LM August 2024

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AI in Education: A Superintendent’s Guide

Dr. Mike Lubelfeld, superintendent of North Shore SD #112, joined the IASA Podcast to discuss how generative AI has enhanced his communication skills and how it can be a tool for teachers to differentiate instruction. The following is a condensed and edited version of the conversation. Click here to listen to the full interview.

With Jason Nevel, IASA Director of Communications

JN: Can you start out by saying a little bit about yourself and your school district? ML: I am starting my 15th consecutive year as a superintendent. I’ve been in education for more than 32 years as a teacher, middle school administrator, assistant superintendent and a superintendent. I’ve got a wife and two kids and that’s more important than anything else. I am proud to lead North Shore School District 112 in Highland Park and Highwood. We have 4,000 students, pre–K through eighth grade. Our school district is kind of interesting because people hear Highland Park or the North Shore and think of rich, wealthy, affluent suburbs. And that’s partially true. But our demographics include 22 percent of our children who qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. That’s one in five kiddos.

JN: The topic of this interview is generative AI. Let’s begin by defining what generative AI means? ML: I have been doing a great deal of research. So, briefly, artificial intelligence has been around for decades. It has evolved into machine learning and deep learning and examples such as GPS, Siri or Alexa .

Generative AI is something new and it generates new text, it generates new audio, it could generate new images, new video or computer code based on content it’s been pre-trained on. And this is where it gets a little interesting, and a little fun, to talk about because of tools like ChatGPT. These are tools that use large language models to predict what you or I might say, read, write or want to respond with. It’s a whole new world.

28 LM August 2024