Page 38 - 04_May-2025

To tackle the issue of AI in schools
and benefit as many students as possi-
ble, 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 con-
cerns, 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, democra-
cies 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.
INDA 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 mod-
els was cheating. But Huedepohl was
pleased when Amii’s kits went beyond
that simple concern. The kits have glos-
saries, slide presentations, support mate-
rials 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
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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.
ONE 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.”
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 class-
rooms 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 intro-
duced 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.
“
 If a question can be answered simply
by AI, is that the right question to be
asking kids?” ­ —Jill Kowalchuk
But Kowalchuk also knows the technol-
ogy 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.
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. ED.