BVSD, SVVSD look to help teachers use AI while protecting student data

The Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts are working to help teachers harness the power of AI, while keeping student data safe and teaching students how to use the emerging technology ethically.

When Open AI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, neither district decided to block the new, generative AI technology that so quickly exploded.

“Chat GPT, that was an inflection point,” said Jason Kelsall, St. Vrain Valley learning systems strategist. “We started having a lot of conversations at the leadership level looking at the potential of AI.”

In both districts, the conversations centered around data privacy, helping students learn to use AI ethically and how teachers could take advantage of the technology to handle more mundane, time-consuming tasks.

“There’s never enough time to plan,” Boulder Valley Superintendent Rob Anderson said at a June school board work session on AI.  “There’s never enough time to assess. If somebody becomes a power user of this tool, the gift will be time they can reinvest in our students.”

In St. Vrain Valley, the district is offering two options for teacher learning this fall. The first is a series of in-person, AI pop-up sessions, while the second is a virtual AI exploration class so they can learn at their own pace.

The district first tried the AI pop-up format last school year, with professional development and technology staff members designing and leading the sessions. This school year, school leadership and teachers are in charge.

“It’s cool to see our leaders and schools really start to tackle this,” Kelsall said. “They can dig in with other educators. We want to create time for teachers to explore how they can use these tools to make what they already do even better.”

The first session, held at Silver Creek High School in September, started with a panel discussion by Silver Creek students. They talked about the benefits and risks of AI, noting potential improvements like screening earlier for cancer, debugging code faster or helping generate ideas for a school assignment.

“AI is a tool, just like the internet is a tool,” Silver Creek senior Kaylee Crouthamel said. “It’s really hard to replace human creativity.”

Teachers then led sessions on topics that included using AI to enhance design skills, integrating AI into special education practices and streamlining tasks with AI.

Cleveland Smith, a sixth grade language arts teacher at Altona Middle School, led a session with the help of Silver Creek senior Lizzie Horton.

Horton, who is the student president of the district’s YES Ambassador program, talked about the ways AI is helpful to her and other students with dyslexia. The ambassadors are middle and high school volunteers with dyslexia who speak about their learning differences, self-advocacy and assistive technologies.

Horton talked about how ChatGPT and similar AI technology can be helpful for students with dyslexia, but said many of her teachers are now requiring assignments to be handwritten to prevent students from using it – a requirement that can make school more difficult for many dyslexic students.

Smith encouraged teachers to “start having better conversations around AI.”

“I’ve been hearing a lot of fear driven messages,” he said. “If our job as educators is to prepare young people for the future, having them write all their assignments on paper because we’re afraid of it is not the answer.”

Smith said writing assignments from two of his sixth grade students were flagged last year as being generated using AI. One student, he said, was using Grammarly to check for errors and clicked on something to make his writing better, with no intention of cheating. Another admitted to purposefully using AI, giving Cleveland the opportunity to talk to him about the choice and why he made it.

Along with having conversations with students on ethical use, Smith said he has used AI in his classroom to help students grow as writers.

He asks students to type an essay in a platform called Writeable, which allows classmates and the teacher to give feedback. He starts with the AI grammar aid turned off for the students’ first draft, then turns it on when students go back to revise their work. Students will see misspelled words and tone and voice problems, allowing them to count their errors and make goals to reduce them in future assignments.

“We’re pairing the students’ ability to think about their own learning with AI,” Smith said. “That’s the difference between AI making us smarter or dumber.”

Rachel Ortiz, who is one of two teachers in the school’s center-based program for autistic students, is using AI to reduce her workload and problem-solve classroom challenges.

“The more I look into it and play around with the AI options, it’s definitely helping me navigate situations in the classroom,” she said.

AI, Ortiz said, has helped her ratchet down the reading level of classroom materials so her students can access those materials when they’re in general education classrooms. She has also used it to create a “social story” for a student struggling at recess, as well as to generate ideas for students’ high interest areas that also relate to state standards.

The trick, she added, is to be as specific as possible in her AI prompts without including any personal data about her students.

“If you just give it bare bones requests, you may not get a good answer,” Ortiz said. “But it will ask if you want to change something. You can bounce those ideas off this interface. It’s like having a sounding board without having someone there.”

In Boulder Valley, the district started by creating an AI advisory committee and, in the fall of 2023, developed monthly AI learning workshops for educators.

The committee worked on identifying a system that would allow teachers to benefit from the technology while protecting student data. The group settled on contracting with the Magic School AI platform, allowing teachers to use the platform while keeping Boulder Valley’s data protected inside a “walled garden.”

“It was a real journey to discover what we really needed,” said Lynn Gershman, Boulder Valley’s academic services director.

The teacher workshops covered topics that included how AI works, how to write prompts, ways to use it in education to save time and how to use the Magic School platform. In less than a year, Boulder Valley teachers have produced 50,000 content generations using that platform.

“Our teachers are really excited and are using Magic School like crazy,” Gershman said. “I’ve been in ed tech a long time. I’ve never seen adoption of a tool like this with so many people.”

Teachers, for example, can use the platform to generate the common elements of an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, document for special education students. Teachers then personalize student-specific learning goals. Teachers also can use the platform with students, but it’s only available to students with a teacher guide.

“The teachers are in control,” Gershman said. “They show the students how it works. The students join the room with the tools in it, and teachers can see what’s being generated. Teachers are embedding that ethical use into their lesson.”

She added that she’s seeing teachers use AI in “really fun and creative ways.” As an example, she pointed to an elementary school art teacher who used AI tools with students to digitally animate the masks they created so they could share information about the different mask types.

Plans for this school year include starting an online forum for teachers so they can share AI lessons and ideas.

Fairview High language arts teacher Katie Miles said she has found AI more useful as a tool for students than as a time saver with teaching tasks, because she often needs to revise or correct what it generates. One way she is using it with students is to generate book recommendations, with students asking AI to suggest books based on T.V. shows, movies and songs they like.

“My goal as a language arts teacher has always been to help students read and write the world around them,” she said. “Whether we like it or not, AI is the world around us. So I’m interested in learning right alongside students how we can wield AI as a tool to help us achieve that goal.”

Miles said she has addressed the potential for students to use AI to write their papers by asking students to write about topics they care about and their own experiences.

“This year, I haven’t seen many students turn to AI when given the chance to share their own voice,” she said.

The best way for the district to help teachers navigate the world of AI, Miles added, is to support them in creating engaging learning experiences that foster creative and critical thinking.

“We need more freedom to help students learn to think outside the box,” she said. “We need more inquiry-driven, self-directed, project-based learning that bolsters young people’s ability to transfer skills across disciplines and solve problems creatively. These kinds of thinkers can understand when and how to use AI to further their own ideas, not use it as a crutch to do the thinking for them.”

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