2 days ago
St. Charles Public Schools gets ready to adopt AI training for teachers
Jun. 9—ST. CHARLES, Minn. — As artificial intelligence continues to advance at a breakneck speed, St. Charles Public Schools is trying to keep up with the new technological changes in its classrooms by giving teachers more resources.
On Monday, the district is set to approve the purchase of a new training program from the company, Gruvy Education, to help teachers keep up with the AI revolution. According to Superintendent Robert Routh, it's not just a matter of making sure students maintain academic honesty in their work, but also about preparing them for a world where they will encounter artificial intelligence in their lives.
"It's our responsibility as a school system to give them the skills that they're going to need," Routh said about teaching students how to adapt to AI usage. "If we don't, we're doing our kids a major disservice of not exposing them to it and adapting with the times."
The district is paying a base amount of $4,000 for the training, with an additional charge of $30 for each person taking it.
Schools have been trying to adapt to the advent of artificial intelligence tools for several years now, since the tech organization OpenAI launched the program ChatGPT. The program allows users to ask even complex questions with the gratification of near-immediate answers. It also allows users to generate large amounts of written work, meaning students could use it to find shortcuts to class assignments.
Routh described the onset of AI tools as the "new Google."
"It's the new tool that we have to find new ways to manage and to figure out how it's going to work within our students' lives," Routh said. "Our kids are going to be a part of the journey with AI for their work life and their personal life. So now, as a school system, we have to decide what kind of influence we're going to have on its use."
According to Routh, the training program St. Charles is adopting will help teachers educate students about the appropriate use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT. One of the ways the district is going to be doing that is by asking teachers to devote at least one unit of class to the application of AI.
Even though the training is ultimately in service of the students, it's expected to have benefits for the teaching staff as well. An outline of the program says that "teachers who complete the training save an average of 3.23 hours per week on preparation and administrative tasks."
"(It's) teaching a teacher how to also use it," Routh said about the training program. "In order for them to be comfortable with it, they have to adopt it in their own lives at some level."
