The district is introducing multiple new artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives for students this year, MUSD Director of Technology Chin Song said.
The first district-wide initiative is Khanmigo, an AI teaching assistant built by Khan Academy, Song said. Khanmigo offers students a variety of features such as a writing coach so students can improve their writing by submitting their own writing samples, he added.
“If AI is adopted well, they’ll actually save both the teacher and the student a lot of time,” Song said. “And so rather than getting a not-so-great first or second draft, they might get a better third draft, and then teachers could put in more poignant comments, and then nudge systems towards better writing.”
Technology amplifies both academic honesty and dishonesty, Song said.
“The one reason why we love Khanmigo is because of the fact that it’s a walled garden of sorts, and if you ask a question, it doesn’t give you all the answers,” Song said. “It’ll be very Socratic, and it’ll say ‘Hey, what did you mean?’ ‘What do you think is the next step?’”
This may be annoying for some students because it doesn’t provide all of the answers as ChatGPT does, but it reassures educators that students are learning rather than copying down answers for homework, Song said.
Students should face some adversity while learning, but AI removes that struggle, English teacher Sanjana Barr said.
“ The AI tools won’t give you the answer from Khanmigo, but kids are not stupid,” Barr said. “They know if they just keep saying ‘I don’t get it’ over and over, it’ll eventually give them the answer.”
We have had AI for long enough that we begin to see students unwilling to use their brains, Barr said.
“ In general day to day for students, I think an over-reliance on AI to solve their problems leads to a lack of ambition because they never want to try something that’s too hard because they want to be able to just get an answer,” Barr said. “If it’s too hard, they give up. So they don’t have resilience,” Barr said.
If children enter the world incapable of self-expression, trapped in their own minds due to AI, that’s a very bad thing, Barr said.
“I think that we process ourselves and our identity and our emotions through language,” Barr said. “Part of the way we give children language is by having them read things that are unfamiliar to them, that explore worlds that maybe they’re not familiar with.”
With the mastery learning provided by Khanmigo, students actually perform two standard deviations, or 47% better, than students with one-on-one tutoring, showing how beneficial AI can be, Song said.
“You can chat with Martin Luther King Jr., so then your writing is not so much based out of, what did you find out in a library and a static text, but you can have an honest conversation with a digital version of Dr. King, and then your teachers may say, ‘What did you learn from your conversation?” Song said. “Because then the teacher can see what type of questions that you might have asked, and then also push you towards your zone of proximal development, which is at the edge of your questioning ability, which should provide you better answers.”
Being able to listen to historical figures like that would be beneficial for school work, senior Vyshnavi Bhavanam said.
“I’m thinking if it’s for a report or a presentation you have about that person, then feeling like you’re hearing from that person would be valuable,” Bhavanam said.
“ The concept of taking a dead black man and, for profit, inserting words into his mouth goes against literally everything we are taught about historiography,” Barr said.
Khanmigo has AI versions of historical people other than Martin Luther King Jr., and some of them have no personal writing ever recorded from them, Barr said.
“When we pretend that these AI characters are really that person, we are allowing students to conflate primary and secondary and tertiary sources, and they (students) no longer have a way to corroborate that in any meaningful way,” Barr said. “Especially at younger grade levels, that’s going to be a problem.”
Another tool that the school district would like to implement is NotebookLM from Google which is already available for students and teachers to use, Song said.
“For example, put (this interview) into Notebook LM and then create a podcast,” Song said. “So you can say, ‘Make a podcast,’ and it’ll actually do the podcast.”
AI will have the same spot in history as revolutions such as the internet, Song said. “For example, when Google, Yahoo, Excite.com were all coming on board, the internet was supposed to improve and change people’s conditions of learning, as well as their way that they live, and the way that they learn and as well as work,” he said. “Similarly, AI will just be embedded in our everyday workflow.”
There are concerns about layoffs and too much automation making jobs disappear entirely, but it would result in more efficient work rather than suffering from less labor, Song said.
“It’s a logistics and a political problem, and so hopefully we can now use this AI, ” Song said. “All these AI tools are coming out the same way that we use farming, which is to multiply our human efforts to go towards something that may improve the human condition and let us explore things outside of this planet.”