We have no lazy students. 
It is a challenging but necessary task. Our goal is to create learners, not hoop jumpers. While they matriculate through our school, we will do our best to teach the intrinsic value of learning and to reinforce it through good habits at school. Once they graduate, it is up to them to have imbibed those principles to guide them through college and career. It is not an easy task, not one that will be 100 foolproof, but it is necessary to try. 
I agree with the concern and goal. But I would push back pretty hard in 2024 as either a parent or student if a private school required pen/paper.
Perhaps you could require that for any source referenced in a paper there needs to be not only a citation to the original article but also at least one full sentence from the source quoted as part of the paper. That would encourage students to use AI in a desirable way as a means to locate primary sources but not to replace reading them.
That is a good idea and is one of the options we are considering. For clarification, we are a “high-tech” school. We issue iPads or laptops to every student and have multiple laptop carts, extensive computer science/engineering and other STEM labs, Apple TVs, and large screens in every room, conference room, common area, and administrative office. We are outfitting an eSports room and more. I share that only because I don’t want to be misinterpreted as backing off our commitment to tech in the school. We are not.
We are assessing whether or not, for some written assignments, the students will learn more and do better by employing older “tech” like pen and paper for some academic work and test taking–back to the “blue book?” We do not know and have made no decision, so we are undertaking a comprehensive review of options and current literature on the subject.
We will embrace AI (I’ve mandated all senior leaders use it to ensure we know what we’re talking about ) and continue operating as a 1:1 iPad/laptop school. We seek to answer the question, "Are there academic areas or times where a return to pen and paper makes sense? " We don’t know the answer. But, it is a question that should be asked and answered. I understand that some (many?) universities have adopted such an approach for test taking. That doesn’t mean it is wise to do so; it only means we are not alone in wrestling with the question. What I don’t want to do is never ask the question or presume the answer before we have looked at all options and reviewed the literature on the issue.
Let’s call them productivity oriented students 
. I actually think that skilfully using tech to make your life easier is something that should be encouraged. So it makes the task even harder.
Love that!!
I actually think that skilfully using tech to make your life easier is something that should be encouraged.
I agree, and we do. What I don’t want to have to happen is students substituting “artificially generated work” as their own or, in the name of efficiency, failing to do the hard work of thinking and writing. Reading, thinking, and writing are essential for learning and creativity. It also encourages the virtues of handwork, perseverance, and grit. We want students to experience the benefits of hard intellectual work.
If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.” Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus
Not an exact application but the principle applies.
100% agreed. Also, I think when AI tools become even more prevalent, expert skills and knowledge become even more important because more menial office work can be automated. So to prepare students for life, all the skills need to be trained.
Absolutely, which is why we are adding one or more AI courses to our STEM program; we are not sure what that looks like, but prompt engineering and “big data analysis” may be components of the program. We are also exploring to what extent AI can help us identify school-wide academic performance trends and individual academic strengths and weaknesses to help us better customize instruction to individual student needs.
This is a high school? Sounds more sophisticated than many colleges. Wow how I would have enjoyed such a school if it existed in my day.
Where is the school? What is the tution?
We are blessed to be able to provide an education that is thoroughly Christian and academically excellent, though there is always room for improvement, beginning with the Head of School.
It is a 7-12 school in Town & Country, MO. Tuition is 21,000/year. We provide 33% of the student body with financial assistance totaling $3.2M. Most students’ tuition is offset by the college scholarships our students are awarded. Consequently, parents consider the school an investment in their children’s spiritual and academic development and a good ROI considering the college scholarships (academic and athletic) awarded.
I would not leave my notes to Google. It is sad that they have neglected the space even in their Enterprise G Suite offering, (i.e. Google Keep is too basic). But one can wait a little bit and see what Microsoft does with One Note, that’s going to be where the real stuff is.
Edit: to say that I was not intended to quote reply to you specifically (Fat fingers!) but my point remains: you didn’t mention Google 
I probably won’t. It is challenging to convert Google Docs to various other formats. I prefer to use Obsidian, DEVONthink, or other more versatile applications. That said, I’m primarily interested in effective, reliable, and trustworthy integration of AI in my everyday tools—writing apps, task managers, calendars, and the like.
At work, we use Google Workspace for everything. I enjoy using it. But for my private data I don’t trust them. The problem is that they kill services all the time. And this one is labelled as experimental.
I started using Gmail in 2004 and it stayed in beta for five years. 
I’m still in Beta, I’m a work in process, just ask my wife.
I see; interesting. If I’m understanding the process is:
So, ultimately it looks like it is limited by the context size. AWS Kendra gives you a 20k retrieval context and will let you pass all of it into the prompt if you want. NotebookLM’s is 5-10x bigger.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between the size of the retrieved content passed into the prompt and how well the LLM can use it and precisely answer, but Google might have additional secret sauce here that would let them perform as well as Kendra on a larger dataset.
At least, that’s my understanding. Hopefully they’ll share more details (and same for how they’re preventing a quality drop-off with the one million token context, assuming they’re doing something other than allowing tenfold the processing vs. 128k.)
That is a great description of the process! The term “Retrieval-Augmented Generation” turns out to be very apt. I believe NotebookLM, or tools like it, could prove highly beneficial for DevonThink users with extensive databases of articles,
Agreed; this approach seems ideal for a folder of documents in DT, ideally with a locally run model. I hope Devon is working on something clever.
Google had its notebook before, between 2008 and 2011.
I’m not worried about Google Workspace, it’s making money and gaining some large customers like Airbus and the US Army. And to be fair a few of the services they “killed” were just name changes or upgrades. I got a Grand Central phone number in 2006 and it transferred to Google Voice when they bought the company.
But yes, Google throws a lot of services at the wall to see what sticks. Lately they’ve started bring in outside experts, like Steven Johnson, to work with their developers. Johnson is the author of thirteen books and a long time Devonthink user. Maybe his working on NotebookLM will help them raise their batting average . . . maybe.