by Seán McCarroll
AI has infiltrated everything in our lives. Whether it’s art, the content we see when we are looking for entertainment, or even searching for something on google and having the overview forced onto us.
An area where AI is especially prominent is education. Whether it’s students using it to replace doing their homework or teachers trying to get some help with preparation, it’s important to try and figure out the pros and cons of this scary technology and how it could be used in our schools.
My view as a student
As a student at Deele College I have interacted with the topic of AI quite a bit, writing an essay for the Oireachtas national essay competition on whether AI is a threat to our democracy. It’s a topic that is very interesting and constantly developing.
AI, is not something that I agree with. At least on the current large-scale ‘Large Language Models’ (LLMS) such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini.
Whether its the ethical aspect, being that it not only is combining a bunch of already existing work and creating nothing actually new, the fact its being marketed as a replacement to genuine creativity or the environmental effect and the amount of water being wasted to keep these ginormous data-centres at a safe temperature. And the thing is, these data-centres are only going to get better, and more electricity will be used, more water wasted and it’s going to affect all of our cost of living, and affect the environment so negatively.
This is something that needs to be understood by anyone who’s using these softwares, whether it’s a student getting help on an assignment or a teacher having it help with resources.
I wanted to see what teachers at my school thought on AI and I interviewed a few on the topic.
There were a couple of common things said by nearly every teacher so I’ll go through those first then focus on more specific to subject points.
AI has become a very helpful tool for a teacher to help create resources for students, especially because they know when it’s wrong and they can edit it accordingly.
But because it can be wrong they worry about how this wrong information will affect a student who may not realise that.
Both Mr Enda McHugh, an English teacher and Mr Cahir Wilhare, a history teacher, pointed out that it can be very useful to help give students feedback on work and streamline correction overall, specifically on things like quotes:
“Use it as a tool to help your understanding, not to actually teach you the subject,” Mr McHugh said.
These were the main common features of teacher responses.
There is an overall worry about the skills that projects try to teach being lost.
In language learning classes such as French and Spanish it is “not at a point where it’s a threat,” said Mr Kelvin Gallagher, a Spanish and French teacher. In subjects like these it’s still at a point where tools that translate for a student are more of a threat rather than AI.
EXAMS
Whenever it comes to essay-based subjects like History and English there’s a bigger mix of both pros and cons according to teachers. Exams are the majority of the history course and the entirety of the English one so in many ways it’s unlikely to affect a student’s result, but because of that it’s concerning if a student becomes reliant on it because they won’t have it in that exam situation.
“Whenever a student uses it instead of writing something it’s very obvious,” according to both Mr McHugh and Mr Wilhare.
It could negatively affect the proposals for the senior cycle reform whenever we see the possibility of a project being added to English, and we just don’t know what would happen if a student got caught using it to either create or help on these projects.
The final people in the school I interviewed were Ms Annette Gildea and Mr Evin Devenney, they are both in the sciences and considered to be the school’s AI experts. They have given talks to staff on how to use AI safely and they believe that
“With AI we are building a plane while flying it,” said Ms Gildea. For the senior cycle projects, Mr Devenney has implemented a project tracker to make sure students are engaging with the project properly, and if they are using AI to help them, but not replace their work he doesn’t see a problem with that. The quality of the prompt is something that they also emphasised to me
“Slop in then you get slop back out,” said Ms Gildea.
I was very lucky to get the chance to sit down with Dr Martin Gormley, director of 15 schools (including my own) at the ETB to ask him a couple of questions on the topic. He said some of the previously mentioned things but also brought up concern with “academic integrity,” and raised concerns on forms of assessment outside of the classroom.
He also had a lot to say about the career guidance side of things, and how that may change.
AI is going to have a huge impact on the working world over the next few years and “making sure we consider AI whenever talking about further education and guiding students” he said in our interview. Whenever it came to regulation he spoke on how “the department of education have published AI guidelines, and as an ETB we have also had to have a look at how to best “use it effectively.” Its clear to see that AI isnt going anywhere and is going to continue to creep further into our lives and education.
Fifth year Deele College student Seán McCarroll.
