Artificial intelligence will make certain professions redundant. Mainly professions based on existing knowledge. Is the teaching profession in danger?
Until now, artificial intelligence has mainly helped in the area of repetitive tasks such as service representatives, warehouse workers or welders, it seems that the new generation of artificial intelligence will affect professions based on knowledge such as content writers, accountants or programmers. Are teachers in danger? The short answer in my opinion is, no! And the longer answer is:
In the 1967 film ‘To Sir, with Love’, Sidney Poitier serves as a teacher, and as in teachers’ films, he gets an impossible class, throws away the textbooks and succeeds where his predecessors failed. Sidney Poitier was an engineer who never studied to be a teacher and somehow succeeded, except that we are no longer in 1967 and a teacher in the near future will have to be a bit of an engineer and harness technology to his/her aid. So what should the teacher do today?
As a first step, the teacher must be updated on developments in the field that may affect the study, it is important to play with applications such as ChatGPT or Dall-E (the interface is simple), try to prepare a lesson plan (I tried it, it can really help), use the system for preparing assignments for the students so that the assignment will make the student learn and not just copy the answer mechanically (in Hebrew it’s still not very good, but combining it with Google Translate gives really good results).
Work with the students – the students do not need the teacher to discover the technology or how to use it, but since they will use it mainly to bypass the system, i.e. prepare homework and assignments for them, there are certain aspects that the teacher should lead, such as:
• Criticism of the results – the written text created by ChatGPT is impressive and convincing, but a critical examination reveals that it often contains incorrect facts.
• Asking questions – using ChatGPT requires skill in asking the right question.
• Personal counseling – problems that bother a student and he is ashamed / afraid to involve other people (such as bullying or suicidal thoughts). I pretended to be a 16-year-old boy who suffers from physical bullying and talked at length with the system.
• Other creative uses – the system knows how to answer questions on any topic – for example, a walking route around the school related to the water cycle; write software – for example, software for managing the student’s time; solve problems in any subject – for example, a solution to a rather complex equation (which I found on the net).
Teachers’ lounge – involve as many teachers as possible in thinking about what can be done with the new toy.
The student’s point of view – the tool is able to give different points of view to any problem including the students’ point of view, for example, I asked why students don’t like to study history.
Personal summary – the more I play with the systems, the more interesting uses I find, some of which are already mature. I estimate that some AI applications will be a part of our lives within a few years just like a calculator, Google Maps and a diary. That’s why I recommend for a change not to ignore the technology but to try to work with it – no prior knowledge is needed just ask questions or place requests.
HE