The Brighton Central School District is one of the latest local K-12 districts to roll out artificial intelligence tools for educators.
Several school districts — including Fairport, Greece, and East Irondequoit — are also integrating AI technology in their work while others, like East Rochester, are currently not incorporating it into curriculum.
At Brighton,the rollout of the platform MagicSchool for teachers and administrators began this summer after about a year of planning.
“We want AI to be a tool that gets our students where they're going to be," Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum Allison Rioux said. “We want to prepare them for life, and AI is a tool that's going to help us get there.”
The platform’s AI tools, like a worksheet generator and a report card comment generator, are meant to help increase instruction time with students while streamlining other productivity tasks, Rioux said, adding that there is a notable interest in use among some teachers.
“Special education teachers are rising to the top, and it's because they are using AI to help them differentiate instruction in a way that they have never been able to do before,” she said.
When schools use AI platforms for educators, they must safeguard student data privacy in compliance with state education law 2-D.
At Brighton, the plan is to continue moving slowly with the rollout, she said, and while there are tools within the platform that students can use, that is a phase that — as of the third week of school — the district has not yet implemented.
“Let's have our teachers build up their capacity a bit first before we unleash this to students in a way that might not get them where we want them to go,” she said.
That approach to AI in school is one that professors at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education are homing in on — including with professional development support and collaboration at local districts, like Brighton.
“They spent the whole year focusing on AI for their school district, what it meant for their classrooms, for their policies,” said Assistant Professor Kristen Love, who was part of a planning committee with Brighton "They were focusing on access and equity. They were also focusing on that family communication and relationship between what's happening at home versus what's happening at schools.”
The move at school districts like Brighton to incorporate AI marks a wider shift in academia toward accepting the technology and finding a balance between the opportunities it presents while navigating risks to student information privacy, to student learning outcomes, and to misuse of AI.
“When you think about AI literacy, I think that the first question you want to ask yourself is, what is your goal?” said Professor Raffaella Borasi, director of the Center for Learning in the Digital Age at UR.
“And if you're talking of K-12 students, I think that our main goal is to really make sure that they are able to use AI effectively, safely and ethically,” she added. “You don't want to use AI to cheat on your test, but you want to use AI as a thinking partner, as something that can help you with tasks, that may help you with maybe remediation, in some cases."
For Borasi, the benefits of AI in education lend themselves to opening up more time for educators to work with students in ways that are most effective for maximizing learning.
“Teacher time is the most precious commodity we have, so how can they use it to the maximum benefit of their students?" Borasi said.
