At Mount Vernon, students are utilizing artificial intelligence resources, such as ChatGPT, to assist with writing, research, and even completing assignments for them. Some use it to come up with ideas or for proofreading. And as the technology continues to develop, the school district must create rules about how it can be used.
At Mount Vernon High School, the use of AI has been skyrocketing over the last couple of years, with the creation of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Students use these tools for ideas and proofreading, but also use them for copying others’ work online and writing the assignments for them.
The Mount Vernon School District needs to implement a school policy considering the use of AI within the school beyond leaving it to the teachers. The goal cannot be removing the use of AI; it needs to be educating students about how to use it responsibly. AI can actually help students learn. AI can assist with writing, create new concepts, or help students stay organized. But if students are having AI do all their work for them, they’re not learning or creating ideas their own way.
Having strong rules would spike the students’ interests. Students would understand what is and is not allowed towards AI. Teachers would not have to make an educated guess about how to handle AI use. And parents would be more aware of how their children are using technology in school.
The school district has multiple reasons to try to remove and limit the use of AI in schools. Still, one of the main reasons that is heavily researched and looked over is that using AI takes away critical thinking skills, because when the students use the AI in class to copy and paste paragraphs for a book report for example, they didn’t take the time to read the book and care enough to look through it, they are taking the short cut that gives them no thinking skills towards their actual topic and book. But in other eyes, AI can be used for brainstorming ideas about a topic for a paper. Say you need data on a topic, so you ask AI, and it will search the web for your question and answer it.
The truth is, AI isn’t going away. It’s going to be a major part of people’s daily lives. If schools don’t help students learn how to use it responsibly now, we’ll be less prepared for the future. Mount Vernon has a chance to create a way to show how AI fits into learning, not by ignoring it or punishing students who are trying to adapt to new technology.
