At the recent Lexington-Richland School District Five school board meeting, members discussed the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in schools, reporting another district's opinion that it's been helpful for teachers' busy schedules.

Superintendent Akil E. Ross informed board members that if Lexington-Richland schools were to get the green light to implement AI, they would pursue Magic School. Magic School aims to brainstorm lesson plans, generate IEPs, develop assessments, assist in grading and more.

Chief of Academics Tina McCaskill led a team to learn more on how school districts are implementing AI in their schools.

District officials said they met with Horry County.

An article by WBTW journalist Adam Benson says that Florence 1 Schools plans to use Khan Academy's Khanmigo, Magic School and Gemini.

According to McCaskill, AI can help lighten teachers' workloads. For instance, a teacher in the district put a prompt into an AI program and it was able to give a score to the student, provide areas of strength, areas of growth and feedback on writing mechanics. AI can additionally be used to help multilingual students as it provides a text translator and takes less than 30 seconds to communicate with the students.

“AI allows me to be more productive and more creative. AI doesn’t create lessons for me but it does give me feedback on my ideas. Sometimes AI can give me new ideas that I can take and modify for it to make sense for my students," an English teacher from Dutch Fork High was quoted saying during the district's presentation. “In addition, it can help me make instructional materials that would otherwise would take me a long time to do...AI can't replace teachers but it can make them feel  empowered by having more time to be creative."

District officials did not provide the name of the Dutch Fork teacher who said this.

Educators don’t put students' personal information onto the platform but do provide details on what grade they are in and what aspect of the topic they are struggling with.

“Every teacher that I have talked to about this program has given glowing feedback,” board member Kevin Scully said. “It is so exciting and they are really pulling for us to get this in schools.”

However, Elizabeth Barnhardt had a different opinion and expressed concern on the usage of AI. Barnhardt said though she isn’t scared of AI, she believes this can be a slippery slope. She raised the question that if teachers can utilize platforms that involve AI, what will be done to ensure students aren’t using it to write essays and get homework done?

McCaskill said that Magic School AI is geared for education and students only have access to tools teachers assign to them. This platform is designed to help students brainstorm; it does not write or give answers for assignments.

McCaskill noted that AI has gained popularity and many employers expect employees to use it with integrity. Ross said that they would additionally want to give this information to parents so they can help students with assignments.

“Before we implement it completely, we just need to think ahead a little bit,” Barnhardt said.

According to the College of Education at the University of Illinois, there are both advantages and disadvantages to implementing AI in education. Some advantages include personalized learning that can tailor student needs and learning styles, provide immediate feedback, create content, make abstract concepts more understandable and handle administrative tasks.

Disadvantages include reduced human interaction, potential bias, inaccurate information and privacy and security concerns. AI may produce inaccurate or outdated information therefore individuals should double-check all AI-involved content.