Reflections from a week of Generative AI in schools - my quick learnings from a busy week

As a Technology Strategist in Education at Microsoft one of my roles is to ensure that the schools that I serve have visibility of the latest tools to support them.?? This week I was lucky enough to work with Catholic Schools Parramatta at their GenAI event as well as Keynote at the CSNSW AI Symposium.? In between these our education team also ran several sessions with School administrators, teachers and head offices to skill them up. ??

My learnings:

• For school system leaders debate is essential, but don’t let the policy and worry slow or you down.? ?‘Just get in, use it and play’ was what one panelist said.
• Assessment – Is going to change and it’s a good time to start debating what assessment would look like in your school.? The fact we are focusing on this in our recent AI podcast series seems good timing.
• Digital Divide – There is still massive gap in the knowledge of most of the population when using tools.? Many have not got copilot or other LLMs on their phones yet and do not know how to prompt. ??These are some courses for all educators and school leaders to get started : AI for education | Microsoft Learn? also these are my resources and ppt from the day including prompting guides: https://aka.ms/csnsw

• Shadow IT – ?Teachers are starting to go rogue and use third party LLMs without thinking about the consequences – There seem to be a million browser addons and tools that are now available.?
• It’s not just an Education thing. Gen AI is disrupting more industries in the public sector.? From healthcare to policing and from government to private enterprise

• We are looking at Gen AI but there is a bigger picture that educators may not realise.

Finally?during healthy debates, some believe that Big Tech are over hyping the technology. However, it was clear that teachers are sharing time and time again some amazing uses of AI for assessment and engagement.

What a week!