AI for Teachers: Defeating Burnout and Boosting Productivity – EdTech Magazine: Focus on K-12

How AI Vendors Are Addressing Data Privacy in Education

The current generation of education automation and AI-supported products offer strong support for overwhelmed teachers, but questions linger around data privacy.

“Privacy is a big concern, properly securing and maintaining the data privacy of students,” says Lewsadder. “Parents are worried about teachers taking student writing or work and having it end up in a public large language model. We need to know where it’s going or keep it in the district.”

Newer offerings such as SchoolJoy and Merlyn Mind, which recently released large language model, address privacy by using a “private” LLM built exclusively for education.

“If you use an open-source tool like ChatGPT, you may get hallucinations, references to false information,” says David Miyashiro, superintendent for Cajon Valley Union School District in California. “But with products like SchoolJoy, you know all the data is real. it is coming only from internal sources exclusively within the district. That helps a great deal and keeps student and staff data private and secure.”

LEARN MORE: Get the pros and cons of generative artificial intelligence.

Planning for AI in Education

While AI has proved useful, HMH’s report notes that only 10 percent of 1,000 classroom teachers surveyed nationwide used generative AI in their classrooms last year. 

Miyashiro believes he knows why that percentage is so low.

“Our education system can sometimes be too risk averse and change averse,” he says. “That may make it hard to make the transition to using AI. For teachers, we need to give them access to these tools and help them keep up with other professions using AI. Teachers will start to use their creativity to develop tools we haven’t even thought of yet.”

“District support for using AI would be providing professional development and then providing a properly protected AI environment to use,” Alexander adds.

As for teachers, she advises, “When thinking about applying tech or AI in the classroom, they need to ask, ‘What problem am I trying to solve?’ It needs to start with this question.”