5 Mistakes Teachers Make with AI (and how to fix them)

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The AI Teacher Toolkit, Part 1: 5 Mistakes Teachers Make with AI (and How to Fix Them)

Hey everybody, welcome to the first post in my new blog series, "The AI Teacher Toolkit." I'm Aaron Makelky. As a classroom teacher, I've made a bunch of mistakes with AI. I've also worked with schools, teachers, college professors, even state departments of education to help with, how do we change school and teaching and learning now that generative AI is in our classrooms?

In this series, I want to share five common mistakes that teachers make with AI, and more importantly, how to fix them. My goal is to help you, as teachers and professors, to use AI in your classroom instead of fighting it or banning it.

Mistake #1: Ignoring AI

Since November of 2022, students have had ChatGPT on their phone, on their computer. Now there are lots of other ways. But it isn't going away. Ignoring it isn't an option. How do I know? I ask my students. On the second day of class each semester, I give my students an AI use survey.

Here's a really interesting finding from over 100 students in the 2024 25 school year: their top used AI tool? Snap AI. Not what most adults think, not what all the techie programmer bros on LinkedIn are talking about. Over 70 percent of my students say they've used Snap AI. That's more than any other tool.

Another way we know you can't just ignore AI, is when you ask students, what are you using AI for? School, research, writing, your job? It was none of those things. In fact, 63 percent of my students said they're just using AI for fun.

Now what's that have to do with ignoring AI? It means no one's teaching them how to use it productively, but they're exploring it on their own. They're playing with it. They're curious about it. Which is another reason why you can't ignore AI in your classroom. You can steal my survey. There's a link below. You put in your name and email, it's free, and I send you all of my stuff to start scaffolding AI into your classroom, including copying my survey, my syllabus, and some lesson ideas. So if you're not asking your students about AI or giving them surveys, you can write your own or you can just steal mine. Check out the link in the description.

The other thing we should know from this is, it shows our kids are using AI. I only had about 11 percent, out of 115 or 120 students, that's 10 or 15, who say they don't use AI at all. We'll talk about later why that's wrong. But with students using it for fun as their primary use, it also tells us they don't know how or where to go to learn how to use AI. And teachers, we don't have to be the expert. I'm not the expert on anything. I'm just a practitioner. I experiment, I'm open to it, and I ask my students questions. But if we're not learning alongside our students using AI, where are they going to go for information? TikTok, Instagram. Should they learn these tools with you in an educational setting, in a classroom, or from some freshman in his dorm room on TikTok who has a t shirt over his face as a shysty, like this guy? I think you should be learning with them, because if you're not, that's where they're going to get their info and it's all going to be about how to cheat, and how to scam AI detectors, and how to get away with stuff.

Another reason why you can't ignore AI is students want to talk to you about it as their teacher, as somebody who knows how to learn. While there were 12 percent of my students saying, I don't use AI at all, they're wrong when they say that because they don't understand what AI is.

Mistake #2: Trying to Ban or Block AI

You also can't control what students have on their phones and their personal devices outside of your classroom. Your district or your internet connection might filter chat GPT while they're at school or block certain websites, but you can't control what they put on their phone. You can try to tell them AI is bad, you can tell them it steals their data, and there might be truth in that. But they have it anyways. Snap AI, that's their top used app, because they're already on Snapchat all day. You have to recognize, you're only with them an hour or two a day, and the other hours a day, you can't control what they're doing or what they put on their device.

The other reason you can't just block or ban AI is because then only the low effort cheaters or the kids that aren't skilled at using it are going to get caught. AI is really an equity issue. That is, your techie students who know how to get around AI detection software with their prompting can get by all of your firewalls, your things that you think keep AI out of your classroom. Whereas the low effort cheaters or the kids who haven't learned those prompting techniques are going to get busted. Also, students are going to pay 20 bucks a month, get an app that humanizes their writing and can beat Turnitin.com. Most of your students can't afford that, but do some of them have mommy or daddy's credit card on their Apple wallet and can just pay 20 bucks a month for an app that lets them cheat because you rely on AI detection software? I've seen it. Kids in my class will show me they have those apps. If you think you can block or ban AI, you can't. They'll leave your classroom, they have apps on their phone, and then it becomes an equity issue with the students who don't know how to use it or can't pay for those apps that let them get around your limits and restraints.

Mistake #3: Thinking You're Smarter Than AI

I don't know any teacher who knows more names, dates, and facts than Google does. I don't know any teacher that has a larger repository of information than Wikipedia does. While those tools aren't perfect, they're a lot better at storing information than our brains. And if you try to out Google, Google, or out Wikipedia, Wikipedia, you're not going to win. Don't fight that battle and don't try to be the expert on everything. AI is the same way. It can do a lot of things better than humans, even if you're an expert, even if you have a college degree, even if you've taught your subject for 20 or 30 years, there are going to be things that AI can do better than you. So don't fight it.

If you needed 30 copies of a handout for your students, you could take a pencil and paper and handwrite those out yourself. But you would be crazy to do that. AI is no different. When you're trying to come up with ideas and improve your lesson plans or give students feedback, there comes a point where, yes, you could do it manually, but there's a better, faster, easier way that's going to lead to a better result for your students. Just like making copies, use the copy machine.

What are some of the ways that you can use AI instead of fighting it? Ask it about things that you would consider yourself an expert in. I don't mean math or science. I mean in your content area, of all the subjects you teach and all the topics, pick one or two that you are really good at or know the best. And ask it to explain things to you in the context of a student in your class. I'm a history teacher. Let's say one of my areas of expertise is the Roman Republic. I've studied it. I know all about it. I'm going to say, 11th grade student in your class, teach me about the Roman Republic. And then start asking it more and more specific questions.

Another cool way you can do this is with voice mode. Because some people don't want to sit and chat all day with an AI chat box. Put your earbuds in or take your phone and have a voice conversation with it and just talk back and forth while you're out for a walk or doing chores around the house and test it and see, does it really know as much or more as I do in these areas of my expertise? And you might be surprised, AI probably does, and you can start to evaluate, how well can it explain it, and how did I get that out of the AI?

Then what you can do to really challenge yourself is take that content, that you just explained to me, come up with an analogy for my student who's really into fishing to explain that concept from the Roman Republic to the fly fisherman. Or explain it on this student's level. I have an IEP student who reads on a sixth grade level and he's really into engines and trucks. Help me explain this complicated historical stuff to him on his level or connect it to another concept like something from chemistry they learned in the class period before me. Or what we learned last unit about Greece. And then you start to see, AI doesn't replace me. It's not better than me. It can enhance what I'm doing. Instead of fighting it and thinking I'm smarter than it because I have a college degree, I learned how to use it. So I don't have to be the expert anymore.

Mistake #4: Spamming More of the Same

Of all these mistakes that I see, number four is probably the most common. I see teachers spamming more of the same. What do I mean by that? What we were teaching a year, two, five years ago, we're just doing the AI version of that. Here's an example. I had a talk with a teacher. They were having their students watch a documentary. They said, I wanted to make sure the students would pay attention to the video, so I used this AI tool to come up with a viewing guide and I turned that into a worksheet for them. We've already been giving students worksheets with videos. That's not that different than Google Docs, which was not that different than paper pencil before. Spamming more viewing guides is not a transformational use of AI. You might as well not use it if that's what you're doing. If you're just creating more packets and more work, we're not using AI in the right way.

Another thing we get when teachers spam more of the same is what I call AI ping pong. In other words, a student uses an AI tool to write something. That's the ball going over the net. A teacher uses an AI tool to give them feedback. That's hitting the ball back over the net. And it's AI to AI to AI to AI. And what's the point of doing that if we're just assigning more essays and just grading them faster with AI? That's a mistake, and that's not how AI should be used in the classroom. Now, I'm not against using AI for feedback, or having students get feedback from AI on their writing before they turn it in. But if we just automate the essay process, their AI essays are going to get spammed at us teachers, and we're going to spam them back with AI grading tools. And then, the humans aren't even interacting at all, and we go, what was the point of this AI ping pong game that we played? Don't just do more of the same, teachers. We have to do something we couldn't do before we got AI.

Mistake #5: Relying on a Specific Tool or GPT Wrapper Apps

The fifth and final mistake I see teachers do with AI, and I've made this mistake myself, is relying on a specific tool or GPT wrapper apps. What do I mean by that? Here's an example of how I made this mistake. In a previous school year, I only used one AI platform with my students. I put all of my content in it. I had a tool to help them write better essays with it. My school didn't block it. My kids liked it. It was great. And I thought, look at me. I'm so smart. But I was making mistake number five. I was relying entirely on one platform. Why was that a mistake? I came back after summer break. All this content's there. My tool is there. I'm ready to go. First week of school, my new students, I tell them, come in this space and use this AI writing tutor that I built. And guess what they told me? It's blocked. Here's why that's a problem. Besides the fact that they couldn't use it, all my content was only in one place. That one place was blocked. And as a teacher or professor, we usually can't do anything more besides beg the IT guy, please unblock this site for my students. And they don't usually listen to us. It took me five months to get my site unblocked.

I learned the lesson. Don't invest in just one platform. Don't be dependent on one tool. I'm not gonna name names of those tools, but a lot of them give you these fancy overlays and they're just chat GPT in a certain window. If you only know how to use AI in that context with that tool, your school's gonna block it. Or your school's not gonna pay for it. With all these AI companies starting up, a lot of them in the ed tech space, it could just be disconnected and unplugged and they went bankrupt or shut their doors, and all of your stuff is gone. You can't just rely on one tool for all of your AI use. Whether it's for you as the teacher, for your students, or like I did, really both. Because you get locked out or stuck behind the filter.

Which raises a great question, what should I do instead if I don't want to be stuck in one platform? We should be learning and teaching the skill of using AI, not this program, not how to use this app. I don't teach my kids how to use ChatGPT. They do use it, I teach them skills that transfer there, but I'm teaching them skills that will transfer to any other platform just as well.

What's Next?

In the next blog post, we're going to talk about AI policy, because in the series of four things that we're going to become masters of in the AI Teaching Toolkit, number one is policy. Number two is skills. What are those skills that I can teach? Number three is going to be the tools. What platforms, what apps, what large language models should I be using or can my students use? And then finally and most importantly, the applications. How do I do that with my content area on this assignment in this unit? What does this stuff look like in a college classroom, or a high school classroom, or in your LMS when you post assignments and discussion boards? How do I apply this stuff? If you want to learn how to get your policies in line and create AI policy that doesn't suck, check out the next blog post in this series.

I'm Aaron Makelky, your AI teacher. Again, if you want those resources, you can put in your name and email address, and I will send you sample syllabus, AI policies, some of my lesson plans, and that survey you can give your students so you can ask them how they're using AI and what their concerns are, and you can build content in your class specifically for them.

Thanks for checking out part one in my series, the AI toolkit for teachers. If you haven't already, please subscribe to my YouTube channel so I can bring you more AI tips to make you a better teacher. See you in the next post!