Educators embrace AI in classrooms: Charleston schools

What happened

Artificial intelligence chatbots have become the bane of teachers everywhere, but to prepare for the new school year, a group of educators in Charleston, South Carolina, packed into a high school auditorium and talked about inviting AI into the classroom. "The result drew gasps of disbelief and laughter. Projected on a large screen was a map riddled with bizarre errors.

Teachers and students said they were navigating the technology on their own and wanted clear rules and instruction. As the school year begins in Charleston, Phase 2 kicks in: training. Teachers and middle and high schoolers will get a mix of online and in-person instruction on how AI tools work and how to use them effectively.

The student course walks through familiar scenarios - like asking a chatbot to help with a research paper - to show that generative AI might deliver wildly inaccurate information, including made-up studies, with unflinching authority. High school teacher Ray Knauer attended the summer training and left with "teachable moments" for his AP Research class.

Why it matters

" Dozens of other countries' names were misspelled or written in pure gibberish. After initially trying to ban AI use, a growing number of US public schools are trying a new strategy: encouraging classroom experimentation, partly so students can see its shortcomings, including generative AI's notorious tendency to "hallucinate," or fabricate information.

AI literacy has become a buzzword of this back-to-school season as educators try to strike a balance between equipping students with the skills they need for an AI-driven future while preventing them from outsourcing their thinking to chatbots. There is no single definition of what AI literacy means, or how it should be taught.

Tech giants like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic offer schools training sessions in how to use their AI tools. But for educators, there is a growing consensus that AI literacy is about more than learning how to use generative AI and write good prompts. "Some districts build their own approaches on AI literacyThirty-seven states have now published official AI guidance that schools can use as a blueprint.

South Carolina is not one of them. So the state's second-largest school district set out to do it on its own, said Lucas Clamp, deputy superintendent of the 50,000-student Charleston County School District. Phase 1 was laying the foundation. The district organized student focus groups and learned that student AI use was ubiquitous but unguided.

What to watch

"We're all trying to figure this out right now: What's the right balance so we don't scare students away from AI but don't encourage them to run to it," Knauer said. "We have to teach students: You can't just get an answer and move on. Over the past year, Winters led AI training for over 7,000 teachers, almost a third of Utah's public school instructors.

"There is a clear method from the top in Utah," said Chris Agnew, director of the Generative AI for Education Hub at Stanford University.