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00:00This is the second story in our series on artificial intelligence being applied here and now, where it matters most.
00:07Last week, we brought you the story of the AI used by your doctor.
00:11This week, it's about your teacher, the one you depend on to educate your children,
00:16the one we all depend on to prepare the next generation of workers,
00:20the one that we all remember from our own childhood.
00:24Whenever I talk to people about their experiences in education,
00:27they always named this one teacher who was so influential and they got into this discipline
00:33because this teacher was amazing and they inspired them, where students said, what?
00:38Professor Shamya Kurambaya now teaches those teachers.
00:42As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, she lives at the intersection of education and tech,
00:48focusing on the application of artificial intelligence in America's classrooms.
00:53We know that teacher in the front of the classroom and students in front of their laptops
00:57is not a model that works. It's broken.
00:59Last couple of years especially has been very exciting.
01:02And I would say the big change is the ability for teachers to customize what's happening with AI.
01:08So what I want you to look for on your Kira dashboard...
01:11Lance Key is one of those classroom teachers adopting and adapting AI
01:16as he teaches computer science in the Putnam County School System, just east of Nashville, Tennessee.
01:21Computer science curriculum, they've really gamified it and they've made it colorful
01:26and engaging and exciting for the students.
01:29And also, you know, inside of there, if they try to do things that they can't,
01:32it again will redirect them.
01:34It'll give them, oh, there's an error here.
01:35And then they can go to the chatbot and try to work through what the error is
01:39and then it'll redirect them to where they need to go.
01:41I think the big opportunity that stems from AI in the classroom
01:45is the ability to personalize instruction to individual students.
01:48Andrea Passanetti is co-founder and CEO of the company Kira.
01:53It provides the education software platform to Lance Key's classroom
01:57as well as to many of the largest school districts across the United States.
02:02With AI, a teacher has an unlimited number of teaching assistants to support that process.
02:09And the teacher can provide guidance, guardrails and guidelines
02:12on how to provide that support to students.
02:15That looks like students working on a terminal and having an AI tutor
02:18that they can query either in written text by typing on a keyboard
02:21or in spoken word by speaking directly to the terminal and the computer.
02:27That personalization is something that Key is experiencing every day
02:31in his Tennessee classroom.
02:33It allows me to have a more personalized relationship
02:36with my students in the classroom.
02:39Before, there was one of me, and for every question that came up,
02:43I was like bouncing around the room just answering questions all the time.
02:46But now we've got, you know, a tutor that can help them along the way.
02:50And I can build personalized tutors for them too.
02:53So if it's on a specific content area, I can say, okay, today we're working on solving two-step equations.
02:59Here's a two-step tutor that my students can work with alone.
03:02And they can ask it questions.
03:04So then I can walk around and then one-on-one check with students.
03:07I've also got a dashboard on the backside that will alert me if there's a student that's having problems.
03:12So then I know real time that I need to go check on Johnny or Susie.
03:16Over and above that personalization, AI can also provide teachers like Lance Key with some much-needed relief.
03:23My wife previously was an English teacher, and I recall grading essays being very daunting for her
03:31because she would have to score 150 essays every time that they wrote an essay in the classroom.
03:37So using a rubric, being able to upload our district rubrics into Kira and being able to use their, one, their grader off of that rubric,
03:47but also their AI detection, their plagiarism detection, and their feedback writer has been amazing.
03:52So we can load all the papers up into that.
03:54It will score it off for us.
03:56It will give us all the feedback.
03:57And the teachers can then just review it.
03:59And I think that's the big thing that we can focus on with AI is the time that it gives teachers back in the day.
04:04By 2030, we're going to need to hire 30 million teachers because we've got teachers retiring and people not going into the field.
04:11So we're going to have a teacher shortage that's coming along with a high burnout rate.
04:15So I think AI can help us with some of the repetitive processes that we do over and over and over again.
04:20For all it's promised today, it turns out that the use of AI for education isn't all that new.
04:26While large language models are only just making their debut in schools, other forms of AI have a long history.
04:34How long has either artificial intelligence or maybe we should call it machine learning going back, how long has it been used in the classroom?
04:41You'd be surprised how AI and education, uses of written education, have a lot of common sort of origins.
04:50And so I come from an academic background where my advisor's advisor's advisor back in 1980s was creating what we now call as cognitive tutors that were being used in Pittsburgh classrooms.
05:04And people have studied there.
05:06There's work done in the 1990s on ethnography, basically, of how teachers are using AI in the classroom.
05:13What does introduction of AI in the classroom change in the social structures, student-student interaction or student-teacher interaction?
05:21It's only in the last few years that AI has developed to the point where companies like Kira can put it to use in the classroom.
05:29According to surveys by RAND, as of the 2023-24 school year, a quarter of all U.S. teachers were already using AI to teach students.
05:38And Passanetti says the key is the conversation.
05:41We use AI as a catch-all term for a lot of different technologies.
05:46In reality, what's happened with the most recent wave of AI, with LLMs in particular, is a more discursive medium.
05:53So AI now, unlike even three, four years ago, is able to have real conversations with students.
06:01It's able to engage with students on a level that feels more human in some respect.
06:05We founded Kira four years ago, before AI was popular.
06:11AI wasn't cool.
06:12It seemed premature.
06:14And in many cases, it was entirely verboten.
06:17There were a lot of districts that said, we can't really be talking about AI with parents because it gives them a lot of anxiety.
06:22Or there's a lack of understanding about what AI can do.
06:26And so the whole conversation would die at the very beginning.
06:31So I would say there's been a radical shift where that anxiety and resistance has given way to curiosity.
06:40And some of that curiosity has turned into plain necessity as school districts across the country struggle to deal with teaching students in a multitude of languages.
06:50It's important to bring students' home language into their classrooms.
06:54A very promising benefit or opportunity for AI here is to bridge the gap between the language that the teacher speaks and the different languages that the students in the classroom speak.
07:0632 states in the United States reported that their students speak over 200 languages.
07:12And these 32 states have a deficit of bilingual resource teachers.
07:17So there are all these opportunities out there in terms of what's already working in the classroom, but there is limited human resources.
07:24The number of districts that can now teach languages like Mandarin or Arabic or, you know, French and Spanish,
07:32where historically it would have required teaching or hiring a native speaker of that language,
07:38and as a result been much more difficult to achieve for a district, the ability to do that now is immediate.
07:46Districts can leverage AI tools to teach a new foreign subject or a foreign language as a subject in a way that they couldn't have in the past.
07:55For all its advantages, the widespread use of AI in the classroom is not without its risks,
08:01risks we've all heard about with other applications of AI, things like hallucinations and bias,
08:08but also risks that are unique to education.
08:10A Pew study from last year showed that a quarter of teachers think AI tools do more harm than good in the classroom.
08:18Only 6% say AI is beneficial.
08:21Any piece of AI that is generating text, anywhere where it is student-facing,
08:26you have to be careful about the implications hallucinations have in this specific context of education.
08:32The goal in the classroom is for us to help students learn.
08:37Hallucination is absolutely detrimental to students learning.
08:42Any sort of misinformation, it could, I would also talk about potential biases,
08:47potential, you know, toxic content, the kinds of, any kind of text that the AI is generating
08:55that is harmful for students' learning and well-being.
08:59But perhaps a greater risk with AI applied to the classroom is the risk of expecting too much of it.
09:06AI is a tool like anything else.
09:08It has very, very real limitations.
09:11The fact that it's discursive and it resembles an interaction with a human in some isolated cases
09:19makes it feel a lot more advanced than technologies we've interacted with in the past.
09:24But as of today, AI's boundaries are still limited.
09:28And it's very easy to overstate.
09:30There's a lot of hype.
09:31It's very easy to feed into a narrative of fear.
09:35But the reality is AI is still answering fairly discrete questions being asked by students
09:41and supporting teachers with the answering of those questions.
09:44I think students interacting with computers one-on-one is definitely something that schools,
09:53district teachers, parents, students themselves need to be careful of.
09:58It can take students out of interpersonal relationships.
10:02It can dull students' abilities to interact with their peers.
10:04So AI is by no means a panacea.
10:09Over 90% of innovation in AI for education fails.
10:12I believe that it is because they do not consider what's the kind of practices that's happening in the classroom
10:19and it's built in this black box.
10:21Second is also often in computer science.
10:24I have a background in computer science.
10:26Often we make oversimplifying assumptions about real-world context.
10:30So we are sort of assuming that these factors do not play a role.
10:34And we build a system for this ideal context.
10:37But classroom, real-world classrooms are far from ideal.
10:40Students have very different needs.
10:42There's a lot of learner variability.
10:44They come in with a lot of preconceptions that often is hard for us to catch right away.
10:50So with all the hype and a fair amount of failure,
10:53how can an investor sort out which AI education applications have the most promise?
10:58The AI hype certainly has led to a lot of funding for what I would call as systems that are generated
11:07to put a lipstick on a pig.
11:10Is that the phrase?
11:12If you haven't thought about fundamentally how are you going to improve education
11:17and you're only coming from the point of view of we have this AI tool
11:20and we're going to find something to apply to, it's not going to work.
11:23It's yet another fancy tool, but the underlying things that has been broken in education
11:28continues to be broken.
11:30Whether it's investing or teaching or learning,
11:35everyone agrees that in the end it all comes back to the teachers themselves.
11:40I think that's the real promise of AI.
11:42It allows teachers to do what they do best.
11:44When you think of your favorite teacher, you don't think of, you know,
11:47the teacher who taught derivatives the best.
11:49Do you think of the teacher who encouraged you, who made you feel smart, who made you feel capable,
11:55who made you feel like you could learn anything and accomplish anything?
11:59And I think that's where teachers really shine.
12:02That's where AI is really a democratizing power, I would say, in education.
12:06There is something about that human intent.
12:08There is something about a human being caring about a child, about a student,
12:13which I don't think AI is able to do that.
12:15My dad just a few years ago, he changed a headlight in the car, and I'm like,
12:20why don't you take it somewhere and get it done?
12:21He said, well, I watched a YouTube video, and it taught me how to do it.
12:24So I think that we have some dispensations that are happening in education right now
12:28where some shifts are happening.
12:30Teachers are not being minimized, but our roles are changing a little bit
12:34to where we're guiding students to learning,
12:36and we're able to personalize the learning more because we have the time to be able to do that.
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