Abstract: As a crucial teaching tool for fostering digital citizenship, generative artificial intelligence plays an extremely important role in higher education in the digital era. As a constitutive element of smart teaching, generative artificial intelligence overcomes the bottleneck of textbooks lagging behind reality by constructing a cross-disciplinary knowledge system that keeps pace with the times. It shapes students' critical thinking and professional skills by creating an immersive learning environment with human-machine collaboration. Furthermore, it promotes the continuous optimization of the educational ecosystem towards empowering students' growth throughout the entire cycle by creating an intelligent core that enables self-adaptation of the teaching system. Taking the course "National Security and Rule of Law" as an example, we should fully leverage the role of generative artificial intelligence in smart teaching. On one hand, we should adhere to student development as the center, follow the laws of education and teaching as well as the laws of student growth, and build a new ecosystem of smart education centered on student development. On the other hand, we should be proficient in the application strategies of generative artificial intelligence, deeply integrate it into the entire process before, during, and after class, and form a new "teacher-machine-student" ternary collaborative classroom model. This will continuously enhance students' core competitiveness to adapt to the future and contribute to the construction of a powerful educational nation.