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Date: 9/14/2023
BELCHERTOWN — With a new school year beginning for students and staff, the Belchertown School Committee and building principals met on Sept. 5 to discuss the use of artificial intelligence in students’ work.
Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, more commonly known as ChatGPT, is a website that was launched in November 2022 that allows people to use AI to have human-like conversations and help with different tasks like answering questions and writing emails or essays.
With ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it to write you an outline, find sources or write a sample essay that you can use.
After you receive the finished product, you can edit what was produced to fix any grammatical errors or other sentences.
Superintendent Brian Cameron said, “We know it’s here; we know about ChatGPT. We have had multiple conversations about it. We don’t have all the answers to it, but we wanted to be present to figuring it out together.”
Belchertown High School Principal Christine Vigneux said her staff recently met to discuss the use of AI.
According to Vigneux, the main point of the discussion was to get everyone on the same page about the use of AI.
“I am going to be honest with you, it’s an emerging technology, if you will. The biggest point of our discussion and what I wanted to come from it is that people are all over the place. Some of my educators weren’t clear what ChatGPT was before today,” Vigneux added.
Vigneux added that since last school year she has been doing her research on ChatGPT and has worked with the school’s Information Technology Department on how to detect the use of AI.
There are a few websites that have been created to detect the use of AI in an essay but are not accurate, according to Vigneux.
She said, “I think people can use the various detectors out there, but they are not accurate. We have work to do but I think it starts with what we do in the classroom.”
Vigneux added, “I think part of the biggest discussion today was how things need to change in the classroom like the kind of assignments that are being given and I think we would like to have some more opportunities to see what that looks like.”
Cameron said it is important to discuss ChatGPT as it can also help educators make lesson plans, generate reading passages or create lesson review questions.
Vigneux added, “There are a lot of ways our teachers use it in the classroom as well. I don’t want to say it is the end-all, be-all, but we have to find ways to work with it and help our students understand more about it. Students are going to venture online and find it so we have to let them know the problems with it.”
Cameron and Vigneux added that there is no exact protocol or solution for the use of ChatGPT or AI right now but it is important to educate the staff and students about the use of it.
Cameron added, “I think it goes back to knowing your students. Having those relationships with students. I think we have to very careful of accusing people or students for using it. We can have a thought they are using it, but we really can’t go around accusing people of using it because we really don’t know.”