“You’ve got this, teachers,” Logan said, “because you deal with this every day.”
Logan, who teaches social studies in the Snoqualmie Valley School District in Washington state, shared her district’s recent and ongoing experiences with AI on Sunday during the National School Boards Association Annual Conference in New Orleans. The presentation, “The Times, They are a Changing,” was attended by educators and school board members from several states.
The Snoqualmie district, located 30 miles east of Seattle in a community where many parents work in the technology industry, has 7,109 students in grades K-12. A fund for technology improvements was established in a community referendum. When the district began using ChatGPT and other AI tools at the high school level last year, the district communicated all related information on its website, including federal privacy standards and regulations. Parents were allowed to opt their child out from any AI use, but so far none have, explained Justin Talmadge, the district’s technology director.
To underscore the significance of how AI will transform education, Talmadge provided an AI-generated image of a school building on top of an aircraft carrier ship.
“Building the plane while we’re flying it,” he said.
Feedback from staff and students so far has run the gamut, Talmadge explained as he shared a slide of examples, but most opinions have been positive. One teacher remarked: “Please stop pushing AI on us. Let us do our jobs our own way.” One student, when asked to note the challenges and opportunities presented by AI, said: “A challenge is wanting to cheat on a test (I don’t, but I once saw someone else cheat), and an opportunity is editing my essay.”
When asked why AI should be used, Talmadge and Logan noted that some future version of ChatGPT with a 1,600 IQ could be what’s needed to cure cancer and solve some of the world’s problems, so a tool of that magnitude should be included in education. They recommend creating an early adopters’ group to help districts pilot and navigate AI tools. The Snoqualmie district offers a digital learning day in August so teachers can learn from each other, and many of them also attend professional development programs throughout the country. The district website also has blogs and short-form videos where educators can share their experience.
Logan emphasized the importance of prompt engineering, by which students develop strong communications skills for directing AI to retrieve the information they need. Sometimes vague and more open-ended prompting is a good way to explore broad topics and allow a student’s curiosity to lead the way.
“You can’t outsource the entire writing assignment to AI,” she said, but the tool can provide you with great ideas to get started and assist with the organization and editing process.
Logan provided an example of a student who struggled with writing. He was assigned an essay about the Declaration of Independence and complained that he could not relate to that piece of history. When Logan asked the student what he could relate to, he replied “football.” In a brief exchange after that, the boy decided that the concept of meritocracy pertained to both topics, and he wrote an excellent piece about how football players are able to get to the National Football League not based on their wealth or where they came from, but their hard work, talent and abilities. And the words in the essay were consistent with the student’s views and understanding of the concept that connected the topics.
Logan noted that while her experience represents only one district, determining the future of AI in the classroom is especially challenging right now because guidelines and suggested policies are ambiguous or vague.
“The air is clear and cold, but the view is beautiful,” she said of the regulatory environment around AI. “We are here because we want better outcomes for students for a fair and just world. This [AI] may be one of the ways you can achieve it.”
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