A much higher percentage of teachers say they’re integrating artificial intelligence into their lessons this school year compared with the previous one.
In February, Education Week asked its audience, in an informal LinkedIn poll, if they had integrated AI into any lessons this school year. A majority—60 percent—of the 1,186 respondents said they had integrated the emerging technology into their lessons, while 39 percent said they had not.
Education Week asked a similar question to its LinkedIn audience last school year. Then, 40 percent of the 1,142 respondents said they had integrated AI or discussions about the technology into their lessons, while 60 percent said they had not.
The increase in the number of teachers incorporating AI into their work comes as more of them are getting professional development about the technology, whether from their district or school during dedicated training days or from other organizations on their own time.
Forty-three percent of teachers said they have received at least one training session on AI, according to a nationally representative survey of 1,135 educators—including 731 teachers—conducted in the fall. That’s a nearly 50 percent increase from the EdWeek Research Center’s spring 2024 survey, when 29 percent of teachers said the same.
The shift in teachers’ AI usage also coincides with many ed-tech companies that are fixtures in the K-12 world, such as Google, Microsoft, and Khan Academy, adding AI features to their products.
Here are some of the ways teachers say they’re integrating AI into their lessons, based on responses from EdWeek’s LinkedIn polls from this school year and the previous one. (For more on teachers’ AI use, see in-depth case studies from three veteran teachers and an additional 40 responses from teachers on how they’re using AI in their day-to-day work lives.)
I used AI to help create rubrics.
After writing a paper, we plugged it in to see how the AI would have written it, then compared and contrasted the two papers.
Now that my students have figured out My AI on Snapchat, this will become a part of our lessons on responsible technology use and plagiarism.
Students are using Magic School to check their writing assignments. I upload the rubrics so the AI knows the expectations. This allows for students to get multiple chances for feedback. I have also used AI to write mini textbooks for students who struggle with research and require text at a specific grade level.
I also used AI image generator in the introduction part of my descriptive reading and writing lesson; first I asked my high school students to imagine themselves in their fav place and then told them to write their descriptive text and put it on Wepik [an AI image generator] to compare if it is the place they imagined or not.
We discussed using AI as a tool instead of a crutch. For example, using it to rewrite sentences that students are having trouble comprehending, or to paraphrase a student's work making more condensed and to the point.
In my high school elective creative writing class, we used AI to explore what a short story is, what qualifies as a short story, and to test out how “cliche” their short story ideas might be.
