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AI in Education podcast With Dan Bowen and Ray Fleming

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AI in Education podcast With Dan Bowen and Ray Fleming

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With Dan Bowen, Beth Worrall, and Lee Hickin from Microsoft Australia

It's a fortnightly chat about Artificial Intelligence in Education - what it is, how it works, and the different ways it is being used. It's not too serious, or too technical, and is intended to be a good conversation of background information.

Of course, as well as getting it here on the website, you can also just subscribe to your normal podcast service:

"This podcast is produced by Microsoft Australia & New Zealand employees, Lee Hickin, Dan Bowen, and Beth Worrall. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are our own."

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Lee Hickin, Beth Worrall, and Dan Bowen work in the Microsoft Australia and New Zealand team, they talk about Artificial Intelligence in Education - what it is, how it works, and the different ways it is being used. It's not too serious, or too technical, and is intended to be a good conversation of background information.

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Build digital skills and AI literacy with Minecraft

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Build digital skills and AI literacy with Minecraft

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Reed Smart: AI Detective world and resources used with Year 7 students at St Michael's Grammar School.

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Learn how to teach AI across the curriculum with Minecraft Education and write great prompts to generate engaging lesson plans.

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Need your co-workers to get better with AI? The University of Melbourne's Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) and Cool.org have come together to build this free course. "The programme opened my eyes to the variety of AI tools available and made using them feel less intimidating. I've been reluctant to try much beyond ChatGPT and Claude but can see the potential of trying other tools, particularly those purpose-built for education, and feel more open-minded about AI in general after completing the course."

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AI Literacy for teachers - Ethical AI in Education | Cool.org

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Join our free professional development course on AI in education to learn hands-on teaching strategies for ethical AI usage in the classroom. Created in partnership with AVPN and Melbourne University’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics.

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St Leonard's College is running a conference on 14th September - Wellbeing in the Age of AI. Adam Voigt, Kristy Elliot, Michael Carr-Gregg and Rafaelle Ciriello will all be speaking. We're also calling for abstracts for a teach-meet section in the afternoon - what systems around AI and technology have you introduced that are connected with your wellbeing policies? lt would be great to connect the silos of technology and wellbeing. Email charles.neave@stleonards.vic.edu.au for more information.

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Teachers and students exploring on their own without appropriate regard for risks.

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Very difficult to monitor what students or staff do

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Rename assessment policies to 'evidence of learning' which reframes the thinking about assessment

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AI Agents for NAPLAN/English marking

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Currently seen as the biggest concern in many schools. How do we prepare students and staff for the realities of this in an AI world, when VCAA hasn't shifted the goal posts in Year 12?

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How do we prepare our students and protect them from emotional dependency on AI technology? How do we prevent the technology 'hacking attachment' in the same way it has already hacked attention?

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Do BYOD schools need to seriously reconsider devices with local admin access and autonomous agents being able to act on their network with the identity of the school user?

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Question became 'how do we teach the teachers hiw to practically use AI?'.

We discussed creating workshops, the challenges in using policies and guidelines and applying them to our individual schools.

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Ethical issues around access - who has access to the best versions? Who doesn't? How can we ensure assessment is equitable?

We need to design assessments that call for critical and creative thinking - we are seeing more students memorising assessments (when asked to do it hand-written) that were assisted by AI at home.

The assessment aspect is in our control... this is something we can work on. What may be more concerning is how children are using chat bots. How do we continue to develop in this space? How much of a role should school's play? Children are leaving a digital footprint - student information is being shared with AI (often by the student's themselves). This needs a whole community approach.

Should we be resourcing specialised subjects like 'Digital Literacy' t ensure students understand the ethical issues

Special provisions - eg. voice prompts. Whilst it may be an ethical issue that we should respond to disabilities, are we also entrenching dependency... eg. not building up the ability to write in these situations. AI exacerbates these issues as it takes a role in 'doing' work.

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the approach that works best for us is collaborative staff profrofessional learning and real world examples. Supportive environment.

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Lack of awareness from students and staff about data and privacy

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Needing to be sure that there is the PD there for staff to educate and inform on a consistent basis, thus ensuring that people are more consciously thinking of what they are asking of AI and the data that they are putting out into the web

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How do we weigh up risk and innovation in schools?

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Are we being reactionary or proactive?

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Students taking ownership of their learning and thinking.

Digital dementia and cognitive offloading

Digital social media chat bots

Parents and community

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Do we trust our vendors? Do we trust our paid-for and recommended vendors... like Co-Pilot (Microsoft)? But also, with shadow AI, do we trust those extra tools that teachers are using (probably not). The key is to ensure we're giving quality professional learning to teachers.

Professional learning also needs to be provided to professional staff - not just teachers

Professional learning works best when it's practical - getting staff to get their device out. Also good to differentiate training to staff - giving them choice about which level to attend.

In K-12 schools - sometimes there is a divide between primary and secondary staff.

Sometimes staff don't actually understand that they are using AI... education is also important (in App AI).

Google Classroom is a powerful tool - with integrated AI. Integration is key for ease of use... but is the AI gathering data from areas that it shouldn't? How can we control this?

Develop a co-pilot agent which staff can use to ask questions about policies (about AI).

Students also need to understand when they are using AI - often they are not aware.

Deepfakes identified as a major issue going forward... how do we help our students to manage these challenges going forward? How do we protect the privacy of staff?

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AI should be used as a tool, not the final result

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AI should be used as a tool, not the final result

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AI can do some amazing things, but should still be used as a tool and can do a large portion of the job/role, but will always need a human to look over the result, as it is not infalliable, it doesn't know the intricacies of students and thier learning, their home situations, their wants and needs. AI can be used to assist for those who learn differently, but initially at least, doesn't know enough information that staff know instantly.

It is great to prompt it for another way of teaching, but you also need to know what the source of truth is (ie Grok has been changed MANY times to now spout "alternative facts". If you can't trust the source, you can't trust the information.

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How are schools managaing wearables?

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Varies greatly between faculties and staff. Whilst many have embraced AI as an a assistant to their planning, other staff view this as a "replacing" teachers, leading to teachers not wanting to adopt.

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Variation between faculties and sections

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Displayed in classrooms, assessment scale level listed on task sheets.

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Child Safety is becoming harder to protect

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Child Safety is becoming harder to protect

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Not only are there the countless social media sites to access, but now protecting children from generated advice is becoming harder.

No longer can you google a question and have a trusted, safe website offering advice, but now it is all generative answers, taken from all sources of the internet.

It is much harder to protect students from misinformation, both at school and at home, when AI still gives bad advice. Recently, a student was struggling with self-harm thoughts, and the advice provided by AI was almost the exact opposite of what should have been provided.

Lots more development needs to be done, to keep the information accurate and safe. It isn't there as yet, and that's a concern.

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how are we (teachers/schools) helping young people navigate their future?

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Lots of discussion about generating Agents for learning.

CoPilot licencing is impossible to work out! Documentation says Agents can be consumed without licences, but this is not what a couple of schools were reporting.

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Lots of great tools for teachers.

Data is stored in US so we are not able to recommend it officially for staff

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Many staff may be adopting technologies that are not trusted or secure due to feeling the need to 'adapt' or stay 'up to date' on changes in the AI landscape. Staff must ensure they are operating these technologies in appropriate environment with insignificant data. - Should schools develop policies around 'Trusted Sources' and platforms?

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Things start with staff. If we agree that some direct instruction around AI, technology use etc., then how can we rely on this if teachers don;t know themselves?

Teachers need to use AI tools in a skilful way. Writing prompts is still really important - so that students are required to respond, revise, be resilient, re-draft.

Leadership in schools need to have a buy-in. If leadership is engaged then teachers can also take this on. It comes down to reassessing teh way we teach and the way we assess. We need to be able to let go of general recall.

Day of AI seems like a decent resource

Social intents seems like a good basis for a school based chatbot that could be used with younger students

Clear guidelines for students still needed about AI

We need to be open minded about teachers using AI to assist in grading - a moderation tool. This is another PL tool.

Here's what St Leonard's College is doing: https://learn.stleonards.vic.edu.au/tpl/technology-at-stl/using-ai-as-an-educator/supporting-responsible-student-use/

Here's another interestng marking software: https://edexia.com/

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Students have their own page on effective and responsible use of AI, which is a powerful tool to put them on to. It has the basics of what LLMs are and how to use them effectively. To help students use LLMs appropriately: Be explicit about when AI is allowed - and when it's not.

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Schools align with one - if so, are we short changing our community by locking ourselves out of tools? Will this lock out lead to users signing up with their personal email addresses?

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Example: Filled out design thinking worksheet

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Example: Filled out design thinking worksheet

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Workload - Teachers

How can we use AI to improve our use of student data in a way that reduces teacher workload?

Parent teacher interviews: we need to have one source of summarised student data ready for PTIs

NAPLAN data - would be good to get a summarised snap shot of stduents usable for teachers

Bringing everything together in one place is important - and that would reduce the workload of looking in lots of places

We want the AI to be able to interpret the data and give us options of next steps

There's so much adata but no teacher has the time to look at teh data - and often lack the skills

AI can synthesis the data and digest it and present it in the right format.

AI needs to be able to build itself... it needs to be able to set itself up and create systems for us to use

AI needs to write the integration to join our data together - as an agent. Connecting Ed Perfect, all the places students do work, learning behaviours etc. Then it needs to interpret and summarise.

AI needs to help us to know our students better... go through their work and give us some key talking points

AI needs to build a structure that all ed tech companies can align to

Key question: how are students performing versus how are they expected to perform? AI needs to be able to give teachers this answer, with some suggestions as to next step actions.

AI also needs to give a synthesised interpretation of qualitative data.

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Rubbish is identified and students get rewarded by getting their barcode scanned