly and ways it might be abused in schools, not too far into the discussion. I realized that students seemed surprised we were even having this conversation.
They confided in me that their other teachers had said, don’t use it, period. End of conversation. Then a student raised their hand and [00:11:00] eagerly asked, so does this mean we’re allowed to use AI in this class? I answered excitedly. Emphatically, yes. Surprising my students is one way. I keep them engaged, but there was a caveat and I said it only on assignments.
I clearly state that you can use it. After I said that my students started whispering to one another. I saw some were smiling in sort of mischievous ways, some looked confused. Um, some were looking at me in complete shock. At that point, I began to panic a little like uhoh. Did I just, what kind of can of worms did I just open?
I added and announced to my students, well, we won’t use AI for all of our assignments. I have to [00:12:00] teach you, and we’re not gonna start yet. I have to teach you how to use AI ethically first. So the following day, I lectured on the meaning of. Certain words that were important to ethics. I used posters. I designed myself using Canva to explain plagiarism, copyright ethics.
Then I taught students about how to cite AI using MLA. We discussed ideas for how to use AI in an ethical, responsible manner. In another lesson within the AI unit, I modeled brainstorming theme statements for a short story we read. Then I modeled using chat GPT to outline the theme essay that led me to the obvious next step, having chat, GPT, write the essay using the outline.
I figured students were probably going home and doing it anyways, [00:13:00] and I felt it was important for me to teach students how to approach using a a I to help them with an essay in an honest, responsible, and ethical manner. I figured since we were talking about being responsible and honest, that we should be honest about how tempting and so freaking easy it is to just have the bot.
You know, write the essay. I talked openly with my students about this. After doing this though, I repeated over and over again to my students how unethical it was to copy and paste what chat GPT had created and turn it in as, as if they had done the writing. That is plagiarism, that is unethical. I said these things over and over again to my students.
I modeled how to read through the essay chat GPT had generated in seconds. Write down key words and ideas I liked from the robot [00:14:00] produced essay, and then closed the window and begin writing my own essay using the words and ideas I’d taken notes about. I told students. This is the ethical way to use chat, GPT and ai.
Chatbots. Use it as an assistant, as as something that can inspire ideas, not a tool to do your work for you. After I taught all of this, we moved on to a poetry unit. I wanted the poetry unit to start off fun and exciting. My first lesson involved having students read the poetic definitions of poetry written by famous poets.
Here are a few of the definitions. Students took turns reading aloud on day one of the poetry unit. All the changes in life draw poetry from us. Those of us who are in touch with it. Alice Walker [00:15:00] Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Carl Sandberg poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.
Christopher Fry. Then I had students hand write their own definitions of poetry that day in class, no ai. I stated, matter of factly, students begrudgingly began their handwritten work. They seemed to be okay with it, but one student came up to me and asked, with pleading eyes, so when will we get to use ai?
I was cornered. I really didn’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I wasn’t ready. Suddenly, I heard myself answer. Um, soon we carried on with the poetry unit. I had students draft a poem about poetry the next day [00:16:00] on paper with pencils. In class, they had to turn these drafts in that day in class too.
The heaviness of the burden of AI proofing my classrooms started sinking in at this point, and it was only the second week of school. At the end of that poetry unit I had to confront one student I suspected, had used AI to write their final poem. The student quickly admitted to using AI to write their poem.
They apologized and seemed genuinely apologetic and a little scared. And maybe it was like I felt they knew deep down that, that they would get caught and I would figure it out. So how did I figure it out? I had students perform their poems about poetry to the class after writing and rewriting three different drafts of the poem by hand.
In class. This was me AI proofing my classroom, right? We’re all having [00:17:00] kids hand write again on paper. The student who used AI to write their poem was, the poem was just too perfect. It was too humorous, it was too tidy, it was too robotic. After. The student performed their poem. I compared their final poem that they had turned in, uh, and that they’d read aloud to the class with their handwritten drafts.
They were vastly different from each other. I just knew they had used AI to write their poem. So we proceeded through the year onto the next unit, a class novel. Culminating with a theme essay about the novel. During this unit, I caught a student using chat GPT on their cell phone during a comprehension quiz that required students to describe the context of a scene related to a quote I pulled from our reading.
I administer these very short and simple comprehension quizzes using the Google Forms quiz [00:18:00] feature. This feature of Google Forms does not allow students to navigate to any other websites while taking the quiz. I caught the student because when I asked them to stand up, their phone fell to the floor from between their legs.
So how did I handle all this blatant cheating? You may be wondering, definitely not in the way most teachers or administrators would usually handle it, give the kid an f, call their parents. I don’t think this solves the root of the problem. The bottom line, in my opinion, is that I believe students who cheat or plagiarize need to be approached thoughtfully and with empathy rather than with anger and dis disappointment.
If you wanna know more about this topic and how I approach cheating students, uh, scroll to the bottom of, uh, this post. It’s, it’s one that I wrote three years ago about ai, uh, my best ideas to prevent cheating with chat GPT and how to handle [00:19:00] plagiarism suspects. Uh, at the end of that post, I, I do talk about how, how I handle plagiarism.
Suspects or people you know, plagiarized. But today I’m not gonna go into that. As the year progressed, the cheating and plagiarism continued. I felt tense all the time. I felt I had to be constantly vigilant of possible cheating during every minute students were working in my classroom. It was definitely not the same as it as it had been before ai.
Chat bots existed. Eventually, I finally allowed students to use chat GPT for an assignment. The assignment was to write a simple Teck paragraph about a short story we read. TE stands for topic point. Evidence commentary, students were required to cite AI using the MLA format as I had taught them during the AI [00:20:00] unit, they had to cite every prompt they provided to ai.
So if they asked AI five things, they needed to have five citations. I’m still not sure how ethical students behave during this experimental assignment. It all felt too overwhelming and huge for me to monitor all by myself. I mean, I was proud of the students who did cite chat GBT correctly using MLA and provided the multiple prompts they’d used during the assignment.
Thinking back on it all I realized what a frustrating year it had been because of AI and cell phones. I felt so consumed with ensuring my students weren’t cheating. I felt animosity towards my students for putting me in the position to be so vi vigilant in the first place. Why do they always need their cell phones with them?
Why couldn’t they just turn them off? Why do they feel the need to cheat in the first place? Couldn’t they just think for themselves? [00:21:00] In hindsight, I realize none of this is students’ faults. It’s so easy for teachers and administrators and school staff to come down hard on the victims of this messy situation.
Created by the unregulated world of tech, AI, and corporate interests. The students are not criminals. They are victims, and so are teachers. But there’s more to all of this than just cheating and plagiarism so much more. So please stay tuned for part two of this series where I discuss in even more depth the significant downsides of ai.
In part two, I discuss issues related to AI As someone who’s been in the online entrepreneurial world for over a decade, thank you for listening to my story, and I hope that you’ll stay tuned for the rest of this [00:22:00] series.
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