District 87 school staff and students, including Bloomington Middle School; [BJHS] We are now on the same page about using artificial intelligence [AI] technology.
As a result of the District 87 Task Force on AI Policy, BJHS students are allowed to use AI in the classroom. BJHS uses MagicSchool AI, a more highly regulated and limited alternative to classic AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
MagicSchool allows students to use it as an aid in school without having to use it for non-work needs.
“It’s a contained AI, so it doesn’t push the kids to go all out and ask all kinds of questions,” said Crystal South Law, an eighth-grade social studies teacher. “So it’s contained and very controlled.”
Policy formulation
Current guidelines for all schools in District 87 prohibit the use of AI as a substitute for academic work that requires independent thinking. Using AI to complete assignments, projects, or tests without teacher permission is prohibited. Students taking individual education programs [IEPs] Additional permission may be granted for use as an adjunct. The policy also allows school officials to use AI content detectors to check for AI use and plagiarism.
Other schools have similar policies. For example, the Unit 5 and Tri-Valley student handbooks contain nearly identical language as District 87.
South Law was a member of a special committee that helped shape policy. She also took classes over the summer to learn more about AI technology and how to implement it in the classroom.
While some educators are wary of including it in their classrooms, citing environmental concerns and its impact on learning, Southlaw said students will graduate at a disadvantage in the workforce without some experience.
“There are schools all over the country that are specifically teaching people how to be responsible with AI,” Southlaw said. “And I think it’s important that my students are as competitive as the kids who are trying to get out of those situations.”
The task force was created after several years of discussions within the district about how to approach AI in District 87’s schools. Mr Southlaw said discussions ranged from how it would be implemented in classrooms to considering whether an outright ban was warranted.
classroom use
Technology lessons at BJHS have completely changed as students are now able to use MagicSchool and other personal software with teacher permission.
“You can create a purposeful classroom setting within it for your students to use, and you can really limit what they can do,” said technology teacher Jeff Pratt.
Platt’s 7th graders can use AI in their graphic design assignments, allowing students to focus on the design itself rather than spending too much class time on research. It also provides an opportunity to teach students how to use AI most ethically and how to spot when an AI response contains false information. Platt’s class will also use AI image generation from the online platform Canva to complete assignments and learn some of the ways to identify AI-generated content.
South-Law continues to work toward implementing clear ways to show students when to use AI in class assignments and when not to use it. Next year, she plans to include symbols in her lessons and slideshows that indicate how much or how little AI is allowed to be used for certain tasks.
“You set those goals, requirements and parameters for kids so they understand,” she said.
She said students in her classroom now understand when to use AI and when not to use it. For example, Essay: AI can be used for brainstorming and can also be used to check spelling and grammar. Sites like Grammarly and writing software like Google Docs and Microsoft Word use AI to check for errors, clarity, and conciseness. These features are also allowed. Still, it is not allowed at the drafting stage of the essay, and students may try to circumvent this rule.
“We often see languages that are way beyond their linguistic abilities,” South Law says. “You can see the hyphens are still there. Even if you’re writing complex sentences, kids aren’t necessarily at that level. So you’ll see them get copied and pasted. A lot of times kids will copy and paste, but the bold will stay because of ChatGPT.”
When Southlaw suspects that a student has tried to pass off the AI’s writing as his own, her first step is to avoid accusations.
“I’m not going to lose my relationship with my students over that,” South Law said. “What I try to do is say, ‘What I want you to do is rewrite this. Can you put that on paper?’ I think that’s better than losing the relationship.”
South-Law prefers vision tests over AI detection sites like GPTZero. For example, she said, students learning English as a second language often have their work judged inauthentic by AI detectors simply because of the way they write.
“They do a lot of things with text that AI might do,” she said. “So there is bias within those detectors as well.”
Students who do not want to use AI for their assignments can do so.
“You can browse through the encyclopedia pages and all the different sources of information out there,” Pratt said. “You should go to the library to do that research.”
The additional protections MagicSchool provides to keep students out of trouble are already helping Pratt’s classroom. A year ago, a student approached MagicSchool for relationship advice. We provided a message back to students that the software worked as intended, that such use was not intended, and notified Pratt if such use occurred.
“But once they have free access, we’ll have the answers. We need them to learn. That’s not what you use it for, that’s not human,” Pratt said.
“Either we teach them how to use them properly and the safeguards that their brains need to have in place when using them, or we end up becoming adults who believe things that are so outrageous that they should really know the difference,” he added.
Access to MagicSchool was purchased by the school district to provide access to students as well as teachers. Pratt said teachers can use it to create projects and set up spaces in the classroom for children to use. He said many classrooms at the middle school and high school levels use it for this purpose, but he doesn’t believe the same thing is being done in elementary schools.
For instructors, Pratt said MagicSchool is aimed at teachers who are generally not tech-savvy. As a technology-oriented person, Platt was able to use Gemini for more difficult tasks such as coding.
“When you write any kind of code, the starting point is always the hardest part, so you’re given an initial starting point and you take it with you,” Platt says.
Then review the code and make your own improvements if necessary to make it more functional. By walking students through the process, you have the opportunity to teach critical thinking and problem solving.
“You need knowledge in these multiple areas to really use it effectively, not to create text, but to create something useful.”
