- September 8, 2024
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When the Flagler County School Board directed the district in March to start an artificial intelligence task force, Ryan Deising and Teresa Phillips — the technology officers charged with leading the initiative — had no idea how fast it would take off. But then, that’s the trend AI is following.
“AI is changing not even daily but by the minute,” Phillips, the district’s curriculum specialist for instructional technology, told the board.
Phillips and Deising — the district’s chief of technology and innovation — presented the board with a task force progress report at a School Board information workshop on July 23. Phillips has taken the lead in launching AI programs and trainings within the district, Deising said.
When they sent out an initial survey to employees asking what they’d like to see in AI regarding policies, guidelines, operations and education, 70 responded with 40 attending a half-day session just before spring break. Since May, 496 Flagler Schools employees have taken advantage of AI-related training, Phillips said.
“It shows the vested interest from our team. It’s a great number for Flagler rolling into this. They took time out of their summer to be a part of this,” she said.
The district sent several teams to state and national conferences, including the Future Educators Technology Conference in Orlando, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and Florida Council of Instructional Technology Leaders. Superintendent LaShakia Moore joined Phillips at a conference in Colorado.
With safeguards in place, AI can provide shortcuts for teachers in preparing lessons as well as enhance lessons for students, Deising and Phillips said.
“CoSN and ISTE (the International Society of Technology in Education) have great tools we’ve been able to take advantage of,” Deising said.
The website Teach AI has all the guidelines in place for teachers using AI and educating students about AI and using it as a tool, Phillips said. The district landed its focus on the MagicSchool AI platform, which is more user friendly than ChatGPT or Google Gemini, she said.
As an example, Phillips said, through MagicSchool, the chatbot can turn into a character from a book. With the book, “Sara, Plain and Tall,” the chatbot turned into the character of Sarah, and was shared with third grade students, answering students’ questions as the character.
“They actually did that during one of the summer reading courses,” Phillips said. “Kids are hard to get into reading sometimes, but they were like, ‘that’s so cool, she turned Siri into Sarah.’ It’s a great way for that engagement. They’d ask one question, and say, ‘Wait minute she really did answer, maybe I can ask a harder question.’”
There are programs already aligned with Florida’s state standards, Deising said.
“You can ask AI to create a set of questions based off of Florida standards, and it will create those questions and incorporate those into our (learning management system), and now the time the teacher spends aligning them into standards and ensuring that, is a click of a button, and a couple of seconds process. It’s impactful from a standpoint of efficiency.”
It’s like a creative assistant helping and guiding the teacher, Phillips said.
We’re making sure everything is appropriate and we’re rolling it out the right way. It’s here, it’s our future.”
— TERESA PHILLIPS
Canva Magic is a graphic design platform that students can use to create posters. MagicSchool has an image generator that can generate an image from a student’s descriptor from a story, Pillips said.
“If the image doesn’t look quite right, they can go back and add more descriptive,” Phillips said.
Guardrails are built in, so if the word, stupid, comes up, for example, a yellow flag pops up, she said.
As far as tools for teachers, Khanmigo from Khan Academy helps them develop personalized tutors for their students. Because of a grant from Bill Gates, Phillips said, the platform is free for all teachers to use.
“Every student may be able to have a tutor specific to their needs,” Phillips said.
Through the platform teachers can also brush up on a topic and it will give them ideas on how to present the topic to a specific grade level.
“We’re making sure everything is appropriate and we’re rolling it out the right way,” Phillips said. “It’s here, it’s our future.”
Superintendent Moore said the district is taking a cautious approach before integrating each tool.
“Safety rails must (be in place), especially for our students,” Moore said. “At the conference in Colorado I was very proud of the work we’re putting in in Florida on data privacy. Some states didn’t have that.”
Digital literacy will continue to be a component of today’s education, Phillips and Deising said. The task force’s first implementation was to change the Student Code of Conduct’s plagiarism policy.
“It was kind of outdated and did not match what is available now with AI,” Phillips said. “We moved it to academic integrity, a broader umbrella to cover those things.”
Deising said the district is also beginning to work on an AI bot for Flagler Schools’ website to answer questions in a specific way in context. Staff members are also volunteering to develop procedures and policies for using AI to build efficiencies for instruction and also for food service, finance and operations.
“It’s on a lot of our team’s minds already,” he said. “They’re willing to roll up their sleeves, because that’s not always the fun stuff.”
