SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — The School Administrators of South Dakota will hold workshops for school board members, teachers, and administrators—the first in Rapid City on September 7th. AI has a lot of promise for better education, but it can also impact a child’s education negatively.

“Please give me five questions to ask 5th-grade students who are understanding the place value system in a math class,” DSU’s David DeJong said out loud as he typed the words into his computer.

DeJong says when people first see it in action they are amazed at what artificial intelligence can do. In a matter of seconds, the requested questions came up on the screen.

“If you know which questions to ask, you can ask them to generate, and then it just lists the questions,” he told us.

Dejong says teachers can use Chat GTP to save time. The trick is, they have to tweak and edit to make sure it is usable. In the hands of a student, the technology could be exploited, and teachers need to know how to handle that type of situation.

“Now students are just asking Chat GTP to write papers for them and they are trying to figure out how to get away with submitting artificial intelligence work into their classroom and that in education is something we relied on a lot is for people to think and write, you know the game just changed,” said DeJong.

At Brandon Valley Schools, Superintendent Jarod Larson is well aware of the future challenges AI can generate for the district’s teachers.

“There are pros, and there are cons, and there are certainly unintended consequences,” said Larson.

His district will spend the upcoming year learning about AI and how it can be implemented in the classroom. He wants teachers and principals to help explore the strengths, limitations, and unintended consequences AI can bring to education.

“I think about AI a little bit like I think about a microscope,” said Larson. “Well, you don’t use a microscope every single day in bio; you use it when it is appropriate for the educational activity or the labs, so I think it is very important that we evaluate appropriate uses.”

Larson said when the internet and then smartphones came along, they were supposedly going to change education. Schools adapted, and the impact wasn’t what some expected.

Larson believes AI is an incredible tool for those with the skills and ability to proofread, edit or tweak writing that is produced in draft form by the computer,” said Larson.

“I do believe this firmly and wholeheartedly that never, ever, ever before has it been more important for educational systems to teach fundamental skills such as reading, writing, and math.”

Dejong is helping organize the upcoming workshops for teachers, principals and school board members. He is Dean of the College of Education at DSU.

So he understands how artificial intelligence can impact a young person’s education and how teachers can use it to their advantage.

“We have more information at our fingertips than we’ve ever had before, said DeJong. “We just need to get our teachers, principals, and superintendents into the habit of using artificial intelligence to make them better teachers.”

Artificial Intelligence and Schools Workshops will be held in Rapid City, Aberdeen, Harrisburg and Chamberlain in September. This is such a hot topic in education, hundreds of people have already registered.

Here are the dates for the workshops. Rapid City on September 7th, Aberdeen on September 14th, Harrisburg on September 19th, and Chamberlain on September 26th.