The need for ai literacy in education
The rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (ai) space requires school and district leaders to understand how emerging technology applications, including those using generative ai (Gen ai), are being integrated into schools and districts across the United States. There is a lot of uncertainty about what ai is, how it works, and its implications for students, families, educators, and the broader school community. School and district leaders have shared the challenges they face regarding using ai for teaching and learning. They are also concerned about exacerbating existing inequalities in access to digital technologies and tools, presenting further structural barriers for students and communities. In our work with educators, students, and families, we have learned how critical it is for educators to understand ai literacy to take advantage of these technologies and support all students, particularly those experiencing marginalization.
Just as ai is becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives, it is ubiquitous throughout the school day and in all subjects. ai literacy enables educators to understand how ai works, how to evaluate it, and how to best adapt it to their disciplines and students. Additionally, demystifying ai can help people engage productively and responsibly with ai technologies in society, their personal lives, and their careers. In Digital promiseWe firmly believe that ai literacy is the best place to start and goes hand in hand with our Digital Equity work.
What is ai literacy?
ai Literacy apply 21st century skills, including communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. It is based on years of work in Digital and media literacy and Computational thinkingincluding elements of computer science, ethics, and additional areas beyond science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
The skills and practices needed to interact with ai are relevant to all disciplines. More importantly, ai has the ability to broaden the face of learning within a particular discipline, introducing teaching strategies and novel applications for concepts. For example, students could train a machine learning system to recognize patterns in math class or test a text-to-speech system to see if it can differentiate between homonyms in English language arts.
In addition to disciplinary concepts, it is important to address areas such as the use and timing of ai, the historical context of ai development, addressing bias, safeguarding the privacy of data shared with ai systems/tools, and ensuring the equitable access to ai tools. , and considering environmental and human labor considerations.
“There seems to be a collective acceptance that ai has great potential to disrupt the outdated narrative of education. However, time and again it has been highlighted that teachers need to have professional learning about ai. “We need support across the education landscape to increase the capacity of educators around ai.” — EngageAI Institute educator and forum participant
Develop ai literacy with digital equity
Digital Promise is developing processes, practices, and resources for school districts to support educators in developing ai literacy and leveraging ai for powerful learning in K-12 learning environments. These supports include:
- Learning paths Explicitly connect classroom learning with cross-curricular initiatives, such as ai. These pathways articulate system-wide, K-12, learning opportunities that are consistent across classrooms, cumulative from year to year, and competency-based.
- Professional learning experiences provide contextualized support for educators to learn artificial intelligence knowledge and apply emerging technologies in their classrooms. We are working with several districts to promote ai literacy in line with their ongoing initiatives.
- Resources such as definitional frameworks and contextualized examples are essential to support ai literacy efforts. We are developing these resources for educational leaders to define and operationalize ai for educators.
artificial intelligence, like all educational technology, has the capacity to reproduce existing inequities in education. We have long-standing commitments to address equity and intentionally design and implement these supports for educators in alignment with our Digital Equity initiative. We address three pillars (availability, affordability, and adoption) in order to provide historically and systemically excluded students and families with the knowledge and skills necessary to help their communities remain connected, informed, and able to fully participate in society.
We see the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence space as an opportunity to design more inclusive learning environments. We have ongoing partnerships between scientists, designers, and learning professionals to co-design digestible, accessible, and relevant content for digital equity professionals.
Read the new policy brief from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational technology, tech.ed.gov/ai/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>artificial intelligence and the future of teaching and learning: ideas and recommendations and take a look at Resources to promote digital equity for all students..
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