Part two in a two-part series. Read part one here.
If you're a student in Jen Roberts' 12th-grade English class at Point Loma High School, you know what to do when class starts. You pull out a book and start reading.
“I believe very strongly in the power of reading,” Roberts said. “So my class period always starts with ten minutes of silent reading.”
In this unit, students are learning about food politics. They’re reading books like “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.
After they close their books, they open up their laptops and do more reading — this time with a tool called Brisk Boost.
Students scroll through the text on the left side of the screen. On the right, a chatbot asks questions based on the learning objectives Roberts has set.
It keeps students engaged, said Taylor Ashton, one of Roberts’ students.
“I could go through the text multiple times and just, like, read it and be done with it,” Ashton said. “This forces me to process it by keeping me interacting with it.”
But not everyone is on board with this approach.
A group of parents is asking the San Diego Unified School District to limit screen time in its classrooms. Nearly 1,200 people have signed the group’s petition. Their proposed board resolution would, in part, prohibit students from using generative AI.
Roberts said tools like Brisk Boost aren’t doing the work for students. Instead, they provide feedback more quickly and more frequently than she could on her own.
“I could come around and have an individual conversation with every one of my 36 kids to see if they all understand the article. I could give them a quiz that would be, like, five static questions and give them the results two days later,” she said. “But it's so much better when they can, in real time, find out what they do and don't understand.”
Another AI program she touts is MagicSchool. Its idea-generator tool can give students prompts for narrative writing assignments, Roberts said.
“Rather than letting a student sit there staring at a blank screen or a blank piece of paper for 45 minutes, I'll give them a tool in a MagicSchool student room,” she said.
Alfonso Jacinto, another senior in Roberts’ class, said he's used AI tools to create study guides for classes like economics and statistics. It can be tempting to use it for more than that, like answering homework questions, he said.
“It's very easy to fall into temptation,” he said. “It’s very hard to get out of it.”
The temptation to cheat is just one concern about AI in schools. Another is privacy.
Last year, researchers at Stanford University found that leading AI companies use conversations people have with their chatbots to train their large language models. Some of them collect data from teens.
Roberts said student safety and privacy are at the top of mind when she’s picking digital tools to use in class. MagicSchool, for example, says it doesn’t sell data to third parties or use it for targeted advertising.
MagicSchool founder and CEO Adeel Khan is a former teacher and principal. He shares a lot of the concerns that parents have about AI, such as kids forming an emotional attachment to a chatbot.
"Consumer AI tools are not safe for kids. Point blank,” he said. “If your kid's using an un-guardrailed version of ChatGPT or Gemini at home, without supervision, and not under the guidance of you as an adult, that is a scary premise.”
Roberts also understands concern about screen use. But she thinks phones and social media are bigger problems than school laptops.
“With screen time, it's more about how you're using the screen, not just the fact that the screen is on,” she said.
