Berlin publishes a guide on dealing with ChatGPT in schools

The guide focuses on teacher’s tasks when facing the new tool, but also on techniques that can circumvent the AI’s capabilities

At the start of the week, Berlin’s Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family published guidelines for schools on dealing with ChatGPT. The new AI text tool has seen a massive rise in popularity over the last few months and one of the areas that are most significantly impacted in the initial phase of this new tech’s adoption is education.

This is because the tool can write school-level essays with great ease and speed, a perfect exploit for the stressed-out student looking to get a passing grade in literature.

According to Berlin authorities, the AI tool needs to be treated with a certain level of respect from teachers, however, and their primary duty as educators would be to train students on the right circumstances to use the tools.

Ways to make ChatGPT useful in the classroom

Some of the most important parts of the published guidelines are about the validity of tasks created or partially created with the programme. According to local authorities, in principle, AI ​​applications offer opportunities and risks at the same time, so lessons should be to teach the students skills in dealing with the new technology.

The guidelines equate ChatGPT with a calculator in the sense that is a work tool, but can also be used as an educational tool. At the same time, this classification means that the educational system and schools do not need to pay for ChatGPT, as it is not created with the same intent as a textbook, for example.

Tasks that cannot be completed without using human input

The recommendations also provide suggestions for teachers on how they can use tasks that, according to the current status, cannot be solved exclusively by AI applications.

Additionally, it emphasises the idea that students should be taught and understand the value of developing their own editing skills, learning how tasks work and indicating the tools they used to complete them appropriately. Furthermore, exams can remain in ‘analog’ form for the time being.

Also, the Senate has provided a list of tasks that cannot be completed without human input:

• Promoting metacognitive skills by reasoned presentation or discussion of solutions, by assessing the information, by independent reference and by describing the organisation of the solution process.
• Discussions about the learning and working process and the results themselves.
• A teaching tactic of flipping the script, where lessons are delivered via a script as homework, while in-class time is spent writing and practising, distinctly away from AI tools.
• A change of homework media: while AI applications can help in collecting and developing ideas, homework can depart from the written form and become audio or video based. Additionally, tasks can also require flow charts and graphics, which are still out of the scope of ChatGPT.
• Practical tasks implementation and evaluation of experiments cannot be implemented extensively by AI applications.