When Jamie Haug came into the role of technology director in the Pearl River School District in January 2020, she did not expect to resist two major changes: the closure of COVID-19 and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Now, five years in the role and applying the instinct of a veteran educator, she helped the New York school district not only react to AI but proactively incorporating it into daily education.
“When we learned for the first time on Chatgpt-I have been in education for over 20 years, I knew it was going to be important,” she said. “I told it when Google became really popular, and you had the ideas and tools that you could really use in a different way.”
Haug said that his class experience helped her make the impact that AI would have and to go quickly beyond the idea of resisting it. In 2023, the district trained a committee with teachers, parents, administrators and educational coaches, and this year, they added five students to the group. The committee is responsible for creating guidelines, which will be published this summer, to shed light on professional development on new technologies, determine the AI tools to be used and keep an eye on technological trends.
Their guidelines start with the words “students will explore”, because students already use AI tools.
Haug said Pearl River questioned his students and found that half already used AI for school work and 40% for social media. The students said they had found the engaging and useful AI, and it was their favorite research tool.
“We started with the students who will explore ” because we knew that it would be something that they would have the rest of their lives, and that would continue to grow,” said Haug.
The investigation revealed that the students appreciated this attitude of the heads of school. They wanted teachers to understand the impact that AI would have on their post-high life and recognize it as more than a cheating tool. Three -quarters of the student body said they needed more in -depth knowledge of how to use it correctly.
During the 2023-24 school year, the district began working with the Ed-Tech Schoto platform to integrate AI into levels and materials. After the third -year students used chatbots to interact with fairy tales, they said it was more real than reading their history aloud. Secondary level mathematics courses also used the platform as a personalized tutor.
“I brought something to a third -year classroom here that my 12th year students also use to help kill them in the AD calculation,” said Haug. “You don’t often find any tools that make them both.”
HAUG has described its search for AI tools as a study program, and it was impressed by the characteristics aligned with Schotolai standards. While some teachers were skeptical about AI, this alignment with the requirements of the curriculum allowed them to show them some of the potential advantages – mainly personalized help for students available at all hours of the day and translation capacities for learners in English.
New York has strict data confidentiality regulations that help ensure that these benefits are not at the cost of student personal data, HAUG said. But cheating is always a high -end problem, as well as updating standards across the state to better include technological changes.
To combat cheating, HAG works with the Superintendent to create a section for use in AI. The section places assignments on a scale of zero to five, which means that students must attest that they have not used AI and five at all, which means that students expressly use AI to explore a subject. While some teachers have started to create homework that integrates AI, she said that the longer -term changes in institutional standards that reflect changing technology will help schools more significantly integrate it.
“It is difficult to make this kind of radical change when, at the end of the day, you always determine success and your standards are always aligned with a much more outdated system,” she said.
