COASTAL OBSERVER

Artificial intelligence won’t replace teachers in the classroom, says Brian White, a history teacher at Waccamaw High.

But it will if current and incoming teachers don’t learn how to use it, he said.

“It’s the next big thing. I don’t want it to overtake the good people that are in the building,” White said. “This AI thing is not going away, and we’ve got to learn how to adapt to it to make it to where it’s useful for us. It’s another tool for us.”

White was a major proponent of the Georgetown County School District adopting Google Classroom in 2016. He attended a Google Summit in Charlottesville, Va., and learned how school districts across the country were using the program.

He was eager to tell his peers about the “next best thing.”

“I knew nothing. Nobody in here knew about it. They were like talking foreign language to me,” he said. “When I came back, I said, ‘we’ve got to do this. We’re going to be behind.’” 

White was the first teacher to test pilot the first batch of Chromebooks in the district. He raised $8,000 through businesses and the WAVE parent-teacher organization, now known as the Warrior Club, for his class.

He had a hunch 10 years ago that Google Classroom would be “revolutionary,” but he never expected it to turn into what has over the last month.

“I couldn’t even sleep when I finally figured out what this thing was doing. It got me so wound up, and I wanted to tell everybody about it,” White said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in spring 2020, White’s curiosity paid off. He didn’t have to worry about scrambling to upload online lessons when the district schools closed and remote learning began. He said he was so far ahead of online learning that he already had recorded lessons from 2016 before the pandemic.

“Those kids didn’t miss a beat,” he said. “We didn’t fail. We tried. The problem was that nobody was prepared for that.”

His stance hasn’t wavered especially with Google Classroom’s introduction of AI tools.

It uses tools such as Google Notebook LM that are able to create guided notes and mulit-layered lessons for teachers. It also uses “Gems,” a condensed version of Google’s Gemini chatbot.

David Hammel, principal of Waccamaw High, said he was amazed when White showed him what Notebook LM can do in a matter of seconds.

Hammel said it’s a way for teachers to work smarter, not harder, as it saves them a lot of time.

“They’re already very, very busy,” he said. “Instead of them spending hours researching and trying to pull, it gave them curriculum at their fingertips.”

For students, White said Notebook LM is an AI tool built exactly for them to use for a specific class.

He can manually load up to 50 of his own sources for the chatbot to pull from, including PDFs, presentation slides and YouTube videos. Users can load up to 300 sources with its premium version.

Based on those selected sources, Notebook LM’s studio feature can create flashcards, mind maps, study guides, blog posts, videos and even podcasts. Practice tests and quizzes can explain why an answer was incorrect along with providing the right answer. 

“That’s where, I think, this thing shines,” White said. “It’s a good practice tool.”

But that comes with some challenges, Hammel added.

“The challenge has to be for us is to teach students to use it, you know, ethically and with integrity so they can use it to study without using it to literally copy work, which is one of the big things right now with AI,” Hammel said. “Once they get exposed to it, I really think sky’s the limit.”

The school district doesn’t have policies for student and employee usage of AI. School officials said the district has been monitoring AI’s impact for the last couple of years. 

Hammel said that the district needs a firm footing on the flaws and benefits of AI as it becomes mainstream. He said he sees a policy coming.

“We’re at the birth of AI, really, being used in education. You’ve got to have a little bit of implementation to know where the flaws are. I just don’t think we’re there yet,” Hammel said.

With a tap of his finger on his smart board White can listen to two AI-generated podcast hosts discuss New Imperialism in voices that sound unnervingly human. 

“We sift through the sources so you don’t have to,” the AI podcast host said.

The teacher’s view of the program differs from what the student sees, White said. Students have access to the resources created by the teacher such as a generated podcast on a topic. When a student pauses the podcast, it becomes interactive. 

“They can ask it a question, and it will respond back in one of those AI voices,” he said.

White said he could even record his own voice for Notebook LM to use to generate a podcast or video.

His students in AP European history like it, he said, but it’s a matter of them realizing it’s there and if they utilize it.

“It’s right there for them,” White said.

The tool has been accurate most of the time since he began using Notebook LM about a month ago. However, he said, it’s not perfect and realized that he still needs to fact-check any supplemental resources it creates. 

This week he asked it to create a mind map, which is similar to a flow chart. 

“It totally screwed the map up,” he said. “I really need to look at it pretty close because sometimes there are things that will be inaccurate.”

Despite its hallucinations, White said he prefers it because the AI tool is pulling from sources he loaded into it rather than scouring the internet for other information.

The key to get the right answer he’s looking for is to be as specific as possible when he enters a prompt, commonly referred to as prompt engineering.

“The more details you give it, the better it’s going to be,” White said. “Each time you add a source, you’re making it smarter and smarter because you’re giving it more and more information.”

Traditional ways of teaching aren’t dead, White said, but utilizing Notebook LM is a helpful tool and supplemental resource for teachers and their students to accommodate different learning styles.

“You’ve got a poor reader in this classroom, now I got a podcast that I can give that person,” he said. “You’ve got something to sort of reinforce what they’re doing in class.”

White and Rayna Smith, who teaches engineering at Waccamaw High, are the only two educators in the building who are utilizing Google Classroom’s AI features.

White recalled when he first learned how to operate a PC after he graduated college. The students in his classroom are already familiar with AI in general, he said, and teachers need to catch up and implement a “new world” in education.

White said he’s not an expert when it comes to Google or AI but he has seen what it’s capable of.

“Teachers need to get involved in this and be ahead of it. They can resist it all they want. Resistance isn’t gonna get you anywhere,” White said. “You’ve got to find ways to utilize it in the classroom. We need to start now. We don’t need to wait around. This is here.”