LM August 2024

JN: What is your sales pitch to a superintendent about how AI can benefit them in their careers and benefit their school district? ML: My own personal generative AI journey began in October 2023. I was so taken at a conference where a guy from Microsoft who works on the Open AI desk was inspiring a group of superintendents to improve our ability to communicate efficiently by using generative AI to change the tone of voice of an email. I know that’s low level. But, then we kept going deeper and it was like, well, you also can help personalize your experiences. Suddenly, we’re talking about personalizing for adults or making our work life easier or more efficient or summarizing large text. But, then it became, wait a minute, what about potential possibilities for students? The sales pitch is, we have been talking about differentiated instruction for decades. We’ve been talking about meeting the individual needs of each child, every day, for decades. It’s been elusive, right? So, my sales pitch is AI may be the calculator for the humanities. I didn’t come up with that phrase. I’m going to credit Amanda Bickerstaff for that, but I think it’s the calculator for the humanities. That sold me on it. JN: There’s an AI platform you’re particularly fond of that gets at what you’re talking about. Can you tell people about Magic School ? ML: Nothing is the silver bullet, so to speak, in our district. We looked at everything. Magic School AI is willing to sign the data privacy agreements, and it offers a huge suite of developing tools for teachers. If students are to use it, it’s only with teacher deliberate control and monitoring. Magic School AI is what you call a guardrail LLM, or a guarded language model or a closed language model. The reason we’re piloting with it is because it allows teachers low-level tasks, such as rewriting an email, which, by the way, could be really important, to high level tasks like developing an advanced learning plan for a child. Magic School AI , and all of these incredible AI tools, will never, never, never, never replace humans ever. What they’re doing is getting us about 50- to- 70-percent complete with an idea or a whiteboard. What Magic School can do is save teachers hours on clerical tasks. Ultimately, it can potentially create equitable educational access for each child, every day,

JN: Let’s say I’m a superintendent interested in AI, but I’m not quite ready for something quite as comprehensive as Magic School . I’m just looking for help writing some communications messages. Can you talk about what AI platforms a superintendent could use? ML: I use Chat GPT from Open AI daily. And, for full disclosure, I pay $20 a month out of my own pocket by my personal choice. No one needs to do that. Open AI’s ChatGPT is vastly trained and has been extremely impactful in looking at an email that I’ve written. I ask it, how is the tone? Is the tone empathetic enough? Are my points clear? Is there a way I can clarify this? Can you help me be more concise? The tool comes back with cogent, thoughtful suggestions that I can apply, and I do apply in my daily work. Claude AI has been reported to being a better writing model. I don’t know personally. I’ve been starting to test it, but I’m not sure. Gemini from Google is a tool with some neat features. You know when you do a Gmail and you’ve got like 30 conversations— you reply to me, I reply to you. We’ve got all this going, and it becomes real overwhelming to figure out what was the point. Gemini has a summarized email feature where it actually gives you an easy to read and a digestible format to understand what the conversation was about. JN: When this school year started, how many teachers were using Magic School AI? ML: We started the pilot in May. We had four professional development webinars with a teacher from California this summer. We have about 40 of our teachers engaged in the webinar. I’m going to say that we’re going to have about 10 percent of District 112 teachers and support staff deliberately and directly using Magic School AI. As the year moves forward, with our instructional coaches and professional development offerings, I’m going to predict that number will double or triple to 20 or 30 percent of teachers in the school district. Here’s in a personalized environment and allows the teacher tools to differentiate. the deal. They’re not required to use it. It is not a mandate. It is simply another tool in their toolkit

29 LM August 2024 continued...