Teacher Tips: How to use generative AI safely in the classroom

Hello world and welcome to the podcast for educators passionate about computing and digital making. I'm James Robinson, Senior Learning Manager here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and this is the third of four episodes released to accompany the latest issue of Hello World magazine. This issue explores online safety and security, asking what we mean by those terms and how we can better teach the skills that young people will need to use computers effectively, safely and responsibly.

In today's episode, we're talking about using generative AI in the classroom and in particular about protecting students and their data. We're joined by Chanel Belvin, a computer science specialist with 15 years teaching experience based at the Texas Advanced Computing Centre at the University of Texas. So over to my colleague Laura to introduce our guest.

Hello, I'm Laura James. I'm a learning manager at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. And today I'm joined by Chanel Belvin. Chanel, welcome to the Hello World podcast.

Thank you for having me.

No worries.

Before we get into the details of our discussion, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

So I have been in education for 16 years. I've taught elementary, middle school, math and science. I was a special education math and science inclusion teacher at the high school level, for the past six years, well, prior to this year, I was a high school computer science teacher and dual credit teacher. So I taught college courses to our students there. So I have a lot of experience working with technology in the classroom. Currently, I am a computer science education specialist with the Texas Advanced Computing Centre. We focus on providing professional development for teachers who want to be certified in computer science or tech apps. We also provide a lot of professional development to bring computing projects to the younger grades, elementary and middle school.

That sounds brilliant. It's always very important about educating the educators, isn't that that's something that, is so important at the moment. Today we're focusing on Gen AI in the classroom. Let's get into it. What's your first tip for teachers?

My first tip for teachers is that you don't have to use every new tool that that pops up. You definitely want to use a tool that, that you can be familiar with and that you can use well. I believe the best tools for teachers, especially if they're using it with students in the classroom, a good rule of thumb is to make sure that you actually need Gen AI to complete a lesson and know that it's just a tool. It's not a miracle, you know, machine or anything. It's just like any other research tool. You have to know how to use it well. So, curated resources are your best bet. Or especially for keeping student data safe using Gen AI that maybe is simulating instead of actually reaching the internet. Because that way you can control the data. Also making sure that the models that you're using aren't using student data to train itself. Because that's also a privacy issue. So I think those are my biggest tips. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah, they're really good. I mean, your first one where you say you don't have to use every single Gen AI that's being thrust upon you because there's so many tools, you know, that are being baked into just normal applications that you use every day. It's really difficult to sometimes turn them off, isn't it? And it can be tempting to just try all of these things. In your article you talk about guardrails quite a lot and protections for students. What do you mean by that?

So when you are using these tools and you're creating prompts, guardrails basically are things that you embed in the prompts to say this, this is your fence. This is all I want you to do. So of course it's very application specific, the guardrails, meaning, I want you to only look for, academic resources. Don’t use social media resources while you're answering this question. Make sure that you only do things that you have permission to do. So just providing those safety explanations to the AI tools so that it's not going beyond the scope. You know, a lot of students use AI as like a chat companion, right? And so putting guardrails for safety or, “you can't do this, you're not a therapist. You're only supposed to speak to students in this particular manner.” You know, especially in the classroom. Is a good thing to do.

So it's almost teaching teachers and, by guidelines, like prompt engineering a little bit isn't it?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, fantastic. Thanks for that. Let's talk about data privacy. You sort of mentioned it a little bit earlier. What do you think teachers can do to help keep their pupils safe?

I think first, teaching digital literacy and ethics, explicitly to the students. And that's very important because knowledge is a great tool. Right? So explaining to students, teaching them how to use these, these tools, saying you don't want to put all of your information out there. And then also training them that they can look at like, ChatGPT or something like that, and they can put a little bit of information and these models and actually go out and find things about them. So that is a very eye opening, hands on task that students can see. Oh man, you know, once my data is out there, it's really out there. You know, even if I try to delete something. So it's just having students to understand how to keep, you know, some things private about themselves so that it can't be used for, you know, advertising and things like that.

Yeah. That was a really important aspect in your article, wasn't it? Your data is your most important resource. When I was teaching, though, a lot of students would say, well, I don't really care. You know, I don't mind if the ads that I see it targeted to me. How do you really like make it crystal clear to students how important their data is?

I think that's the challenge, isn't it? Because, with social media and you have, you know, the students are constantly making videos of themselves and and they don't they don't really understand the importance of data privacy in that, you know, once it's out there, your images could be used in a nefarious way. Right? With the advances in, Gen AI, your image could be used to say something that you don't even really represent and I think it's difficult to get students, you know, to understand that because they just want to have fun. They want to make videos, they want to. Yeah. So I think that is a real challenge.

It's about digital literacy, as you said, isn't it? It’s about making sure that they are critical users of the digital space, isn't it? I think I was also thinking about teachers also need to use these tools themselves, don't they? If they're going to use a Gen AI tool in the classroom, to actually read the terms and conditions and to use it themselves just to make sure they understand the, like you say, the parameters of the tool.

Yes. It's important that teachers understand what Gen AI can do and what it can't do. I spoke about hallucinations that are possible when using these models in the article because Gen AI, I was in a training and I loved how the presenter said, you know, Gen AI is like a toddler who wants to please their parents, right? So if it can't find the answer, it's going to make it up to make sure that, you know, it's pleasing you. You know, it's doing what you asked it to do. So just, knowing that with these tools, you can't just use them and then not look at the sources that it gives you because it can hallucinate and make things up. So you want to make sure that you double check whatever it's giving back to you. You just don't want to copy & paste.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's really true. I love your analogy of it being a toddler, that's brilliant. In your article, you talked about using a curated research notebook in the classroom. How does that work and what's the advantage of using that?

So the advantage is that, as a teacher, you should be familiar with the content that you want to teach and the resources that you want to use, right? And using Gen AI in the classroom is all about saving you time. So if you know the resources that you want to use, you can actually take those resources and place them in a curated Gen AI notebook for students to use. So now you know what resources are going into the lesson. It's less likely to hallucinate. And Gen AI is really good at summarising information, and that is very valuable to the students, and to the teacher. Because maybe you're learning something new that you have to teach. You know, and you're like, well, you know, what are some ways that I can do this? And then by having that curated set of resources and allowing students to explore that, then it's in that more controlled environment. I mostly use NotebookLM, and I actually have one pulled up. If I can demonstrate how this would kind of work? Oh, yeah.

That would be great.

So this is a notebook, that I've created as an example. So this is called the “Biology notebook”. On the left hand side, there's a button here that says “Add sources”. So any sources that you have, maybe in PDF form or YouTube videos even, you can just add them here if you click. Here I've added three sources. I have a YouTube video that talks about the difference between atoms and molecules. Another one that is, what is isotope? And then I have a, biology excerpt. Now, this is an open, textbook here, and it's a chapter from this textbook that talks about, the chemical, building blocks of of life. So with these three resources, I was able to add them to this notebook, and it automatically just gives me this nice summary of what these materials are saying. It tells you about, you know, the atom and the protons and neutrons, and it's talking about the chemical bonds. So as you scroll down, you can see that there's some questions here that are already generated that students can automatically use. And so let's click on one of these. So this first question is: how do protons, neutrons and electrons define an atom's property? So based on the resources that I've put into the notebook, it's going to read through those resources and then summarise that for me. So that's what you see here.

Fantastic. And I can see there are links within the text.

Yes. So this is really fantastic for students. You can see if I hover over some there, it'll go to the page that's in the textbook that I've linked and it will show images. And so this is just fantastic for students to be able to kind of explore and ask their own questions as well.

I can immediately see that for revision, so if it was a student who was revising for their, you know, their end of year exams, this would be great if they could reference the actual topics, from the exam specifications in here. This looks great.

Absolutely. And another great thing about this particular notebook is that you can generate other things like, I love the mind map. Because it will take all the resources and make the connections. So I'll go ahead and click on that here. And so it'll take just a few seconds to generate this mind map. A lot of students are visual and sometimes they have difficulty seeing the connections between material. So if we click on this mind map, it just opens up. It's beautiful. For students to be able to learn, they can move it around. So here's our main topic. And then you can see how these topics just branch off and they can kind of follow along with the information and how everything is related. So that's another great tool that's in here.

I can see that visual learners would really like that. Do you have any kind of, research on the impact of students using you know, a notebook like this over just traditional sources?

I do not. You know, everything is, happening so quickly and so fast and this is an area that would be a fantastic place to have more research, to see the impact to students. Because it's just brand new, you know? And every time we look around, there's a new tool that can be used. So yes, research in this area is definitely needed.

But this is one of the reason that, you know, Hello World and podcasts like these are really helpful because you've obviously used it with teachers in the classroom. And we can see that it is actually relevant rather than, you know, some company pushing us to use a particular Gen AI tool. So I think that's one of the great things about having this sort of forum where real educators can share useful resources. So thank you so much for that. That was a really good little demo. I like that I'm going to go away and play with it later on. Fantastic. So thank you so much, Chanel. It's been fantastic to hear your perspectives. And I loved your little demonstration of how to use a notebook. That's fantastic. Your article is really good, and I think the things I took away from it is the fact that teachers need to be using these tools for themselves, don’t they? They need to be curious and playing around and seeing what's out there. And finding out what other teachers are doing. I think because the landscape is changing so rapidly, there's no one right answer, is there? There's not one tool that fits all yet, is there? Would you agree?

I would, I would definitely agree with that, yes.

How do you suggest teachers try and stay ahead of that curve? Because, you know, as we know, teachers are all so busy and they are often drowning with the things that they have to do. What's what's your kind of advice for for keeping if not ahead of the curve, kind of on the curve, as it were.

My biggest advice is to focus on what you want your students to learn, and then you pick a tool that allows you to help the students learn that. We can go and play with 20 tools, but not all of them are going to be effective. So you want to find that one tool that you know that you can use well, and you can train your students to use well and keep the main goal, forefront, which is students growing and learning the material.

It's a really good point. Yeah. Don't don't lose the wood for the trees, as it were. Try and focus on the outcomes of the students. That's brilliant. Thank you so much Chanel, for sharing your wisdom and resources with us. It's been brilliant.

Thank you so much for having me.

So that's it for today. I hope you found today's discussion useful, and that it's giving you some practical tips to use in your classroom. See you next time. Goodbye.

Thank you. Laura. You can check out the full version of Chanel's article in the latest issue of our Hello World magazine, which is out now. And whilst you're at it, if you haven't already, head to helloworld.cc to subscribe, explore our back issues and listen to more episodes. What are you waiting for? The podcast will be back in a few weeks discussing youth online safety and wellbeing with Dr. Karla Badillo-Urquiola, a human computer interaction researcher based at the University of Notre Dame in the US.

So stay tuned.