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on a scorching hot saturday st anthonyDozens of teachers took a day off to get a glimpse of the future. Topic of the day’s workshop: Enhancing education with artificial intelligence.
After being amazed by AI’s ability to instantly grade classwork and turn lesson plans into podcasts or online storybooks, a high school English teacher raised a concern that many have on their minds: “Are we being replaced by AI?”
This remains to be seen. But to keep the country’s 4 million teachers relevant and help students use technology wisely, teachers unions have formed an unlikely partnership with the world’s largest technology companies. The two groups don’t always see eye to eye but say they have a common goal: training America’s future workforce.
MicrosoftOpenAI and Anthropic are providing millions of dollars for AI training to the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union. In turn, tech companies have an opportunity to penetrate schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance.
AFT President Randi Weingarten said skepticism guided their conversations, but the tech industry has something schools lack: deep pockets.
Weingarten said, “There’s no one else to help us with this. So we felt we needed to work with the biggest corporations in the world.” “We went to them – they didn’t come to us.”
Weingarten’s first meeting with the CEO of Microsoft brad smith To discuss partnership in 2023. She later reached out to OpenAI to adopt an “agnostic” approach, meaning any company’s AI tools could be used in a training session.
Under the arrangement announced in July, Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to the AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million of funding and $2 million of technical resources, and Anthropic has offered $500,000.
Tech Money to build AI training center for teachers
With the money, AFT plans to build an AI training center in New York City that will offer virtual and in-person workshops for teachers. The goal is to open at least two more centers and train 400,000 teachers in the next five years.
National Education AssociationThe country’s largest teachers union announced its partnership with Microsoft last month. The company has provided a $325,000 grant to help NEA develop AI training in the form of “microcredentials” — online training open to the association’s 3 million members, said Daiyah Bilal, NEA’s senior director of education policy. The target is to train at least 10,000 members this school year.
“We designed our partnership very surgically,” Bilal said. “We are very conscious of what a technology company can achieve by spreading information about the products it develops.”
The two unions set the same terms: Teachers, not private funders, would design and lead the training that would include AI tools from multiple companies. The unions own the intellectual property for the training, which covers AI skills as well as security and privacy concerns.
The Trump administration has recently encouraged private investment by creating an AI Education Task Force in an effort to achieve “global dominance in artificial intelligence.” The federal government urged tech companies and other organizations to pay the bill. More than 100 companies have signed up so far.
Technology companies also see opportunities in education beyond training teachers. Microsoft unveiled a $4 billion initiative to fund AI training, research, and gifting its AI tools to teachers and students. This includes AFT grants and a program that will provide free access to Microsoft CoPilot tools to all school districts and community colleges in Microsoft’s home state of Washington. Google says it will invest $1 billion for AI education and job training programs, including free access to its Gemini for Education platform for US high schools.
Several recent studies have shown that AI use in schools is growing rapidly but training and guidance is lagging behind.
The industry offers resources that can help quickly scale AI literacy efforts. But educators should make sure any partnership focuses on what’s best for teachers and students, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
“These are private initiatives and they are run by companies that have a stake,” Lake said.
Microsoft CEO Brad Smith agrees that teachers should have a “healthy dose of skepticism” about the role of tech companies.
“While it’s easy to see the benefits right now, we must always be mindful of the possibility of unintended consequences,” Smith said in an interview, pointing to concerns such as AI’s potential impact on critical thinking. “We have to be careful. It’s still early days.”
Teachers see new possibilities
At the San Antonio AFT training, about 50 teachers came for a three-hour workshop for teachers from the Northside Independent School District. It is the largest in the city, employing approximately 7,000 teachers.
The day started with a spirited conversation.
“We all know, when we talk about AI, teachers say, ‘No, I’m not doing that,’ trainer Kathleen Torregrosa told the room. “But we are preparing kids for the future. This is our primary job. And AI, like it or not, is part of our world.”
Attendees created lesson plans using ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and two AI tools designed for schools, Khanmingo and Colorado Colorado.
Gabriela Aguirre, a first-grade dual language teacher, repeatedly used the word “amazing” to describe what she saw.
“It can save you a lot of time,” she said, and add visual flair to the lessons. She left with a plan to use AI tools to create illustrated flashcards in English and Spanish to teach vocabulary.
“With all the video games, cellphones you have to compete, kids are always like, ‘I’m bored.’ Everything is boring,” Aguirre said. “If you can find ways to connect them to new technology, that’s all you have to do.”
Middle school teacher Celeste Simone said there’s no going back to the way she taught before.
As a teacher of English language learners, Simone can now ask the AI tool to draw pictures with vocabulary words and create illustrated storybooks that use students’ names as characters. She can take a difficult passage of reading and ask the chatbot to translate it into Spanish, Pashto or other languages. And she can ask the AI to rewrite difficult passages at any grade level to match the reading level of her students. All in a matter of seconds.
“I can give my students access to things that never existed before,” Simone said. “As a teacher, once you use it and see how useful it is, I don’t think I could go back to the way I did it before.”
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