Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Artificial Intelligence topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Southeast Polk outlines K'12 AI lessons, forms EduAI collective and adopts Magic School AI for classroom use
Summary
District technology staff described a districtwide approach to AI education, formation of an EduAI collective to create a usage/assessment scale, and adoption of Magic School AI with data protections and school-device filtering; board members asked about parental outreach and plagiarism detection.
District technology staff on Oct. 2 described a multi-pronged approach to teaching and managing artificial intelligence across Southeast Polk schools, including new lessons, a teacher-led working group and an instructional-focused AI tool.
Kendra Carlson, the district technology integration coordinator, said the district has integrated age-appropriate lessons across K'12: elementary teacher-librarians and counselors will teach what AI is and the ethics of usage; secondary teachers will cover citation, cheating concerns and how AI and social media interact. To guide classroom use, Carlson said the district formed an "EduAI collective" of teachers, instructional coaches and administrators to develop an AI usage and assessment scale differentiated by developmental level.
Carlson said the district adopted Magic School AI for classroom and teacher-facing tasks because the platform is designed as an instructional assistant and, she said, "does not sell, collect, or share any of the data" and keeps inputs firewalled within the platform. She described teacher-created, classroom-specific chatbots students can access via a code and said teachers can view all student inputs and outputs for oversight.
On safety, Carlson said school-managed devices block general public OpenAI sites (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot) for users under 18 and that the district uses a filtering/monitoring tool (Securely) that can notify parents about concerning searches; building administration receives high-level alerts for serious concerns. Board members asked about the accuracy of AI-detection tools; Carlson said available detectors are imperfect and emphasized live, in-class writing and teacher training to preserve productive struggle.
Board members requested updates as the EduAI collective develops its scale and suggested short videos or segmented parent communications to explain classroom uses.
