How will elementary educators use AI to make their job easier? They told me. I'll tell you.
No doom and gloom fears of plagiarism to report here
Elementary teachers: what do you think about using AI to help you with your work?
This was the latest question I asked educators on LinkedIn. (Join the discussion here.)
When I worked in a first-grade classroom as a paraprofessional, I was only assigned to two students. However, that work was more draining than teaching a full schedule of high school kids, which I did for a decade.
How can that be true? Well, consider the elementary teacher.
You’re teaching multiple subjects.
Students are still learning foundational skills.
Emotions are running wild (same for high school but different).
And sometimes the kids do stuff like refuse to climb down from the jungle gym, or tell you crazy stories about their home life.
Not to mention the room decorations, narrative-style progress reports, countless dress-up days etc.
Elementary teachers deserve a break, powered by AI or otherwise.
Over the past few months, there have been countless discussions centered around the impact of ChatGPT and AI tools on middle and high school students, but far fewer involving the oh-so important early years.
Using tools like ChatGPT with elementary students seems like less of a possibility for now (or concern, if you're focused on cheating).
But maybe I'm wrong.
So what about on the teacher side? How will elementary teachers use AI-powered tools to help do the job?
Here’s what they said.
Simplify and streamline parent communication
Stephen Anthony Guerriero, former elementary teacher and Chief Learning Officer at Litmus Learn:
I started my career teaching 4th, then 3rd grade. Well, the applications for Chat GPT aren't quite there in terms of instructional technology for the students, I see a much greater opportunity to save teacher time and work on the parent communication side.
One of the tasks that took the longest for me, was responding to emails, writing a weekly newsletter update on what we had done that week and how parents can help their kids reinforce that work at home, and giving personalized updates for kids whose parents wanted more communication than just once a week. Then, at the end of each marking term, I had to write several paragraphs worth of reports for each student talking about their level of mastery in specific areas of the curriculum, frameworks, as well as an update on social and emotional well-being.
I could see all of these tasks being assisted by Chat GPT, both in terms of communicating quantitative data in clear, narrative language understandable for parents, and in helping craft quality responses to parental emails asking about things like what we were working on in class, or any suggestions for supports to use online at home.
Make administrative tasks in special ed more efficient
Stacy Lee, Special Education Teacher for the Columbia County Board of Education:
I'm curious how this could work for creating goals and objectives for special education students' IEP's?
Monica Wilkerson, Content Specialist for the School District of Lee County agreed:
This is my thought! I think there are some real possibilities for assisting in writing IEPs/504s etc.
Elizabeth Greer, Special Education Teacher at Maynard Public Schools, also agreed, while introducing concerns about student data privacy:
I was thinking the same! Creating legalese to put in the additional information section, writing accommodations and objectives, aba behavior intervention plans... could it help with progress report writing?
My only thought... how does it store information, is there a database to choose from? Does it keep data to sell? Are there implications for student confidentiality?
Differentiating content to meet student needs
Christopher Castle, former middle school language arts teacher:
The the most useful #edtech is not kid-facing but teacher facing (at least so far).
I taught 7/8 social studies for a bit then moved to reading. Title I, 80% or more reading well below grade level. Lesson planning and finding materials to meet their needs ate up my weekend and free time. I just tried a few topics my kids struggled with using #openai then #chatgpt. What took me days to prepare took me half an hour. I then copy-pasted to worksheet template for hard copies or online use.
#ai will save a ton of time for lesson prep, especially in high needs of schools where the materials provided by the school are at a text complexity years higher than the readers.
Optimizing the daily tasks of the job
Rachel Huber, Elementary Literacy Educator at Industrial ISD
Lesson planning, responding to emails, generating lesson ideas, and consolidating ideas into seamless project scopes.
Summary + My take
Overall, it appears that elementary educators might not have as many plans to teach students to leverage AI tools as middle or high school teachers might. This makes complete sense, as these younger students are still learning foundational skills.
However, teachers are already using ChatGPT and other tools to save time, which is good news. Education is too often a few steps behind the broader tech world, often to teachers’ detriment when it comes to workflow efficiency.
What about EdTech products?
Text-based AI features as a singular focus of discussion will fade as more and more EdTech products integrate them.
As an analogy: today, no one cares about an app just because it’s on mobile. They use an app because it solves a problem. Similarly, winning AI EdTech products will be the ones that solve educators’ problems most effectively. Not the ones that get teachers excited about using AI.