Tiny handwritten notes, strategically placed smartphones, or the classic-but-high-risk peeking over a classmate’s shoulder — for as long as teachers have tested students, students have found ways to cheat. Artificial intelligence is, in some ways, yet another new temptation. But it has also prompted a much bigger discussion — one that school-teacher-turned-technologist Jill Kowalchuk has been having with Alberta teachers for a very long time. “I was the teacher that did away with all the textbooks in my social studies class in favour of the internet, in favour of Chromebooks,” says the current manager of AI literacy at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii).
But being an early adopter of in-class technology doesn’t mean Kowalchuk is a technophile teaching students to bow down to our AI overlords — quite the opposite. Kowalchuk got her master’s in education at the University of Toronto, where she focused on students’ digital literacy. And, as a PhD student at the University of Alberta, she studies the role of generative AI (like ChatGPT) in teaching and learning.
To tackle the issue of AI in schools and benefit as many students as possible, Kowalchuk worked with the school board to recruit 80 high school teachers to Amii’s pilot program. There, she asked the teachers about their AI-related concerns, if they were using AI, and, among other things, what resources would help them in teaching with and about AI. The results yielded four learning kits that are now available on Amii’s website. They cover generative AI (like ChatGPT), AI’s impact on industries and future career pathways, technical elements, and the ethics of AI in the economies, democracies and society at large.
Kowalchuk then went through the process again, this time with 150 teachers from Kindergarten through Grade 9, creating more learning kits to enhance the curriculum and, as she’s been known to do, change the conversation.
Linda Huedepohl was one of the teachers who used Amii’s pilot kits, from October to December 2024. The Grade 6 teacher at David Thomas King School has seen many technological changes over her 28-year teaching career, but she calls AI “a giant step.” When she first heard of ChatGPT, she knew two things for certain: Her students knew about it already, and so she had to learn about it quickly.
“As a teacher, I want to understand it enough to be able to answer questions and talk about safety,” she says. “Because when we’re working with online sources, we’re thinking about students being digital learners, having digital citizenship, and leaving digital footprints.”
Teachers’ earliest discussions were about whether using large language models was cheating. But Huedepohl was pleased when Amii’s kits went beyond that simple concern. The kits have glossaries, slide presentations, support materials and lesson plans. They ask students to identify AI in their Spotify playlists and TikTok feeds, in part to show that AI has been in their lives long before ChatGPT arrived. “Right away I thought, ‘Wow, this could really help kids,’” says Huedepohl. “The kits break down what AI is and gently present it in ways that Grade 6 or even Grade 2 students can wrap their minds around.”
As of spring 2025, more than 1,000 teachers have accessed Amii’s resources, which Kowalchuk estimates have reached at least 40,000 students so far. And they’re not all from Alberta. Kowalchuk now gives national and international talks on her team’s work, and regularly speaks to teachers and school boards, hosts webinars and goes on podcasts to get the message out.
None of this ignores the fact that the introduction of AI to the classroom comes with a lot of moral and ethical baggage. “The biggest response to the pilot programs came from social studies and English teachers,” Kowalchuk says. “There was a lot of talk around their agency in the classroom, and how this technology is going to impact the student-teacher relationship.”
The topic of dealing with plagiarism comes up a lot, and it gets complicated. There’s an “extreme” school of thought that says literally copying and pasting from ChatGPT isn’t plagiarism in the traditional sense, because it’s original text, says Kowalchuk. “You can hit that regenerate button as many times as you want — you’re going to get new text every single time.”
But Kowalchuk also knows the technology provides opportunities for teachers to rethink the questions and activities they present. “If a question can be answered simply by AI, is that the right question to be asking kids?” she asks. “We want to get them to those higher-level thinking places.” For instance, elementary students need to differentiate between what is and isn’t AI, but teenagers could be encouraged to question the algorithm itself. Kowalchuk wants students to think critically about how AI recommends content based on what they’ve previously liked. She encourages them to question whether repeatedly seeing similar information is valuable and beneficial to their learning.
Teaching students how to use AI is only a small part of what AI literacy is, Kowalchuk says. It’s also about evaluating sources. So, students can start by asking AI a question, but then — following Amii’s AI learning kits — they must contrast that information with a textbook or other reputable source. They’ll have students generate something with AI, such as a book report, then have them critique it without the aid of artificial intelligence to scrutinize it for errors and omissions.
What Kowalchuk doesn’t want is for the AI to hinder or “atrophy” kids’ cognitive processes. Nor does she want Alberta schools to follow some in Texas and Arizona with AI-instructed classrooms that reduce teachers’ roles to what they now call “guides.”
“That’s why I argue for this kind of AI bilingualism, where there is definitely a time and place for pen and paper and thinking on your own, but there’s also a need to equip students with the skills to use AI effectively.”
Every time a new technology is introduced into classrooms — going back to the invention of calculators — teachers will figure out ways to teach with it while some students will figure out how to cheat with it. That’s just the way it goes. For all the ever-advancing anti-cheating software, Kowalchuk believes teachers will always be in the best positions to discern whether their students really wrote the words they hand in.
AI is here to stay and will be, in one version or another, with students for the rest of their academic careers and beyond. “In the age of AI, there’s
a new set of skills that students are going to need to help them in their careers, and in their lives,” says Kowalchuk. She believes that now is the time to build up fundamental skills around AI programs, and, in doing so, establish a sense of ethics and responsibility for future generations of people and AI itself.
This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Edify
