Episode 264: Bruce Alter: Pros and Cons of Allowing AI in Schools

In this episode of Talking with Tech, Chris interviews Bruce Alter, a pediatric Physical Therapist and AT Consultant with the Tigard-Tualatin School District in Oregon. Bruce has a long history working with technology, including as a user; he was an early adopter of assistive technology in school to support his challenges with dyslexia. Bruce and Chris’s discussion focuses on artificial intelligince (AI) like Open AI's Chat GPT, including some of the uses it can have in the schools and some applications for AAC users in general. 

Before the interview, Chris and Rachel get together with Rachel's twin Matt Madel to talk about Rachel and his connection as twins and some of the ways that he uses Chat GPT in his own work, including quickly creating code in Python. 

Key ideas this week:

🔑 ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI that is designed to generate human-like text responses to natural language inputs. It can do more than just answer informational questions - it can write unique code, create formulas for Excel, respond at a particular Lexile level or grade, and more!

🔑 Bruce emphasizes that ChatGPT does not answer questions the same way that a human being does. ChatGPT is known to have "hallucinations" that sound convincing but are factually incorrect. We should teach students that they need to fact check what ChatGPT says to ensure it is correct!

🔑 Should school districts block or ban something that will be available to society, like chat GPT, or do they have a duty to help students figure out how to help students use it? You have to balance students getting their own skills at writing while also teaching them how to utilize tools like GPT to improve their learning.

Links from this week’s episode:

Cult of Pedagogy Podcast: How to Use ChatGPT as an Example Machine https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/chatgpt-example-machine/