LONGMONT — The questions that baffle Mai Vu’s students, that frustrate them one second and motivate them the next, also foreshadow the future.
At first glance, their work seems ordinary. Scattered across a classroom, they each pore over their laptops, eyes firmly trained on their screens like any other teens.
But the queries consuming each of them hint at the kinds of challenges high schoolers will take on in coming years: How do you teach a camera to spot pedestrians and stop signs from inside a self-driving car? What does it take to speed up a pizza order in a short-staffed restaurant? Can gaming technology help students better master a second language?
Both the students and their projects are part of a new wave of learning that educators say will transform how kids grasp information. The engine driving their work: artificial intelligence.
“This is a tool that is going to be a part of our future world,” said Michelle Bourgeois, chief technology officer for St. Vrain Valley School District, where Vu’s students are experimenting with AI. “How do we make sure that we are ready not only to use it, but also to make sure our students are ready to use it?”
As AI technology rapidly advances and raises substantial questions about the future of work, some Colorado schools are at the dawn of exploring how AI could revolutionize classrooms. Even while still in its early stages, the technology is helping teachers with the heavy lift of daily lesson planning, communicating with families and tailoring their instruction to individual students. It can also give kids more seamless ways to learn at their own pace or put sophisticated ideas — like a camera trained for a self-driving car or a pizza bot — in motion.
But embracing AI in a way that accelerates students’ academic success, as opposed to offering them a shortcut, will require schools to introduce the technology gradually, both experts and educators say. Meanwhile, leaders and teachers across districts are grappling with how to keep both students experimenting with AI and their data safe.
Questions about how AI will reshape education prompted the Colorado Education Initiative to form a statewide steering committee last year with San Francisco-based nonprofit The AI Education Project to shepherd schools through complex decisions about how to blend AI into their classrooms. The steering committee, composed of educators, district leaders, scientists and business professionals, will focus on developing a cohesive plan to point schools, policymakers and industry experts in the same direction as more students delve into AI, said Rebecca Holmes, president and CEO of state initiative.
“We’re at a moment where this is moving so quickly that whether you’re a teacher in a classroom or a superintendent or a school board member, you’re sort of looking for trusted guidance,” Holmes said. “And you also don’t want to move too slowly. You don’t want to get completely outpaced by another state or another district.”
The AI Education Project, a 5-year-old nonprofit, is one resource working with schools across the country to help them figure out how to use AI responsibly and give teachers a “foundational understanding” of the technology so that they can decide how it will best enhance their work with students, said Christian Pinedo, chief of staff for the organization.
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“We’re really trying to establish this call to action to schools, to educators, to students that you don’t need to know how to build or code an AI model, but you do need to know or build critical thinking skills around what AI means in society,” Pinedo said, “because the reality is that AI is well ingrained into our everyday lives. Students should be given the ability to think about what are the societal impacts, the ethical impacts, the emotional impacts of AI technologies around them.”
AI is making its way into the classroom at a time “education is long overdue to be shaken up and to be rethought,” he added.
Public education has long been rooted in the idea of measuring students and their intelligence based on how they perform on assessments like multiple choice tests or essays — which AI can master just as well as students. That’s why it’s becoming increasingly critical for schools to start prioritizing other skills that AI cannot replicate, such as collaboration and empathy, Pinedo said.
“It’s no secret that in the future, your coworkers are not all going to be human,” he said. “You’re going to have AI agent coworkers, and a lot of companies already do. Building those skills among students is going to be really key for them to succeed in that workspace.”
How do you empower kids to use AI as a tool, rather than a replacement, for learning?
St. Vrain Valley School District, which has a statewide reputation as a pioneer in technology and innovation, started ramping up its use of generative AI among teachers and administrators last fall and is determined to train all educators on generative AI by the end of the school year, district administrators say.
“Our goal this year,” Bourgeois said, “has been to prepare our teachers for the world that we know our students are going to get to thrive in.”
The district, which has about 32,500 students in preschool through 12th grade, has nudged teachers to play around with AI in simple ways, creating a bingo game that gives them ideas about how to use AI, such as planning a weekend trip, a workout routine or a class rubric. Teachers then earn professional development credit for filling out the card.
A key part of the district’s approach in coaching teachers on using AI has been focused on reinforcing safety of students and their personal information.
Data shared for a specific use could be used in a different way, Bourgeois said. “So be very intentional about what data you share with an AI,” Bourgeois said.
St. Vrain Valley School District’s school board has not created a policy specific to the part AI plays in the classroom, district administrators say. Instead, the district is reviewing its policies for privacy, responsible use and student academic integrity and evaluating whether those policies adequately address AI.
Vu, AI program manager for the district, takes students under the hood of AI — teaching them about how it’s created and how it works — and how AI might improve their lives. Part of the challenge of teaching students AI revolves around the warp speed at which it evolves. Vu knows that the technology she’s teaching students now, or at very least the model she’s working with, will be outdated within a few years.
But the possibilities AI opens up to her students excite her as she encourages them to think about how it could transform the world around them. For example, could students use AI to detect depression in the pictures they take?
Some of her students are already making strides in using AI to solve problems they’ve identified on their own, including Malcolm Smith, a junior at Niwot High School who is building a website aimed at helping elementary schoolers understand the basics of robotics.
Malcolm, 17, has been using AI in the form of an image classification model in which he submits images of robotics parts, which the AI then sorts. His website will show students different robotics pieces so that they easily distinguish between them. He won third place in the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth for his project.
“Behind every breakthrough, there’s some clever idea that had to go into it,” Malcolm said. “And someone thought of something, and then they tried it and then it worked. And it’s a lot like kind of the rest of how science has been working.”
Meanwhile, in Colorado’s far northeastern corner, teachers with Haxtun School District RE-J2 are also starting to explore how AI can make lesson planning more efficient and help them better meet individual students where they’re at by customizing classroom materials to their different reading levels, Superintendent Marsha Cody said.
One of the district’s high school social studies teacher, for example, has used AI to find inspiration for lesson planning, projects and ways to engage students and has been able to generate materials for students reading at a lower level. Meanwhile, a high school English teacher has directed ChatGPT to conjure up grammar examples and exercises. Another teacher used ChatGPT to spur ideas for a support letter as part of a grant application, editing the language it created, and teachers are also starting to rely on Chat GPT to develop class rubrics.
“It’s all about generating ideas, getting some language and then heavy revision,” Cody said.
Schools are also placing a focus on the ethics of using AI.
The possibility of kids taking advantage of AI to cut corners has led schools to take steps now to show students why integrity is a key part of using the technology responsibly.
“We have to teach them, what is their North Star?” Vu said, asking her students, “what is the line that you’re willing to cross?”
Amanda Escheman, a humanities teacher at Cherry Creek Challenge School in Aurora, warns her seventh and eighth graders that they will undermine their own growth if they rely on AI to do their work for them.
“You’re losing that opportunity to work out your brain, to complete these tasks on your own without the help of technology,” she said, “and because of that, you’re not going to learn the skills.”
She also reiterates to students the importance of crafting a foundation of original work before ever consulting AI to improve their writing or help them to think differently about a prompt and cautions them against automatically trusting the information that AI technology spits out.
“My overarching lesson to kids has been, unless you’re an expert in the field, you should not use the AI as your only resource for learning,” said Escheman, who urges her students to conduct their own research to verify what AI generates for them.
Even as AI becomes exponentially savvier, experts say it’s no match for a teacher
For all the promise AI holds for schools, experts also worry about its potential to deepen the divide between students who have easy access to technology and those who do not. .
Pinedo, of The AI Education Project, said he worries that AI is “adding gasoline to already existing inequities” in schools, particularly as many students have struggled to get the same kind of devices as their peers along with a reliable internet connection.
One all-consuming question gnaws at Pinedo as he sees districts and teachers prioritizing testing out AI in the classroom and others who don’t expose their students to the technology at all.
“How do you leverage the technology to close the digital divide rather than exacerbate it?”
One effort to make AI more accessible and approachable to both teachers and students has sprouted in Denver.
Longtime educator Adeel Khan initially pinpointed AI technology as a long-awaited answer to what he calls the “historically intractable problem of just incredible teacher workloads” and set out to develop a generative AI platform specifically designed to ease their to-do lists.
“AI can be confusing,” said Khan, founder and CEO of Magic School AI. “It can be scary. So let’s make a platform that really speaks to teachers where they’re at and the tasks that they do, that they know super intimately.”
Through Magic School AI, teachers can expedite the process of lesson planning, emailing parents, giving students feedback and customizing the ways they teach to accommodate individual students.
Khan, whose platform has drawn 1.3 million teachers and support staff over the past eight months, is expanding his focus on AI in schools by rolling out a platform next for students called Magic Student. Students will be able to get a taste of how AI can propel their learning while their teacher will maintain control over the platform’s AI capabilities.
Khan, who helped launch Denver’s Conservatory Green High School after a career teaching, likens some of the challenges in introducing AI to students to giving them a calculator.
Students only start using calculators after they’ve learned the basics of math. The same will be true for AI, Khan said, with schools having to get a better sense of “when’s the right time for people to give AI to students in kind of unbridled access, obviously with the appropriate training and understanding, and when is the time to maybe introduce it in smaller waves?”
But no matter how sophisticated AI becomes, teachers will always remain at the center of their classrooms just as they have at every turn of technology, from movies to computers to one-to-one devices, educators say.
That’s the “magic” of teachers, Khan said.
“AI is not the magic,” he said. “(Teachers) work unbelievably hard to serve their students and know them and build relationships with them and inspire them to learn, and AI is never gonna replace that.”