Yesterday, we finished a two-day professional development program for middle school teachers in Florida with a focus on the applications of artifical intelligence to both thier professional practice as educators and their students learning and development. I was very excited to engage with such dedicted educators as we tried to unpack how to appropriately integrate this emerging technology into our educational enterprises. I am also thankful for our awesome graduate students and educators who made this event a success. While we did not have conclusive guidance on the many good questions posed to us, we were able to start the conversation in the northeast Florida region and share experiences from the talented educators at PK Younge Developmental Lab School here at the Univiersity of Florida. The only thing I think we were all able to conclude is that AI like its predecessors (e.g., calculators, the Internet) is here to stay so we need to find appropriate ways to model and use the technology.
The AAIMSE project focused on creating a PLC centered on applications of AI to middle schools and the dissemination of what we learned as a PD to surrounding schools. The AAIMSE project has two additional objectives to achieve in year two of the project: 1) design, development, and generation of preliminary validity and reliability evidence of an AI literacy measure targeting middle school students, and 2) the creation of guidelines and possibly standards for the appropriate uses of AI in middle schools accounting for teacher, student, administrator, and parent concerns. Thankfully, the many middle school educators atending the event are willing to assist us in carrying out these last two goals by providing access to students, teachers, and parents at their schools. We are also going to carry out a second year of the PLC at PK Younge with some of our existing teachers and some new teachers interested in the topic.
Our next several months will be focused on preparing our data collection instruments for conducting focus groups with students, teachers, and parents for developing guidelines and standards as well as designing the AI literacy measure and generating the items to measure this unclearly defined and evolving construct of AI literacy among middle school students. After we finish this work, we decided to shift gears to an NSF DRK-12 Level II Design and Development proposal, which would allow us to scale our work to more schools and districts using what we learned from this project. A big thank you to the Shewey Support for providing the seed money for project AAIMSE. This is going to be a busy summer and fall, but an exciting next several of months for us to focus on this work.