During the first semester, Eagle County School District’s AI Think Tank focused on building literacy and creating guidelines for subsequent technology use by staff and students.
Vail Daily Archives
As artificial intelligence tools make their way into classrooms, the Eagle County School District launched an AI think tank this year to better understand the benefits and pitfalls of the technology.
Led by the district's education technology team, the think tank initially aimed to develop recommendations for AI-related policies and strategies, but once the team got underway, members decided to first focus on education and building AI literacy.
The shift comes as the group considers rapid changes in technology and AI tools, and any policy will likely become “outdated” soon after being set, said Bri Chittenden, the district's instructional technology manager.
So from January to March, the group focused on developing strategies and guidelines to ensure the technology was used appropriately and safely.
The think tank held meetings throughout the spring across the valley, seeking feedback first from teachers and administrators, and then from high school students and parents, to help guide the school's future strategy.
Support local journalism
to donate
By the end of the semester, the team had produced draft guidelines for the use of AI, as well as a student and staff agreement on AI.
That doesn't mean the district won't make any policy changes: Next year, the think tank will likely make sure the district's “current policies are inclusive of any technology that may come along, including AI,” Chittenden said.
The think tank has a “human in, human out” approach to everything it does, meaning that while it uses technology, the human aspect is key.
The draft principles define this approach as follows: “When partnering with AI, we will maintain human oversight throughout the process. … AI tools serve as thought partners but do not replace the responsibility for critical thinking on the part of students, teachers, and administrators.”
How teachers can use AI
The organization began its activities in January to provide AI literacy to teachers.
“Generative AI was a very new technology, and we wanted students to understand how it worked,” said Scott Hopkins, an educational technology specialist for the district. “It's not magic, it's just math. And we wanted students to understand and be aware of some of the inherent risks.”
The group put together an AI Literacy 101 presentation and various educational materials to establish a foundational knowledge of what the technology can do and what pitfalls it might face.
This literacy is expected to continue into the upcoming school year, and the edtech team is already planning AI exploration sessions and workshops for educators in August and throughout the year.
Part of the group's teaching and exploration also involved exploring how teachers could use AI in their lesson plans and classrooms. To help teachers find ways to use AI, the group created what they called an “AI Exploration Choice Board.”
“They offered beginner, intermediate and advanced options for teachers to dip their toes into AI depending on where they work,” Hopkins said. “The beginner level might be something as simple as, 'I have five ingredients in my pantry, generate a recipe for me.' Something more advanced might be, 'How can I level text for different reading levels?'”
The challenge here is not how to make the tool work, but ensuring it's accurate and unbiased. “We need to make sure that whatever we want students to read is actually what they're going to read,” Hopkins added, saying this is part of “humanizing out.”
How Students Can Use AI
The group then worked to understand what appropriate use of AI by students looks like, a topic that “all teachers are interested in,” Chittenden said.
“Teachers were all very nervous and apprehensive about students using AI inappropriately or letting it do their work,” she said. “It's a difficult discussion to have with teachers.”
Chittenden said there was a “wide range” of opinions, from faculty who want to block AI entirely to those who want to allow students to use it freely. Similarly, approaches to handling AI in the classroom vary across education systems, schools and districts across the country.
“When generative AI first came out, it was literally block or allow. That's what school districts and universities were doing. Then we had the traffic light model where red means no use, green means full use, and yellow is in between but very ambiguous,” Chittenden said.
The Eagle County School District group used research and drew on the work of others, including a group of Vail Mountain School students, to create their own version, called the “AI Integrated Scale.”
“This is just to give teachers some guidelines. It's not meant to be a resource for students. It's meant to be something that teachers can utilize and discuss and have conversations with their students,” Chittenden said.
It separates acceptable uses of AI into four buckets for teachers, ranging from no AI assistance at all to AI co-creation. In between are buckets for allowing AI to assist with brainstorming and for AI to assist with editing. The idea is that for each assignment, teachers set expectations about acceptable uses of AI.
There are two groups of AI student platforms being used in education, Chittenden said.
“One is that students can work on assignments and get feedback from the AI, so it basically helps personalize and individualize learning and helps guide specific students,” she said.
“Another way is to help students develop prompting skills through tools like Chat GPT, where students can ask questions,” Chittenden added.
As school districts move forward with their AI efforts, they plan to pilot or purchase school-specific AI platforms that will create a “safer environment” for students, as education-specific platforms can better protect student information and filter out inappropriate content, helping to prepare students for their post-high school careers.
“This is something students have to use when they graduate.
“And we want to make sure students know how to use it,” said Will Harris, the district's instructional technology specialist.
