At August’s Clearview Regional High School District Board of Education meeting, the board discussed and passed new curriculum/instruction on the implementation of new AI programming, SchoolAI.
In the last issue of the Mullica Hill Sun, we reported on the introductory elements of SchoolAI and the development of the district’s SchoolAI Integration Team, which includes two teachers from the middle school and three teachers from the high school.
During the September 17 BOE meeting, chief academic officer, Keith Brook, gave a slideshow presentation and demonstration on how SchoolAI works.
According to his presentation, “SchoolAI is an artificial intelligence powered school experience platform designed for K-12 educators, students, leaders and families…designed to support learning without doing the thinking for students…(and) gives teachers an AI sidekick that helps them plan lessons, provide feedback and communicate with families – while giving students a safe, supervised AI tutor and assistant.”
Brook said that SchoolAI is used in more than one million classrooms and used by more than five million students across every state in the U.S. and nearly every country across the globe.
“Every student interprets information differently. What this platform eventually – once our students will be interacting with it – will do is meet them where they are and help them learn at their pace, and it is going to give the teachers an awful lot of information in real time to help them determine where kids are,” Brook said.
He also discussed other standout reasons for choosing to implement the use of SchoolAI at the middle and high schools, citing “the problem SchoolAI solves” is teacher burnout and workload, as well as unmanaged student AI use.
“Immediately, one of the things that stood out was what this could do for our staff. We know that our teachers have two preps throughout the course of the day, but most teachers spend hours after school preparing their lessons, grading papers, doing those kinds of things that are extremely time-consuming,” he said. “So, we want to focus on what teachers and students can do while they’re in the classroom together. At no point is this designed to replace the teacher and student interaction.”
He noted that the teachers will still be the ones grading student work, not SchoolAI.
Additionally, Brook said he recognizes that students have access to ChatGPT and other AI platforms on their phones and personal devices. AI, he mentioned, is practically part of most things today.
During a demonstration of SchoolAI’s student view, the district’s chief academic officer entered an unrelated question to the activity chat, which showed how SchoolAI will not engage in anything off-topic.
However, through the use of SchoolAI for academic purposes on their school Chromebooks, students will have guardrails, supervision and limitations with their AI use. While using SchoolAI, students cannot derail the AI chat function or questions in studying activities.
During Brook’s demonstration, he pulled up one of the “Spaces” on the program (“Spaces are AI-powered workspaces where teachers design and students engage in structured activities,” according to Brook’s slideshow) and found a studying activity for causes of the Civil War (there is also a function to explore and utilize Spaces created by other teachers across the software).
He viewed it in the student mode. The function asked a question in the activity about the Civil War, and instead of answering something related to the question in the chat function, he typed, “what was the score of the Phillies last night?” The SchoolAI chat did not engage with the derailed topic. Rather, it explained that this topic was outside of this Space and then redirected the student to the original question about the Civil War.
“It’s always going to redirect the students. It’s never going to look up something either inappropriate, harmful or off topic,” he said.
At the time of the meeting, Phase One of integrating SchoolAI has been complete, Brook said. Every student and teacher has been rostered into the program; however, teachers are not mandated to use it. There have been basic training sessions for teachers already, and more will be conducted in October.
“We’re going to get a lot more in depth with our training. It’s going to do a lot more, but again, never replacing the teacher’s role (and) the student’s role in understanding things,” he said. “But we see it as a valuable tool to interact with AI in a safer way.”
The district said it is prioritizing safety and privacy. SchoolAI is compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). This means the school district owns the data from its students, and the data will remain private. The data, statistics and personal information will only remain within the district, and it will not be used for model training.
For more information on SchoolAI and exploring the program, go to www.schoolai.com. For more information on its trust and safety, go to www.schoolai.com/trust.
The next BOE meeting will be on Thursday, October 15 at 6:30 p.m. at the Administration Building.
Clearview Regional School District’s chief academic office gave a slideshow presentation and live demonstration at the September Board of Education meeting on how the educational AI program, SchoolAI works and will be used in classrooms across the district.
