Activity: Experimenting with AI

Purpose

The purpose of this activity is to give you hands-on experience with generative AI tools. By getting a feeling for how these tools work we can be better informed on how students are using them, but also if they can help you in your daily tasks as an instructor.

Task

1. Access Microsoft Copilot Links to an external site.. If you aren’t already signed in with your Community Colleges of Spokane account, sign in using your Outlook/Office 365 login credentials.

2. Look for the “Protected” shield icon label near the top-right corner of the window. This ensures that you’re accessing Copilot using commercial data protection. It means that nothing you enter into Copilot will be saved or used as training data for the AI. Even in protected mode, we strongly advise not entering any sensitive information, identifying information, or student work into Copilot or other AI tools.

3. Start typing a prompt into the "Message Copilot" box to begin a conversation with Copilot. You can ask it to do almost anything — write a poem, a meal planning suggestion, a meeting agenda, an email, a grant proposal, etc. Giving it more specific prompts will generate more specific results. You can also iterate on your initial prompt, responding to what it writes in a conversational way, asking it to re-write its output with any modification you like. Experiment as much or as little as you like, before continuing.

4. Now try using the AI from the perspective of a student. Copy and paste the instructions for one of your writing-based assignments and ask the AI tool to complete the assignment. We recommend starting with one of your early class assignments, one that doesn't have a lot of scaffolding or prior context. As you read through Copilot's output, reflect: How would you feel about the submission if you didn't know it was AI generated? Would the output adequately meet all the requirements of the assignment and receive a decent grade?

5. Try iterating on Copilot's output, give it constructive feedback and ask it to revise its work. You can continue to refine the output with repeated iterations. Reflect: Were you able to achieve a better result with iteration? How much knowledge of the content did the iteration and refinement process require? What feels like it will always be missing?

6. Copy the text of your Copilot conversation and submit it to this assignment. The easiest way to do this is to select and copy the text of the conversation, and paste it into the text submission box below. You can also copy each piece of the conversation individually by clicking the copy button next to each conversation piece. This takes a few more steps, but will maintain more of the conversation formatting.

7. Along with your conversation transcript, share your reflections. Was anything surprising? Reassuring? Frustrating? Could your assignment be modified to make it more resistant to AI misuse? Could it be modified to work with AI in a more productive way? 

Criteria for Success

A successfully completed submission will demonstrate that you spent some time experimenting with Copilot, testing it against an assignment, iterating and refining prompts, and reflecting on the experience.

Click Next to start thinking through potential uses for Generative AI