Personally, I see AI as a "thought partner." As a first-year teacher, AI has been a helpful way to quickly differentiate lessons and to brainstorm teaching/engagement strategies without having to scour the internet. Thus, I found myself nodding my head as I read the Ferlazzo article. I really resonated with the first teach who described AI as a tool to create her "starting point, not [her] finished product" (2025). Like this teacher, I believe that what AI spits out is a "rough draft" and it is then the responsibility of the expert (the person putting in the prompt) to critically evaluate the product and make adjustments to fine-tune the product to best meet your needs. This year, being my first-year of teaching and having to plan for 90-minute blocks, I spent roughly 4-6 hours on each lesson, often even with the help of AI. Thus, I can only imagine how many hours it would have taken me had I not had this tool at my disposal. Similar to Ferlazzo, I feel like as I get more familiar with my curriculum and pedagogy, AI will continue to be a time-cutting tool that takes my practices from something that takes hour to minutes (2025). I was also inspired by these second teacher's story of using AI in the classroom to make high-level scientific material more accessible to students (Ferlazzo, 2025). As someone who teaches primarily ELL students, I feel like AI is a useful took to create summaries and adjust reading levels to increase access and thus engagement with high-level material. However, I do question the notion that AI can accurately translate, despite what was shared in the third piece of Ferlazzo's article (2025). Regarding the Galland & Rettinger article, I was intrigued by the idea that cheating is driven by a variety of factors and the importance of addressing the "reasons for cheating, rather than the behaviors" (2025). I feel like this article helped me understand the root causes of cheating and it humanized, rather than villainized, the students. Also, as someone who works in a high school, I resonated with their sentiments that students are not taught how to properly research and cite articles; thus, they often do not know what cheating looks like (Galland & Rettinger, 2025). Unfortunately, I disagree that students can recognized basic cheating, such as copying and pasting from websites, because this is behavior I have seen numerous times in my own classroom. This notion takes me back to the Spiegel (2018) article in the sense that it highlights the need to teach students both technology skills and media ethics; students must learn these skills at some point, and I feel like the further we go up the educational ladder, the more we assume students already have these skills. In a time where technology and innovation are happening at such a high speed, I feel like we must help students identify cheating vs appropriate research and citations just as much as creating an environment where they feel they are capable of doing the work and also have opportunities to learn, fail, and grow.
I agree with you 100% I feel like AI has gotten to a place of no return so we need to adapt. We need to inform ourselves and inform our students when and how to use it. We need to inform them on the benefits and harmful effects.
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