New York City has also banned AI for younger students as concerns over classroom use grow
Another school district has banned AI from being used in the classroom by students across all grades. While this isn’t the first ban of its kind that we’ve seen, what’s interesting is that it was introduced just weeks after the district started piloting Google Gemini for older students. Frederick County became the latest school district to ban AI use in the classroom this week, voting 6-1 to restrict the technology from pre-K through 12th grade. Initially, the board considered only banning AI for younger students, but eventually extended the ban through high school.
This is frankly a lazy assessment. AI itself is no more anathema than any other convenience (or plagiarism) tool, it is purely how dissociatively one engages with it that matters.
I’ve used AI as a personal tutor in my chemistry degree and it is an absolute boon for those who cannot afford private tutoring. But one has to actually engage with the content of course, instead of having it do your assignments for you.
Your use case is a good example, and as a teaching aid it can definitely be useful. I’d I were a teacher I’d be using it to code up small demos and example visuals all the time.
But I mean if you’re using it to do a task like writing, programming, learning a language, doing researching for you, entering Excel formula, etc. you aren’t hitting the friction that builds neural pathways.
It’s just like how writing by hand is better than typing for memory. That doesn’t mean you should only write an essay by hand, a word processor lets you reorganize and edit, move paragraphs, restructure your points abd connect your thoughts. That process allows you to engage deeper, which is a positive. But if you ask an AI to do that editing and rearranging then you won’t learn as much, just like you won’t remember typed notes as well as hand printed ones.
Using AI for school work is more what I mean, vs leveraging it to allow new forms of engagement.
We do have strong evidence that so much digitization was bad for teaching, and we have good evidence now that AI can erode or block important skills. It should be used selectively, and in that, my anathema comment was too strong.