Lavina Jaswani: We have been using a number of AI-enabled tools to explain concepts to children; to offer personalised learning; and to help teachers create resources, from stories and worksheets to different types of assessments and quizzes. There are different apps we use, such as Kahoot! and Quizlets, to offer a gamified, interactive, and sensorial learning experience that keeps children engaged, rather than the traditional rote learning method.
However, the teacher still has to ask herself: what is my learning objective? What does a child need to understand? Where can the technology add value and is it truly beneficial and essential for the child? Keeping such questions in mind, AI tools can be effectively used in the classroom.
Deepa Jacob: In our school, technology is integrated seamlessly into our teaching and learning experience. Every child from kindergarten onwards has access to an iPad, which is kept at the school; they don’t take them home. They have apps that might be able to assist them with learning such as Seesaw, which is a journal of their learning through which they can keep a record of things that they do, like published writing pieces, videos of science experiments, their reflection on their learning etc. You can even assign tasks on them.
Educationists and philosophers in the field of education have talked about existing in the liminal space, which is that space where you struggle with a concept, that threshold between not knowing something and struggling with something and then finally learning it. I think that is a beautiful space to be in mentally and we need these as human beings. We need this time and space to reconfigure ourselves; time for ideas to incubate and grow. Relying on technology in that phase would be terrible. While technology should be used as a tool, it is easy to over-rely on technology and use it as a crutch. If you want to create human beings that make their own contribution in the world, I think there should be serious restrictions on the amount of AI used among kids.
One fear is that AI could harm a student’s ability to think and learn for themselves — for instance, if they just enter their homework as a ChatGPT prompt, the AI does their homework for them. Is this a valid fear?
Lavina Jaswani: Yes, this is where we need to take a balanced position. AI can affect children’s thinking abilities, but it depends on how we use it. There are two possibilities: one is when the child uses the AI, the AI gives the answer, the child copies it, submits it and moves on. Then we have a problem, as the child is not using his brain. Instead, we need to guide the child on how to use it and that is where we need to put the restriction.
Deepa Jacob: The problem is over-reliance. If you’ve been driving a manual car and then you shift to an automatic car, you’re going to find it really hard to go back to driving manual, right? Similarly, I think you can become over-reliant on someone else doing the thinking for you or even synthesising ideas by just feeding them into an AI tool such as the Notebook LLM. The capacity of the human brain is immeasurable. There’s so much study that has gone into how brains function, and their neuroplasticity. It would be a shame if we let it die. Especially in the primary and elementary years, where so much of growth is happening.
So while AI is a great tool, I think we should be very cautious in how it is used.
Deepa Jacob: As educators, we don’t really have control over what kids are exposed to at home, but the one place where we can still teach critical thinking skills is in the classroom. I think we have to preserve that as far as we can. Also, I think children these days are really good at spotting something that’s AI-generated versus the real thing, and for many of them it is not cool anymore.
I feel like we, the older generation, are more easily fooled when it comes to AI.
Lavina Jaswani: Children are much more tech savvy and even AI-savvy than they were a few years ago. So I don’t think bans and restrictions are the solution. It is better to understand AI and make our children aware of the pros and cons.
Lavina Jaswani: AI should not replace a teacher; it should extend the teacher. Especially in primary education, where children learn best through stories, activities, and conversations — moments that are very important to human relationships. That bond with the teacher is very important. So I would never want AI to become the teacher sitting in front of the children. I see AI as a learning assistant.
Deepa Jacob: My first job was in a village school and there were times I wished I had more resources and more tools, especially to translate more content and make it accessible. But I agree that you cannot completely do away with teachers just because knowledge can be found anywhere. But if you think of schools as not just knowledge centres, but wisdom centres where you learn from other human beings about how to become a good human, then you need teachers to be present, curating resources for the child.
Also read | How have you found AI helpful for teacher preparation and training?
Deepa Jacob: Prep time is very limited so AI tools really help. If I input what I need to teach into Gemini, it helps me create slide decks that I can then present to the class, but again, we need to be careful because we have learnt through experience that AI can hallucinate and put out wrong information, so teachers do need to double check.
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