Learning with AI

What significance does artificial intelligence have for schools? This revolutionary technology harbours countless opportunities, but also confronts schools and teachers with a variety of challenges. At Swisscom.ch/campus, we offer tips for parents, an online webinar and a new course for teachers on AI in schools.

I recently had an interesting conversation about this with Lucerne primary school teacher Werner Odermatt, who teaches children in the fifth and sixth grades. He actively works with AI and explained to me why he finds it exciting and useful. It's best if I let him tell me himself:

"We primarily use Chat GPT during so-called learning time, when pupils work individually on a task. A concrete example: We recently had the topic 1920s. I gave the children a picture and they had to ask Chat GPT specific questions to find out more about this period.

Linguistic quality as an advantage

The advantage of the Chat GPT language model is that it answers such questions in excellent language quality. The children have to read and understand the answers and derive further questions from them. Or ask further questions if the answer is too complicated. As they do this work individually, they are all highly focussed, motivated and find the lessons very exciting as they receive continuous feedback on their work.

The fact that the information from Chat GPT is not always correct is critically included in the lessons.

This example shows that I use AI in its current form primarily because of its linguistic quality. We critically incorporate the fact that the information from Chat GPT is not always correct into the lessons: The children learn to scrutinise the answers and develop a critical attitude, which in turn is a core element of media lessons.

AI also enables me to teach in completely new ways. For example, we recently conducted an interview in class in which Chat GPT took on the role of Napoleon. The children asked questions and the AI provided answers of a high standard in terms of quality and content.

Children are fascinated by AI

The children were fascinated and the learning effect was correspondingly high. It is important to me that the children learn to work with these tools at primary school. As teachers, we can still have an influence here and show them in class that the computer is not just a fun device, but can be used for serious work. At the same time, we also want to motivate the children to be critical and alert when dealing with the information provided. If we only start doing this in the upper school, the train has already left the station."