The greater conversation revolving around artificial intelligence takes place inside the classroom, centered on students. At Llano ISD in Texas, however, there was an effort to use AI as a way to help teachers take some of the load off of their plates so they would have more time to focus on teaching itself.
Maurie Beasley, Network Administrator at Llano ISD, talks about how AI has been used to assist teachers in their daily tasks to help save time and improve student/teacher relationships. Beasley was recently honored by Tech & Learning during a recent Regional Leadership Summit with an Innovative Leader Award for Innovative System Administrator.
How the AI Integration Began
One of the biggest booms in recent tech memory has been the incorporation of AI into almost everything we use nowadays. Once AI made its way into the mainstream, the possibilities for its use were endless.
“Our technology director has been here for 20 years, and he actually has a background in computer engineering. Full disclosure, he’s my husband. He keeps up with all the latest [tech developments],” says Beasley. “Maybe a little over two years ago, when OpenAI first released AI to the world, he was on it immediately. He was in the pilot program. He would play with it and ask it questions and really dig into the technical aspects of what it was capable of. He knew it would be a game changer.”
How did he begin using AI for the district?
“He started developing internal onboarding, similar to a chatbot, using AI,” says Beasley. “He had already started doing a chatbot before AI became a thing, and so we started really looking into taking it in.”
The number of daily administrative tasks a teacher has, such as putting in a work order, not only affects their interaction with their students but can take time away from what’s truly important. And from this obstacle and a deep curiosity in AI, Agnes was born.
Just Ask Agnes
Agnes is a chatbot that, through the addition of AI, has become a reliable way for teachers to offload some of the time-consuming administrative work within a day, giving them more time to focus on other tasks AI cannot perform.
“We were trying to get teachers to [ask Agnes] what their schedules were, whether they had class duty, what the phone number is for the payroll person,” Beasley says. “Especially for our new teachers, because our turnover rate is so high in education now that we really thought this would be great for new staff. That’s where it started.”
While helping teachers had its own benefits, moving the Agnes chatbot to the administrative level helped solve a new gamut of problems. Preparing documents that either took a large amount of time to complete or had to be outsourced (which added to the budget) was exactly why Agnes was created. And as more administrators have understood its purpose, more schools have been ready and willing to adopt it into their environment.
Beasley says that integrating AI into the district's operations has saved several hours of troubleshooting while also helping to make up for limited resources in a smaller district. As with any AI tool, there are concerns about safety and security, but Beasley points out that existing regulations covered AI in its usage and regulation.
How AI Can Help Your School at Higher Levels
Beasley says that the best way to introduce AI into a school, whether at the classroom level or the administrative level, is by prioritizing educator integration. Making sure that teachers and administrators know how to use AI tools can go a long way toward introducing them in the classroom while also helping to deal with tasks that take too much time away from educators on a daily basis. For example, there are AI tools that can help teachers create lesson plans, such as Diffit and EduaideAI, or ones that can assist with multiple tasks, such as MagicSchool.
Another way to help integrate AI into a school or district can be through a dedicated curriculum. Beasley notes that starting AI education is important due to the continued popularity of the medium and its swift adoption in the educational space. To assuage fears related to AI use, Beasley suggests following existing district technology use guidelines and ensuring that AI is used within closed systems to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.
