AI in School — Interim Report (part 1)
I’m using my spring break to reflect on AI in K12 education. Education is unlike other industries in that during breaks and summer vacations, the pace of activity slows down and creates an opportunity for flow.
In AI Directions in K12, I hoped that AI would provide rich and personalizable lesson plans and student AI assistants to help guide them on the learning pathway. Looking at the available products, I now want the lesson plans to be dynamic to reflect each student’s individual pacing and engagement.
In the Future of Software Development, Living in an LLM World, and Lesson Plan Clash, I wondered about how AI could ease access to school information and how this might impact lesson planning and EdTech companies more broadly. Every well-intentioned EdTech company I chat with is creating its own database of information with a proprietary UI/UX. EdTech companies should think about how their product would work in a school data lake. This involves making sure information is accessible via an LLM and how to help make the responses more useful. It could also involve additional metadata to help respond to a prompt that asks what information is available and for what timeframe.
