AI in Schools: Things Teachers Should Consider
According to a fall 2023 RAND study, 18% of K-12 educators reported using AI for classroom teaching, with middle and high school ELA and social studies teachers being the highest adopters. Another 15% said they tried using AI in the classroom at least once. These findings show that teachers have already embraced using AI in schools. According to a 2024 EducationWeek survey, 56% of school and district leaders expect AI use in education to rise next school year. What do we do about that?
In this article, we’ll look at how educators and students already use AI in schools, the new challenges with this technology, and how to incorporate information about AI use and responsibility into your lessons.
How do teachers use AI in schools?
There are a variety of ways teachers use AI in the classroom to give lessons, do prep work, and analyze student data. Some of the most common ways teachers use AI include:
Personalizing learning: Teachers can differentiate instruction in real time for students by using AI to identify their strengths and weaknesses in certain skills or topics and adjust content and materials to meet their needs, such as by leveling content.
Providing real-time feedback: AI can give students instant feedback, allowing you to dedicate your time to more personalized one-on-one interactions with the students who need it most.
Increasing productivity: AI helps teachers automate certain tasks, such as generating formative assessments or using instant grading, to free up more time for lesson planning and instruction.
Creating interactive learning experiences: AI makes developing interactive lessons, materials, and activities easier with less prep work, such as through AI-powered educational games ready for in-classroom use.
Gathering data-driven insights: AI data collection and analysis help teachers identify trends and patterns in student learning and create better plan lessons.
Providing accessibility accommodations: AI tools can improve accessibility for students like English learners or those with disabilities with functions like translations and text-to-speech.
How do students use AI in schools?
Like their teachers, there are plenty of ways students can use AI during lessons, independent practice, or group work to expand their learning. Some of the most common ways students use AI in school include:
Brainstorming and outlining projects: Students use AI to generate ideas or create outlines to help them work on projects and write essays.
Improve efficiency: Like teachers, students can use AI to be more efficient and productive. For example, they can use it to remind them when assignments are due.
Proofread work or check answers: Students can use AI to proofread their writing or check their homework answers before turning in assignments to ensure accuracy.
Receive real-time feedback: Students can get immediate feedback from AI tools while they’re working on an assignment. This also improves efficiency because they don’t have to wait for a teacher to call on them or address their needs.
Challenges of using AI in schools
Despite all the ways you and your students can use AI as a support in the classroom, you may still encounter challenges when using AI tools in school. They include:
Bias and misinformation
AI can’t think for itself. It can only share what it’s “taught” from manual input or by scraping the internet for information. When programmers, spammy websites, or content creators “teach” AI misinformation or disinformation, it fuels students' problems telling facts from fiction. Plus, if AI doesn’t have access to enough content with diverse viewpoints, it may “learn” implicit bias that appears in the results.
To curb AI misinformation and bias in the classroom, you can:
Explain how AI is a tool for research, not the authority on any subject.
Teach students about AI hallucinations, when the tool produces information that’s incorrect and misleading but looks true.
Remind students how to validate sources and fact-check information when doing any research, including with AI.
Incorporate more human-developed, vetted, and factually accurate content into your lessons to supplement AI use.
Low-quality results
While AI can save you time by automating tasks, the results can be generic, confusing, or unhelpful. Let’s say you want to differentiate content for students at different reading levels. With AI, you can feed it an article and ask it to rewrite the content at a fourth-grade reading level. It returns an adapted piece with shorter, more direct sentences and lower-level vocabulary words. But what’s the quality of that AI-adapted article?
AI isn’t concerned with scaffolding the content or helping students’ reading comprehension. It simply performs the task you ask it to do: Simplify the content. It doesn’t factor in things that matter to you and your students, like clarity or accuracy.
There are two ways you can combat subpar AI results:
Learn how to write expert prompts that leave no room for error.
Find better solutions.
If using AI is supposed to save time, learning how to become an expert prompt writer isn’t a quick skill to pick up. Finding other solutions could be better. For example, Newsela products offer news and nonfiction content at five reading levels. Our editorial team levels each article while accounting for elements like clarity, scaffolding, and student abilities so you can trust that no matter which level you use, the content is classroom-ready and designed to help students learn and improve their literacy skills.
See something you like?
Sign up for Newsela Lite and claim a teacher trial to access our full suite of premium content and activities.
Plagiarism and cheating
One of the biggest worries teachers have about AI is cheating. You may be concerned about students using AI to copy and paste full essays, do their math problems, or answer their science and social studies questions rather than doing those tasks themselves.
Beyond those concerns, teaching students about plagiarism and respecting other people’s artistic works and intellectual property is difficult. AI makes it that much more confusing because the tool scrapes content from many sources and puts it together. What’s worse, in many cases, AI doesn’t cite its sources or provide proper credit, which may lead students to think they don’t have to either.
To combat these issues, have open discussions about ethical ways to use AI in schools, such as generating ideas, recommending sources for research, or proofreading their work. Remind them that they are the creators and AI is the tool. It shouldn’t replace their work with its own.
Data privacy issues
We still don’t know all the impacts AI can have on data privacy. The White House has created a Blueprint for the AI Bill of Rights, and many states and territories have introduced AI-related legislation. Even with those suggestions in place, it’s natural to wonder if all tech companies are following them or what AI evolutions could come up that sacrifice your data privacy.
To keep your and your students’ data safe in the classroom, use only reputable tools that list how their AI collects, stores, and uses your information. For example, Newsela products follow industry standards to ensure student privacy, and we comply with regulations like the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). We also don’t send teacher or student data to outside large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
Decreased social interactions
Though students come to school to learn information and skills, building relationships and interacting with others is also an important part of education. Over-reliance on technology of any kind, not just AI, may lead to reluctance to work in groups or less social interaction among students and teachers.
Avoid this digital pitfall by teaching students about AI’s purpose as a tool. Show them how it doesn’t replace teacher instruction. Stress how they can use it to collaborate without making it a member of the group project. Creating plenty of time for in-person interactions, group work, and technology-free time throughout the day can help.
3 tips for teaching about AI in schools
You may not teach weekly AI classes in school, but that doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate information about it into your lessons. Use these tips to find ways to teach students what AI is, why it matters, and how to use it responsibly:
1. Build background knowledge on AI
The first step to understanding anything is learning more about it. You can build background knowledge on AI, its tools, and its uses throughout other lessons. Our Artificial Intelligence unit for Newsela ELA and our Complex Topic: Artificial Intelligence text set for Newsela Social Studies can help.
Each one includes various articles and videos to launch discussions about AI. It also includes perspectives about how AI touches fields outside of technology, such as medicine, transportation, and education.
2. Make past-to-present connections about technology
You don’t even need to dedicate a specific lesson to AI to bring the discussion into your classroom. Use your social studies lessons to make past-to-present connections. Say you’re teaching a unit on the Industrial Revolution. You may talk about how inventions like the cotton gin, steam engine, or lightbulb changed society as people knew it. How is that similar to what’s happening with AI today?
3. Add AI to your digital media literacy and digital citizenship lessons
You likely already teach digital media literacy and digital citizenship in your classes—even if you don’t know you’re doing it. If you have discussions with students about using technology responsibly or interacting with others on the internet, you’re already incorporating digital literacy and citizenship into your lessons.
Now, it’s time to add AI to those conversations. When we address and set best practices for using AI in school, we can help students become smarter about using the tool. We can teach them how to spot hallucinations and disinformation. We can also encourage them to do more research to find out if they can trust what AI tells them.
To get students to show what they know about AI, use our ELA Debate and Discussion: Is Artificial Intelligence Ethical? text set. Have them choose a side based on the information they read and then use textual proof to support their arguments.
Use ethical AI in your classrooms with Newsela’s products
At Newsela, we believe AI can have positive impacts on the classroom. It can power great teaching solutions, but it can’t replace educators who work hard to keep their students engaged, learning, and succeeding each day. Our job is to provide high-quality edtech products that use responsible, ethical AI to make your classroom experience easier and more fulfilling. When you use Newsela, you’ll see the following AI features across our product suite:
Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science:
Article planning supports for features like key terms and before-reading activities
Article summaries at the beginning of each text
Tier three vocabulary definition generation
Writing prompt generation
Question generation
Answer hints
Writing prompt generation
Flashcard and practice set generation
Real-time, rubric-aligned writing feedback
Assignment prompt generation
There’s so much more the Newsela product suite can do for you. Discover more ways to engage, support, and grow every learner today.
This article was first published in April 2023 and has since been updated to reflect new research and best practices.
Brian Krause is a former Newsela Fellow and contributing author for this article. He is an instructional technology coach with the Learning Technology Center of Illinois, a program of the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). He supports technology classroom use and infrastructure for K-12 school districts and educators in the state. Brian serves as a coach for two districts in northwestern Illinois and has led professional development at conferences across the Midwest.