PRINCE ALBERT — The Saskatchewan Rivers Public School Division has introduced new guidelines outlining when teachers and students can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the classroom.
At the board of education's regular meeting on Monday, Superintendent Garrette Tebay presented the newly adopted guidelines for responsible use of AI in Saskatchewan Rivers.
Tebay said students will graduate into a world with sectors where AI is used regularly, like engineering, farming, and healthcare, and schools need to help prepare them for it.
“We want to make sure that we're not pretending it doesn't exist,” she said. “That won't prepare our students for the future, but we also need to make sure that we're using it in responsible and ethical ways.”
The board expressed interest in AI guidelines in August when Trustee Grant Gustafson requested further information.
The guidelines are rooted in five belief statements about the use of AI. The division said it will use AI to help all students achieve excellence for every learner while adhering to existing policies and regulations. The guidelines also call on the division to build an understanding of AI for staff and students, support teachers in adapting instruction in a context where some or all students have access to generative AI tools, use AI to advance academic integrity, and ensure that both students and teachers retain their autonomy when using AI tools.
The guidelines cover in-classroom activities only. The division does not support the use of AI detection tools.
"Oftentimes, especially at the high school level, students work on projects outside of the classroom. They do homework at night. They are working on their school work beyond the school day,” Tebay said.
“We could lock things down in our school division, but they can go home and have open access to all of these tools.”
Tebay said that with the explosion of AI in the education world last year, several teachers connected with consultants asking what to do when they suspected AI was being used and what safeguards were in place or could be in place.
Tebay said it’s challenging for the division because it seems like three new AI tools pop up for everyone the division could block.
"We had to have the conversation as a division as to what were we going to do because you can't block every AI site,” she explained.
"It really was (about) how we understand the use of AI and how do we guide our staff and our students to use AI responsibly,” Tebay said.
Those conversations led the division to create its own guidelines following conversations with staff members.
"Using research-based documents to be able to guide our work there was very important,” Tebay explained. “That was step one as we found some of the best examples of AI guidelines and procedures from across the world…. From that and those discussions, we created a draft of our AI guidelines and our tech leadership group gave feedback on that draft.”
This feedback changed the guidelines and they were introduced at the beginning of the school year.
"We created our guidelines and then we also created a visual … infographic to help teachers with that plan on what responsible AI use looks like in our school division.
“Then we also created some take-and-go PD (professional development) for our principals to use with their staff as well through an AI guidelines presentation.”
She said that the division will navigate how AI tools change, which means the guidelines may change too.
She gave the example of the use of Chromebooks as a new technology in schools and how the division has had to develop long-term plans.
"Now that this is part of our common practice to have these devices in our buildings, we now have to have a long-term plan for how do we maintain the devices, how do we renew and refresh the devices and how do we ensure that we're using the most appropriate software on those devices as well with our instructional practice,” Tebay said.
