Schools should “embrace” artificial intelligence in three key areas, delegates were told at a future-gazing event organised by an international schools group this month.
The School of the Future 2024 annual conference was told that, despite clear “challenges” around AI, there are also “many, many real opportunities”.
This qualified optimism on AI underpinned a presentation from Simon Camby, group chief education officer at Cognita, which has around 100 schools in 17 countries.
There are three areas in which AI holds particular promise for schools, Dr Camby told delegates at the in-person and online event organised by Cognita Chile.
How AI can benefit education
Here is how Cognita is looking to “integrate AI more into our work”:
1. Planning
Planning “takes teachers a long time,” said Dr Camby, but “there are ways we could use AI to be more effective”.
2. Tutoring
The potential to use AI to support student tutoring is “really an exciting area, but one that we have to get right”. Dr Camby said that pilot projects at Cognita are due to start in January, but only with students aged over 13.
“We will never use AI with students under the age of 13,” he said.
3. Assessment
“Finding ways to use AI to support teachers and students with assessment of work” is another priority, said Dr Camby.
Assessment, planning and tutoring “are the three areas that we are investing most of our time and thinking on, because we think they are the areas that have the biggest potential impact”.
“Of course, we should be embracing AI because it’s part of the world we live in and it’s part of the future,” said Dr Camby. “However, we should also be thinking really hard about those human aspects and all the holistic aspects of education that we really value for the children in our care.”
He shared reflections from many conversations he has had with students, which often revealed attitudes towards AI that contradict commonly held views about young people and technology.
Students “really value” AI for generating and organising ideas, and also for critiquing their work. However, they were on the whole “quite sceptical” about AI and “don’t want to use AI for everything”.
This was “really interesting”, said Dr Camby, given media portrayals of teenagers who “want to be using AI the whole time”, sometimes to cheat at school.
“That isn’t the evidence that I’ve found talking to our students,” he added. “On the contrary, they’re actually very discerning about where they would like to use AI and not use AI.”
He advised delegates to “listen to our students, because they are wise”.
Dr Camby also shared five key points from Cognita’s AI framework:
- AI in education is “about complementing a really high-quality holistic education...not about replacing it”.
- Educators must “think really hard” about how to teach students about the “many, many ethical implications” of AI.
- Notions of criticality and analysis are extremely important - in other words, ensuring that students “don’t automatically trust content that is AI generated”.
- Schools must ensure that students display “academic honesty” - when, for example, they use AI in coursework for the International Baccalaureate, they should clearly cite it.
- Students should “understand that it’s not just what they get out of AI, it’s also what they put into it”, and that “their digital footprint is growing every time they use AI”.
In his concluding comments, Dr Camby said he did not see AI as a “technical issue” but as a “leadership issue”, and laid down this challenge to educators: “Are you brave enough to engage with AI? Are you brave enough to think differently?”
He added: “If we really want to thrive, let’s embrace AI - but let’s make sure that it’s part of a blended world.”
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