How Can We Effectively Use AI in Education? A Summary of the Second Keystone 10th Anniversary Education Salon with Michael Nachbar
“It’s not going to be AI replacing lawyers, it’s going to be lawyers working with AI replacing lawyers who don’t work with AI.”
-Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
On the internet, you can now find whole websites and interactive news articles dedicated to answering the question: will AI replace your career? AI anxiety is at an all-time high, and various industries are adopting AI tools at a rapid pace. Although some scholars believe that AI will eventually replace humans in most careers, others like Erik Brynjolfsson believe that it will simply be workers who use AI effectively replacing ones who don’t. However, one trade is asking much different questions about AI – education. In education, there is much less talk about AI replacing teachers and administrators, and more focus on how AI should be used by teachers and students to effectively enhance learning. This was the topic discussed by Michael Nachbar, the Executive Director of Global Online Academy, at the second Keystone 10th Anniversary Education Salon, which gave the audience a good idea of how to effectively implement AI in the classroom to unlock exciting new learning possibilities.
Mr. Nachbar started his speech with a video of himself welcoming the audience in fluent Chinese. While this wowed the large crowd in attendance, Mr. Nachbar soon revealed that this video was entirely AI generated, prompting both excitement at the possibility of AI advancing communications between people, and skepticism about the truth of AI generated content. It is precisely this mixture of intrigue and hesitancy that creates the crossroads education currently finds itself at. While some institutions like the IB are embracing the use of AI and the new possibilities for learning it unlocks, other schools and organizations are banning its use for fear of AI generated content replacing student work.
Although many of the questions surrounding the ethics of AI are still unanswered, it is certain that AI will change how we interact with technology. This leads to many exciting new opportunities for educators to take advantage of. While fully AI-generated essays may pose plagiarism problems, there are so many more creative ways AI can be used to enhance student’s learning experience without taking away from the actual learning process. In this Education Salon, Mr. Nachbar gave concrete examples of how everyone in education can use AI to streamline their workflow and even improve upon traditional learning and teaching.
While AI cannot replace a teacher in the classroom, it can help speed up additional work such as planning and organizing. This can save teachers time that they can use to work more with students in a variety of ways. Differentiation has been an important topic in education recently, and AI can be used to quickly create several differentiated copies of instructions or activities so that teachers can better reach the whole class. Mr. Nachbar even gave the example of a bot created by a Spanish teacher to help students review all the new vocabulary words they learned this semester. Such a task would be nearly impossible for one teacher to accomplish before AI, but now students can get additional review time with the bot while the teacher has more time to work with them individually on other areas.
In addition to planning and preparation, Mr. Nachbar believes that assessment will be one area that needs to change with the rise of AI. However, instead of outright banning AI, Mr. Nachbar argues that we should see how students interact with AI as a form of assessing their critical and creative thinking. Teachers should focus more on performance-based assessment, real world problem solving, project-based learning, and focus on skills when designing a curriculum. At Keystone, teachers already focus on many of these aspects, meaning the style of learning can remain relatively consistent even as the use of AI becomes more widespread.
When discussing the use of AI, schools, educators, and parents often worry about students using generative AI to complete their assignments for them. While this sort of cheating can certainly cause problems, talking to students themselves reveals this fear may be overstated. Mr. Nachbar has found that students who have learned to value academic integrity will still refrain from using AI to complete their work for them, making restrictive policies totally banning AI redundant. Instead, what educators should focus on is how students can use AI as a tool to enhance their learning, like how a calculator can assist with high-level math, while the students themselves remain the key thinkers and problem solvers.
Instead of prohibiting AI, schools should empower students to use their newfound AI “superpower” to challenge themselves to even bigger creative projects. Mr. Nachbar gives the example of a “homework apocalypse”, where traditional types of out of class assessment go extinct. Instead, projects challenging students to utilize AI to try something they have never done before, such as coding or building a website, can allow students to further explore their passions and skills. In fact, developments in AI can assist educators to enhance student creativity, helping students create new projects they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to.
The potential benefits of adopting AI don’t stop with teachers and students. Schools themselves run many complex systems that cover everything from reports to parent communication. Many of these systems can be streamlined with AI, and some in ways we don’t even know about. A school eager to implement AI may find that it is able to work more efficiently, leaving more time for reflection, communication, and collaboration between staff and students.
AI and the changes it brings are markedly different from other technology such as calculators or even the internet. The rapid pace at which it is developing brings exciting promise for the education field but also many new unknowns. These new educational variables brought about by AI don’t necessarily mean negative things for schools. If educators, parents, and schools listen to the brilliant ideas from students and teachers, AI can become a tool to deeply enhance learning and change it for the better.
