The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 by OpenAI brought Generative AI (GenAI) to the attention of educators and society. GenAI presents numerous opportunities for enhancing teaching and learning in schools. GenAI tools can assist teachers with administrative tasks so that they have more time to attend to students’ learning needs. Teachers can also use GenAI to help develop educational materials. This has the potential to make it easier for teachers to tailor educational materials to suit the individual needs of their students. Moreover, GenAI tools are showing some promise in their use to support adaptive testing and feedback. For example, teachers might be able to use GenAI tools to adjust the content of assessments to match students’ progress and performance.
Computing teachers at primary, secondary, and post-16 levels are likely to have started to consider issues surrounding AI and how to teach about AI and the social and ethical implications. The introduction of GenAI raises questions about how to make use of the capabilities of such tools in the teaching and learning of computing, while maintaining the integrity of assessment. Further questions arise about how to use GenAI products to assist in a range of administration functions associated with teaching including report-writing, lesson-planning, and developing teaching material and timetabling. Ethical questions are also brought to the fore over issues of biased and inaccurate output, and energy usage. There are also concerns over safety, data privacy, copyright, plagiarism and the threat to assessment and students’ critical thinking. While this guidance is not aimed at answering all these questions in any detail, it serves as an introduction to the main issues while primarily aimed at giving computing teachers more confidence in taking GenAI into the classroom.
Conscious of the needs of computing teachers, including all those who may not necessarily consider themselves specialists, a small working group of interested teachers and researchers have worked together to develop guidance and examples about the area of generative AI and its use in the teaching and learning of computing in schools. We are particularly focused on the UK, but there’s no reason why this document might not be useful to you wherever you are in the world. Our approach has been led by the working group’s perspectives as active computing teachers so we hope that what you read in these pages is useful, accessible and relevant. The target audience for the whole document is all teachers in primary, secondary and at sixth-form level, who teach some computing at some point in the year. Other teachers may be interested in specific sections on generative AI for whole school issues and for administration.
The working group first met in December 2023, and has met online several times since. It consists of eight computing teachers (two primary and six secondary) alongside a small number of other academics and researchers. It’s been a participatory and collaborative project, and we’ve listened to each other’s perspectives and views and tried to incorporate all of these in this short document. What we’ve focused on is providing examples of what you might use generative AI for in the classroom, specifically for computing, and some background definitions and tips that teachers might find useful. We’re aware that there exists a plethora of guidance and information on the topic of generative AI; this document sits alongside that as a small contribution, and part of our work has been to signpost useful resources for further reading and research. We’re also aware that this is a fast-moving field, and that documents like this will need revising sooner or later, probably sooner. That said, we hope you enjoy reading it and we look forward to hearing your comments, and welcome volunteers for the next iteration when it comes!