The Santa Fe school board unveiled a plan last week to guide teachers on using AI in the classroom, including a pilot program to provide up to 1,000 students with AI tutoring software.
“What’s important to understand — and what we will help our teachers and our students understand — is that AI is intended to be a thought partner,” said Neal Weaver, Santa Fe Public Schools’ chief information and strategy officer.
The plan, derived from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, involves providing teachers with AI tools to help in the classroom and a guided spectrum on how much AI use is acceptable for students on a scale from zero to four — zero, meaning the assignment allows students no aid from AI, and four, meaning students have full use of AI as a “co-pilot to enhance human creativity,” Weaver said.
“We’re absolutely not going to replace teachers, but [AI] allows teachers to be able to focus on specific student needs,” Weaver said. “It saves teachers hours of time.”
For example, AI applications could assist teachers in providing students with speedy feedback on their work or compiling summary reports on the subjects each student finds most challenging, said Vanessa Romero, the district’s deputy superintendent for teaching and learning.
In some cases, teachers already have started incorporating AI programs in their classrooms to provide students with real-time feedback.
Two years ago, Santa Fe Public Schools adopted Amira Learning, an AI software to tutor students in reading in both English and Spanish. The software “listens” to students read and provides adjustments based on errors it “hears,” offering feedback to students and a report to teachers.
The district also uses Khanmigo, an AI math tutor. The AI voice asks guided questions without providing a direct answer to the math problem at hand.
And earlier in September, the district rolled out its “Chat for Schools” pilot program, which will provide 12 middle and high school teachers with 1,000 licenses for a specialized version of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot made by OpenAI. The technology will allow educators to design their own tutors.
“They’re not providing answers; they’re providing guidance,” said Gary Lewis , Santa Fe Public Schools’ director of digital learning.
Why embrace AI so readily? Because, Lewis said, “artificial intelligence is here and has been here.”
Lewis gave examples: After his most recent doctor’s visit, AI sent him a medical report. AI anticipated the paths of recent hurricanes better than human models did. And AI dictates the search engines in our phones and computers.
Another reason for embracing it, Lewis said, is that students are already using AI in their classes, and the new initiatives might give educators the tools to regulate its use.
The school board expressed some concern about students using artificial intelligence to complete their assignments for them.
Anti-plagiarism tools are already in the software, Lewis said, though the burden still lies on educators to “know the voice of their students.”
Some, however, still urge caution in the adoption of AI. In a presentation Monday before the legislative Science, Technology and Telecommunications Committee, AI expert and University of New Mexico computer science professor Melanie Moses pushed back on the idea that AI is just another piece of powerful technology.
“This is a kind of tool we haven’t seen before,” she said. “Being afraid of it is not helpful. Recognize that it is here and it could do very damaging things — and it could do very extraordinarily transformative, helpful things.”
Whether it helps or hurts depends on how humans treat AI, Moses said.
Since the technology learns from human data, it’s susceptible to human biases. Algorithmic bias tends to identify doctors as male, terrorists as Muslim and criminals as African American , she explained — which can cause real harm to the humans with whom the technology interacts.
“Some of this material is from decades or even centuries ago,” Moses said. “We’re pulling biases and false beliefs — maybe incorrect scientific or medical beliefs from a very distant past — and potentially projecting those into the future.”
Some beliefs can be as explicitly incorrect as the number of R’s in the word “strawberry,” which AI has insisted is two.
Moses’ biggest concern was the impact on the creative economy. Her class of computer science students — many of whom are “fans of AI” — were in 100% agreement that the technology “is stealing creative work and using it to take the jobs of creatives.”
If AI is to be a collaborator rather than a competitor in creativity, Moses said, “it needs a nudge in that direction. I don’t think we want to trust that to happen on its own.”
©2024 The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, N.M.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
