The Future of AI in Schools and Education

The US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology recently released a toolkit to navigate this AI landscape. The toolkit, titled “Empowering Education Leaders: A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration,” focuses on supporting the integration of AI in educational settings to enhance learning while addressing privacy, security, and equity concerns. The toolkit is designed for a broad audience, including educators, administrators, parents, and community members across formal and informal learning environments.

The toolkit builds on the Department’s AI and the Future of Teaching and Learning report and offers practical guidance for using AI in school districts. The main emphasis is on transparency, awareness, and the right to opt out of AI applications. The toolkit is divided into three sections, each with modules to help educators navigate different scenarios and stay vigilant in AI-adoption.

Mitigating Risk

The first section covers risk mitigation, which includes what federal laws are saying about safeguarding privacy, security, and nondiscrimination. Then, there are three modules in this section aimed to help educators weigh the pros and cons of AI tools within schools, enhance one’s understanding of current regulations around AI, and examine the ways students’ rights should be considered. This section ends with questions and discussion points that may provide aid during conversations with local education agencies.

Building a Strategy

After educators are familiar with AI and its capabilities, the next step is to merge the tool into the instruction. This step relies on analyzing data around AI and community input: a quantitative + qualitative approach.

The four modules in this section support an AI strategy that considers both current and future AI technologies. This section underscores the need for data evidence on how AI is benefiting education, provides tips for developing awareness and knowledge of AI, and lays out steps for establishing a governance task force to oversee AI use and support the community. Educators should set priorities within their AI integration and pace the adoption phase.

Maximizing Opportunity

The third and final section looks at AI literacy, policy revisions, and system-wide implementation. The three modules in this section provide information to help keep educators up to date on AI and remain adaptable to the changing tech landscape. Particularly, education leaders need to manage how educators across the school are using AI. This means training educators on the language of AI, aligning on acceptable use of AI and technology within the classroom, and creating an action plan for expanding AI into the community. Within this are theoretical situations that educators can use to practice their responses to common AI issues.

Dive Deeper

This overview of “Empowering Education Leaders: A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration” is aimed at helping education leaders understand where they are in the AI-adoption timeline and identify where they need to go next. The toolkit also goes into detail on topics such as educational equity, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and responsible usage. When integrating AI into a school, educators must keep in mind how other student-related issues will be affected by AI. This includes cyberbullying, deep fake image generation, and impersonation or anonymous campaigns. This requires proper surveillance on students’ AI use, while also allowing creativity and freedom to test the tool.

The report suggests that when developing a proper process to AI-integration, start with informing yourself. Attending webinars, roundtables, and other public listening sessions will provide the most up-to-date insights on integrating AI safely and effectively. AI is here to stay. But with collaboration, planning, and ongoing evaluation, successful AI adoption is possible. This toolkit can help education leaders ensure their educational community is ready for AI.