Imagine being a kid again, sitting down in your history or English class at school. In days past, this might elicit some groans of boredom from many students as they flip open their hefty textbooks. But what if you could talk to Robert Oppenheimer, or ask Jay Gatsby what it’s like to throw a house party during the 1920s?
That’s how some students in Oak Ridge High School classrooms are starting to engage with course content, thanks in part to the efforts of several educators, including Instructional Technology Coach Brian Jones.
“It’s not so much a novelty, but like a new kind of activity, or way to engage in class that they didn’t have before,” said Jones.
The school has been experimenting with A.I. in the classroom for several months now. They’re using a program made specifically for K-12 teachers, known as Magic School.
It’s designed to help complement teachers, not replace them, and is marketed as a time-saver that can help prepare lesson plans, grade essays, or generate quiz questions. Oak Ridge High School Principal Drayton Hawkins has been making use of the program to help compose emails, for example.
“I’ve kind of fallen in love, I guess, for lack of better words, with magic school,” Hawkins said. “Teachers always talk about how they don’t have time. So this is a way to save yourself some time on some trivial things that you have going on, or something maybe not so trivial.”
The program also has tools for students. It can give feedback on assignments, help them find sources for a research paper and even help tutor them in various subjects. But Jones was quick to point out that it’s not as limitless as popular programs like ChatGPT or Dall-E. It has limits to help prevent cheating and protect students’ privacy.
“It's not like ChatGPT, and I'm just handing you this open AI to do your homework for you,” Jones said. “But it's … a writing feedback tool to put in front of students. So you're going to upload your essay and then ask it these questions about your thesis statement and topic statements or things like that.”
Caramia Milloway is a librarian at Oak Ridge High School, and works closely with English teachers. She says that when free, open-source generative AI tools first started showing up, many were worried that students would use it to cheat.
And in fact, nearly half of all high school students in the U.S. are using AI to help them with school assignments, according to a December 2023 study published by the ACT.
To combat this, Oak Ridge High School teachers moved assignments into the classroom. That meant less time for teaching, and more time doing in-class writing.
“It's sort of been a gotcha campaign, trying to catch them,” Milloway said. “You know, looking for copying and pasting from the internet, plagiarism. So that's primarily, I think, how we've seen our students at the high school level using it.”
But Milloway says she’s gained a new appreciation for the capabilities of AI since they began testing Magic School, and allowing teachers to experiment with the new technology.
“I think in the last year we’ve just gotten to start using it more as teachers, and we’re starting to understand that there’s some really awesome things it can do to help facilitate learning,” she said.
Mark Buckner is a teacher at Oak Ridge High School, and a retired researcher at Oak Ridge National Lab. He’s been teaching students how to engage with real-world AI models responsibly and ethically, while also learning a thing or two about history.
“We're working on a project where we're literally trying to recreate historical figures from the Manhattan Project,” Buckner said. “We're going to create three-dimensional statues using generative AI, and then we're going to have, basically, digital twins of them – cloning their voice, talking about their involvement.”
And in English classes, teachers are using the technology to help keep their students engaged with readings.
“I created chatbots, so that each chatbot is going to act like the main character of the novel,” Milloway said. “So Jay Gatsby is coming to class tomorrow, for example. And students can ask Jay questions about his life, his motivation, you know what his parties are like, whatever they want to ask.”
Buckner says they want to introduce the technology to students, and teach them to understand it, so that they’ll be better prepared for the workforce once they graduate.
“It’s going to be the people that understand how to use A.I. and automation that’s going to revolutionize and create remarkable value, and cure cancer and all the other things,” Buckner said. “So how can we help our students learn how to harness and to be the best version of themselves they can be through the technology and help multiply its effectiveness for good?”
