School board hears report on AI pilot program
The Lee County School Board learned about the roll-out of an artificial intelligence (AI) pilot program during its workshop on April 14.
The roll-out stems around building confidence and comfort before the program is pushed out into the schools at the School District of Lee County.
Chief Academic Officer Dr. Nathan Shaker said their AI strategy is grounded in U.S. Department of Labor’s All Literacy Framework.
“First, we build confidence and comfort before we move into the area of strict governance or oversight,” he said.
Shaker said it starts with bringing staff up to speed through various challenges for teachers. The first challenge took place from January through spring break with completion from 566 teachers. The second run included 120 teachers, and the advanced program attracted 140 teachers.
One hundred school administrators took part in a school leader challenge.
A pilot program will be launched with a structured 10-week onboarding roll-out at eight to 10 high schools tentatively planned for August to mid-October and possibly middle school through late December.
“Our AI governance team has been hard at work every week talking about the best approach to slowly roll out AI tools to students,” he said.
The team met last week and opted to hold on any elementary implementation.
Shaker said as they will move to establish the pilot locations. They will look at such areas as English classes and some elective courses for AI tools.
He said students currently cannot access the tools as they are blocked.
The district views AI as the “easy button, but wrapped in caution tape,” Shaker said.
“We want our educators to truly view AI as a high-level administrative partner,” he said. “It provides a blank page solution. AI handles the initial organization and data crunching leaving the final authority on instructional quality exactly where it belongs — with the teacher.”
For leadership, AI reduces cognitive load by synthesizing data suggesting immediate differentiation scaffolding for high complexity tasks and provides clarity for observation, Shaker said.
“For teachers we have tools like our Benchmark Unpacker Gem which helps quickly identify how students’ answers may or may not meet the rigor of a state standard — how we can leverage AI in a positive way,” he said.
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