Experts predict that 2025 will be the year artificial intelligence (AI) truly gets off the ground in K-12 schools.
2024 laid the groundwork for AI to reach a level of "maturity" in education, with the federal government releasing guidance on the issue and growing numbers of teachers getting professional training on the technology and classes on data science available to students.
Now, a development that once baffled educators and administrators is ready to go mainstream.
“I think the system was still in reaction mode. I think we still saw a lot of uncertainty as to where and how AI fits into education. I think you saw this in the way that AI was beginning to be implemented into technology that facilitates classroom management,” said Zarek Drozda, executive director of Data Science 4 Everyone at the University of Chicago.
“I think, over time, going into this next year, that you're going to see more maturity come to the system even further,” Drozda added.
A report from his group found that since the 2020-2021 school year, 2,500 teachers have had more than 71,000 hours of data science professional development, and 277 schools have added data science classes.
Earlier this year, the federal government released a 74-page AI toolkit for schools that focused on safeguarding student privacy, creating plans to integrate the technology to fit student needs and how to use it to assist with learning.
Educators are now using AI to help speed up lesson plan creation and assisting in plans for individualized instruction a student may need.
But 2024 also saw a rise in AI bullying, with multiple reports of students using the technology to create sexual inappropriate photos of classmates.
"I think we're better equipped to use it in ways that promote safety and privacy and that mitigate some of the big security risks, and we have a long way to go. I see it as an opportunity for helping folks develop more AI literacy [...] because, yes, harm can be spread at scale with these systems and tools, and we need to make sure that we are helping folks both understand that and mitigate that,” said Pati Ruiz, senior director of education technology and emerging tech at Digital Promise.
The new year will offer a major opportunity to take advantage of more of the training educators have received, as well as expanding on AI and computer science literacy in schools.
The Data Science 4 Everyone report shows only California and Oregon had more than 3 percent of students in a data science course as of the 2022-2023 school year. Twenty states had 0 percent of their K-12 pupils in such classes.
Advocates say it's time for schools to shift from figuring out how to efficiently use AI to responsibly incorporating it into students’ lives.
“We're going to be seeing a lot more on the evaluation side of AI systems and tools,” Ruiz said.
With that responsibility comes increased conversations about misinformation: The World Economic Forum said at the beginning of 2024 that AI misinformation could be the largest short-term global threat to the world.
“What we will see in 2025, definitely, I think we will see a proliferation of the use of AI, particularly in thinking about the ways in which misinformation and disinformation gets doled out to communities. We saw a lot of that happening this year, it being an election year, for example. And so, that's one of the key pieces around education and how we think about the what the tool offers,” said Noemi Waight, associate professor of science education at the University of Buffalo.
2025 will also be a time of development for the technology itself that schools will need to be aware of.
Currently, popular interfaces such as ChatGPT are free or cost relatively little on an individual level, but for schools to get the licensing to have a system that works schoolwide for teachers and students is much more costly.
