The teenagers have strong opinions when asked if dogs or cats can better keep a secret, or if a hot dog can be considered a sandwich. The question projected onto the whiteboard on a recent Tuesday, however, left many of them stumped.
"Are robots smarter than humans?" it read.
The IDEA Carver College Prep students debated what a robot is, declaring it everything from self-driving cars to smart kitchen appliances.
"What about artificial intelligence?" one of them asked. Not quite, Martin responded, but robots can be powered by AI — just like the tools everyone uses in her classroom.
Teachers nationwide are adapting to the rise of generative AI, helping shape its transformative impact on education. In Texas, they're doing it pretty much on the fly.
The Texas Education Agency has sent them no guidance. Most San Antonio area school districts have yet to adopt formal policies, though administrators are experimenting with fledgling platforms and weighing the risks against the potential rewards.
Teachers can use it at their discretion, for now — and many teachers think the rewards already are obvious.
Those embracing the new tools say they can increase productivity, personalize learning opportunities and rapidly execute otherwise time-consuming tasks.
Some educators worry about the possible drawbacks — academic dishonesty, stifled creativity and compromised student privacy — of AI-fueled teaching technology.
Martin says she's going for the right balance between using AI and empowering students to be independent thinkers. The ones in her AP English composition course draft open-ended responses to essay topics in class, and the next day plug their work into Class Companion, a platform that helps teachers provide instant feedback — which Martin always checks and if necessary, tweaks.
"It's like the tool is the infantry and we get to be the generals," she said.
'PROCEED WITH CAUTION'
A teacher for 12 years, Martin knows a thing or two about cheating.
Despite widespread wariness that AI could make plagiarism easier, she hasn't seen a rise in it since the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot that generates instant answers and analyses in response to prompts. It can mimic human language but it can't mimic individuals in her class, Martin said.
"As long as you're doing your job as a teacher and you have done some preliminary assessments to get a feel for your students' writing, you will be able to spot it," she said.
When an assignment does raise suspicions, Martin runs it through a detection tool that also, ironically, is driven by AI. She showed a reporter one example, a student essay flagged for appearing to be 90 percent AI-generated. Students who misuse the technology to cheat face the same consequences as any other student who violates the school's academic integrity policy.
Teachers can easily deter the inappropriate use of AI by creating assignments focused on the learning process rather than the end result, said Christine Ramsey, the director for instructional technology at North East Independent School District. The idea that using AI opens the door to more cheating is slowing down efforts to apply it to challenges facing public education, she said.
Teacher are using AI but students are currently blocked from accessing it on NEISD devices. Blocking the sites forever, though, "would be like chasing our tails," she added. Once students are well-informed on best practices, the district will provide more opportunities for them to use it.
"We are on the excited side of AI because we feel like this might open up some possibilities for students who may not have someone at home to lean on academically," Ramsey said. "It may help level the playing field a bit."
The district's AI task force tracks usage across its campuses and encourages staff to follow an "80/20 model." When providing feedback, for example, a tool like Brisk AI can take on 80 percent of the work, but teachers should do the final 20 percent to ensure accuracy and personalize the result.
Instead of worrying about cheating, educators should concentrate on "how we can use AI as a resource to help students understand the content better," said Adam Gonzalez, a math coordinator for Northside ISD, San Antonio's largest school district.
About half of the 20 teachers Gonzalez oversees as an instructional coach at John Jay High School use AI regularly. The others are hesitant but open-minded, he said.
Last year, Gonzalez led training on MagicSchool AI, a platform that assists teachers plan lessons, generate assignments and unpack grade-level curriculum standards. Math teachers can use it to transform number questions into relatable word problems or create group activities based on class lessons.
They can also teach AI literacy by asking chatbots to solve math problems incorrectly and getting students to find where they went wrong.
While Northside ISD is embracing AI, it's a "proceed-with-caution situation," the district's academic technology director, Carrie Squyres, said.
But teachers are leading that procession, requesting what tools they want access to and weaving them into instruction as they see fit.
Administrators met this summer to discuss the need to develop a districtwide AI policy, but "when you start asking yourself if you should be developing policy around something, it's already too late," Squyres said.
Class Companion and MagicSchool AI are among the most popular education-focused platforms among teachers. So is Canva for Education, which offers a suite of "student-safe" resources, from content editing and reformatting to presentation design. After training staff, the district gave high schoolers access to the website this school year.
"Teachers never have enough time. And if we can help them claim back a little bit of time so they can spend it on more creative ventures or working directly with students, then that's the angle we want to take," Squyres said.
Artificial intelligence has enabled Northside ISD to connect with families it has "had a hard time reaching," she said. On Screencastify, for example, teachers can translate class recordings to more than 50 languages in a jiff.
The tools are currently free, and, like other districts that use them, Northside has required the companies to sign data privacy agreements.
"Because this has now taken off, there's an immense opportunity for these companies to make quite a profit," Squyres noted. "Unfortunately, that's probably not going to be from us, because we won't have the budget to keep up."
TOOL OR CRUTCH?
Back at IDEA Carver, AP social studies teacher Monica Flores said she interacts with AI daily, from asking it to break down course exam descriptions and interpret public data sets to drafting emails to send to parents.
"I try to integrate it into everything I do," she said. "It has made my life and my job so much easier."
Time is scarce in her high-volume classrooms and Flores said she is not usually able to read over each student's class work and offer them immediate feedback. Tools like Class Companion can instantly identify areas that need improvement and provide additional intervention to students struggling with assignments.
"AI isn't going anywhere," Flores said. "It's going to be part of our lives forever. There is no escaping it, so we have to work with it and learn how to master it."
Teachers old and new are "all scrambling to keep up" as education is being reshaped by machine learning, said Tina Bausinger, a lecturer at Palo Alto College.
She said she occasionally uses AI to provide clear rubrics for her English composition classes but draws the line at using it to grade student assignments because AI "can't gauge my students' growth like I can."
Hired by the Alamo Colleges District earlier this year, Bausinger has a doctorate in higher education administration and learning technology and has taught at the high school and college levels for 12 years. Both the cautionary tales and the abundance of potential at the intersection of AI and academia were at the forefront of her training, she said.
Bausinger doesn't allow her students to lean on AI to complete assignments, but she sometimes wants to. They often struggle with writing thesis statements and sites like ChatGBT can be a handy springboard for that work. But she also knows some students would go too far, copying AI-generated text and submitting it as their own. For now, she's fixed on creating strong writers who feel confident enough to do without the help.
"As an English teacher, it is my goal that I help students tap into their natural writing skills, and I think jumping in and showing them (how) to use AI right away kind of cripples the process," Bausinger said.
She also worries permitting AI would give those who can afford the best programs the upper hand against "a student of limited means who is trying to break out of generational poverty."
Equity concerns prompted San Antonio ISD to move in the other direction, opting against the trend at other schools districts to block AI on district-provided laptops and Wi-Fi. Barring those sites puts low-income students at an even greater disadvantage, said Eva Mendoza, the district's chief information technology officer.
The district has created an AI strategy group of teachers, administrators and central office staff to develop guidelines and train students on ethical use.
"The digital divide is real, and we don't want to worsen it further," Mendoza said. "AI is not going to take people's jobs. People who know how to use AI are going to take other people's jobs — so we need to put our kids at the same level as everybody else."
Mendoza's biggest concern is data privacy. It would be easy to copy and paste a special education student's Individualized Education Plan into an AI-powered tool to generate assignments, but "that's not supposed to be done because you're dumping secure student data into this open world," she said.
People need to be aware of what type of AI model they are working with and how the data is being used, she warned. But there's great promise for increased efficiency and student outcomes if AI is used appropriately, Mendoza said.
"As school districts, one of our biggest jobs is to ensure these kids are ready for the world after they leave us, and that world now includes AI," she said. "I don't think schools really have a choice. If they want to fulfill their mission, they need to embrace AI."
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