Using AI Tools for a Successful School Year
It’s that time of year. Students of all ages are gearing up and heading back into the classroom. From preschool to graduate-level students, there are class lists, schedules, and supply lists. So, let’s make sure you’re ready. Pencils… Yes. Notebooks… Yes. Crayons… Of course! AI tools… the what?
It’s been a fascinating year or so since ChatGPT took center stage. However, its application for research and writing is something I hadn’t considered until school started up. If you had not heard, ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI. It is designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input it receives. It has been trained on a diverse range of internet text, allowing it to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses to a wide variety of prompts.
ChatGPT can perform tasks like answering questions, providing explanations, generating text, offering suggestions, and even engaging in natural language conversations. It has the ability to comprehend the context of the input and produce contextually appropriate outputs, making it useful for applications such as content creation, customer support, programming assistance, language translation, and much more.
As a student, this is an incredibly valuable resource to conduct research, find sources, cite sources, and review/edit papers. It’s important to note that while ChatGPT is capable of generating impressive text, it may not always be completely accurate, and its responses should be evaluated critically, especially for important or sensitive tasks. So, I treat ChatGPT like Wikipedia: use it to find actual sources, but most importantly, trust but verify.
And AI tools don’t stop there; Google has announced its NotebookLM. An AI tool (in Beta) that allows you to interact with the data in your Google Docs. Imagine, as a student, saving research and documentation on a specific topic and then having a specifically trained AI model to interact with that specific data. Rather than poring through research yourself, you can then have a conversation with that AI about the information you poured into it. What a time to be a student!