AI in Education

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated

Adam :

What's so important is that we educate our educators and our students to know how to ethically and responsibly use this technology as a tool to increase our productivity to enhance our learning.

Natieka :

Hello and welcome to School Me, the National Education Association's podcast dedicated to helping educators thrive at every stage of their careers. I'm your host, Natieka Samuels. Today, we're diving into a topic that's on everyone's mind, artificial intelligence, or AI, and the role that it'll play in education.

My guest, Adam Aguilera, is a national board-certified middle school teacher in English language arts with 16 years of teaching experience. He also chairs the Washington State Professional Educator Standards Board and serves on several national and state AI task forces. Thank you so much for joining us today, Adam.

Adam :

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Natieka :

Let's start off with a little bit of basics about you. Where are you working and what do you teach and why is AI so interesting to you?

Adam :

Yeah, thank you. This is my 17th year of teaching English Language Arts in Evergreen Public Schools, which is located in Vancouver, Washington. And I've been involved in teacher leadership in my union, whether it's my local the Evergreen Education Association or my State of Washington Education Association, and then also my involvement in the National Education Association around teacher leadership opportunities in organizing members.

And one particular passion area recently that I've had as a language arts teacher is around this mainstreaming of generative AI tools that has spread throughout our society and is beginning to be seen and be quite visible in our schools and in our classrooms. And so I've had the opportunity to be not only the chair for the Washington Education Association's AI Task Force, but I've been a member of my state education agency here in Washington State's AI Task Force.

We developed Washington State's guidance for AI from OSPI, which is the Office Superintendent of Public Instruction. And I've also been a member of the National Education Association's AI Task Force, which has done amazing work already in training hundreds of educator leaders around what generative AI is going to mean as a transformative experience in public education.

Natieka :

So why did you decide to become an educator in the first place?

Adam :

Well, I come from a family of educators. My dad and my mom are both retired teachers. My dad taught high school English for 37 years. I was actually his freshman student one year when I went to the same high school he did. And then my mom has been a public school charter teacher in California as well before she retired too. And she was involved in teaching a whole bunch of different content areas including leadership in yearbook.

And so growing up in that environment, my parents always encouraged me to get into education, and I really found my passion in it when I began student teaching at Heritage High School in Evergreen Public Schools. And once I began working with those students and inspiring them and improving their confidence in their reading, writing, and communication skills and just their overall wellbeing as human beings, that's where I definitely caught that bug and being a teacher and remaining a teacher in the profession. So here I am, 17 years later.

Natieka :

I think that we are going to have a lot to talk about, and I have so many questions for you, so let's just dive in. I'm going to ask the most basic question, which is, what is AI? And when people think about AI, what are the different types, if any, that they should be aware of?

Adam :

Yeah, I would start with that artificial intelligence is all around us, and you've already been using it for years. There's different kinds of AI systems. There's system recommendation kinds of AI. So when you're interacting on Netflix or YouTube or on Facebook, and you get sort of this recommended link or this next show that you should see next, that's an AI algorithm that's predicting what it thinks you may want to watch next or to shop next for if you're on Amazon for example.

And what people are starting to pay attention to is this generative AI technology that is becoming mainstream and in our classrooms. And the difference of what that is can, I think, best be summarized by your experiences around chatting with this chatbot, inputting a prompt where you ask it to create something, whether it's text-based, image-based, or video-based. And within seconds, you see it manifest in front of you. And what's really powerful about that technology is generative AI is sort of like a brain that is being developed, something that you can interact with and responds back to you.

And that generative AI technology is currently being embedded into robotics. And we have a lot of tech companies that are currently in an arms race with each other to develop the first mainstream humanoid robot that will be powered by generative AI in how it communicates with you and how it executes actions on your behalf. So it's pretty expansive technology with generative AI and how it's going to shape and transform all of our personal and professional lives.

Natieka :

Yeah. And I'm thinking about how AI can only exist because of the internet because so many of these models are trained on the internet, and what we've been posting for the last couple of decades as internet has gone mainstream and we never could have imagined where this would've gone. Although people always talk about robots, I don't think we knew that this would be the way that it came about.

Adam :

And the mind-blowing thing about that too is OpenAI, for example, which released ChatGPT, and that kind of started all of this, they are doing now, is they've actually developed basically a language model that doesn't need to scrape the internet for data anymore.

They have a Strawberry model, as they code name it, that can actually create its own logic and reasoning, and then they're using that to create additional large models that would then get released to the public. So we're getting to a point where training generative AI will not even require sort of scraping the internet anymore for a lot of content.

Natieka :

How are you currently using AI in your own work as a teacher, and can you give us a few examples of how it helps you?

Adam :

It is a great thought partner when you are trying to design lesson plans when you are putting together model examples for students to be able to see because you can create rubrics from the same lesson plan you're generating with AI, and it will follow the conversation and be able to assist you through the entire process, creating models for that that you can then reformat, edit, however you want to, add your own voice to it, correct it, which is a very important thing to do is whatever it generates for you, make sure to fact check it.

Make sure that you use your own knowledge and your content area and your pedagogical practices to make sure that it's developmentally appropriate for your students. And one of the things I've been enjoying using it for right now as a thought partner is with ChatGPT, you now have voice chat. So I can have conversations now with generative AI where these conversations sound very realistic as if I'm talking to another person.

I can interrupt at any time. I can ask it questions. It will ask me questions. And it's really powerful in being able to kind of focus and train yourself around an AI that you're using for a certain account because the more you kind of train yourself into it, the more responsive it is to your specific and customized needs as an educator.

And if you're not sure what questions to ask to be trained under it, just ask it, "Hey, what do you want to know about me to help train yourself in being more responsive to helping me when I'm designing lesson plans or my classroom management skills or writing this letter that will go out to parents for that kind of thing." And it will ask you the questions that it wants to know.

Natieka :

Pretty amazing. Many people, and I'm sure, subset many teachers are feeling hesitant or overwhelmed by AI and what it could mean. So for those who are just starting to explore it or getting curious, what are some basic practical ways that they can start to use AI to either save time or just make their day better?

Adam :

I would start practicing with a large language model chatbot, like ChatGPT or Claude or Llama. Another good thing is that there are platforms out there right now. Magic School is one of the more popular ones that is out there, and that's like a platform utilizing kind of like a chatbot. They have helpful prompts where you just kind of click into a button to design a lesson plan or click into creating interactive learning games for your students. It kind of creates a menu of options without just looking at the chatbot and trying to figure out what to write next.

So you have all these different platforms that are beginning to emerge that are really excited to work with teachers and educators on practicing and using their tools. They're very responsive to feedback because they want to make it better. They want to customize it to your liking so that you want to continue to use it for your profession and in the classroom. So it's kind of a cool opportunity for us as educators right now to shape how this technology is going just by using it and providing feedback to these new tools.

Natieka :

I think the worry that we have about AI and the way that people are using it in work is, while people aren't actually doing work, if you can generate lesson plans using ChatGPT or Claude or Magic School to essentially do your job, what are you doing? What is the value of you? And I know that that's coming up a lot in a lot of industries. So how do you respond to people who say using AI is just being lazy and not doing your job?

Adam :

What I would speak to that is understanding that generative AI is a tool, and we have access as educators to all kinds of tools. And for those of us who may be listening to this who are veteran educators can remember that when the calculator came out and was going mainstream, there was a lot of fear and doubt about students just using calculators to do all of their math, and then they're not going to learn anything. Well, we move past that and calculators are a tool that we openly use in our classrooms and is mainstream. And as a tool, they actually help our students to be able to take on even more advanced mathematical concepts.

Now, certainly, you can cheat with the calculator, and you can certainly cheat with a generative AI tool, but what's so important is that we educate our educators and our students to know how to ethically and responsibly use this technology as a tool to increase our productivity, to enhance our learning, to be able to take on more challenging tasks and learning opportunities that we would normally get bogged down to for additional hours, just trying to get through the basics of those concepts. But now we have a thought partner that is able to create content and teach us things in ways that go beyond just searching something up on the internet or watching a video on YouTube.

It's more interactive. It's more personalized, and you feel like you're having a human-like conversation between something that can do so much to help you. And so I think it's a balance that we have as responsibilities educators and knowing how to use this tool, and ethical and responsible way so then that we can teach that ethically and responsibly for our students. It's certainly not a shortcut to doing your whole job. It does require a lot of thinking and being very specific in how you prompt these tools to create the high-level content that you want to generate for your students and for yourself.

Natieka :

So if we think about generative AI as having potentially the same transformative power as the arrival of the internet in terms of at the home level, how do you see AI impacting the classroom in a similar or even bigger way?

Adam :

What we're experiencing right now with generative AI it's like the internet happening all over again. It's like the telephone becoming the cell phone all over again. What makes this even more transformative and it will be even more impactful, is that the human-like element of interaction that it's going to be. Right now, it's a voice on a screen. You can kind of create avatars and see it, but it is eventually going to become more embedded into robotics. That we will physically be interacting with this technology and visibly seeing it and can touch it. That is only a short time away.

I would say, in 10, 20 years, we will see sort of like a humanoid robot powered by generative AI that we will be interacting with. And just like how we transitioned to the cell phone like it was nothing. It was so easy to just give up the corded telephone. It will be like that too. We'll just sort of adapt into what we think now is going to be science fiction. We'll just adapt into it, and it's going to really be a transformative experience for all of us.

So that's why it's so important right now that we embrace learning about it and educating ourselves on it because it's so important that educators are leading this with their voice in the classroom and the schools because we want to make sure that our voice and the voices of our students are being heard to set these policies and these guidelines on how to use this transformative technology before a politician or a tech bro dictates that for us.

Natieka :

Students are already using AI tools that we might know, like Grammarly, and Apple is, in the future, rolling out AI that's integrated into their devices. So how do you think that this will change the student experiences, and how can educators stay ahead of those trends?

Adam :

Oh yeah, it already is. I can't even tell you how many times I had students last year that were trying to just generate a complete essay off of Grammarly or another generative AI tool and try to turn that in as an assignment. I know many of you who are listening out there right now have also experienced that. This is something where I think it's so important again to train as many people as possible so that they're even aware of it because we still have educators out there, and there's also a training disparity with our classified staff members, our paraeducators.

They're getting even less training on this technology, and I'm still coming across staff members that are like, "I don't even know how my student is writing this. I don't know what's going on here," because they have no concept even of generative AI yet. So that training is going to be so important in helping us to understand what does it look like when a student creates something that is generated from AI and how do you want to teach them how to use it ethically and responsibly at different levels.

It's important for us to realize as educators that with where generative AI is at already, it now needs to be a part of every student's basic education. We just have to have that mindset that just like we teach reading and writing and math and science, we have to teach this technology as a part of their basic education because they're going to be using it for the rest of their personal and professional lives. Whatever job they're going to be doing in the future, they're going to be interacting with generative AI tools.

Natieka :

I was going to ask what you felt is a fair use of AI in the classroom from the student side of things. I'd love to talk about how we might rethink the way that we assess students when we know that AI is going to be a part of their assignments.

Adam :

You can actually use generative AI tools to help with that. You can prompt a chatbot or a learning management system that has AI embedded into it to generate lesson plans and units that require students to look at assessments in a project-based way, for example, where it's not just this one-step learning process they're doing, but that there's actually sort of this tiered project of content generation, reflection, editing that's occurring that they're showing their history on and that they're able to complete on a high level of critical thinking level.

All of that is possible not only using your own pedagogical practices as an educator but using generative AI tools like that to help create that kind of content for your students. Another example is please look at Washington State's guidance on generative AI through OSPI. We have an amazing guidance document. Other states are doing it too. We have a living document. We're updating it regularly. We have an AI assessment scale that you can use right now in your classroom where you can show your students different levels of using generative AI that you can teach them over time.

You can open up those levels to where, "Maybe this assignment, you only use a level one or a level two for generative AI use." Or maybe after you've taught them all the levels, you can open it up to all of the levels possible where they can even go up to full AI generation as long as they're following the criteria around that and that they're using APA or MLA source citations that are already out there on how to properly cite AI-generated or edited content.

Natieka :

Thanks for listening to School Me, and a quick thank you to all of the NEA members listening. If you're not an NEA member yet, visit NEA.org/whyjoin to learn more about member benefits. Also, what I wanted to get to is detecting AI-generated work because, of course, I think, over time, you can probably see it with your own eyes what's AI-generated and what's not, but are there tools that people who are sort of training themselves to get there can use to just check whether their students are trying to give you a completely AI generated piece of work, or at least assisted with AI?

Adam :

There are AI detector tools out there. There's many of them that you can use, however, they are not reliable. What I tell teachers in my experience as we've been educating educators on around generative AI is that you as the educator are your own best AI detector. You know your students writing the best.

How do you do that? Well, at the beginning of the school year, you collect early writing samples, right, handwritten samples, typed-out samples, tasks that wouldn't necessarily tempt a student to look at generative AI initially, more maybe personalized towards the student's identity and experiences where they're happy to just write their own content, and then you hold onto that content.

And then, as you progress through more complex tasks with your unit or district curriculum, what I recommend educators do is use Google Documents, Google Slides because on that Google set of software, when your students share and give you editing privileges to those documents, you can look up the entire history of writing of that document and you can see how your students are crafting and editing and writing it over time.

And if you suddenly find only one history edit on that document, and it's this giant sort of copy and paste that fills up a whole page, yeah, that's probably a red flag that your student used generative AI content for that. So I like to tell educators that you are your own best AI detector. Collect writing samples of all types for your students, have them complete their assignments on Google software or other software that allows you to see the history of that writing document be completed over time.

Natieka :

There's also a lot of talk about AI's ability to level the playing field by assisting students with different learning needs. So how can you use AI, or how do you see AI promoting equity in education?

Adam :

What's powerful about this tool is that because it's been trained by large sets of data, it's also been trained by large sets of education pedagogical data where it understands concepts like universal design learning. So one of the things that we encourage educators to do when they're lesson planning is prompt it to lesson plan and make sure that it lesson plans under a universal design learning template because UDL is nationally recognized.

It is the standard of how we provide lesson planning and instruction to students with special needs. And generative AI tools understand how to create lesson plans around that context and with that template. So I would say it really empowers educators to save hours in creating a high-quality lesson planning material that can also differentiate for specific students in your classes.

For example, when I'm writing a universally designed lesson unit or a particular lesson plan, I can also prompt the generative AI to differentiate that lesson plan specifically for my students that may have a reading disability, or I also might have a mix of highly capable or gifted students.

So how do I differentiate for them too? And what's amazing is that within seconds you will get a list of ideas on how to differentiate that same lesson plan for your students with reading disabilities and for your students who are highly capable in that classroom. And then it's really helpful to be able to have that context.

Natieka :

And are there any risks that you should be aware of when you're thinking about equity and AI in the classroom?

Adam :

Yes. Understand that generative AI, the way it works, is it's a predictor algorithm. It predicts what it thinks that you want to see in the responses that you prompted it for. So it can completely hallucinate and just make up stuff, make up citations and examples. And that's why it's so important to fact-check it and making sure your students are doing that too because we don't want to learn off of false data. So it's important that we do that. As the technology continues to improve, it's becoming more advanced in creating image and video generation.

And one of the concerns that I'm expressing to politicians and to education leaders and stakeholders is that we need to make sure that we are passing laws, policies, and regulations that protects students and educators privacy, and that it also respects their intellectual property and their identity. These generative tools around image and video generation can basically take your face, your voice and almost perfectly replicate it already with the way the technology currently is. So you can only imagine how more advanced and almost indistinguishable it's going to be in the future.

So we have to be concerned about protecting our students, which we've already seen case examples in schools all around this country where students create pornographic content of other students using their likeness. Students and educators trying to frame another educator by replicating their voice to have them say something in a recording that they never said, or to create a video of them looking like they're saying and doing something that never happened. And so, we need to make sure that the laws, regulations, and policies are catching up to this really real concern and issue of safety that can already affect any student and educator right now.

Natieka :

How about educator job security? Are there any concerns about that? As we sort of alluded to earlier with knowing that AI can do a lot of things that you would do with some prompting, are there concerns that are popping up about educators being replaced by robots in the near future?

Adam :

So here is what I recommend everyone who's listening right now does. Get involved in educating yourself around generative AI. Be a leader and a voice in shaping it because there's still a majority of people who don't really know what this technology is. And we have this unique opportunity, this short window, to really have a voice and a say in designing and setting the policies of how this is implemented in our schools. And fortunately, the policies and guidance that are coming out so far, like in Washington State, where we released our guidance, is that we are very clear that the implementation of generative AI in education must be human-centered.

It cannot replace the educator. That the value of a teacher and an educator is not replaceable, or the students. The technology itself, even years into the future, is still going to be very limited in how it will be able to interact with students and within a school system. A generative AI chatbot cannot manage a classroom, cannot control student behaviors beyond a computer screen setting right now. You need to have an educator, a teacher who not only is interacting with the student and providing for their academic learning and safety, but the human-to-human connection also instills, and we know this as educators, that we teach our students how to be socially and emotionally well.

We are a human figure in their life that can at times feel parental, at times feel like a mentor, a model to look up to, and a robot can't replace that, a chatbot on a computer screen can't replace that. And our students who are already so embedded in technology and growing up with an iPad a cell phone already, they recognize that too, and they are hungry to have more human interactions, and they value those human interactions because they have already been so overexposed to social media and technology. So I want to encourage people out there that we are not going to be replaced by this technology.

In fact, we have an opportunity to really enhance our own profession and do it in a way that is transformative, that allows us to be more productive, that allows us to enter levels of higher thinking that we just didn't have the time for before. And it will help not only our professional lives but our personal lives as well, and just the access and opportunities of creating a level field where we now have access to powerful tools that everybody else has access to, regardless of your wealth, your status. You can go on the internet and access these tools right now.

Natieka :

So looking ahead to when AI is just as common as laptops and internet in a classroom, what do you think education will look like? And again, I'll go to what are some of the tasks or challenges you imagine AI will be handling in the near future for educators.

Adam :

We do need to continue to make a commitment towards racial equity and equity in general in how we implement this technology. We want to avoid situations where if we embed generative AI into our school security systems, for example, what cameras are recording and then generative AI using that footage, is that creating potential bias against our students? Is it misidentifying students, which already exists currently with problems with that kind of technology?

So we need to make sure that by prioritizing this technology in educating everyone and making it accessible to all of our students and our staff too, is that we need to reduce the digital divide that has always existed in this country, and public education is the access point, the opportunity point for families who may lack computers and technology to be able to come to school and have access to these very powerful tools that can be transformative in their personal and professional lives.

There's certainly a generational gap too that these tools can help reduce the gap for, but we must embrace it as a technology that is a part of basic education because to block it or to deny it is only widening the digital divide. It is only widening issues of inequities in our education system by allowing these tools only to be accessible for the haves versus the have-nots.

Natieka :

And how about education support professionals? You mentioned a little bit about paraprofessionals, but I'm thinking about office staff. There's so many different positions that could probably be affected by AI. But could you quickly go over how you feel outside of the proper classroom setting, how education might be changed by AI for those other job categories?

Adam :

It's going to change every single job, profession, industry. So, in the education system, not only will our classroom educators be utilizing this technology, but all staff will be using it in some capacity in their jobs.

So office staff, for example, will be utilizing district systems that will have sort of a generative AI chatbot that is interacting with them, talking to them, helping them to see identities and trends in the data that they're recording, being able to communicate to families, to have interactive voices that are AI voices that are representing the school or the school district, and that families are able to have a back and forth conversation, a high-level conversation about their student because this generative AI tools are embedded into district systems that have access to that data, that follow privacy protocols.

And everybody will be utilizing this technology and how it will transform your job to be more productive, more efficient, and feel like you're doing more in a meaningful way that you didn't have the time to do. We always think this, "Oh gosh, I got this full list of things that I always need to do this learning I always need to do, and I just don't have the time to do it." And this will help unlock hours of savings in our lives to be so much more that we want to be as an educator or a paraeducator or a staff member in our schools.

Natieka :

You've made a lot of your work outside of the classroom centered around AI, so you might not be scared of anything, but what does scare you about the impact of AI on education, if anything?

Adam :

I am concerned that if we are not leading with educator and student voice and the voices of our families that we serve, that that hole will be filled by powerful, elite, wealthy interests that will have caught on to how powerful this technology is and will then start to dictate what this looks like in our society, our general society, and especially into our schools. As I was mentioning earlier, I don't want a politician or a tech bro CEO to be dictating how these tools are used in our classroom.

We have to avoid the mistake that we did with the internet and social media where we just didn't do anything, and we let all of our kids get exposed to it, and we saw the horrific mental health toll that it has had on a generation of students so far. So we need to make sure that we're in front of this so that we can reduce and minimize the harm. There's going to be harm. That's going to happen.

There's going to be bumps in the road. Any change or transformation inevitably has that. But the more that we're upfront and center it with our voices and our expertise, the better future I believe that we will have in not seeing a dystopian society where you have the few and powerful that have access to the most superior best versions of artificial intelligence and then are using it to control, manipulate, or oppress whole societies and communities of people without us even knowing it.

Natieka :

I do like to end on something positive. So next-

Adam :

Yes.

Natieka :

... question naturally will be when you think about, let's say the next year with how fast things are moving next year, maybe five years, what excites you most about the impact of AI on education?

Adam :

I see this year as kind of like the training year. I see this where now we kind of know it's out there. We have AI guidance in different states. The priority for this year is just training everyone, as many people as possible, whether it's your local, your school district, your state union, the NEA itself. We just need to train as many educators certificated, classified as possible so that we can have an understanding of it and begin the process of teaching our students how ethically and responsibly use it. So I see these next couple of years as that starting point.

Imagine when that computer lab first came into the library, or you've got your one-on-one devices that arrived in the cart in your classroom. It's going to be kind of like that. All of a sudden, it's going to show up on our computer screens, and now we have access to it, and let's start using it, playing around with it, having fun with it, and finding the joy of interacting with a new technology like this with our students. I think about, I was doing a Choose Your Own Adventure story with my students last year, and I pulled the chatbot in front of the projector screen. We just had fun creating a Choose Your Own Adventure story together.

Students started adding themselves as characters into the story and what their personalities were like and what did they want to have happen next in the story. And then, the chatbot would give us two choices, and then we would vote and pick the next choice. There's so many fun ways that you can have interactive learning moments, community-building moments with your students that we've only just scratched the surface of because just wait until image and video generative AI really goes mainstream too because imagine the stories of videos you can create with your students where your only limitation is your imagination and of course, being school appropriate.

Natieka :

Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Adam. It was really great to hear everything you had to say, and I know that this is going to be an episode that a lot of people find really valuable.

Adam :

Thank you. I hope that for everyone listening out there, that you're able to take something out of this where you can just run with it and see what happens. Because we're so early into this, just imagine yourselves as emerging leaders in AI and education.

I know it seems a little daunting, like, "Well, I've only just kind of started in this," but the fact that you might know more now than most of the people still out there goes to show the responsibility that you have as an emerging leader to educate yourself more and begin to educate others because, right now, you're one of the few that are engaged and listening in on these conversations or maybe trying out the tools right now. So run with it.

See what opportunities and doors that it opens for you to really lead in this work and make a difference on a local, state, and national level. People are hungry for educator perspectives in shaping this technology. They want to hear from you. They want to interact with you, so see where you can go with it and how it'll change your life.

Natieka :

Thanks for listening. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of School Me, and take a minute to rate the show and leave a review. It really helps us out, and it makes it easier for more educators to find us. For more tips to help you bring the best to your students, text POD, that's P-O-D, to 48744.