Is AI making its way into your child’s classroom?
EL PASO, TX (KVIA) -- Artificial intelligence grows and evolves at a rapid rate. According to Worldmetrics, 45% of K-12 schools in the U.S. use A.I. for personalization.
Schools have to decide whether to implement A.I. into their daily curriculums.
Texas doesn't have a mandatory A.I. framework for public schools, meaning the Texas Education Agency (TEA) leaves specific classroom rules up to school districts.
However, exposing young users to A.I. can come with risks.
"Children tend to pour into the tool -- personal information, medical information, friend dating information, family information. And that can become very dangerous," said Raina Mankarious, CEO of Crime Stoppers Houston.
Mankarious said in some cases, children form emotional attachments to A.I. tools.
"They are even taking their own lives or saying that this is my partner, this is who I'm in love with," she said.
ABC-7 went to Socorro ISD to see how they navigate artificial intelligence in their everyday curriculums.
ABC-7 spoke with Miguel Moreno, the district's Coordinator of Instructional Technology.
Moreno explains SISD is almost ahead of the game when it comes to AI guidelines.
"We can go back up to three years where our districts started going out to national conferences and just hearing about what AI tools might be coming into our educational space. And so we started looking at how we could best prepare our teachers to be able to understand and learn how to use AI so that they could then be prepared." Said Moreno.
SISD even developed a handbook that aligns with district policies.
"Over the last three years we've been developing our own systems, our own policies, our own guidelines to guide our campuses."
Moreno said the district takes a "somewhat conservative approach"
"We use a program called Magic School, where teachers are able to use AI components with students without having to compromise student information and student data. So it is not a free for all."
He said the students have very limited to no access to generative AI tools.
"The AI tools that they do have access to are either embedded in another application, where they're composing, and that AI tool will give student feedback, but it won't compose for them.So it might give them suggestions as to how to improve their writing, but it wouldn't actually compose anything for them."
But Moreno acknowledged there is no way to control what students do outside of the school.
"It can be a great tool as a supplement, as a reinforcement. But if you're using it to replace your own ability to think, to create, to express yourself with words, to figure out how to do math, reading, science, that's a huge problem. And if you're unable to discriminate real, firm, fake, that's a huge, huge, issue." Mankarious said.
