AI will help save teachers time.
Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time you hear this pitch.
Automation and time saving
If you have been in the classroom for more than a couple of weeks, you know this scenario, which has been running since the first teaching aid was created.
"Here's some new stuff," declares your administration. "Use this. It will save you lots of time." Then, under their breath as they head out the door, "Once you get it set up." Getting the tech set up and ready to use? A zillion hours. Time to get the bugs out and establish comfort using the tech. Another zillion hours. Time saved once it's up and running? Fifteen minutes a week. Only that's not really saved, because admins figure that since you have this new time-saving tech, you can pick up this additional work that will only take a zillion hours out of your week.
Now comes AI, which will save you all this time doing things like creating lesson plans, once you get better at creating prompts. Except that you will need to double check every single thing it extrudes, because all it will do is make stuff up, and some of that stuff will be real and some will not. Because, no, ChatGPT will not go examine a bunch of material on your chosen topic, determine which materials are most sound and accurate, study up on what would be most developmentally appropriate for your students, and run this past a comprehensive examination of the best pedagogical techniques. No, it will show you what a possible lesson plan would look like, based on probably word strings. It will not "care" about any of that other stuff. Just saying.\
A solution on the prowl
When you have a solution in search of a problem, you always have the same tell. Instead of starting by asking, "What would be the best way to solve this problem," we get the question, "How would our piece of tech solve this problem?"
In the sales biz, this is called assuming the sale. We've skipped right over the question of whether or not we should buy this "solution" and skipped ahead to the attempt to show the benefits of this tech we'll assume you've already adopted.
If we are so concerned about teacher burnout and teacher's need for more time to do the work (a problem since forever), then let's start by asking, "How could we help teachers have more time to do the work, and maybe not get so crispy around the edges doing it?"
And the thing is, we know the best answers, and they aren't "an unreliable plagiarism machine." The answers are to reduce class size, hire more teachers, have administrators or aides take over non-teaching jobs, and, in some schools, all the little things that would occur to you if you considered teachers trustworthy professionals deserving of support and respect and not serfs who must be micromanaged.
The fact that we didn't have any of that conversation around any version of that question tells me that "AI will save teacher time" is a baloney sales pitch, which suggests something else...
Your best foot
You're trying to sell your product as a solution to some problem in education, and the best you can come up with is "It will save time"? Besides the whole "quickie lesson plans" argument, I've seen a smattering of "help with differentiation" and "whip up some very pointed worksheets," but for something that is supposed to be the Swiss Army Knife of ed tech, AI just doesn't seem to have found very many excuses to be shoved into school problems to solve.
You could use it to grade student writing, but it's pretty hard to pretend that isn't simple dereliction of duty. Anecdotally, I'm hearing about plenty of spectacularly lazy administrators using it to write emails, and in that case, it really would be a time saver to have your chatbot read and respond to the administrator's chatbot, creating a closed loop that causes a big time suck to vanish into its own nether regions.
Look, here's how ed tech adoption really works in the field. New tech is introduced. Maybe with no training, so it falls into instant disuse. Maybe it piques teacher curiosity and she trains herself (which involves hours playing with it instead of dealing with that huge stack of papers on her desk). Maybe there's enough training that she has a handle on it.
But ultimately the school year is grinding away, and as a teacher has to perform a zillion different tasks and either A) she reaches for the tech because it would be helpful or B) she doesn't, because it wouldn't.
There is another ed tech adoption scenario, which is the one where someone comes to run a training and explains that this tech would be really useful if you just changed the entire way you do your job. "Our new hammer is a chisel, and if you just change how you build houses, the chisel will be really helpful." AI hasn't been pitched this way because the folks selling it can't come up with any alternate school universe scenarios, either.
Mostly AI for schools is being pitched by people who don't appear to know enough about teaching to know how an AI could be helpful and so are left to vaguely gesture in the direction of "saving time by doing stuff that, you know, teachers could be not doing." If people really wanted to give teachers more time to do the work, they could talk about staffing or class size or human support staff, but none of that is going to move product.
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