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Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Schools

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The Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools (the Framework) seeks to guide the responsible and ethical use of generative AI tools in ways that benefit students, schools, and society. The Framework supports all people connected with school education including school leaders, teachers, support staff, service providers, parents, guardians, students and policy makers.

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AI 101 For Teachers: Fireside Chat with Sal Khan and Hadi Partovi

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TeachAI | AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit

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The AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit is designed to help education authorities, school leaders and teachers create their own thoughtful guidance to achieve potential benefits of incorporating artificial intelligence in primary and secondary K-12 education while mitigating risks.

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computer science and information technology

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How genAI is revolutionizing the field of economics | CNN Business

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Anton Korinek, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, tells the students he advises nowadays that they should really begin to master a flourishing technology expected to transform the field of economics. That technology is generative artificial intelligence, or "genAI" for short.

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10 ways Curipod engages your students with AI

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Curipod creates interactive slide presentations in seconds using artificial intelligence. It can engage your students and save you time.

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Readiness Checklist / Readiness Checklist

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Giving students guidelines for AI use on assignments-via a green, yellow, or red light-provides clarity around this powerful technology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the way we teach and learn. However, with great power comes great responsibility. It's crucial for us as educators to establish clear guidelines for students on when and where AI can be used in the classroom. This ensures that the technology serves as an aid to learning, rather than a crutch or a tool of academic dishonesty.

As teachers returned to school with an eagerness to incorporate AI into their instruction, our coaching team began helping them to develop clear guidelines for students on when it's appropriate to use AI and when it is not. We believe that every summative assignment should include AI guidelines as part of the instructions, guidelines, and rubrics that students are already given.

Red Light: AI Usage Is Not Permitted in This Activity

This option is straightforward and leaves no room for interpretation. It is particularly useful for assessments or activities where the primary goal is to evaluate individual student understanding and skills. By explicitly stating that AI collaboration is not allowed, educators can maintain the integrity of the assessment process.

For assignments that fall under the "red light" category, think of traditional quizzes, exams, or short-answer questions that are designed to assess individual knowledge and skills. These are activities where the primary goal is to evaluate each student's understanding of the material. Is the activity designed to assess individual understanding? Is it a formative assessment where collaboration could skew the results?

It's essential to explain the rationale behind this restriction. Students are more likely to comply with rules when they understand the reasoning behind them. In these cases, teachers can have conversations with students about the importance of individual assessment. They can explain how this type of evaluation helps identify areas where improvement is needed and why academic honesty is a skill that will serve them well throughout their educational journey and beyond. Providing context helps students see the bigger picture and appreciate the importance of adhering to guidelines.

Providing clarity is especially important when students are working independently from home. When students are not physically present in the classroom, it can be tempting for them to seek AI assistance when they shouldn't. Thus, it becomes paramount for educators to set clear expectations about when AI collaboration is permitted and when it is not. Just as teachers have guidelines for plagiarism, citing sources, etc., so can they have guidelines around AI use.

While it's true that some students may not always adhere to the guidelines when working from home, it's crucial to recognize that teaching responsible AI usage is a valuable educational opportunity. Instead of simply restricting AI access, we should aim to empower students with the knowledge and understanding they need to make responsible choices.

Yellow Light: permission from teacher required before using AI

This option offers a balanced approach, allowing for the possibility of AI usage while maintaining a level of oversight. The "yellow light" option is particularly useful for long-term projects that require extensive research, group activities where individual contributions are part of a collective grade, or case studies that could benefit from multiple perspectives.

Incorporating AI tools into the classroom, such as Magicschool.ai, Diffit, and Perplexity, can enhance the learning experience in these scenarios. These technologies offer valuable resources that, when used with guidance and permission, can amplify students' abilities to explore, learn, and contribute collectively. It is in these nuanced situations that the "yellow light" approach shines, facilitating the responsible integration of AI into the learning process, promoting teamwork, and fostering a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

When students ask for permission to use AI, it opens the door for a meaningful dialogue. Teachers can ask students to articulate what they hope to achieve with the aid of AI and how it aligns with the objectives of the activity. This conversation also provides an opportunity to discuss the ethical considerations of using AI, such as the importance of citing sources when incorporating external content. By requiring permission, educators can ensure that students have a clear understanding of the activity's objectives and how AI can appropriately aid in achieving them.

Green light: Students are encouraged to use AI software

This option is the most open, encouraging students to explore the capabilities of AI in their learning journey. Assignments that are ideal for the "green light" option include creative writing tasks where AI can serve as a brainstorming tool, research projects that involve gathering and analyzing large sets of data, or activities that encourage innovation, such as coding projects or design tasks.

However, the openness of this option necessitates a robust framework for ethical usage and academic integrity. Before diving in, students are required to discuss their planned approach with the teacher. This ensures that the use of AI complements rather than replaces human effort. The conversation also serves as a checkpoint for discussing how to properly indicate AI collaboration in their work and reinforcing the importance of transparency and ethical conduct.

Managing the "green light" option when dealing with a large number of students will certainly require planning. One strategy that teachers can employ to effectively oversee this open approach is to establish online discussion forums or collaboration spaces where students can share their plans for integrating AI into their work. These platforms can provide students with a space to post their ideas, seek feedback from both peers and the teacher, and foster a sense of collaboration.

Conversations and Considerations

These guidelines serve as a framework for teachers when assigning work. They are communicated explicitly at the outset of any assignment or activity where AI collaboration could be a factor. The advance notice is crucial; students are more likely to adhere to rules when they are aware of them beforehand and understand the reasoning behind them.

The conversation between educator and student during the "permission phase" of the yellow and green light options is invaluable. It serves not just as a checkpoint but as a teachable moment, helping students learn the nuances of academic integrity and ethical technology usage.

A valuable strategy to manage a full roster of students is to schedule regular check-in sessions, either individually or in small groups. During these sessions, teachers can discuss each student's AI usage plan, offer personalized guidance, and ensure that ethical standards are upheld.

The integration of AI in education is not a matter of if but when. As educators, we have the responsibility to guide our students in navigating this new landscape ethically and effectively. By being clear about the guidelines for AI usage in classroom activities, we can foster an environment that encourages innovation while maintaining academic integrity.

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A Stoplight Model for Guiding Student AI Usage

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Teachers can create AI usage guidelines for different activities so students know when and how they can use these tools.

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Create review questions, quizzes, lessons, or enhance previous quizizzes with quizizz AI using websites or typing in a topic.

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"AI integration allows for changing the question type, correcting grammatical errors & my personal favorite, replacing the question with a similar one - all generated by AI! Major teacher time-saver!"
Evan Mosier, Tech Innovator, Davenport Community Schools

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Quizizz AI | Your personalized teaching assistant

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AI (artificial intelligence) technology has infiltrated all aspects of our lives, including making its way into our education system . AI's role in education can revolutionize the way we learn and teach from student engagement to teaching styles , including helping learners of all different styles more accurately understand course materials.

In this article, we'll outline the many ways AI is being used in education, and it's impact both positive and negative.

Skip ahead:

Before we dive into the many ways AI can help improve the education system first, we'll define it. So, what is AI anyway?

AI, sometimes called machine intelligence, is the simulated human intelligence in computers. Think SIRI, which uses artificial intelligence for voice recognition.

4 ways AI in education helps improve student outcomes

There are so many ways AI can help students. From identifying early signs of struggle to creating a more interactive and personalized learning plan. Here are 4 ways it can positively impact students' learning.

The ability to cater to personal learning styles is one of the most positive benefits of AI in education. AI technology can easily adapt to different learning styles . And taking things a step further, AI technology has the ability to analyze students' past performance and make tailored lesson plans and adjustments based on past performance.

When it comes to personalized learning, AI can also help point students in the right direction for resources and other useful data and information. AI has the ability to come up with personalized study plans for students without having to wait for interventions from learning specialists. All while meeting the overarching goal of making learning easier and helping students interact more effectively with the material so that it sinks in.

Finally, Where AI really shines from a personalized learning level is its ability to reach students at a mass level. With overcrowded classrooms at the elementary school level and classrooms of hundreds of people at the post-secondary level, AI can help personalize to all students at once, making it easier for everyone to succeed.

Sometimes students need that extra bit of help, and AI allows you access to on-demand tutoring without an actual in-person or live Zoom tutoring session. Because AI uses algorithms to adapt, it can quickly shift to cover the areas students need the most support. Much like a human tutor would adapt to a student's learning style and ability to absorb the information, AI tutoring systems are quite sophisticated in their ability to focus on areas of strength and improvement to deepen individual students' education as a whole.

AI-based tutoring technology's major advantage is the ability to help students understand complicated, sophisticated terms and concepts on a mass level.

Finally, with AI, access to tutoring is no longer limited to those who can afford to pay for it. Additionally, educators can spend less time focusing on helping those who don't understand the concepts, allowing them to keep the lessons and momentum going.

A huge chunk of teachers' time is spent grading assignments. Ai technology can help speed up this process. In addition, when it comes to improving essays and assignments, AI technology can analyze and give students feedback on things like grammar, content, and vocabulary. By taking that shift off teachers, they can focus on other aspects of teaching that are important, like lesson planning and student engagement.

Finally, one of the biggest advantages of automating assessments and grades is that it eliminates human error, biases, and mistakes. It can also provide each student with a detailed outline of where they went wrong and how they can improve, with no extra time involved for teachers.

AI can keep students engaged in educational material and keep learning interesting. One of the ways educators can incorporate AI into the classroom is through the use of Chat Bots. Chat Bots' ability to personalize and adapt to students' learning styles creates more opportunities to keep students engaged. And the fact that Chat Bots can be accessed anytime or anywhere means that students can work at their own pace and continue their learning outside of traditional class times.

The fact that AI improves engagement is exciting for course creators. It means they can provide very personalized and interactive learning of their courses, regardless of the topic. Which improves what people take away from your courses and helps strengthen the impact it has on people's lives.

3 ways AI in education benefits teachers

So far, we've talked a lot about how AI can benefit students. However, there is a huge potential impact on educators as well-particularly when it comes to ways it can save time.

Here are the top three ways AI in education is beneficial to teachers.

A cool and emerging area of AI in education is predictive analytics. AI can analyze data and predict which students might fall through the cracks. Predictive analytics is exciting for educators as it means students with learning challenges can be identified earlier and given the tools they need to be successful. Additionally, early intervention means that students who may have otherwise failed or struggled have the opportunity to become successful students by being given the right tools to help them succeed.

One of the ways AI is used in education is to enhance teaching methods. With so much on teachers' plates these days, there is often little time to organize alternate ways of learning without putting in hours over and above classroom hours. By using AI technology, teachers have the ability to quickly put together games and simulations that help students practice and learn the lessons being taught without having to put more time into lesson planning, which is a huge time saver for teachers.

If you ask any teacher and they'll tell you that assessments are one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. An exciting area of AI in education is the use AI technology to improve and speed up the assessment and grading process. For example, assessments can be done in real-time rather than having to do lengthy marking at home. Not only is this a time-saver for teachers, but it improves students' understanding of the material at the moment rather than after the fact.

What does the future of AI in Education Look Like?

AI might be in the early stages of education, but its potential and impact on transforming the future of learning are huge. Like any new technology, it is not without its challenges, for example, the potential for biases to come through when relying on an algorithm. Another challenge, of course, is ongoing training for educators on how to use and incorporate AI into their teaching modalities. Technology changes rapidly, so it involves a lot of learning and adapting on the part of educators.

As course creators, there are many advantages to AI when it comes to developing your learning materials, including quickly developing new courses, creating templates and creating engaging and interactive material for your students.

Interested in learning more about what's up and coming for the learning industry?
Check our free 2023 online learning trends report! This post was originally published in April 2023. It was updated in August of 2023 with more information.

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With the rise of tools like chat GPT, AI is more a part of everyday life than ever. Find out what role AI will play in education.

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ChatGPT and Beyond: How to Handle AI in Schools | Common Sense Education

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Here’s what educators can do as this technology evolves.

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74 Million Reasons to Give

Support The 74's year-end campaign with a tax-exempt donation and invest in our future.

The future of education has never looked more creative and promising.

Since making its public debut last year, ChatGPT has profoundly impacted my perspective on generative AI in education. As a writer and former high school English teacher, I experienced an existential crisis watching the chatbot effortlessly generate lesson plans and rubrics - tasks that would have taken me hours to accomplish.

Generative AI allows educators to move beyond traditional learning systems and provide a more responsive, personalized learning experience in which students demonstrate mastery, not just passing grades.

"The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it's about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve," XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. He also formerly worked in the education, business and technology sectors. Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit - a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes.

Changing that rigid system is our mission at XQ. We work with schools and communities to transform high school learning so it's more relevant and engaging while also preparing students to succeed in college, career and real life. We recently co-convened a two-day summit with the Emerson Collective, in partnership with MeshEd and Betaworks, to bring educators and innovators together in a collaborative space - envisioning ways to use AI technology for transforming high school redesign. Those ideas and insights are available to explore on this beta wiki page.

After a year's worth of conversations and observations with educators, our AI convening and EdTech Week 2023, there is much to share with educators to help them make the most of the rapidly evolving ecosystem of artificial intelligence. Here are seven AI in education trends to be aware of next year.

1. Professional Development

Throughout 2023, demand for AI professional development for educators remained high. In 2024, we should see an avalanche of districts and schools providing their educators with AI professional development materials to integrate these tools into their teaching practices.

At PSI High, an XQ school in Sanford, Florida, MIT's STEP Lab 's Sarah Wharton visited to present interesting ways to think about AI in the context of the school.

"We looked at ChatGPT as a possible tutor, personal assistant, creative tool and research assistant," said PSI High School Coordinator Angela Daniel. "In our PD session, we considered how these cool applications could be used in classrooms as learning tools that accelerate learning and teach the tool simultaneously."

Daniel explained that teaching students how to use AI is a first step that will change things for students going forward."But to really get at the heart of that question, we need to understand how generative AI can change our processes and resources right now," she added. For the team at PSI, that means learning how to use generative AI effectively with ongoing support as the application continues to evolve.

Workshops, online courses and collaborative learning communities are also increasingly popular for providing educators with hands-on experience in AI.
Want to stay on top of trends to help you rethink high school? Check out the XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. Sign up here.
2. Formal AI Policy

Integrating AI in classrooms is no longer a matter of "if" but "how," making it imperative for educators and policymakers to navigate this terrain with informed and responsible strategies. However, the landscape of AI policy development - especially regarding education - has been dynamic, if not lagging.

The Council of Europe has continued providing critical insights for equitable policy and practice, an area where U.S. schools have been seeking guidance. New York City Public Schools, after initially banning ChatGPT, is now collaborating with academics, experts and school districts in the AI Policy Lab, focusing on issues such as privacy and cybersecurity. Recently, the Biden administration issued an executive order to guide the U.S. in leveraging artificial intelligence. This directive emphasized AI safety, privacy, equity and responsible use, signaling a shift in how AI is integrated into sectors like education. However, it is likely that AI policy in education will develop on a location-by-location basis first.

3. Open-Source Tool Development

Concerns about AI's ethical implications and biases are sure to shape policy goals. One way to alleviate those pressures is the expansion and increased use of open-sourced tools - programs where the code is accessible and can be modified. The potential for AI to perpetuate biases is significant, however, expect the conversation to focus less on the output of AI tools and more on the kind of data it's trained on.

Ensuring AI tools are equitable and inclusive goes beyond technical challenges - it requires continuous dialogue among educators, technologists and policymakers. This conversation is essential for addressing data privacy, surveillance and ethical use of student data. With a democratized, open-source marketplace, we could see the market promote open-sourced tools as they grow in popularity.

4. Frameworks for Teaching AI

Before the start of the 2023-24 academic year, educators and schools were waiting for a framework to guide their integration of AI tools. As policy moves forward in 2024 and more institutions develop professional development materials to train and support educators, expect AI curricula frameworks to finally emerge. Frameworks like TeachAI are being developed to guide the integration of AI in education. These frameworks focus on aligning AI applications with educational goals and promoting equitable access to technology, ensuring that AI complements and enhances student learning experiences.

5. AI Literacy, Competencies and Standards

With AI becoming more prevalent in various sectors, including education, there's a growing need to integrate AI literacy goals and specific learning outcomes into school curricula. This involves teaching students how to use AI tools and understand the basics of AI technology, its applications and its implications.

At the Purdue Polytechnic High School network, an XQ partner with three campuses in Indiana, CEO Keeanna Warren explained how equipping staff and students with the knowledge and skills to harness AI's potential promotes effective and responsible use of AI to enhance learning experiences.

"We firmly believe that our students' innate curiosity drives their desire to learn, and we trust their integrity," she said. "If AI can be used for cheating, it reflects a flaw in the assessment, not in our students' character."

The challenge lies in integrating AI literacy into an already packed curriculum. However, the opportunity to foster critical thinking, problem-solving and ethical reasoning skills through AI education is entirely possible.

6. AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Systems

One of the more exciting pathways with AI is that student learning experiences will become more uniquely adaptive and personalized with a quicker turnaround. But creating effective programs requires training these systems on some level of student data -- a delicate balance.

As policy formalizes how student data gets implemented into these programs, AI-driven adaptive learning systems will emerge to shift instructional practice. Expect these programs to appear prominently in assessments and curriculum packages before evolving into real-time feedback systems that can inform teachers even during a lesson.

7. Custom GPTs Built By Educators

While all these advancements are promising and exciting, the marketplace for AI-driven ed tech tools will become incredibly crowded quickly. Recently, OpenAI's maker space for building and using custom GPTs, which both use and are built by ChatGPT, is guaranteed to be a massive disruptor.

Ty Boyland, school-based enterprise coordinator and music production teacher at Crosstown High, designed a custom GPT. ( Crosstown High is another XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee.) Boyland's students use Dall-E, an AI system for generating images, with GPT-4 to create designs and prints for student-driven projects.

"But how do you create a project combining culinary and music production?" Boyland wondered. His customized GPT pairs XQ's competencies with Tennessee State Standards to build a new project.

It will be interesting to see what educators create in this space to resolve pain points teachers and schools are intimately familiar with and what gets made to help schools achieve their vision and mission.

The Bottom Line for Educators
Do you want to learn more about how to rethink high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. Sign up here.
From policy shifts emphasizing equity and privacy to the emergence of AI-driven curricula, the transformation is palpable. We've seen how AI can revolutionize and disrupt classroom practices, empower educators through professional development, and create inclusive, personalized student learning experiences. But the burgeoning AI ed tech market demands discernment. Educators must navigate this space wisely, choosing tools that genuinely enhance learning and align with ethical standards.

As we enter 2024, educators and stakeholders face a challenge: keeping pace with AI and engaging with it thoughtfully to catalyze educational excellence instead of just putting a new face on old practices. It's the primary reason we at XQ convened so many educators and innovators into one space- to rethink high school by harnessing the potential of our AI-powered future. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming year.

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7 Artificial Intelligence Trends That Could Reshape Education in 2024

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The revolutionary role of AI in education has a major impact on teaching and learning. Here's what to watch next year.

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AI Classroom Assignment Guideline Samples

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A rundown of some AI sites shared with me by a fellow library media specialist

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A rundown of some AI sites shared with me by a fellow library media specialist

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/15gMCD6mdytrLdFcJ82iv7Stcim2GMA-cInfsLqgO-FA/mobilebasic?urp=gmail_link

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InVideo - Online Video Creator for Content and Marketing Videos

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Many have hailed 2023 as generative AI's breakout year . Doomsday scenarios that were previously the province of researchers, ethicists and technologists went mainstream . The boardroom dramas of AI companies were above-the-fold news. Commentators wondered how the acceleration of AI technologies would impact , environment , and a host of other areas. Meanwhile, played around with new AI edtech tools and prompts - by turns delighted, frustrated, excited and scared by what we discovered.

That was particularly true in education, where teachers, students, staff and administrators alike experimented with AI-powered tools for a range of tasks, including organization, writing, research and form completion. Some of these approaches were productive, while others produced concerning results. Meanwhile, it seems that every edtech product now positions itself as "AI-powered," seeking to capitalize on AI's big moment.

At the same time, many hyped predictions for AI in education never came to fruition: School districts' initial prohibitions on the use of ChatGPT on school-owned devices gradually gave way to guidance for using AI tools. Regular usage of AI tools by educators and students was more limited than many commentators expected. There was no sizable increase in cheating behaviors among students, even with the wide availability of AI tools.

As we begin a new year, it's time to think less about what AI mean for education and more about how can harness AI technologies for education right now. There are a host of possibilities. Some involve direct interaction between educators and students, and others assist with back-end functions such as record-keeping and lesson planning. But whatever the case, we need to focus less on the technology itself and more on how the technology can help empower quality instruction - either by helping teachers in core instructional areas, or in freeing up time for them to concentrate on providing impactful instruction.

AI edtech tools can provide power boosts to instruction

With AI seemingly everywhere, and educators exhausted, overworked and often unclear how to evaluate the usefulness of new tools, it's helpful to think about AI trends through the lens of "technology-enabled instruction," an emerging term that we've explored . Tech-enabled instruction looks beyond technology integration (whether technology is used in the classroom) to when and how use technology in their instructional practices in ways that research shows improve learning outcomes.

How can educators and administrators understand the potential value of an AI tool for promoting tech-enabled instruction? Researchers have identified five power boosts that technology in instruction can provide:

Personalization, differentiation and customization to address learner needs.

Curation, availability, accommodation and accessibility of vetted educational materials and learning environments.

Student engagement, interest and motivation.

Communication, collaboration and relationship-building.

Learning analytics.

Some AI tools are well-designed to harness these areas of instructional impact, while others are not. Most useful tools will not align to all areas; indeed, some might provide value in a single area or may free up teacher time to concentrate on these areas. Such alignment must be a key consideration when educators and administrators make decisions about when and how to use AI-powered tools.

What questions should educators ask when evaluating alignment between an AI-powered edtech tool and power boost areas for impactful technology-enabled instructional practice? We break down five critical questions.

1. Does the tool allow teachers to differentiate?

2. Does the tool offer access to vetted educational materials?

The availability of vetted educational materials through edtech platforms frees teachers from the burden of having to compile materials from disparate - and often unvetted - sources. Researchers have shown that this compilation plays an important role in advancing student learning in two critical ways: supporting learner variability and making learning .

3. Does the tool help teachers promote student interest?

So-called intelligent tutoring systems may have the potential to make this process easier, offering guidance to students about how to evaluate sources of interest to them and freeing teachers to foster deeper student interest. Of course, accuracy, bias and ease of use will be important considerations as educators evaluate such tools.

4. Does the tool offer opportunities for relationship-building?

Strong teacher-student relationships lead to better learning outcomes in the long term, according to a report from Search Institute. Similarly, when educators form strong relationships with families, students are more likely to make positive gains in the long term.

At first, it may seem counterintuitive that technology could help strengthen relationships between people. But imagine a video platform that provides automatic translation services in a meeting between a teacher and a parent about a student's progress. Or imagine a technological tool that allows students to share how they are feeling, flagging opportunities for follow-up with teachers.

5. Does the tool offer impactful learning analytics?

What's Next?

Decisions about which edtech tools to adopt and in what ways are notoriously difficult. AI has expanded the edtech field, making adoption decisions more challenging. Using the lens of technology-enabled instruction and technology's power boost potential in teaching is not a panacea for this challenge. But asking the five questions above is an important first step in separating the chaff from the wheat in harnessing AI-powered tools' full potential.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own. _________________________

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5 questions to ask when evaluating AI edtech tools - SmartBrief

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How teachers can magnify AI edtech tools' power by focusing on their needs and possibilities when selecting them.

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https://www.ecampusnews.com/campus-leadership/2023/10/13/colleges-use-ai-admissions/

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/is-ai-affecting-college-admissions

https://getschooled.com/article/5gww-ai-in-college-applications/

https://blog.collegevine.com/impact-of-ai-on-college-admissions

https://irp.cdn-website.com/6db53688/files/uploaded/Lumiere%20White%20Paper%20Beyond%20the%20Essay%20-%20Ethically%20Using%20AI%20in%20the%20College%20Application%20Process.pdf

https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivalegatt/2023/11/13/the-ai-revolution-in-college-admissions-balancing-efficiency-and-ethics/?sh=19dc72116a4b

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2023/10/09/admissions-offices-turn-ai-application-reviews

August 2023 – Georgia Tech Admission Blog (gatech.edu)

Juniors. Can We Chat(GPT)? – Georgia Tech Admission Blog (gatech.edu)

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The Case for Slow-Walking Our Use for AI

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The Case for Slow-Walking Our Use for AI

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Advice | The Case for Slow-Walking Our Use of Generative AI

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Four principles to guide your thinking on the role of ChatGPT and other such tools in your teaching.

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Five Differences Between Human and AI Tutors

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Five Differences Between Human and AI Tutors

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Five Differences Between Human and AI Tutors

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Chatbot tutors have not arrived and we should wonder if they ever will.

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Artificial Intelligence and Teacher Workload: Can AI Actually Save Educators Time?

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Artificial Intelligence and Teacher Workload: Can AI Actually Save Educators Time?

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Across Australia and internationally, Departments of Education, School Associations, and individual schools and teachers are asking the same question of generative AI: can it solve the teacher workload problem?

Over the last 18 months, I've seen literally hundreds of ideas discussing how AI can assist with everything from administrative tasks to classroom activities, communications with parents and community, and everything in between. Unfortunately, much of this advice has come from outside of education itself - tech developers and companies on the fringe of education whose ideas would seem attractive, but which for reasons I'll discuss in this article might not always be a good idea.

Educators who are using generative AI technologies are producing fantastic materials and, in the spirit of teachers everywhere, sharing them widely on social media and through professional associations. But those teachers are still few and far between. Every school might have a handful of educators who have the time and the inclination to dive into generative AI, but the majority of K-12 teachers and university educators that I've worked with simply haven't explored the generative AI enough to make big gains in handling their workload.

Understanding the problem

In the last few years in Australia, there's been a lot of media attention and political focus on teacher workload, largely due to issues with teacher retention, burnout, and low numbers of students studying teaching at university.

It's easy to see why Generative Artificial Intelligence has been positioned as a solution to some of these bigger picture problems, with the assumption that if we can dig teachers out of the avalanche of administrative tasks and other duties outside of the classroom, and free up more time to actually teach, then people will be much more likely to enter the profession and stay in it for longer. There's plenty of research out there about what constitutes teacher workload and why many teachers feel so overwhelmed.

This recent synthesis of research by Creagh et al., for example, explores the "time poverty" of educators, including teachers and principals. It offers a few key observations about teacher workload, including:

1. Studies commonly report teachers working over 50 hours per week, with work spilling into weekends and personal time.

2. While some research suggests teachers' working hours have remained constant over 25 years, most studies report workload has increased due to the intrusion of "non-core" tasks like administration, curricular reform, and compliance with accountability frameworks.

3. Principals also report high workloads of 50-60+ hours per week encompassing all facets of school management, legal issues, marketing, pursuing alternative funding, and extensive stakeholder engagement. Non-educative work is seen as impacting principals' capacity for educational leadership.

4. Technology has exacerbated principals working outside traditional hours because of a perceived need to be more available and visible. Administrative work gets pushed to evenings and weekends as a result.

Unfortunately, research into teacher workload is sometimes misconstrued, or used to serve particular agendas. For example, the Grattan Institute in Australia has produced reports indicating that planning and resource creation are one of the primary burdens on teachers, and their solution is to provide Departments of Education teachers with pre-prepared unit plans, lessons, and resources.

The announcement was met with a lot of pushback from teachers, who stated they would rather have time than be handed resources. Aligned to this attitude towards workload, however, it's easy to see why so many providers are developing applications designed to produce lesson plans and resources for teachers en masse. The approach appears intended to address issues like educators who are teaching out of field (not in their trained subject area), newly graduated teachers who find themselves entering a school that is not well resourced, and experienced teachers who feel they do not have the time to develop quality resources.

Based on my own experience as a teacher and council member for the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, and regular conversations with teachers, most don't want off-the-shelf resources to take into the classroom. Like the comments made in the Conversation article above, they want the time, space, and collaboration to create rich and meaningful resources that lean into their areas of expertise and interest. In my experience, they certainly don't want cookie-cutter lesson plans from generative AI or anywhere else.

So, if providing educators with off-the-shelf resources isn't the answer, how can generative AI used effectively reduce teacher workload?

Practical AI Strategies is available now from Amba Press
Understanding how the time is spent

In March 2024, I worked with Independent Schools Victoria principals to understand the implications of generative AI for their roles and for their schools. On the day, one of the activities we tried out was the classic Eisenhower matrix, sometimes called the urgent-important matrix. This approach to tracking time was popularised by Stephen R. Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The approach divides a grid into four quadrants, with tasks ranging from not important to important and not urgent to urgent. These quadrants then provide four ways of dividing up day-to-day activities:

Quadrant 1 (Urgent & Important): These are tasks which are of high value and need to happen right away. For example, emergencies which must be dealt with by the individual, priorities which absolutely cannot be delegated or pushed aside, or high-value interactions which have a near deadline.

Quadrant 2 (Important & Not Urgent): These are tasks of very high value which do not have the pressing urgency of quadrant one activities. For example, long-term plans and strategies, activities which will only be rewarded in the future, and tasks which are beneficial to sustaining an organization or an initiative but which require significant planning and scheduling of time.

Quadrant 3 (Urgent & Not Important): These tasks are often other people's problems which have either been delegated to the individual or which have descended from an external organisation, such as compliance or accreditation. Deadlines have to be met, but the activity is not necessarily important for the individual's day-to-day work.

Quadrant 4 (Not Urgent & Not Important): These are time fillers or time wasters - activities which don't add anything meaningful for the individual's role or the people that they work with.

It's important to note that there's nothing inherently wrong with any of the quadrants, although Covey would recommend that we try to shift most of our daily tasks into Quadrant 2, meaning we are spending time on longer-term, meaningful, and impactful work and less time putting out fires, responding to other people's business, or wasting time.

Sometimes it might be absolutely necessary to kill half an hour during the day scrolling through social media, but if that's a daily habit, it's probably not very helpful in the long run. In order to get most activities into Quadrant 2, it's necessary to be proactive - to plan ahead for problems before they crop up, to identify appropriate ways to delegate or reassign responsibilities, or to automate or make more efficient some of the more pressing but less important work. Generative AI can potentially help at all of these levels.

The following example is just based on my experience as an educator. I've populated the four quadrants in ways that I believe are appropriate, but you might disagree with where I've placed some of these things. That's fine. Ideally, if you like this idea, you should carve out half an hour to sit down and do it yourself. Reflect on all the things you do day-to-day or week-to-week. Write them down in a long, unfiltered list, and then divide them up into the four quadrants as you see fit.

Urgent & Important

Not Urgent & Important

- In-the-moment feedback
- Important scheduled meetings (e.g., with parents)
- Behaviour incidents
- Today's lessons
- Assessments and reporting deadlines
- Physical injury or mental health crisis
- Responding to urgent communications from school leadership
- Responding to genuinely important communication from parents and students

- Personal physical & mental health
- Own career goals
- Longer-term subject & unit planning
- Faculty-level strategic planning
- School-level strategic planning
- Professional learning
- Developing skills outside of professional context
- Building positive relationships with students, colleagues, and community
- Scheduling time for important collaboration

- Phone calls and most emails
- Surprise visits (e.g., from students at lunchtime)
- Most administrative and compliance deadlines
- Covering classes for absent colleagues
- Dealing with technology issues (e.g., broken wifi router)
- Attending unproductive meetings
- Completing unnecessary paperwork to a deadline

- Social media use
- Unproductive conversations
- Time-wasting activities which don't contribute to any of the other quadrants
- Compulsive email checking
- Procrasticleaning
- Over planning lessons or resources (or laminating anything, ever.)

As I said, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of the tasks in any of the quadrants, but you can see how if you spend most of your time in Quadrant 3, dealing with other people's problems or responding reactively to situations as they crop up, then you'll have far less time for the important work in Quadrant 2. There's even a time and a place for Quadrant 4 activities. Sometimes you just need to get something off your chest, wind down for an hour, or vent to a colleague. But generally, unless you turn those vented frustrations into something more proactive, they don't lead to anything beyond a bad mood.

Shifting the dial

Before we're even talking about generative AI, it's worth looking at how some of the issues can be moved towards Quadrant 2. For example, if you find you spend a lot of time in the classroom managing behavioural issues, there is obviously a need for both a personal and a school-level strategic approach to behaviour. I absolutely do not hold with the idea, which seems to be prevalent in the media at the moment, that teachers are solely responsible for shaping the behaviour of young people.

I also reject the implications of suggestions for things like a "behaviour curriculum," which abrogates the responsibility of society as a whole for helping young people to grow and develop in ways which aren't harmful or hurtful. Frankly, the idea of a set of worksheets that some poor homeroom teacher has to go through with a group of 20-something adolescents to teach them how to behave properly fills me with horror.

But there are, of course, ways that you can devote quality time to improving your own skills and thinking strategically that will, in the long term, pay off. For example, spending half an hour during a free period or over lunch reading through a well-researched and inclusive book like Christopher Hudson's Leading Positive Classrooms is a decidedly Quadrant 2 activity that might ultimately reduce the time spent managing behaviour in Quadrant 1 (Chris and I share a publisher, but even if we didn't I'd wholeheartedly recommend his book).

Similarly, if you find yourself spending a lot of time during the week resourcing lessons on the fly, that's worth identifying ways that you, your faculty, and your school can support more conscientious planning.

Particularly for those of you in middle management and executive management positions, I imagine you spend a lot of time in Quadrant 3, dealing with other people's problems. Empowering staff and the community at every level to solve their own problems is a long-term Quadrant 2 activity - through professional development, work with parents and friends, and so on - but the more time you invest in encouraging people to solve their own issues, the fewer of those issues are going to land on your desk unexpectedly in the middle of the day.

None of what I'm saying here should be news to anyone, but it is something that requires a great deal of conscious and collaborative effort across all levels of the school.

Identifying where AI can help

Using the Eisenhower Matrix as a framework, I'm going to explore a few ways that generative artificial intelligence can be used to support teacher and school leader workloads beyond generic lesson planning and resource creation.

Quadrant 1 Activities: GenAI On-the-Fly

GenAI is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and this could be a good thing. Having Copilot, GPT, Claude, or whatever, always on hand can be a boon when something comes up that is urgent and important.

For example, often in the middle of a lesson, particularly with senior students, conversations can become diverted down rabbit holes which are interesting (for the students at least) but perhaps outside of the teacher's areas of expertise or not appropriate for the content of the lesson. These are often some of the most engaging ( for the students) moments in the class - they're not planned for, they're spontaneous, and they're often predicated on the kinds of relationships with students that teachers value. Rather than brushing off these urgent and sometimes important conversations in the classroom, artificial intelligence can be used both to explore these ideas and to bring the lesson back on track.

Here is a concrete example. You're in an English classroom studying a set text, say The Crucible, for a major assessment or final examination. In the middle of a discussion about the relationship between two of the characters in the text, a couple of students make a comparison to a popular reality TV show (if you're in Australia, you'll know what I mean when I say ), and the quality of conversation in the classroom quickly dissolves.

Rather than trying to stanch the flow of conversation or spending too much energy dragging the conversation back on track, use an Internet-connected AI to draw a comparison between what the students are talking about and the text that you're studying. Write the results up on the board, and then move on.

How this helps with teacher workload

This might seem like a facile example, but a lot of time is wasted in the classroom battling to get students on topic when they're determined to talk about something else. This can be stressful for the teacher, can lead to further behavioural issues if the relationship becomes antagonistic, and can create more work if content isn't covered in one lesson and then has to be revisited in the next. And just in general, it can be stressful and annoying. But using generative AI in this light-hearted approach shows the students you care about what they're interested in, but also that you're only willing to discuss that within the bounds of the lesson. You can keep things on track and allow yourself to move on without sacrificing those relationships.

Even better, you might incorporate some of the generative AI results into your planning for the next time you teach this topic. Although, by the time you've got another group of kids in front of you in 12 months, it's highly likely they'll be interested in something totally different and equally distracting.

Hand on the door-handle planning

Another Quadrant 1 activity example is the "hand on the door-handle" lesson plan. At some point in anyone's teaching career, they do what my mentor all the way back in the early 2000s used to call the "door-handle lesson plan." Maybe you've been under the pump all week - it's one of those weeks where you have to also cram in swimming sports or athletics, parent-teacher interviews, and so on. Maybe it's in a heavy assessment or report writing season. Or maybe (don't pretend this has never happened to you) you actually just lost track of which day it is and had no idea you're teaching this class.

As you approach the classroom, you place your hand on the door handle and hope that inspiration strikes. This is definitely Quadrant 1 material - it's urgent (you've literally got your hand on the door handle) and it's important because if you don't think of something quickly, you're going to have a bunch of fairly bored adolescents staring at you.

Here is an opportunity where generative AI can be useful. We still don't need generic lesson plans, but if we can quickly write a prompt which has detailed enough context, we can get something that meets the needs of this particular lesson very quickly. Here is an example:
For some reason, it slipped your mind that in less than 15 minutes, you have to teach a Year 10 Science class on biofuels. You flip open your laptop and use the following prompt:
I am teaching a lesson on biofuels to a Year 10 Science class. Please provide the following:

1. A brief introduction to biofuels, including what they are and why they are important (2-3 sentences).

2. Three key points to cover about biofuels, with a one-sentence explanation for each point.

3. An engaging, hands-on activity or demonstration that can be completed using common classroom materials to illustrate a concept related to biofuels.

4. Two or three questions to ask the students to check for understanding and encourage discussion.

5. A one-sentence conclusion to summarise the main takeaway about biofuels.

Use the following information to provide context: <copy/paste a curriculum document or a resource from the school Learning Management System>Don't make a habit of it, but in a pinch, GenAI can produce contextualised, specific lesson plans in a hurry.

Not that this ever happened to me, but I probably could have used this a few times in my career to save the day and reduce my Q1 'urgent-important' workload. Obviously, I don't recommend you teach every lesson in this fashion, but you can see how this will help in a pinch, reducing stress so that the lesson is still meaningful and on-topic. It still uses your existing resources or input from the classroom, and it solves the immediate problem. As with the earlier activity, you may even end up creating a really interesting and engaging resource that can go into your longer-term planning.

Quadrant 3: Other People's Problems

A lot of the time, Quadrant 3 things revolve around electronic communications. An email suddenly lands in your inbox from a parent. It's urgent and important to them, and if your school has a 24-hour turnaround policy, it's urgent enough for you. But you can't let it become a time sink. Generative artificial intelligence can be used to understand emails, particularly ones which are longer, complex, or fraught with emotions, and then produce draft responses to those emails which don't require a great deal of mental energy.

Increasingly, this is being built into popular email platforms. For example, you can use Google's AI in Gmail and Microsoft's Copilot in Outlook, if you have access to Copilot for Microsoft 365. But this shouldn't mean we end up in an endless cycle of AI talking to AI, where you use your chatbot to write an email, somebody uses theirs to respond, and so on. As with all of the Quadrants 1, 3, and 4, we should be looking for ways to shift these tasks towards Quadrant 2 tasks that reduce the overall volume of these communications.

But in a pinch, using AI can reduce the time taken to respond to this type of communication. For external deadlines, responding to other people's deadlines, requests for information, and so on is unfortunately part of daily life. It's urgent, carrying a specific deadline, but in the grand scheme of things, it's probably not important for the individual. There are three ways to deal with these with generative AI:

1. Use generative AI to help understand the requirements and produce the content.

2. Use generative AI to draft the content to send back.

3. Speak to whoever is in charge of issuing these things and ask them to please stop.

Quadrant 4: Time Wasters

If you find yourself endlessly doom scrolling social media or standing in the staff room talking to anyone who'll listen about how frustrated you are every single day, then, respectfully, you've probably got bigger problems than AI. In my experience, people don't actively avoid their job unless they're particularly stressed out, antagonised, threatened, diminished, or otherwise unhappy or burnt out.

Quadrant 4 is not a good place to spend most of your time. It's obviously unproductive - throwing hours of your workday into TikTok isn't going to hit any goals no matter how many #TeacherTok videos you scroll past. But even worse than that, you'll finish off the day feeling unproductive, with that complex mix of frustration and shame that comes from knowing you haven't done a good job and not really knowing how to get yourself out of that position.

In this instance, generative artificial intelligence isn't the answer. If it's a one-off, fine. If it's something that's happening daily, talk to someone you've got a strong relationship with, such as someone in school management, and tell them how you're feeling. If you don't have someone you can trust in your organisation, find out if your school or sector has counselling services for teachers. Failing that, speak to someone in a public mental health organisation like Beyond Blue in Australia.

Obviously, generative AI is not a panacea. If you're in a temporary rut, though, then you could use generative artificial intelligence to get yourself out of the ditch. For example:

I'm finding myself wasting way too much time on social media at work. Suggest three evidence-based strategies for getting me back on track and being more proactive.

Quadrant 2 activities: Longer term workload reduction

This is the most important quadrant, not only because it's where we're getting the biggest workload gains from using generative AI effectively, but also because despite the idea of generative AI for solving low-hanging fruit, quick lesson planning or resource creation is not where the real power lies.

Quadrant 2 activities centre on projects which require us to create space, dedicate time, and create opportunities to step back from the urgent demands of the job and deliberately focus on our roles and our future goals. Here are some suggestions on how generative artificial intelligence can help:

Automate the Boring Stuff

This is the title of a series of books on coding by Al Sweigart, and automation is a key facet of his programming philosophy that should be part of your day-to-day work. If you find yourself doing something again and again and again, chances are there is a way you can use generative AI to automate it. This can range from simple tasks, like reformatting documents (e.g., "Take these notes and expand them into Understanding by Design lesson plans with the following sections..."), to much more complex ideas, depending on your level of expertise with the technology.

For example, if you find yourself constantly reformatting documents, taking notes and putting them into pro-formas or templates, you can see if there's a way you can use generative AI to take uploaded notes and export them as an Excel file. These more advanced tactics will mostly only work in more sophisticated, paid versions of models like GPT-4, but it can be worth the 20 US dollars a month. I'll be writing much more in the future about automations for educators.

Strategic Planning

I'm a huge strategy nerd, with a bookshelf full of saccharine-sweet business and self-help books from which I cherry-pick the ideas that I like the most. Most sensible people probably dedicate very little time to strategic planning, unless you're in a leadership role in a school. Here, you can easily use generative artificial intelligence to skip some of the learning process and help step you through quick and effective activities that can help you to set goals, plan units of work, or build bigger picture faculty and school strategic plans.

Investing a little bit of time in this kind of thing short-term is going to pay huge dividends in the long term, helping to solve problems like the "hand on the door handle" planning, or perhaps even mitigating some of the risks of behaviour incidents by identifying potential problems. For example:

Here's a unit of work. Identify places where students might become disengaged, where roadblocks could occur, or where the volume of work might cause problems for students completing tasks. <copy/paste or upload unit of work>

Or this example:

I graduated as a teacher two years ago and I've been working full-time as an English teacher. I'd like to progress my career, expanding first as a faculty coordinator and then I think into senior school leadership such as a deputy principal. Ask me some questions that help me develop a plan for that professional learning and development over the next 12-24 months.

Professional Learning Networks

Building a strong professional learning network (PLN) is can be important for long-term growth and development, and also puts you in touch with some great like-minded educators who can help you if you're starting to feel bored, listless, or burned out. Internet-connected GenAI (like Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT Plus) can help you identify key people, resources, and communities to connect with based on your specific interests and goals.

For example, you could use a prompt like:

I'm a secondary school science teacher interested in project-based learning and integrating technology into my classroom. Suggest five key educators, bloggers, or thought leaders I should follow on Twitter or other social media platforms to learn more about these topics.

Or:

I'm a primary school principal looking to build my knowledge of inclusive education practices for students with diverse learning needs. Recommend three professional associations, online communities, or conferences where I can connect with other school leaders and experts in this field.

Data Analysis and Informed Decision Making

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of student data available from standardised tests, to student sentiment monitoring platforms, to self-assessment and reporting. GenAI can help teachers and school leaders make sense of this data, identify patterns and trends, and use insights to inform instructional decisions and school-wide initiatives. These can all contribute to more proactive Quadrant 2 approaches to planning units of work or building relationships with students.

For example:

I have a spreadsheet of my students' scores on the last three formative assessments in my <subject> class. Identify any patterns or trends in the data and suggest two or three potential interventions or instructional strategies I could use to support students who are struggling with specific concepts. Always de-identify data before uploading to GenAI!

Or:

Our school recently conducted a climate survey of students, staff, and parents. Based on the data in the attached summary report, what are the top three areas of strength and the top three areas for improvement? Suggest one specific initiative or strategy we could implement to address each area for improvement.

Conclusion

Using generative AI to reduce teacher workload requires thinking beyond the low-hanging fruit. We don't need generative artificial intelligence to write lesson plans or create off-the-shelf for us. That's what we're trained for, that's what we're experts in, and in my experience, that's what teachers want to do. We need ways to maximise the time that we have for meaningful, collaborative meetings and working with one another as a community.

Over the next few months, I'll be exploring more of these teacher workload ideas, and speaking with educators in K-12 and tertiary about sharing how they use GenAI to reduce their (not)urgent and (not)important tasks.

Success! You're on the list.
If you've got examples you'd like to share which have genuinely had a positive impact on your workload, please get in touch using the contact form below.

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Artificial Intelligence and Teacher Workload: Can AI Actually Save Educators Time?

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Across Australia and internationally, Departments of Education, School Associations, and individual schools and teachers are asking the same question of generative AI: can it solve the teacher workload problem? Over the last 18 months, I've seen literally hundreds of ideas discussing how AI can assist with everything from administrative tasks to classroom activities, communications with...

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Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity

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Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity

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No one doubts ChatGPT's ability to generate lots of ideas. But are those ideas any good? A recent real-world experiment showed that teams engaged in a creative problem-solving task saw only modest gains from AI assistance for the most part-and some underperformed. Surveys conducted before and after the exercise showed that the teams using AI gained far more confidence in their problem-solving abilities than the others did, but that much of their confidence was misplaced.

But don't blame the technology, says Kian Gohar, CEO of the leadership-development firm GeoLab and one of the study's authors. "Brainstorming with generative AI requires rethinking your ideation workflow and learning new skills," Gohar says. This article offers guidance for approaching the exercise as a structured, ongoing conversation, opening up a staggering capacity to develop better and more-creative ideas faster.

No one doubts ChatGPT's ability to generate lots of ideas. But are those ideas any good? In a recent real-world experiment, teams engaged in a creative problem-solving task saw modest gains from AI assistance for the most part-and some underperformed. Don't blame the technology, says Kian Gohar, CEO of the leadership-development firm GeoLab and one of the study's authors. Common misconceptions about generative AI, problem-solving, and the creative process are causing workers and their managers to use the tools improperly, sometimes leaving them worse off than if they'd proceeded without AI input.

A version of this article appeared in the March-April 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Don't Let Gen AI Limit Your Team's Creativity

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No one doubts ChatGPT's ability to generate lots of ideas. But are those ideas any good? A recent real-world experiment showed that teams engaged in a creative problem-solving task saw only modest gains from AI assistance for the most part-and some underperformed.

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A series of videos demonstrating teachers using AI as an assistive tool.

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How AI Works

Learn more about the new technology driving the large changes in AI, featuring two new videos on Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) and Generative AI. Hear how these new technologies work directly from the experts: Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, and Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO of RunwayML.

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Discover the groundbreaking world of artificial intelligence (AI) and its transformative potential in education with our foundational online learning series for teachers.

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In the ever-evolving world of education, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in classrooms has become increasingly prominent. As an educator, it's essential to navigate this landscape with a critical eye. The tools we choose can significantly impact the quality of education we deliver and the safety of the students we nurture.

The Importance of Assessing AI Tools

Imagine walking into a classroom equipped with the latest AI technology. It sounds exciting, right? But here's the catch: just like apps and other teaching tools, not all AI tools are created equal. Some may align perfectly with your curriculum, while others might fall short in engaging your students or safeguarding their data. That's why a thorough assessment of these tools before introducing them to your classroom is crucial.

Think of it as a bridge between technology and education. On one side, we have the potential of AI to transform learning experiences, making them more interactive, personalized, and efficient. On the other side, there are valid concerns about student privacy, data security, and the relevance of these tools to your specific educational objectives.

By evaluating AI tools beforehand, you ensure that you're not just jumping on the tech bandwagon but making an informed choice that enhances your teaching and benefits your students. It's about finding that perfect match where technology meets pedagogy.

Criteria for Evaluation

To simplify this evaluation process, we've developed a practical checklist with three levels of quality: great, good, and poor. We also made a rubric with each criterion more clearly spelled out. This rubric breaks down the key criteria to consider, making it easy for any educator, regardless of how tech-savvy they are, to make informed decisions. You can download a PDF of the Rubric and Checklist to use and share. We highlight four categories of criteria to guide you in your assessment of the AI tool you are considering: relevancy, student data privacy, ease of learning, and support.

Relevancy

For relevancy, we need to consider how well the tool aligns with your curriculum. Does it cater to the age and developmental stage of your students? Is it engaging enough to keep your students interested? Does the tool help students accomplish learning objectives and gain new skills? Additionally, how does it support differentiation and instruction in your subject or content area?

Data Privacy

In regards to student data privacy, which is a big one, it's important to identify if the tool has a clear policy on how it collects, uses, and protects student data. It should also comply with laws like , , and to ensure student safety. Because this category can be intimidating, you may need to touch base with your technology department for help in evaluating the tool. They can help provide valuable insight and possibly offer other AI tool recommendations that are safer and yet accomplish the same task as the tool you are investigating.

Ease of Use

Next, we take a look at how easy it is to learn how to use the tool. I'm sure things are still like they were when I was in the classroom - not enough time to get everything done. Therefore, the tool should be user-friendly for both you and your students. A steep learning curve can be a significant hindrance and disrupt even the best instructional activities. The goal is for the tool to help you save time and your students learn without having to focus on the tool itself so much.

Support

Finally, support is considered. Good support can be a lifesaver. Look for tools that offer comprehensive tutorials, responsive customer support, and have an active community or forum for additional help. This is even more important if you don't have a team at your location with whom you can bounce ideas off and ask for their input on different features of the tool. Additionally, it can be helpful if the tool offers a resource library of materials for added support.

Using the Rubric and Checklist

Consider using the checklist to make a quick initial screening of the AI tool. This can help you eliminate those that obviously don't meet the basic criteria to be used in your classroom. After the initial screening, use the rubric and possibly a friend to evaluate the tool in more depth. Discuss your findings with each other to come to a consensus on how the tool measures up and if it is worthy of further consideration. Also, look for reviews of the tool by other educators and sources that might give insight to the validity and reliability of the tool. Use the tool for a trial period and then reflect on how well it met your needs and/or the needs of your students. Continued reflection and evaluation is important since tools are (hopefully) updated and improved along the way.

Searching for AI Tools

After familiarizing yourself with the rubric and checklist, whichever is a better fit for you, consider searching for an AI tool to use. While it's great to find ones that are labeled and intended for education, don't limit yourself to just these. However, when using AI tools that are not intended for educators or students, be sure to take a closer look at what they do with data, since this may disqualify them for use in schools.

Here are a few websites that allow you to filter and search for various AI tools:

Futurepedia is a dynamic online platform aimed at professionals interested in leveraging AI tools and skills for work. It offers a regularly updated collection of articles on the latest AI tools, including practical applications and emerging trends, designed to keep its audience of over 180,000 proactive professionals well-informed and ahead in their fields.

The Rundown is a comprehensive online resource that categorizes and organizes a wide range of AI tools. It's designed to help professionals easily discover and keep up-to-date with the most useful AI applications across various fields, including education, productivity, marketing, and more.

There's an AI for That (TAAFT) is an extensive AI tool aggregator, regularly updated and catering to over 2 million users monthly. It provides a diverse array of AI tools for various tasks and jobs, helping professionals discover and utilize AI applications effectively in their respective fields.

Future Tools is a digital hub that collects and organizes a vast array of AI tools, offering users an efficient way to find the exact AI application they need for various purposes. This platform is especially useful for educators and professionals seeking to enhance their work with the latest AI technologies, featuring categories such as productivity, education, marketing, and more.

Top AI Tools is an extensive directory of over 5k+ AI tools, acting as a valuable resource for AI enthusiasts and professionals. It offers a user-friendly interface to explore a vast range of AI products and services, categorized for various needs and tasks, including education, marketing, and productivity, making it a one-stop destination for discovering AI applications.

AI Tools Arena is a versatile platform that offers an extensive list of AI tools, categorized to serve various professional needs like automation, marketing, and productivity. It serves as a valuable resource for individuals looking to stay current with AI advancements, providing insights and information across a broad spectrum of AI applications.

Check Out the TCEA Community

If you are a TCEA member, then be sure to jump into the All About AI community group. Here you'll find other like-minded educators and leaders discussing all things related to AI.

So what tool have you evaluated that seems to be a good candidate for you and/or your classroom? Jump in the comments and let us know what you like about the tool

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A Teacher Rubric and Checklist for Assessing AI Tools

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There are a lot of AI tools floating around. But which ones are relevant, safe, and easy to use? Evaluate AI with this rubric and checklist!

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Share this Report

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology's new policy report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations, addresses the clear need for sharing knowledge, engaging educators, and refining technology plans and policies for artificial intelligence (AI) use in education. The report describes AI as a rapidly-advancing set of technologies for recognizing patterns in data and automating actions, and guides educators in understanding what these emerging technologies can do to advance educational goals-while evaluating and limiting key risks.

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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning - Office of Educational Technology

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The need for sharing knowledge, engaging educators, and refining technology plans and policies for artificial intelligence (AI) use in education.

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Parents sue school in Massachusetts after son punished for using AI on paper

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Parents sue school in Massachusetts after son punished for using AI on paper

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Parents sue school in Massachusetts after son punished for using AI on paper

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The parents of a Massachusetts teenager are suing his high school after they said he was accused of cheating for using AI on an assignment.

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The Canva AI tool is great to upload and translate Google Slides along with providing suggestions and "upgrades" to presentations.

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Research Guides: Artificial Intelligence (AI): How to Cite AI

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This LibGuide provides an overview of AI knowledge, the applications of AI tools in teaching and learning, and content for the AI research areas.

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The MLA's method for citing sources uses a template of core elements-standardized criteria that writers can use to evaluate sources and create works-cited-list entries based on that evaluation. That new technologies like ChatGPT emerge is a key reason why the MLA has adopted this approach to citation-to give writers flexibility to apply the style when they encounter new types of sources. In what follows, we offer recommendations for citing generative AI, defined as a tool that "can analyze or summarize content from a huge set of information, including web pages, books and other writing available on the internet, and use that data to create original new content" (Weed).

You should

cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it

acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location

take care to vet the secondary sources it cites (see example 5 below for more details)

See below for specific examples. And keep in mind: the MLA template of core elements is meant to provide flexibility in citation. So if you find a rationale to modify these recommendations in your own citations, we encourage you to do so. We've opened this post up for commenting, so let us know what you think and how you're using and citing generative AI tools!

Using the MLA Template

Author

We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. This recommendation follows the policies developed by various publishers, including the MLA's journal PMLA.

Title of Source

Describe what was generated by the AI tool. This may involve including information about the prompt in the Title of Source element if you have not done so in the text.

Title of Container

Use the Title of Container element to name the AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT).

Version

Name the version of the AI tool as specifically as possible. For example, the examples in this post were developed using ChatGPT 3.5, which assigns a specific date to the version, so the Version element shows this version date.

Publisher

Name the company that made the tool.

Date

Give the date the content was generated.

Location

Give the general URL for the tool.

Example 1: Paraphrasing Text

Passage in Source

Paraphrased in Your Prose

While the green light in The Great Gatsby might be said to chiefly symbolize four main things: optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness ("Describe the symbolism"), arguably the most important-the one that ties all four themes together-is greed.

Works-Cited-List Entry

"Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald" prompt. The Great Gatsby ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

Example 2: Quoting Text

Passage in Source

Quoted in Your Prose

When asked to describe the symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby, ChatGPT provided a summary about optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness. However, when further prompted to cite the source on which that summary was based, it noted that it lacked "the ability to conduct research or cite sources independently" but that it could "provide a list of scholarly sources related to the symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby " ("In 200 words").

Works-Cited-List Entry

"In 200 words, describe the symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby" follow-up prompt to list sources. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 9 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

While we've provided fairly detailed descriptions of the prompts above, a more general one (e.g., Symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby prompt) could be used, since you are describing something that mimics a conversation, which could have various prompts along the way.

Example 3: Citing Creative Visual Works

If you are incorporating an AI-generated image in your work, you will likely need to create a caption for it following the guidelines in of the MLA Handbook. Use a description of the prompt, followed by the AI tool, version, and date created:

Fig. 1. "Pointillist painting of a sheep in a sunny field of blue flowers" prompt, DALL-E, version 2, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, labs.openai.com/.

You can use this same information if you choose to create a works-cited-list entry instead of including the full citation in the caption (see MLA Handbook, sec. 1.7).

Example 4: Quoting Creative Textual Works

If you ask a generative AI tool to create a work, like a poem, how you cite it will depend on whether you assign a title to it. Let's say, for example, you ask ChatGPT to write a villanelle titled "The Sunflower" that-you guessed it!-describes a sunflower and then quote it in your text. Your works-cited-list entry might look like this:

"The Sunflower" villanelle about a sunflower. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

If you did not title the work, incorporate part of or all of the first line into the description of the work in the Title of Source element:

"Upon the shore . . ." Shakespearean sonnet about seeing the ocean. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

For guidance on using descriptions and text from the work itself in the Title of Source element, see the MLA Handbook, 5.28 and 5.29.

Example 5: Citing Secondary Sources Used by an AI Tool

You should also take care to vet the secondary sources cited by a generative AI tool-with the caveat that AI tools do not always cite sources or, when they do, do not always indicate precisely what a given source has contributed. If you cite an AI summary that includes sources and do not go on to consult those sources yourself, we recommend that you acknowledge secondary sources in your work.

For example, let's say that you ask Bing AI to explain the concept of the political unconscious, citing sources, and it provides the following answer:

Let's say that you then decide to quote from the final sentence. You need to click through to the source listed in the note in order to get more information than just a URL for the source. There, you will read the following:

Now, you can treat Oxford Reference as your source since Bing AI was merely a research conduit to the source (see MLA Handbook 5.34 for more information). If for some reason you want to treat a source cited in a generative AI tool as an indirect source-and you know it is, in fact, the source for the information provided by the AI, follow the guidance in section 6.77 of the MLA Handbook.

Note

1. At the time of writing this post, ChatGPT doesn't have a built-in feature to create a unique URL to the conversation. However, an outside tool like the Chrome extension ShareGPT can generate such a link. If you use that type of outside tool, include the unique URL that the tool generates instead of the general URL.

DALL-E allows users to download the AI-generated images they create or generate a publicly-available URL that leads to an image. If you choose to create a shareable link for an image you generate with DALL-E (or other similar AI image generators), include that unique URL that leads to the image instead of the general URL.

Works Cited

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021. MLA Handbook Plus, 2021, mlahandbookplus.org/.

Weed, Julie. "Can ChatGPT Plan Your Vacation?" The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/travel/chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-travel-vacation.html.

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How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center

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The MLA's method for citing sources uses a template of core elements-standardized criteria that writers can use to evaluate sources and create works-cited-list entries based on that evaluation. That new technologies like ChatGPT emerge is a key reason why the MLA has adopted this approach to citation-to give writers flexibility to apply the style when ...

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Screencastify has an AI extension that autogenerates captions for videos AND translates them into various languages. It is a great resource if you record/have recorded instructional videos and want to quickly add subtitles for accessibility and/or for students learning English/ have a home language other than English. Our current subscription allows us to do this for (I believe) 10 videos a month.

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Artificial Intelligence is poised to change teaching and learning forever

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Artificial Intelligence is poised to change teaching and learning forever Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning as we know it. By using AI-powered tools and strategies, educators can personalize learning, improve student outcomes, and better prepare students for success in the digital age.

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Here’s How Teachers Are Using AI to Save Time

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Here’s How Teachers Are Using AI to Save Time

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Here’s How Teachers Are Using AI to Save Time

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A Discussion on AI in College Admissions

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A Discussion on AI in College Admissions

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How should AI fit into the college admissions process? What guidance are institutions offering prospective students? And, how can high school counselors advise their students? In this episode, we speak with Emily Pacheco, Advisor for AI in College Admissions. We talk about ethical use of AI for college admissions, the opportunities ahead and the need to establish "rules of the road" for AI. To learn more about AI in College Admissions, visit edhub.ai for more resources/events.

Transcript

Matthew Sterenberg (00:02.147)

All right, Emily, welcome to the podcast.

Emily Pacheco (00:06.69)

Thank you, it's great to be here.

Matthew Sterenberg (00:08.773)

So I wanted to bring you on because I think the topic of ethical AI use in college admissions is fascinating and you're part of an organization that is dedicated to this. Tell us a little bit more, like what do we even mean by ethical? What are we talking about with AI in college admissions? You're a college admissions professional. Give us the lay of the land.

Emily Pacheco (00:33.198)

Well, you know, those questions you just asked are the questions this group is exploring. And my interest in this topic, you know, came out of finding AI extremely fascinating, finding interesting uses for it in my daily work. So I dug in and looked for the people that were doing things with AI in college admissions, because that's my professional area. And I quickly found that there was a pretty big void of information. just... weren't a lot of experts out there. They're just, in general, this is a pretty new topic, so there aren't a lot of people talking about it yet, is what I found about a year ago. So that was the birth of this group. I created this community to start looking at the effects of artificial intelligence on college admissions. And of course, in that exploration, I think... you know, the most important thing is that we're looking at the ethical implications of this technology. So, you know, I think there's amazing potential in what it can do, and that's what I've seen, but I've also know it's really important that the educators are in the room talking about this and looking at what it means for this kind of technology to start kind of infiltrating college admissions and... What we find is that students are the first to use this, you know, and students have been using this since the first, you know, day it was released. But educators are a little bit behind. And so I created this community where we're just over 1500 people that are looking at kind of what we as educators can do to try to guide this conversation to be more a part of the conversation.

Matthew Sterenberg (02:19.109)

So let's make this kind of real for people. And this always helps me as I understand a topic, like what are the major uses of AI or the potential uses of AI in college admissions? Where my mind goes immediately is the essay, you know, but that's just one piece. Like, what are we really talking about when we say AI in college admissions?

Emily Pacheco (02:41.762)

Yeah, I think there are definitely kind of two sides to usage and it depends who you are in terms of how you're looking at how it's being used. There is the university institutional side. So that's where admission counselors are using it. They're using it to craft personalized emails, marketing campaigns to figure out which students they should reach out to. So there's a lot that admission offices are doing with artificial intelligence to, change how they're marketing, to change how they're interacting with prospective students. that is also in the form of chatbots. So a lot of students have started interacting with pretty high functioning chatbots. These aren't the old school chatbots that weren't able to answer questions. These are actually pretty cool features that some universities like NYU has a really cool one that are answering pretty complex questions and helping students. I think the response there is a lot of times people are like, why would a student want to talk to a robot? They want to talk to an admission counselor. And it's like, that's great. We're there from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. And it can be hard to even during those hours to get somebody on the phone. You've got to make an appointment. You make appointment for next week. You get a 30 minute slot. And that is a big ask, I think, for a lot of 17 year olds. And the nice thing about a chat bot is it's 24/7. Kids at 10 p.m. can actually interact, get questions answered, explore a university. there's that side, the way that universities are using this technology to interact with prospective applicants. The other side of it, of course, is the side that you mentioned. And I think that's the side that people think of usually first when they're thinking about how AI is being used in college admissions. And I do think the first thing that people think of is the college essay. And actually that's where I started in this. I started presenting last year on how college counselors could use artificial intelligence in an ethical way to help students in the college essay writing process. Because that has historically been something that takes a lot of time when a high school counselor wants to work with a student and help them really in a systematic way. And there's a lot of different steps in that process that I've seen where artificial intelligence can help. A human counselor work with a high school student. We also know that students are using it in what most of us would consider unethical ways. And that would be, you know, putting in a college essay prompt and saying, create my essay. So asking chat GPT, you know, to fully form a college essay that they are then going to use. But I think anybody that has done that, if you've put a generic prompt into chat GPT, what you get back is something pretty generic as well. And so a lot of educators, you know, had that experience where they're like, I've tried chat GPT, I've put in, you know, a prompt and it's terrible. It's absolutely awful. What came back was completely useless. And what, you know, what we find is, you know, if you put in crap, you get out crap. so, excuse my language, but yeah, when you put in something that's not very good, what you're going to get back is not very good. So, so we've done a lot, you know, helping educators kind of understand that students are using this in pretty advanced ways that we are not detecting. And they are using it in the essay writing process, both unethically, but also in really creative, cool ways to help them in that writing process. And I think, you know, that's what we're hoping to focus on with our community, because our community being the educators is to teach them to view this not as just a mechanism for cheating, but look at this as something that could help you in the way that you're working with students. you know, whether that be either side of the desk, if you're a university looking at how can you do this better? Like, you know, how can you market to students that are really interested in your institution? You know, not just throwing something out there for every student, but looking for the students that are really the right kind of student for your institution. And then the other side, using it to how do we help students in that college admissions process? It's an extremely confusing process that has just gotten more less transparent and more confusing over the years. And I do feel that there is a glimmer of hope that these tools could be, you know, could help streamline that process and help us in the way that we're working with students to help them get to university.

Matthew Sterenberg (07:18.627)

Yeah, there's, there's a lot of tension related to this. Like I, I just sit back and I go, okay, we don't want it to be, we want the students own words to some degree in the essay, let's say. And, but at the same point, like you said, an admissions office is going to use AI tools to like write emails, to market to students. You might even be using AI to analyze the essay that you get back. So it's kind of this funny thing where it's like, we don't want you to use AI as students. We're going to be using it in admissions to do all these different things, to write the email to you, to market to you, to even analyze. But it makes sense in the sense that we want to get to know the student. Are they a good fit for our institution? And we don't want just something that you were able to get out of AI. We want it to be your own words. We want to get to know you. So I think you're right. We have to have some rules of the game, but it's so new. It is scary. there's a few ways that this can go, in my opinion. One is people are like, well, we're going to do away with the essay. There's got to be some other way that we can get to know the student. And AI might even be part of that. How do you upload all of your achievements and we're able to get a better understanding of who you are as a student. So I think there's some interesting use cases that actually allow us to get to know the students better. But there are definitely things where I'm like, this is, you know, it's too easy. If you know how to prompt engineer this college essay, you can come up with something actually pretty, pretty much it's going to sound like your own words. So it is a very difficult thing to weed through because you have one group that really wants to use AI for efficiency. And they're telling another group, well, don't really want you to use it some, not all. It's an interesting place to be.

Emily Pacheco (09:23.118)

Well, I think we have to be careful saying that universities don't want students to use it. We don't yet, we're not making it clear how we want them to use it. And that's a big problem right now. And I think I've heard a lot of people say that, that line of like, universities are using it, but they don't want students to use it. And when you talk to admission people, the ones that know about how artificial intelligence works and all of the amazing things it can do, I don't hear any of them saying we don't want students to use it.

Matthew Sterenberg (09:31.973)

Mmm.

Emily Pacheco (09:52.662)

Actually, they say, we know students need to know how to use this and we know there's really good ways that this can be used. So it would be stupid for students not to use this in the college admissions process, but we need to make it more clear what those expectations are. And right now we're not doing that. Universities are kind of letting students decide that on their own because there aren't policies, there really aren't many policies that are specific to college admissions. In terms of providing guidelines and saying, this is how you should use it, this is how we expect you not to use it. And exactly that, like just creating the essay out of just entering the prompt and getting that. But there are a lot of really good ways that it can be used. And I do think universities aren't against those ethical ways, but we're behind in creating those guidelines. And that's one of the things that the community that I'm a part of is working on is helping universities do that better. I have a document that's collecting all of the policies specific to college admissions. Right now I only have eight universities on that that have put out guidelines like that. And I expect to see that number double, triple, and then just a floodwater of universities coming out with clearer policies. And I think that's gonna happen in the next few years, but we're definitely at this point that's we're leaving students really not knowing how to, you know, what to do in that process in terms of using artificial intelligence. And that's really unfair. It's unfair to them. It's really, you know, makes it really hard for students at this moment.

Matthew Sterenberg (11:31.543)

Yeah, we need to give them the rules of the road, right? What's acceptable, what's not. You mentioned you have a few universities that do have clear expectations. What, what are they saying to students?

Emily Pacheco (11:43.767)

Yeah, there's a number of schools that have come out. The best guidelines definitely give specific examples. They say, know, do this and don't do that. You know, a lot of them are just a little bit more general. know, one of the guidelines that I absolutely love at the end, I believe it's Georgia Tech has this at the end of their guidelines is, you know, at the end of all of, you know, reading these guidelines, if you're still unsure if the task at hand, could be, should be accomplished by artificial intelligence, ask yourself if this is something that you would ask a trusted adult like a college counselor or a parent to help you with. And I liked that kind of, it's impossible to lay out every guideline of do this, don't do that. But it's nice to say, think about this. Is this something that your college counselor would do for you? If you went to them and said, help me with this task, would they say, no way, you need to do that, that obviously is something you need to take, you need to take authority in that, or is this something that they would step in and say, yeah, we can help.

Matthew Sterenberg (12:51.747)

Right, you wouldn't ask your college counselor to rewrite your paper or something or rewrite your essay, but I remember doing this, I still do it, where you go to thesaurus.com, you're like, what are some other words I can use here? What's a different way to phrase this, right? That to me, of course that's acceptable, right? It's just another resource of how do I translate my own thoughts and words into something that's more compelling or tells a better story or something like that.

Emily Pacheco (13:18.156)

Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, that's not black and white, we find. mean, you to me, you'd say, yes, that makes complete sense. But recently I was talking with a bunch of counselors and I used the example of helping a student brainstorm a title. You know, and to me, that was something like when I was, I still remember going to my mom with a paper and saying, I need a good title, you know, what would be a good title? And she'd help me brainstorm that. But in this room, there were several college counselors that said, no, using AI to brainstorm a title. You know, is overstepping that line. So it's very clear to me as I navigate in this, you know, and talk to counselors, this is not black and white. There's not, there's very little within this that you can say like everybody would agree on this or that. It's actually something that's, that's pretty nuanced. And I think what we're going to see is it's something that is just going to be evolving over time. So the policies that we need to make, we actually need to make them flexible. We need to be able to kind of

Matthew Sterenberg (13:50.351)

Mmm.

Emily Pacheco (14:15.598)

come back to them and say, okay, this made sense two years ago, but, you know, things are changing and that policy is going to change as well.

Matthew Sterenberg (14:21.933)

Yeah. And AI, mean, how good is it going to be in two years? Like we, it's good now. Like the idea that we are not going to have to revisit this constantly is it's evolving so quickly that I think you're going to have to consistently revisit it because it's, we have no idea how good it can be, which is the scary element of all this, right? Like you could put your, you could be

Emily Pacheco (14:48.322)

Yeah.

Matthew Sterenberg (14:50.701)

interviewing me as a student on the phone, let's say, or through Zoom and my camera's off. Like I could program my voice to answer you. there, it sounds crazy, but we are not that far away from being able to take my voice and answer questions that you have for me live, right? It's not that far away really.

Emily Pacheco (15:11.502)

Yeah, right now it's at the level of being able to write a dissertation and it started as a babbling toddler. And that wasn't that long ago. That was November 2022 and here we are, 2025 and it's only improving 100%. And I do wanna go back to something you said about doing away with the essay. I think we do need to question our assessments. As educators and that's something that's just not happening fast enough for sure. But you know, is this the best mechanism to get what we need out of applicants? And I'm not 100 % sure that what we're asking for in the admission process is actually doing the job that we want it to do in the best way possible. So I think there is a lot of hope that this technology could actually, you know, create a new way that we could evaluate applicants and be able to kind of better figure out if they'd be successful at our institutions and evaluate their fit, not just based on the seven items that we are requesting at this point, which are the same seven items that we asked for in 1972 when we first asked for applications. And I don't think that's serving its purpose. It's just not serving its purpose.

Matthew Sterenberg (16:28.589)

Yeah. And if you talk to, you know, different institutions, they're going to give you different answers on what they find valuable. Right. I mean, everything has its problems, right. As a former admissions professional myself, the essay, I always felt like, it's kind of a nice to have it. But a lot of times you either get some student that's just bragging about themselves and how great they are, or it's a sob story about how I know my grades aren't good, but here's why, you know, and you're always like, Yeah, I don't know if this is the, I don't know if we needed this and some people will definitely disagree with that. And then other people say the GPA is not really good at accurate predictor of their success. Test scores are problematic. So how do we get a more holistic view? And I think that is part of the exciting part of AI that we can maybe rethink the information that we can input, how we can actually predict who's going to be a successful student here or. the right fit for our institution. So I think a lot of that is exciting. You have a great website for this. I do want to plug that edhub.ai. You have a number of webinars that you're doing on this topic. So if people are listening to this and they want to continue to engage with this topic, definitely check out edhub.ai. And you've got a number of different resources on there. And you really do a good job of addressing all the stakeholders that are part of this conversation. And it's college counselors, it's higher ed admissions professionals, it's ed tech providers that are building technology or something that institutions will leverage. I want to talk about the college counselors, right? The people that are advising, like you told a little bit of a story of meeting with them, but when they sit down with students, what advice do you have for them? Because there is a lack of guidance from higher ed on how to do this. What should college counselors, how should they address this topic with their students?

Emily Pacheco (18:32.908)

Yeah, I think it's a really important question because as I mentioned earlier, we know students are using this. They were the first ones to jump in and start experimenting with these tools. for a college counselor, not so much for a college counselor who just started last year or two years ago, three years ago. From my experience, those college counselors are pretty excited about these tools because they're finding this is really helping them kind of make up for that lack of 10, 15 years of experience. What you find is when I sit down with a college counselor who has been in their role for five plus, 10 plus years, it can be really hard for them to see the usefulness of them joining this conversation. They say, I have my system. The way that I have been working with students, the way that I've been doing my college counseling, it works really well and I just don't think I need these tools. And I know that's a dangerous, you know, it's a dangerous place to be because your students are using it and you are not using it and therefore you're not engaging in conversations around that usage and figuring out kind of what that means for the way that you have been doing your college counseling because it does have to change now. And that's a hard realization for many counselors. They want to believe that they can just kind of continue doing counseling in the way that they've been doing it. And that really is not the case because the way that students are approaching that admission process is very different now that they're using these tools. I'll give you a...

Matthew Sterenberg (20:09.987)

And if there's a void of information on how to use it, what am I going to use it for? I'm going to use it for like, not to say the word cheat, but if no one's telling me proper uses or helpful ways to use it, I'm just going to use it in the way that I feel benefits me the most instead of like thinking about how I'm using it. I'm not, if I'm not getting that instruction from a college counselor, I'm it's, I'm just going to use it. However, I, I deem the best.

Emily Pacheco (20:33.454)

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, and if you can't sit next to an educator and say, look at this use, you know, what do you think about it? How do you even discover if that's ethical or not? And I think a lot of them are actually doing pretty cool things that we would look at and go, wow, actually, I think that is ethical. I had never thought of that way to use this tool. And there's other things, of course, that they're like, look at this cool thing I'm doing, and that we'd look at and go, no, no, no, you know, let me explain to you why that isn't the right way to use these tools in a learning environment. I recently sat with a college counselor. He's at least 15, if not 20 years in his role at a pretty prestigious high school in Seattle. And he said he had sat with a student, he read the essay from the student, he knew the student really well. So he knew the way that the student wrote. And reading this essay, he said, I felt like he had used artificial intelligence in it, just knowing the student, I didn't feel that this was something that they had created, but it was also what he would consider a five-star essay. And he said, it hit all of the marks. He said, there wasn't anything that I could turn and say, hey, this is obviously created by AI because it's not a good product. And he said, I didn't know what to do. He was silenced. He proceeded with pretending that AI wasn't in the room. And he told the student, this is incredible. I really think this is gonna be a successful college essay. And when I came that had just happened and this, know, and talking about my work in AI in admissions, he brought this story up and he said, I just didn't have any words to discuss artificial intelligence with a student.

Matthew Sterenberg (22:21.593)

And you don't want to levy accusations, but at the same point, I mean, you have to be really careful. Yeah.

Emily Pacheco (22:24.973)

Yeah. Yeah, and it was a good final product. mean, I've heard this story before, know, time and time before, time and time again before, but usually it's where a counselor tells me, it was such a terrible essay. And they kind of, you know, making the point like, artificial intelligence is no good. You know, saw a student used it. It's always so obvious to me, you know, when a student uses it. And I don't think that's the case. I think that's the case when a student is new at using these tools. doesn't have experience and hasn't looked at other good quality essays and hasn't really spent time. But when you take a student who's savvy at technology, they're going to learn how to make this look like a good essay.

Matthew Sterenberg (23:06.755)

Yeah, they literally could put in the prompt, like write it like a 17 year old would write it to make it sound not quite as good or so. Like there's plenty of ways that you could, if you're savvy enough to tone it down, honestly.

Emily Pacheco (23:24.502)

Yeah, and that's what they're doing. know, mean, that's, you know, we've all been students, you know how to get things around that, you know, around the detection system if you want to. But I also think it's important for us to remember that students aren't just cheaters, you know, they don't typically they don't really, mean, know, studies show they don't want to cheat. 5 % of students will cheat and AI doesn't change that. And that's really what we're finding. This isn't making a classroom of cheaters.

Matthew Sterenberg (23:27.098)

Yeah.

Emily Pacheco (23:53.582)

Students are cheating because they don't know, like we're mentioning, they don't know the appropriate ways to use it. But I think with a little bit of guidance, they would just be using this in a way to enhance the learning process. And I think that's the case in college admissions as well. If we want to teach them how to write a good essay, if we still deem that's important, we can help it use this technology for certain aspects of that process and still teach that valuable writing process to them.

Matthew Sterenberg (24:27.523)

Yeah, I like the way you framed it in terms of enhancing, because I think that's like AI is not good or bad. It is all about how the use of it. And then I think we need to get away from there's a binary of did you use AI or didn't you, or don't use AI or use AI because there's flavors of, you know, it's a gray area. Like I used it for part of it, or I, I it's you know, spit something out and then I edited that like it's not, I use AI or did not, there's all different versions of it. But then how does this enhance the experience? Like, I smarter for having used it or am I using it for something I don't understand? Right? Like I could have it spit out a dissertation of which I know nothing about. Right. And that's not making me smarter, but how do I use it in a way that's actually enhancing my experience? How do I use it for it to teach me something? that's a really, mean, I don't know where we even begin there, but again, you could give me a prompt and I could ask it to spit something out, I give it back to you. That doesn't mean I understood it at all. Or I could actually use it to help me understand something that then I could produce. So it's such a difficult spot. But I do think it's like, this making me dumber or smarter? It's like the basic way I would put it. And there are ways to, like, that's good writing. I see good writing. That's a really clear way to frame that. I should use that mechanism the next time I write an essay instead of just relying on it solely.

Emily Pacheco (25:57.954)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and I hear you saying that from a perspective of a student, but I think you can even take that from a perspective of a college admissions counselor, you know, and say, how can I use this to enhance my work? You know, and I think it's kind of making that change from viewing this as Google, as I see it, you know, like where I can use it to put in a question and get an answer, but instead, how do I enhance myself as a professional? You know, this is what I'm able to do as a college counselor. These, you know, I can service students in this way, this number of students, but how can I provide, you know, more personalized attention or do something in a different creative way using these new tools? And that, you know, that takes a switch in our brain. You know, we're not programmed to use AI at all. Our brains, is all new. We're very programmed to use Google and we try to use AI like Google, you know, and that's where a lot of educators, I think,

Matthew Sterenberg (27:03.215)

Mm.

Emily Pacheco (27:05.122)

run into a wall of being like, these tools are terrible. I put in a prompt and what I got back was awful. And when you start digging into it, you realize pretty quickly it's because we don't yet understand how to appropriately prompt artificial intelligence. It's a very different process. a, you know, and it takes a different way of thinking. But when I've seen that kind of switch go off with college counselors where they understand this can actually just make them a better college counselor. It's not looking to replace them. You know, I think almost every parent, every student would love to have a human college counselor to work with. But the reality of the situation is there's just not enough quality human counselors for every student. So I really think this technology could do a lot to provide quality counseling to more students.

Matthew Sterenberg (27:55.447)

Emily, is there anything we didn't highlight in our conversation that you want to make sure we cover for the folks listening? Anything that you want to make sure people know about AI and college admissions before we wrap?

Emily Pacheco (28:09.964)

Yeah, I think it's important that every office, so every admission office, every college counseling office starts to think about who in their office is using this technology and bring them to the table to kind of more systematically have these conversations about what does it mean for our office? What does it mean for our students, you know, who are using this technology? Because people in your office are using it. I always say go to the newest employee that's most likely the person who is using it in the most creative ways and make sure that your office is a place where people can talk about this because if these conversations can't take place, then we can't really move things forward. So if you're not sure where to start, if you are an educator, definitely join the edhub.ai. We are a special interest group recognized under NACAC. So we're really active as well within the NACAC organization and doing a lot with them as well. And yes, we've got a webinar later this month on the 28th of February that's going to be looking at the ethical concerns about this. We always have those questions come up. So we've dedicated an hour and bringing on a panel of experts to kind of talk more deeply about some of those ethical questions specifically around using AI in that admissions process. Great place to start, join us in that conversation, but make sure to join our group on LinkedIn as well.

Matthew Sterenberg (29:35.109)

All right, so check out edhub.ai. If you're a higher ed institution, you're probably coming up with guidance for your students on how they use AI. Come up with some guidance for how your prospective students should use AI. That's a big takeaway for me. If you're a college counselor and you're having a college night, you're bringing in parents and students, talk about AI. Talk about how you expect them to use it, how they can leverage it. Some great takeaways. Emily. Thank you so much for joining me.

Emily Pacheco (30:05.966)

Thank you, Matt. This has been a lot of fun.

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A Discussion on AI in College Admissions

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How should AI fit into the college admissions process? What guidance are institutions offering prospective students? And, how can high school counselors advise their students? In this episode, we speak with Emily Pacheco, Advisor for AI in College Admissions.

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New Tools. Old Complaints. Why AI Won’t Kill Education or Fix it

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New Tools. Old Complaints. Why AI Won’t Kill Education or Fix it

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New Tools. Old Complaints. Why AI Won’t Kill Education or Fix it

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New Tools. Old Complaints. Why AI Won’t Kill Education or Fix it

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New Tools. Old Complaints. Why AI Won’t Kill Education or Fix it

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A.J. Juliani | The Oregon Trail Moment for Artificial Intelligence Is Quickly Ending

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever held a big ol’ floppy disk before! If I could look through this screen I’d see a lot of hands held high :) Way before we all had three devices on us (yea, I see you with the watch, phone, and laptop over there). And way before we used computers for work, communicat

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Jennifer Parnell is a Lawrenceville history teacher and the School’s Director of innovation and AI projects. This article is part of a collection of pieces on artificial intelligence, titled "Survival Guide" in the Spring 2025 issue of Independent School magazine, published by the National Association of Independent Schools.

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Teaching responsible use of AI

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Curriculum for all ages teaching the basics of AI to more enhanced lessons to expand knowledge of AI

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Our Program

We support teachers and educators to run Day of AI activities in their classrooms through curriculum packages and teacher trainings, all of which are available at no cost to participants.

Developed by leading faculty and educators from MIT RAISE (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education), each curriculum features a series of 30-60 minute lessons that engage kids in creative discovery, discussion, and critical thinking as they learn the fundamentals of AI, investigate its societal impacts, and bring grade-relevant applications of artificial intelligence to life through hands-on activities that are accessible to all, even for those with no computer science or technical background.

Our recommended sequence for all students is to begin with the What is AI? lessons to gain a basic understanding of this new technology. After this introduction, you are free to select the next set of lessons based on your interests or the interests of your students. The ages provided for each level should be used as a guideline only, and educators should feel free to adjust the lesson plans based on their students' abilities.

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We support teachers and educators to run Day of AI activities in their classrooms through curriculum packages and teacher trainings, all of which are available at no cost to participants.

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AI literacy lessons for grades 6-12

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Quick, grab-and-go lessons to help your students think critically about AI and its impact.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the world we live in. From using generative AI for schoolwork to dealing with misinformation and befriending AI chatbots, students have a lot to consider when it comes to this ever-evolving technology.

This collection of quick lessons (20 minutes or less!) provide an introduction to AI and help address its social and ethical impacts. Through these lessons, students will:

Understand what AI is and how it works

Consider some of its potential benefits and risks

Think critically about how we can be responsible and ethical users of AI

Also: See our AI Basics for K-12 Teachers self-paced training course!

Training Course: AI Basics for K-12 Teachers

ChatGPT and Beyond: How to Handle AI in Schools

Here's what educators can do as artificial intelligence evolves.

Free Resources to Explore and Use ChatGPT and AI

Get an educator-focused approach to information, concerns, and uses for artificial intelligence.

Transforming Education with AI: What Educators Need to Know

Lessons and Tools for Teaching About Artificial Intelligence

Help your students understand the impacts and uses of AI.

ChatGPT: To Ban or Not to Ban?

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AI Literacy Lessons for Grades 6-12 | Common Sense Education

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Quick, grab-and-go lessons to teach your students how to be ethical and empowered users of artificial intelligence.