Oh AI, how you have really come in and flipped our world upside down. It really seems like something you can’t escape; our social media feeds have AI generated content, our search engines are giving us AI summaries, our music listening algorithms are being fed into a personalized AI DJ, just to name the first few that come to mind.

Education corners are being cut, not just in the way of a new tool added to our tool belt, but in the way of not even needing to wear a tool belt because your buddy Chat will do it for you. I look back on my academic career, and think what a privilege it was to be in my prime before AI became a thing. I honed in on my academic scientific writing skills, writing a thesis where I could not ask an AI platform to proofread or make me sound “more sciencey”. I had to do it the old-school way: have someone proofread and leave comments. Now this was nothing less than an art: you’d have to find a willing soul who could read your work (which was usually so far outside of their realm of knowledge because it turns out you’re the only one in Canada researching Oligocene cetaceans from the west coast of Vancouver Island), this soul would have to dedicate time, energy, and be a critic. Then after hours of their time reading and editing, you’d receive a word doc back that was filled with track changes and red font. Next step – you’re reading through each and every one of those edits, and deciding if you’re going to move that sentence to the beginning of that paragraph, or should you reword it, or should you just get rid of it all altogether? Hours and hours and hours later, you have draft 1. Out of probably 8.

But here’s the thing. You have to have someone who is willing to do that for you. Someone who is okay to spend some of their time reading and editing. For me, I had my dad. God bless that man for being so patient, and learning about all of the topics I worked on. From cetacean evolution to hippopotamuses as nutrient vectors, he sat down and read my papers to help me become a better writer. Often I forget, while I was writing papers for my biology degree my sister was simultaneously writing papers for her mechanical engineering degree. Still to this day my father argues he should have been awarded honorary degrees in both.

I guess if this was happening today I could ask ChatGPT to read draft 3 of my thesis, give me pointers, make it sound like me, write the next draft, and output it in a PDF. Would I learn much? Maybe. Would I have had one-on-one conversations with someone who can point out where I continue to go on tangents in my writing? No. Would I have had that connection with my father who still tells stories about the hippo paper at dinner parties? Nope.

So now I wonder, sure we can use AI as a tool in classrooms. As a science teacher one of my roles will be to help students cultivate their scientific voice. How do we explain this in scientific terms? How do you write a lab report? As a feedback tool, I wonder how I can plead with students that instead of throwing your lab report into AI, can you turn to the person next to you and read their critically? Find areas for them to improve? This led me to the idea of integrating AI as a feedback source, while also using it as something to critique.

I imagine my students using AI in my future classrooms as a tool in their tool belt. However, the other tools in the belt are still there. If we only use AI, you’re burning down the tool shed. But if we don’t use AI, you’re sending students into a world where everyone has a chainsaw in their tool shed and you’ve neglected to give them any sort of blade. A few ways I can see myself using GenAI in school settings are:

• test preparation, where students can input subjects and their notes to generate possible test questions in different formats
• diving deeper on subjects, where students can ask for inspiration/ideas on how to take a project or subject to the next level
• summarizing topics outside of their reach, where students can take a complex topic or journal article and ask for a summary in their reading comprehension level.

I asked Microsoft CoPilot to generate the following:

And this all makes sense! After reading the paper, the ideas and scientific concepts presented by the authors are clearly made manageable by Copilot for a grade 10 student.

While this is a great tool for exploring and extending learning to concepts that may be out of reach for our current reading or understanding level, there is obvious corner cutting we see in education due to GenAI:

• Text creation, where students are losing the opportunity to ponder – reflect – translate thought to words
• Quick answers, where students are losing the opportunity to inquire about topics they already know and reflect on their own knowledge, instead just popping a quick prompt in for an asnwer
• Ease, where students are really losing the opportunity for things to be hard, inconvenient, and an opportunity to ask a peer or teacher.

I’ve seen AI used by teachers for ways to add to their lesson plans, making them more inclusive, creative, or ideas to bridge topics.

I tried it out using Copilot, trying to connect the carbon cycle and climate change, with local marine life here around Vancouver Island:

From Copilot, I received this as a project outline handout:

Vancouver Island Carbon Cycle Research Project

Project Overview

This project explores how changes in the carbon cycle affect marine life around Vancouver Island. You will choose one local marine species and investigate how climate change is impacting it.

Step 1: Choose a Local Marine Species

Select one species from the list below:

• Pacific salmon (Chinook, Coho)
• Southern Resident Killer Whales
• Pacific herring
• Sea otters
• Bull kelp
• Pacific oysters
• Mussels
• Phytoplankton or zooplankton
• Sea stars

Step 2: Research Questions

Answer the following in your own words:

A. Carbon Cycle Basics

• How does carbon naturally move through the ocean?
• What human activities add extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and ocean?

B. Climate Change Link

• How does extra carbon dioxide change the ocean (warming, acidification, oxygen levels)?

C. Species Impact

• How are these changes affecting your chosen species?
• Does it affect their food, habitat, reproduction, or survival?
• Include at least one Vancouver Island example.

D. Solutions

• What actions could help protect this species or reduce carbon emissions?

Step 3: Presentation Format

Choose one format:

• One-page written report
• Poster
• Five-slide presentation
• Infographic
• One- to two-minute video explanation

I then asked Copilot to make me a rubric based on the BC proficiency scale for this project:

One‑Page Rubric: Vancouver Island Carbon Cycle Research Project

Understanding of the Carbon Cycle

• Emerging: Limited or incomplete explanation of carbon movement.
• Developing: Partial explanation with gaps or misconceptions.
• Proficient: Clear, accurate explanation of natural and human-driven carbon movement.
• Extending: Detailed explanation with additional insight or relevant examples.

Connection Between Carbon Cycle & Climate Change

• Emerging: Vague or unclear statements about CO₂ or ocean changes.
• Developing: Identifies some effects of increased CO₂ with limited detail.
• Proficient: Clearly explains how increased CO₂ leads to warming, acidification, or oxygen loss.
• Extending: Connects multiple ocean changes or long-term impacts with strong clarity.

Impact on Local Marine Species

• Emerging: General statements with little connection to climate impacts.
• Developing: Identifies at least one impact with some detail or accuracy.
• Proficient: Clearly explains specific impacts using Vancouver Island context.
• Extending: Provides detailed analysis with multiple impacts or ecosystem connections.

Use of Local Examples (Vancouver Island / BC)

• Emerging: No clear or relevant local examples.
• Developing: Mentions Vancouver Island with limited detail or relevance.
• Proficient: Uses accurate, relevant local examples or case studies.
• Extending: Integrates multiple strong local examples or demonstrates deep regional understanding.

Communication & Presentation

• Emerging: Work is unclear, disorganized, or difficult to follow.
• Developing: Some organization but lacking clarity or flow.
• Proficient: Clear, organized, and easy to understand; visuals support ideas.
• Extending: Polished, engaging, and highly effective communication; visuals enhance understanding.

Would I use it? Sure. Did I personally lose a lot of the joy and excitement of coming up with a creative project for my students regarding a topic that I spent years of my life studying? Yeah.

What could I do to make it more of a tool in my belt? I would come up with the project initially, and then ask Copilot for ways to enhance it, make it accessible to specific learners who need help in my classroom, how to extend it for students who want to go above and beyond, add multimodal aspect to it, etc.

In the end, I personally want to throw myself into the deep end and go through the trials of finding my way of teaching. Of course, there is crunch time where I need help coming up with a 30 minute lab for a topic I am not well versed in. But I don’t want to cut corners and take the personal connection out of it. In the end, I’m a human asking other humans to learn or do something. So who better to come up with it than a human?