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Jason Leon, a technology integrator and teacher at Lake Placid Elementary School, demonstrates using an AI extension called Brisk to give feedback on a student paper in his classroom on Wednesday. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)
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LAKE PLACID — Lake Placid Central School District has begun to introduce artificial intelligence to the classroom, with plans to make tools available to both teachers and students. The programs are designed to save teachers time that can then be spent interacting meaningfully with students.
The district’s formal policies regarding AI are limited to its academic honesty policy, which states that students can only use AI on an assignment if the teacher explicitly allows it and any assignment completed with AI must state which tool was used and how. However, technology integrators at both the elementary and middle/high schools have been hard at work researching and piloting tools that teachers have the option to integrate into their classrooms.
“Our focus was just to understand the capabilities of these tools, but then also to have sort of a cautious optimism about what they can present,” LPCSD Superintendent Tim Seymour said.
Kaysie Kyler, a health and physical education teacher at the middle/high school, is among the teachers who have embraced those tools. She is teaching a new course this year on women’s health. New courses often involve a lot of extra time gathering and creating materials, Kyler said, but Brisk, an AI extension that the district chose to make available to teachers, has allowed her to maximize her planning periods.
For example, she can sit down to create a slideshow on a new topic, say, the history of the women’s health movement. She can give the extension a prompt and it will create a slideshow in less than a minute. Normally, it would take her an entire 40-minute planning period to scan relevant sections of the textbook and assemble a presentation.
“The time I was able to save from creating what I’ve created so far is just unreal,” Kyler said.
After fact checking the AI-created material, which Kyler said has been spot-on with her textbook for the class, she can use AI to create a game, quiz or worksheet. She can use the extra time to work on other things or to look for even more material to give her lesson more depth.
Although the district is still in the early stages of training teachers in AI tools and giving them options to integrate them into the classroom, this kind of time saving is exactly what the tech integrators wanted to offer teachers.
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Tuning into the discussion
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Jason Leon has worked as an IT specialist in various capacities for LPCSD and has been a tech integrator for two years. He teaches tech classes for elementary school students and helps implement state computer science standards at the school.
ChatGPT was released in the fall of 2022 and since the spring of 2023, Leon has been an integral part of the research and discussion that has gone into the district AI policies and approach that went into effect this year. Last year, LPCSD joined with another school district on Long Island, which grew into a consortium of New York schools that meets regularly to share ideas — often failures and successes of various AI apps and tools — that schools around the state have been experimenting with.
Karyssa Merrihew, Leon’s counterpart tech integrator at the middle/high school, said that when ChatGPT was first released, a lot of schools reacted by trying to cut students off from it. However, Seymour said they decided that students will be better prepared to enter the workforce if they learn how to use AI responsibly.
“The toothpaste is completely out of the tube,” Seymour said. “Anyone who can access the internet has the capacity to use AI, whether or not they are even aware of it.”
Seymour said that learning about AI is a critical part of adhering to state digital literacy standards.
It is also an issue of equity. The district wanted to make sure students who might not have access to the internet at home would be able to access AI tools like their peers, according to Seymour.
One of the biggest ongoing concerns with AI is student privacy. This is one of the reasons the district has waited this long to choose specific AI tools. Seymour said that in adherence to New York Education Law 2-D, which deals with student data and privacy, they waited until closed system products were available.
“It’s been better to work toward a progression where we expose the students to the use of this in a safe and effective manner, let them learn the pitfalls of it and control the fire,” Seymour said.
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Putting AI to work
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So far this year, Leon and Merrihew have focused on training teachers on Brisk, an AI extension that works well with Google apps. Among the many tools Brisk offers, it can be used to turn any article or YouTube video into a lesson plan. Teachers can create a presentation, worksheets, activities, quizzes and more in a single workflow that takes as little as three to five minutes. They can also change the reading level of any article and translate it into another language for English Language Learner students.
“Our main focus this fall is helping teachers learn particular tools that will help them become more efficient with those mundane tasks,” Merrihew said, “and really help them get to the heart of what they love about teaching, which is building those relationships with students and being able to have conversations with them.”
AI tools have also been helpful in areas of the school that have limited resources, Leon said. For instance, the district has seen an increase in ELL students and AI is more effective at translating materials than other tools they’ve used. The special education department has also embraced it, Leon said, finding that the AI tools can be used to help generate Individualized Education Programs, which saves the department hours of tedious work that can then be spent in productive conversation with other staff regarding students’ needs.
The student-facing programs are still in the process of being implemented and the current plan is to train teachers in these programs later this fall. Eventually, Leon said teachers will have the option to use student-facing apps that function like tutors and allow teachers to monitor students’ learning more effectively.
“Everybody is getting met where they’re at,” Leon said as he discussed the personalized learning offered by AI tools. “That’s what gets me excited.”
Although student-facing AI programs have not been implemented yet, Merrihew has already been teaching AI units in her computer science classes. She thinks it’s important that students understand what it is before they use it, so they’ve learned how to train models while also learning about ethical questions like bias, responsibility and privacy.
“How do we make sure we’re using it to help and not harm?” Merrihew said. “AI is almost like this mysterious machine. But hopefully, by giving the tools of knowledge, it helps empower our students to be able to see it more clearly and figure out how to use it a little bit better.”