Hello, my name is Katherine Ornelas and I plan to teach English to high school students. So far my only experience in education is with elementary school students, and my time with my young students was incredibly challenging and rewarding. I personally feel that certain forms of media technology have no place in schools, such as social media and generative AI. Social media is a form of entertainment and it distracts students from their lessons. More than that, social media use can be dangerous for especially young students. Even alert students who try to keep themselves safe from strangers online are at risk of becoming anxious and isolated when they rely too much on the internet for socialization. As far as generative AI goes, there are ethical ways to use it to assist students during the brainstorming stage of their projects, but the way I've seen it used by students has only been detrimental to their education. Programs such as ChatGPT not only plagiarize ideas from existing published works, they also regurgitate that information in such a way that it creates a "final draft soup" for essays and presentations which consist of made-up statistics pulled from made-up sources. Students who get caught using generative AI to do their homework from them have to deal with the added embarrassment of turning in a product so nonsensical and robotic that it becomes clear to those students that they could have done a much better job if they'd so much as completed the project themselves hours before it was due. At least by doing your project the night before, you have a decent chance of retaining a fraction of what you've learned for that class, which cannot be said for copy and pasting projects churned out by ChatGPT. Of course I don't think that all media technology should be kept from classrooms, but we need to try to inform administrators, parents, and students of the risks and downsides to generative AI and social media in the classroom.
