Rockwood School District has restricted ChatGPT from all district devices and networks until this October due to privacy concerns. The district is now turning its attention to a new site: Chat for Schools.

“As a student, your personal information will be protected because none of that information enters the larger language model,” said Bob Deneuve, Rockwood’s chief information officer. “With ChatGPT, the data you input is now part of that model and can be used in training.”

Most importantly, Chat for Schools is designed to be used in classroom settings.

“One of the key factors in being a really good AI user is being good at prompting. Chat for Schools has prompt libraries for every subject, so if a student wants to use AI for a specific purpose, but maybe “Don’t know how to prompt, so they can go to these prompt libraries and Chat for Schools can help them out,” Danio said.

In addition to its instant library, Chat for Schools also benefits staff. It can design rubrics and create tutors specific to students. It allows monitoring, so teachers can see how students are using the site.

Over the years, programs like Gemini and ChatGPT have been restricted and unrestricted on school-issued Chromebooks and Wi-Fi, primarily due to privacy concerns in the district. ChatGPT was officially banned in the district shortly after its release in November 2023, primarily because users must be at least 18 years old.

“Because ChatGPT was so new at the time, schools in general were trying to figure it out. ChatGPT has the potential to disrupt a lot of different things, for both positive and negative reasons,” said Deneuve. .

Now, ChatGPT allows users 13 and older to use the platform with parental permission. Following this change, ChatGPT was banned in the district on February 1, due to Rockwood’s perceived need to adopt AI.

The district then launched the first Canvas course, “AI for Students,” aimed at teaching students about the ethics of using AI. It was launched in February 2024.

“ChatGPT, like any other AI platform, can be misused. It can be used for purposes of fraud or intellectual dishonesty, but so with any AI model or many products. happens,” Deneau said.

To date, ChatGPT has been banned again due to concerns about the use of students’ personal data to train chatbots, according to OpenAI’s privacy policy they use information such as User space, “to provide, analyze and maintain. [their] Services.” OpenAI is the organization that developed ChatGPT.

Language Arts Department Chair Lisa Donovan attended an AI workshop and learned that AI sites can generate multiple-choice questions. It was something he thought would be beneficial for some classes, such as social studies.

“I thought, ‘Well, this is a really good way to review and it gives you a built-in study partner,'” Donovan said.

However, Donovan doesn’t find using AI to write papers to have the same benefits. He said the language arts department is trying to get its students away from computer work and relying more on handwritten assignments.

“Students are giving ownership of their thinking to something else, which is kind of sad,” he said.

A state-of-the-art Canvas course will be published in the near future, aimed at teaching students about the ethical use of AI.