Understand AI at Riverdale
🤖 Introduction
As AI continues to evolve, we have a responsibility to understand how AI might fit—or not fit—into our classrooms so we can best guide our students, support each other, and explore ways that we (as educators) can use AI to support our teaching practices and curriculum development. The resources below are meant to help you explore ways you can incorporate AI into your teaching practice and other day-to-day work for the school.
🛠️ Recommended Tools
AI tools are quickly evolving, and they are being incorporated into many popular tools users already know and love (Google Search, Bing Search, Instagram, macOS, iOS, Android, and more). Riverdale will continue to monitor and vet AI platforms so that we can support your work on campus while also protecting your data and activity based on Privacy Policies. Many free AI tools will use your activity to further train their AI models. As a school, we want to protect everyone's online presence as best as possible. Please refer to the resource below for acceptable AI platforms to use at Riverdale. If there is an AI tool or platform you think would be useful for your work at Riverdale, please reach out to the Technology Department by sending an email to support-ticket@riverdale.edu.
📝 Prompt Engineering Tips
No matter how good AI tools get, prompt engineering will always be important. The more detailed and focused your prompt/input is, the better the output you can expect! Find prompt engineering resources below for both faculty and students.
Tip for everyone: if you are not getting the output from an AI tool that you were expecting, don't be discouraged! Prompting is an iterative process, and requires experimentation, time and patience. Once you develop a working prompt model, then you can save a lot of time in the future. Reach out to the Technology Department by sending an email to support-ticket@riverdale.edu if you would like help developing prompts for your work at Riverdale (as either a teacher or a student). We would be happy to help point you in the right direction!
📜 Riverdale AI Policy
Riverdale's AI Working Working has worked to create an AI policy for both students and faculty. Some key ideas are outlined below as the AI policy pertains to classroom instruction:
- Students CAN ONLY USE AI in ways outlined by their teacher (AI Tutor Chart Levels)
- Student CAN ONLY USE school-approved AI platforms (Flint)
- Faculty MUST BE CLEAR about how AI CAN or CANNOT be used on assignments or projects (AI Tutor Chart Levels)
- Faculty CAN CHOOSE what level of AI is appropriate for their classes, assignments and projects
For more in-depth information about Riverdale's AI Policy, please find the policy resources as outlined below:
- (Employees) The AI Policy, AI Tutor Chart, and Cover Sheet are linked under the Employee Portal MS/US Page under Academics
- (Students) Teachers will share the policy with you in class. It will be linked in the Student Handbook shortly.
Detecting AI Work
While it may seem tempting to use AI text detectors to identify potential instances of academic dishonesty, there are several reasons why these tools are not always a good choice. AI text detectors often struggle to accurately identify whether a piece of text was written by a human or generated by AI. False positives can occur, unfairly penalizing students for work they genuinely created. Additionally, many AI text detection tools operate as "black boxes," meaning they do not provide clear explanations for their decisions. This lack of transparency can make it difficult for educators to justify their conclusions about potential plagiarism or to provide meaningful feedback to students. Finally, AI text detectors often require access to students' work, which can raise concerns about data privacy and security. The use of such tools might conflict with privacy policies or student rights, especially if sensitive data is shared with third-party services without proper consent.
Given these concerns, Riverdale does not recommend AI detectors in favor of more reliable methods, such as using revision history in Google Workspace or Turnitin's plagiarism detection capabilities. These tools offer a more transparent, effective, and ethical approach to validating student work. More information about Revision History Tools can be found in the article below.