Rural educators will come together in Springfield Friday, January 5, to learn more about how to use AI in schools. The Community Foundation of the Ozarks is hosting the free workshop “AI for rural educators” facilitated by Christian Jackson and Nathan Critchett of Edapt.
Critchett said many educators have access to the tools, but they might not know how to use them.
"And the way we approach this topic is building the thinker or building the brain that can utilize these tools effectively, right? A lot of times we see people getting caught up in specific use cases or they just feel overburdened by so much information coming at them. We really focus on making it as simple as possible and more just around how to think about using the tools rather than what to do with them," he said.
AI can be beneficial in the classroom in a number of ways, according to Critchett. And he said, if they can teach someone to use it responsibly, it can supercharge the learning process.
Jackson said a tool from Google called Notebook LMS has been available for free since the start of the last school year for every teacher that uses Google Classroom.
"And what we're talking about here is there is a real world where every single student has access to a custom and personalized study environment where they're not just being fed answers and the AI is not just giving them the correct answer," he said, "but they're actually able to think deeply and learn about a particular subject with the interest that they have, whether it sports or whether it be culinary or the arts, theater, whatever it might be, you can have a custom, personalized study environment that's multimodal, so...audio, video, text based, and this all can be student-led and teacher guideline ran, so teachers are the ones that are building these environments and the students can interact with it in a way that's beneficial for them."
They both said there are many potential downsides to using AI in schools, and that’s why learning the correct way to implement it is so important. Jackson said school leaders or teachers are constantly having to put out a fire on social media because of AI, "and that's because we didn't teach students or even ourselves how to use these tools properly."
He said, when students have AI complete their work, they're "cheating themselves of the hard work, the friction and the time that it takes to get to deep understanding of a concept." He said the concern that they're addressing is that there's a generation of students using AI tools who aren't being taught how to use them properly.
"The first thing that we have to do as educators, and because we've committed to this life of lifelong learning," he said, "(is) to teach ourselves how to use these tools and how to use them wisely."
Critchett said he and Jackson have spent a lot of time studying cognitive development and developmental psychology, and there's a lot of science that backs up what a successful learning experience looks like.
He said AI can take away that learning experience if we allow it to, "but it is also one of the strongest tools to create those learning moments."
