UEN Homeroom on AI in Education
Daily Resource Share / May 4th, 2023
One of the most important things when implementing new technologies into a system, particularly an educational system is to try and understand the different ways it might affect different levels of the organization. I worked in restaurants for a long time in college. The place I worked at had a habit of coming up with new burgers and putting them on the menu but forgetting to change the actual physical menus for the customers. When sales were down for the burger, it fell to the wait staff to sell the new burgers to the customers. It was always a pain for the wait staff to have the burden of selling the new product on them, and they felt, them only. Often though, they would forget about the cooks in the back that needed to learn new procedures and practices to cook the order, sometimes in just a few minutes. They also forgot the managers who often had their hands tied to buy new menus due to profit margins and corporate policies. What ended up happening is that the item would be there for a few weeks and then disappear both from the menu and our memories.
Implementing AI can have a similar feel, although I don’t think it is going away anytime soon. Due to its flexible nature as a tool in a lot of educational environments, it can get deeply embedded quickly into a personalized workflow or as an assistant tool for educators. That is why it is important to understand what the different strata of education, from classroom educator to leadership to data privacy think about the innovation and how it could be applied to our classrooms. For this episode, Dani and I were lucky enough to meet with John Lyman, a Utah State Board of Education Data Privacy Coordinator; Suzy Cox, Director of Innovative Learning for Provo School District; and Emma Moss, a digital literacy teacher for Canyons School District. Each participant brought a different point of view to the discussion that was much needed.
The issue with this podcast, Dani and I quickly found out, is that there is just too much to discuss with AI. It is a topic that opens too many doors including John’s great comments about edufuturism, classroom applications and worries, and Suzy’s comments about the need for a strategy with teachers and students. I am always kind of pinching myself when we have these amazing conversations with educators, and this was one that I pinched myself a few times. Check out this timely and engaging discussion. Listen above or you can check out this and more episodes at this link.
