AI as T.A.: The Changing Face of Education

Image created with ChatGPT by Prof. Bill Selak.

Bill Selak, adjunct faculty member in Concordia’s MAEd: Learning, Design & Technology program and Director of Technology at Hillbrook School, a private K-12 institution in San Jose, is an early adopter of technology, which befits his role teaching college students and children of high-level tech employees in Silicon Valley. In Selak’s view, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already changing society and classrooms as much as electricity did more than 100 years ago.

“I agree with those who call this a Promethean moment,” Selak says, referring to the mythical entity who gave fire to humans. “AI is likely going to touch every part of our lives and students’ lives and transform things we know — and things don’t we even realize — in a profound way.”

Selak’s mission is to introduce educators to ways AI can help them communicate with parents, plan complex lessons, and teach students AI-related skills that workplaces now demand.

“I see a new piece of technology and immediately come up with a dozen reasons and ways it should be in a classroom,” Selak says. “I want to inspire and support teachers to use AI, all the while figuring out what on earth it is. There’s massive excitement.”

Selak continually experiments with AI tools, and one of his first efforts was to see if it could help him with a simple, time-consuming task: writing emails to parents. In ChatGPT, he began by feeding it twenty sample emails and prompting it, “This is my writing style. This is my job. These are emails I often get. Would you help me write emails?”

The first responses AI generated “were so, so bad,” he says, laughing. “It was, ‘Hi, I hope this email finds you well.’ I’m like, this is garbage.”

Instead of giving up, he trained the tool to know his voice, and today Selak drafts nearly all his emails in ChatGPT, saving an hour or two per day on that task alone.

“It nails it almost instantaneously and knocks out a draft in five or ten seconds at the length and formality I want. It sounds like my voice,” he says. “I spend another minute changing a couple of small things and send it off. It makes me much more efficient. It’s almost like having a part-time employee working for me.”

As Selak discovers new uses for AI, he teaches them to Concordia student-educators. Lesson plans, he has found, can be created with far more detail in much less time, as can scripts for weekly videos and assignment descriptions. AI can even conduct formative assessments and check how well students understand content.

“I’m trying to model curiosity for my students,” he says. “It’s about learning a new thing and how it connects with something we already work with, like School AI’s Video Explorer, Google Slides, and Pear Deck. There are so many exciting tools. Some are going to be lame, but some are going to be powerful and transformative and allow you to take five minutes instead of 12 hours.”

For instance, last week on his lunch break, Selak asked ChatGPT to write a new iOS app to show his school’s daily and weekly lunch menus. He had never created an iOS app before, but from his verbal commands the AI tool performed advanced coding to create an app that was functioning on his phone by the end of the day.

A “try and see” approach turns AI into an educational partner, he says.

“I encourage my student-educators to be open about it. Hold space for conversations about it. Learn it and play with the tools together as much as possible,” he says. “I say, ‘There’s this new thing. I don’t really know how to use it, but let’s give it a shot and see what happens.’ That’s a powerful thing for a teacher to say to students. Then you try it together and if it’s great, it becomes a lesson you talk about forever, a grand slam. It transforms what happens in your classroom. At its worst, it didn’t work and you learn from it.”

Selak now incorporates AI into grading as well. When he comes across an awkward phrase or concept in a student paper, he pastes it into ChatGPT, which instantly tells him why it’s wrong.

“It’s almost like a graduate-level writing expert,” he says. “It will say, ‘This is in the passive voice. A better example would be …’ The feedback I’m able to give is so much more robust.”

He encourages his Concordia students to take each week’s content and connect it with an AI tool — like the powerful and popular SchoolAI — to see what result they come up with. Writing assignments, for example, might be re-envisioned in several ways. An eighth-grade teacher might feed an assignment into ChatGPT, telling it to create a five-paragraph essay. Then, the teacher leads the class through a group critique of the paper, making changes and annotations to what AI produced.

“Maybe ChatGPT does the first draft, and the students’ job is to edit it, not write it,” Selak says.

Or students might be assigned to write an original draft, submit it to the teacher and then paste it into ChatGPT and ask for feedback. The process of incorporating feedback and improving the writing with AI’s help becomes the learning.

“Our teachers have done all kinds of versions of this,” Selak says, referring to his San Jose school. “AI has the potential to increase critical thinking.” This summer, Selak hosted day-long workshops to familiarize fellow teachers with AI and get them to generate sample lesson plans.

“It is so, so exciting to be an educator where this is a possibility,” he says. “To be a tech director when a kid wants to make a game or says, ‘I want to build an app,’ and the answer is, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s spend an hour with ChatGPT and build an app.’”