Over the last few years, generative AI has moved from something I was curious about to something that is regularly present in both my professional and personal life. I use it to brainstorm lessons, develop classroom resources, organize ideas, troubleshoot technology, clarify writing, and think through projects. At times, it has helped me take an idea that was sitting loosely in my head and turn it into something tangible that I could explore, revise, and use. At other times, it has produced responses that sounded confident and complete but did not actually understand the students, classroom, or situation I was thinking about.
As I begin this learning record, my position on AI is neither entirely enthusiastic nor entirely resistant. I see real value in these tools, but I also have growing concerns about what can happen when AI replaces learning, or damages our environment or accelerates beyond our understanding behind the scenes.
One of the strongest uses of AI for me has been as a thinking and planning partner. I often begin with a fairly developed idea, but AI can help me organize it, identify gaps, suggest another direction, or create a first version that I can respond to. This has been especially useful in my teaching. I have used AI to help create lesson plans, assignments, presentations, visual resources, assessment materials, and technical projects. However, these materials almost always require further revision. The tool does not know my students, the relationships within my classroom, the Saskatchewan curriculum, or the particular circumstances surrounding a lesson in the same way that I do. I have really come to rely more on this as I have lost some of my colleauges that I would bounce ideas off of to transfers and retirements.
My confidence with generative AI is relatively high when it comes to experimenting with prompts, refining responses, and recognizing when an answer does not fit my purpose. I am less confident about the systems operating behind the interface. I understand that a generative AI tool is not simply another search engine, but I still have questions about training data, privacy, bias, environmental cost, etc. There is a difference between knowing how to get a useful response and understanding the larger system that produced it. This difference also affects how I think about digital citizenship. In the past, digital citizenship was often presented through rules about safety, privacy, appropriate behaviour, and responsible participation. These remain important, but generative AI complicates the conversation. Students now need to understand not only how to behave online, but how to make judgments about information that may appear polished, personalized, and authoritative without being reliable.
Saving time is useful, particularly as a full-time teacher, graduate student, learning leader, and parent. However, the fact that a tool saves time does not necessarily mean it supports learning.
By the end of this course, I don’t imagine I’ll be in a better position to be either for or against generative AI. I hope to become more aware of how it supports creativity, access, learning, and professional practice and when it undermines them. I also want to develop clearer language and boundaries that I can use with students. Telling students that “AI cannot do your learning for you” is a useful starting point, but how can we teach them to use it to support their learning? My goal is to become more conscious of the decisions I am already making and more deliberate about the decisions I make next.
