In some Minnesota schools, artificial intelligence gets a seat in the classroom
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Psychology is usually the Monday morning lesson for students in room 314 at Kennedy High School. On this day, though, teachers Rowen Elsmore and Jodi Bang have dropped by to try an experiment focused more on the behavior of machines than humans.
Elsmore tells the students to grab their laptops and sign into ChatGPT, the free online artificial intelligence tool that can generate and organize information about any topic just by asking it questions.
While the technology is complex, the goal of today’s lesson is basic — teach students how this AI works and get them to play around with it — to see its possible applications and its limitations.
“We’re going to be learning to use AI as a thought partner,” Elsmore, a digital learning specialist, tells the class. “Why are we doing that? Because it’s a tool that can either help your learning — or kind of hinder you from learning new things, depending on how you use it.”
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Elsmore tells students to get ChatGPT to tell them a joke, answer a question — and then see if they can get it to reply with some false information. “What I want us to notice is that we have different experiences. Depending on what you’re asking this to do and how you’re asking it to do it, it might be better or worse.”
Experts say artificial intelligence may revolutionize learning as the internet did 30 years ago. In schools, though, the technology is often met more with apprehension than wonder. Nationally, a few big districts have restricted student use of AI, worried about where it could lead.
In Bloomington, Elsmore and other instructors are taking a practical view on AI, teaching students how to use the technology and helping them understand where it can spin out of control — a sort of driver’s ed approach to artificial intelligence.
“These are skills that students need, and we will not be a place that doesn’t provide students to be ready for the next step,” said Bloomington’s computer science coordinator, Alexandra Holter. “We made a choice last year to really lean into AI and understand how it fits into education, how it fits into pedagogy, how it enhances student and teacher engagement, and lead our students and staff through that.”
‘A lot of misinformation’
Nationally, Minnesota ranks last in the nation for offering computer science instruction. Only 28 percent of public high schools in the state offer classes in the discipline, according to an annual report from the Computer Science Teachers Association and several other organizations.
There are currently no statewide computer science standards or requirements for teaching AI, although the newly finalized English Language Arts standards include requirements that students be taught to safely access, analyze and create digital content.
Bloomington is one of several districts making computer science a priority in their schools. In conversations at Kennedy High, students showed varying degrees of interest in AI and how it might connect to their learning.
For Jay Crenshaw, a junior, the lesson is the first time he’s used ChatGPT. He sees classmates access it constantly to help them answer questions from their teachers in class.
“I guess people just try to use it as, like, leverage,” he said, adding he’s always seen the way his classmates pull up ChatGPT as “extra” and unnecessary.
But now, after trying the technology out and realizing he can access it with a school account, he wants to try playing around with it more. He’s especially interested in figuring out if it can help him write code for his robotics class.
Still, he thinks students need more guidance from educators on safe ways to use the new technology.
“There’s a lot of misinformation on the internet, and there’s a lot of things that could be potentially dangerous for children to see,” Crenshaw said. “I don’t really know if you can control it, but I guess teachers could just keep teaching in a safe way — like, the basics of how you can access a question and how, if it doesn’t give you the proper answer, you can revise the question.”
For Mischa Compos-Taylor, a junior who has taken several computer science classes, ChatGPT is something she uses regularly. If she comes across a text or term in a literature or science class, she’ll sometimes ask the bot to explain it to her in different terms.
“I feel like it’s a really cool tool to use in classes, because if I don’t understand something, and I just keep not understanding it, I wouldn’t want to bother the teacher,” Compos-Taylor said. “To have like a little online teacher would be really cool, and a good way to have a resource to use.”
Bloomington’s digital learning specialists are also trying to help district teachers leverage AI for their classrooms. It can translate classroom activities into other languages and walk students through lessons. It can give feedback on staff lesson plans and help generate ideas for planning projects.
The teaching goes both ways. Holter said she’s also learning new applications from students.
“Students are smarter and more clever, more responsible and thoughtful than we give them credit for. They are able to handle new technologies with grace and integrity, and I think we often underestimate that in schools,” Holter said.
“There needs to be some reckoning with education of what do students really need to know to be successful,” she added. “What does success look like? Because it may not look like it did when you and I graduated, or, I mean, really, anybody who’s graduated within the last 20 years.”
Fourth and fifth graders using ‘their powers for good’
A report last year by the Brookings Institution, a national research group, found public schools choosing one of three paths: banning generative AI, integrating it into their curricula, or placing it under further review.
Brookings urged schools not to ban AI, noting that students would always find a work around and that the technology could be harnessed for good. “Imagine using ChatGPT for a history vs. an art class, for students whose first language is not English, and for students with learning disabilities,” researchers wrote.
Timothy Johnson, a professor of political science and law at the University of Minnesota, said he’s seen the technology evolve over the last two years. When it first came out, he rarely encountered students who’d use it to write essays. Now, using ChatGPT to plagiarize work is both more commonplace and difficult to detect.
“Students are absolutely using it. It is getting harder and harder to tell which briefs are done in ChatGPT or another chatbot, versus the students writing them on their own, because the technology is getting so much more sophisticated,” Johnson said.
Plagiarism is a problem, Johnson added, and students who use AI to write essays “are missing all of the points of what education is all about.”
Still, he thinks schools should introduce students to AI in ways similar to what Bloomington is doing. The technology is something he sees older students and professionals using in important ways to refine their grammar and writing, to frame legal briefs and check citations.
The push into AI teaching is also reaching into elementary school.
Students who attend Harriet Bishop Elementary in Savage get an introduction to AI as soon as fourth grade.
“We want our kids to be critically thinking on the internet,” said Shonita Harper, a digital learning specialist at the school.
By the time they leave Bishop Elementary, she said she wants students to be introduced to an age-appropriate, education-focused chatbot, SchoolAI. She also wants them to be able to identify images that have been altered by AI and be introduced to the image editing software, Adobe Express.
“I have shown kids digitally altered images and videos as a way to introduce AI, and then I gave them some tools and skills on how to look at those images and to think about if it's a real image or not,” she said.
Some fifth-graders are already interacting with AI through online images, movies, video games and messenger apps, she noted. She sees her work as helping them handle those interactions critically, creatively and safely with what they’re seeing.
“My goal is to help students become creative communicators … innovative designers,” she said. “I would hope that they can be good digital citizens, and when they’re online, they’re making good choices and they’re leaving behind good digital footprints of themselves.”
Technology isn’t going anywhere and it’s already having a huge impact on students, she said. Her goal in the classroom is to “help and teach kids how to be a great digital age learner and to use, as I always say, their powers for good.”
