00:00We think it has tremendous potential to help teachers tailor material to the needs of their particular class.
00:10In particular, schools are now dealing with an incredibly wide range of abilities in the same class.
00:17Students who have the maximal achievement in NAPLAN and being below the minimum standard.
00:24So having tools that will allow teachers to tailor individual tasks and individual assessment to the level of particular students.
00:34And having technology that can ask additional questions to a student and sort of continue to build them up and help them to reach the class average is really important.
00:46It can also stretch those students that might otherwise be bored.
00:50Teachers though and education unions have been calling for strict regulation on the adoption of AI.
00:57They fear the technology could be used to replace workers.
01:00So are you anticipating resistance to your proposal from teachers and schools themselves?
01:07I don't think there will be great resistance because the teachers who have been trialing these tools are finding that it is a major time saver.
01:17And we know that teachers are extremely overworked and heavily burdened.
01:22Teachers are spending on an average 15 hours a week preparing lesson plans and assessment and six hours a week within that searching for curriculum materials.
01:35Giving them more tools to do those tasks quickly and concentrate on their interactions with the students would be really helpful.
01:43Are there risks though from over reliance on AI, what you need to be aware of in promoting AI in schools?
01:50Certainly. So we're aware of some of the risks. There's risks to privacy.
01:54New South Wales and South Australia have already rolled out a tool in New South Wales.
02:00It's called EduChat and they've rolled it out to all teachers and to 50 schools for students to use.
02:07And they'll be rolling that out further.
02:10And those tools are designed not to share data with the system.
02:17They're also designed to be more pedagogically helpful.
02:20So unlike, say, ChatGPT, which is going to fully produce an answer for you, these tools are going to ask you questions, kind of encourage you further down the road of questioning and learning.
02:34You also have to be careful to to ring fence its use in order not to impinge, for example, on the acquisition of critical thinking skills or group learning.
02:43Yes, I think we're still learning how to best use these tools because we do want to make sure that students use them to do some simple tasks but continue to be stretched, continue to think critically.
02:58And so that's why I think sharing information across school systems about what works, what is best practice, how can we use these tools to stretch our students and not to sort of inhibit their development.
03:11And how do you see the federal government's role in promoting and overseeing the use of AI in schools?
03:17We think there is a big role for the Commonwealth to help states collaborate to use their purchasing power together to buy the best tools.
03:28We think that it can be disseminating information about what are the tools that work the most effectively and for which tasks.
03:37Already it's disseminating information about which tools are safe from a privacy point of view.
03:44Catherine de Fontenay, very good to talk to you. Thank you.
03:46Thanks so much.
03:47Thanks so much.
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