The Colorado Education Initiative (CEI) is working to bring educators and the tech industry together to create guidance for how schools can address the growing popularity of artificial intelligence.
The group partnered with the the national non-profit AI education Project (aiEDU) to launch a steering committee that will design, test and share best practices and recommendations for educators to use AI in their classrooms.
The steering committee will release advice to Colorado schools in six months.
Earlier this year, a lot of the conversation surrounding AI was about how the technology could be used to cheat, but this group's focus is on the benefits of AI.
"A few of the districts— probably two dozen— rushed to put some sort of policy on the books, and it generally was an anti-cheating policy. We heard stories from teachers who said they were telling students, 'I'm just supposed to tell you not to use this,'" the CEO of the Colorado Education Initiative, Rebecca Holmes, said.
Instead, CEI and aiEDU want to expand the conversation around the potential and impacts of AI in schools, support collaborative and shared learning, test and scale new approaches to using AI to shape the future of learning, CEI said in a news release.
The new steering committee will focus on these three areas:
- Preparing Colorado students for a workforce that will be impacted by AI.
- Making sure access to AI is equitable across the state.
- Re-imagining how teachers use AI because a lot of them are already using it to save time.
"Teachers have found cases where there have been hours of planning simplified so they can be freed up to do more student-facing work," Holmes said.
"We known we have an enormous teacher shortage in the state. And if this can be technology that helps make teachers' lives easier, we should be leaning into that as quickly and as smartly as we can," Holmes told Denver7's Nicole Brady.
The steering committee will be comprised of teachers, librarians, principals, superintendents, school board members, special education and technical education instructors, in addition to parent groups and AI experts.
