When OpenAI launched AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, the effect was immediate. The initial temptation and concern that emerged was student cheating. DCPS, like other school districts, elected not to ban the technology in hopes of harnessing and leveraging the potential benefits of the emerging technology. Still, DCPS recognizes that policy challenges remain, such as ethical use of these tools, and must be addressed.

While some students saw AI as a new tool for homework help, others quickly caught on to using the technology for more than learning assistance. This left teachers to grapple with the concept that while an assignment might be submitted under a student’s name, the work they grade might be ChatGPT.

Jackson-Reed’s English department independently elected to employ AI detectors to deter student use of AI. Parents complained and the solution was short lived. “There were some instances where parents said that their child had not used AI at all [but] it had come up on the detectors as being flagged for AI and then that student got in trouble,” English teacher Caroline Szakats recalled. “Since the detectors are not 100% accurate, we [cannot] rely on them as the indicator for use of AI.”

DCPS later added turnitin.com, a plagiarism detector, to Canvas to help teachers recognize stolen work. Still, “the leading tech minds of the world are on the same page that we cannot depend on these detector tools. They are faulty, so we can’t in a policy [use only] detectors to penalize students,” said DCPS Director of Educational Technology Lucas Torre.

Yet many teachers who are familiar with their students’ writing can often spot AI generated work without detectors. “I don’t need [AI detectors] to know,” stated Szakats. “The way that [AI] sounds is not how teenagers write… It sounds extremely formulaic.”

Math teachers have overall seen less impact. “[Chat GPT] has been [almost] the same as Photomath,” said math teacher Elana Horowitz. Like Szakats, she can often tell when students use external resources to cheat. “Students generally copy it exactly so they use different methods and slightly different variables and symbols than we do.”

Though cheating using generative AI has become prevalent in schools, the negative impacts have been accompanied by a multitude of possibilities. In light of this, DCPS chose not to block ChatGPT on school computers. “DCPS is an innovative school district. We don’t see this technology as an issue, we see it as a technology that has both challenges and opportunities,” said Torre. He foresees many more generative AI tools arising in the future: “It [will] really be a black hole of all of these tools out there and just trying to chase [them] is not the approach that we want to take.”

DCPS’s current AI focus is educating staff and students. “We want to take the approach of educating how to be responsible and ethical users of these technologies,” said Torre. Actions taken so far include the creation of a general AI resource page for teachers, AI specific sessions during teacher professional development days, and AI specific lessons for students taught in classrooms across the District through the Digital Citizenship curriculum. Teachers are also becoming familiar with AI resources they already have access to, including tools in the Adobe Suite and Microsoft Learning Accelerators.

Some teachers have already begun to experiment with generative AI. “I have used [AI] to create the first draft of rubrics and then I edit those rubrics,” said Szakats. Other potential uses include grading, lesson planning, and brainstorming reading lists and prompts. 

Within DCPS, Torre aspires for AI to “create more personalized learning experiences. He believes “these tools can really play an important part of bridging the gap [so] instruction can meet you where you are.” He added that “we will eventually begin to incorporate AI seamlessly into instruction.”

Though DCPS aims to use generative AI to create positive impacts, there are still a lot of technical considerations to address, including privacy and security. While DCPS has not blocked the chatbot, it is still unavailable on many student devices. This is due to Lightspeed, an AI enhanced cloud-based filter agent that blocks any content and websites perceived as inappropriate on school devices. Lightspeed helps DCPS stay FERPA compliant. FERPA is a federal law that enforces requirements schools must abide by when managing sensitive student data.

Ethics is another significant consideration. “Always when we’re looking at it, the words that I think of are ethical, responsible, appropriate and human centered, because we have to remember that the human, the student and the teacher, are at the center,” said Torre. “It’s going to grow and I think we always have to be careful of the balance between what are the technical benefits and what are the ethical considerations.”