Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be impacting instruction in Wilton much sooner than expected.
On Thursday, Dec. 5, Bill Antonitis, Wilton Public Schools‘ new digital learning director, told the Board of Education about two new AI applications being piloted in the district. These applications are capable of creating chatbots that could handle some of the instruction.
“We did have an AI Task Force meeting in October in which we decided we want to initiate a Magic School and a SchoolAI pilot,” he said. “These are two different AI apps that are made for education.”
“They offer all the privacy and protections we require and, unlike kind of an open-ended model … They’re made for student-facing applications,” Antonitis said.
“For example,” he continued, “if you wanted to make some kind of chatbot to help a student plan out an essay, you can devise that and you can set it up.”
While he said the chatbot would not write the essay for the student, it would serve as a teacher, responding to their questions and guiding them in their work.
“It would just coach them, ask them questions about things on the rubric and it could help out with proofreading and things like that,” he said.
Other “open-ended type of platforms,” he said, “can’t necessarily create something like that for a student,” but both Magic School and SchoolAI can.
Barring any additional hiccups with the programs, some of which have delayed the start, Antonitis said the pilots will begin within the next two weeks.
“Teachers will have access to paid pilot versions of both of those, because when you don’t get the full version, it definitely doesn’t work as well as I have described,” he said. “There’s more hiccups and you have to fight with the AI a little bit more to get it to do what you want it to do.”
“So we’re gonna test that out and ultimately decide which we prefer and make a commitment to probably one of those,” he said.
“25 Teaching Assistants in the Room”
Board member Pam Ely asked a key question about teacher response to the new technology, though no teachers were in attendance at the meeting to address it.
“Are the teachers alright with this?” she said. “I mean, this is a whole other thing for them.”
Antonitis noted different reactions.
“Some people rolled up both sleeves and got really excited about it and got to work,” he said. “Other people have a little more trepidation about it.”
“I totally understand, because as a society we don’t know how we feel about this yet, either,” he said.
Antonitis, however, who joined WPS in July after eight years in the Simsbury district as an English department supervisor, commended the “openness and flexibility” in Wilton — previously championed by his predecessor Fran Kompar — which he said he intends to build upon.
“I think a lot of places are kind of sticking their head in the sand or hoping that it’ll pass by or they’re trying to regulate it out of existence,” he said.
Antonitis said professional development support is being created to help teachers learn the applications, including a shared database of “best practices” that will be accessible to the staff.
“Obviously we’re trying to put together some P.D. for teachers as we launch into this pilot … We’ll be rolling those things out in the next weeks and months,” he said.
“Maybe not everybody’s gonna want to participate, but I know there’s at least 175 people that have the free version of Magic School, for example, so hopefully most of them will want to try it and we can go from there,” he said.
Board member Pat Pearson shared a positive response.
“It feels like it could be a great asset to have a more personalized teaching experience,” he said, citing the example of a chatbot assistant guiding an essay.
‘It’s like you have 25 teaching assistants in the room with you,” Antonitis said of the AI program.
“It’s an amazing tool because I might be working with (one student) and the rest of you guys don’t have to sit here and wait for me to finish with them, and then you’re just goofing around or getting distracted … You can just stay on task and keep working, and then I can get to each of you and help you with your work too,” he said.
“There’s so many other things you can do in terms of having conversations or brain-storming sessions,” he said. “I’ve seen teachers use it for book clubs as like an extra book club member or an expert off to the side.”
Antonitis said the AI can also be used for performance assessments, helping teachers create them and also grouping students according to the material they’ve completed through the application.
Pioneering the Technology
The AI Task Force will be meeting again in January.
Superintendent Kevin Smith said later this spring the district will have a long-range planning session focused on AI, which he described as a step toward “personalized education.”
“This next session we’re inviting a group that represents higher ed, business, industry, experts across fields, to come and to talk to us about the impact of AI in their respective professions,” he said.
“We want to know what are you seeing, what are you experiencing, what are the disruptions to the extent they exist, and what do you need from us in terms of preparation as we continue to think about our students’ curriculum and what they need to have as they walk out the door,” he said.
Board member Heather Priest expressed worry about AI presenting a one-source world of data to students based on algorithms and random searches.
“As more and more information and data gets in there, that potential for [a] garbage-in, garbage-out kind of concept, to me is concerning … if everything they’re looking at is coming essentially from one source,” she said.
Antonitis and Smith said it meant students would need to receive additional training to foster critical thinking.
“We need to double down on some of those digital synthesis skills,” Smith said.
Antonitis spoke about looking at the implementation of these new applications as an opportunity to stay ahead of the AI curve, comparing it to issues with too much screen time and cellphones.
“As educators, we dropped the ball on cellphones,” he said. “We all put our heads in the sand collectively about that and now we’re not really sure what to do about it,” acknowledging that WPS has chosen one way with the recent ban.
“As a society nobody quite knows what to do about screen time because we never took the time to learn about it when it was first being announced,” he said.
“My vision is that, at least here and in surrounding communities, where we can all kind of work together, we won’t do that with AI,” Antonitis said. “We can give kids a foundation where they can at least use it effectively and not fall into some of those pitfalls.”