Page 37 - 04_May-2025

PROMPTING A NEW
CONVERSATION
AI is changing the classroom — but
not in the ways you think. Inside
the effort helping Alberta teachers
equip kids for a future with AI
INY 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.
37