SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — The Utah State Board of Education recently released a new framework to help school districts create their AI policies, so they can navigate through the potential risks that come with it.
Educators said there are risks with AI, but there would be bigger problems if they don’t give school districts guidance about it at all.
Some educators feel it has potential problems, but they can’t run away from it forever.
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Amanda Longwell has three kids in the Salt Lake City School District, and her youngest has special needs. She said generative AI apps could help her daughter communicate with her teachers.
“AI can help more than just students with disabilities,” Longwell said. “It can help students that are English-as-a-second-language students.”
Longwell acknowledged there are ways to misuse things like ChatGPT, but she said it would be wrong to ignore AI completely.
“The best thing is to be proactive and really figure out how to tap into that so that the education for our students could be more robust,” she said.
In April 2024, the Utah State Board of Education released their latest framework about the use of AI to guide school districts on creating specific policies.
The report said, “While generative AI tools show great promise and often make useful suggestions, they are designed to predict what is right, which isn’t always right. As a result, their output can be inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete.”
State Board of Education Deputy Superintendent of Student Achievement Patty Norman said, “Some people were trying to say, ‘No AI. Absolutely no AI,’ but you can’t stop something that’s already been there. So, instead it’s, ‘What do we do? What’s already in place?’”
Norman said AI is not as new as many people think, and they believe it would be a major mistake to avoid teaching children how it can be used. She said many teachers tried to ban the use of the internet in classrooms when it was first invented, and that caused many problems that they didn’t want to repeat.
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“We have to start somewhere because by giving no guidance, we put everyone at risk,” Norman said.
Under the newest guidance, students would be allowed to use AI to find creative ways to do their work. They can also use it to create personalized study materials, and for tutoring support.
Still, if AI can produce inaccurate or misleading information, how can it be trusted as a tutoring tool?
“That question could have also been asked 20 years ago or 30 years ago when we started with the internet,” Norman said.
She said it’s up to the districts to instruct their teachers on how to spot bad information generated from AI and to help them see when students may be using it to cheat.
The school board members are also concerned about privacy, so students and faculty will not be allowed to put their personal info in an unauthorized AI tool.
“There’s a lot of areas where there needs to be guardrails put in place,” Norman said.
There are some things students would not be allowed to do, such as they can’t become over-reliant on AI tools, and they can’t use it to bully someone else.
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