New York City has also banned AI for younger students as concerns over classroom use grow
Another school district has banned AI from being used in the classroom by students across all grades. While this isn’t the first ban of its kind that we’ve seen, what’s interesting is that it was introduced just weeks after the district started piloting Google Gemini for older students. Frederick County became the latest school district to ban AI use in the classroom this week, voting 6-1 to restrict the technology from pre-K through 12th grade. Initially, the board considered only banning AI for younger students, but eventually extended the ban through high school.
gsuite is almost a de-facto standard for K-12. A lot of institutions can get it for free or cheap which is really attractive to cash strapped districts with a minimal IT budget. Our school was a Microsoft campus and we’d have at least 50% of incoming freshmen who were clueless about using O365 because they were all google classroom K-12. If I were a guessing man (and having been in a similar situation), the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite.” Hell, that’s why we went with Teams during the shift to remote schooling in COVID. We already had it in our O365 subscription, and implementing another solution in like no time would’ve been expensive and a pain in the ass.
I work in IT and your reasoning is solid but there’s a better chance that conversation went more like the board said “here’s every AI option but the one already in our platform” and then IT asked what the AI needed to be able to do and got a ¯\(ツ)/¯ back.
Then IT said “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite."
I have this exact conversation once every few months, but about forms. “Can we get some kind of survey platform? Like surveymonkey?” “We already have office 365 forms, just use that”
I do the same, otherwise they’ll go out and get the wrong service for $100-300k that’ll take a year to implement and they either won’t use or simply doesn’t do what they want to do and expect us to support a service we’ve only known they purchased ~20 minutes ago.
Well, even if there are budget constraints, and they’ll end up using Gemini because of these: They should have looked at alternatives at least, just to know what else exists, because knowledge is the basis for education… Alternatively, they could have been stated the true reason. I’m merely criticizing the poor wording.
Are there really any AI offerings that are specifically tailored to kids? It’s all a crap shoot. I do agree they should at least consider others, but it wouldn’t have made a difference.
I don’t know and in my opinion letting children use LLMs unsupervised is a bad idea regardless of which provider is used. But as long as teachers don’t understand the basics of how LLMs works and treat “AI” as a magical answer box there is not much hope left anyway. Sorry if I’m bitter here. Teachers are expected to know about the materials and technology they are using to teach children. The blatant lack of knowledge and ignorance of the teachers are what makes school AI usage dangerous for children.
Well it’s a lose lose situation. They can’t stop kids from using AI outside of school. And in reality, they don’t have the skilled professionals or budget to even stop it in the schools. My son accidentally “hacked” his way to access other AI models than the one that was approved on the school devices. Their security is very weak. But if they could completely block AI, then the kids would be missing a part of their education that they are really going to need in the future. Given that, my opinion is that they should embrace AI in a sense. But teach the kids how to use it in a way that adds value. Just like making a math test that allows calculators, make assignments that allow AI. Then use a better AI to see if the kids managed to flush out the incorrect information. That will teach them to use AI, and since they will have to actually read what it did to fact check it, it will expose them to the intended subject matter. It ain’t great, but it’s something.