New York City has also banned AI for younger students as concerns over classroom use grow
Another school district has banned AI from being used in the classroom by students across all grades. While this isn’t the first ban of its kind that we’ve seen, what’s interesting is that it was introduced just weeks after the district started piloting Google Gemini for older students. Frederick County became the latest school district to ban AI use in the classroom this week, voting 6-1 to restrict the technology from pre-K through 12th grade. Initially, the board considered only banning AI for younger students, but eventually extended the ban through high school.
gsuite is almost a de-facto standard for K-12. A lot of institutions can get it for free or cheap which is really attractive to cash strapped districts with a minimal IT budget. Our school was a Microsoft campus and we’d have at least 50% of incoming freshmen who were clueless about using O365 because they were all google classroom K-12. If I were a guessing man (and having been in a similar situation), the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite.” Hell, that’s why we went with Teams during the shift to remote schooling in COVID. We already had it in our O365 subscription, and implementing another solution in like no time would’ve been expensive and a pain in the ass.