{"id":116190,"date":"2025-08-28T12:10:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/116190\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T12:10:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:10:08","slug":"chatgpt-isnt-just-for-cheating-teachers-are-using-ai-to-save-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/116190\/","title":{"rendered":"ChatGPT isn\u2019t just for cheating. Teachers are using AI to save time."},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone in education, from K-12 teachers to university presidents, is well aware that AI is transforming the classroom. That presents all the challenges you\u2019ve probably already heard of: students using ChatGPT to cheat, churning out papers and assignments without a second thought. But there\u2019s also the more underreported development \u2014 teachers are deploying the technology<\/a> to write lesson plans, make quizzes, and streamline administrative tasks, saving them hours of grunt work.<\/p>\n

In the best-case scenario, AI promises to make teachers better at their jobs. And ultimately, if AI becomes the transformative force optimists hope it will, that will help students get smarter, becoming a tireless teaching aid and providing 24-hour tutoring assistance. That\u2019s a big if, of course.<\/p>\n

At the very least, the time saving element for teachers is real, and it\u2019s a big deal. A recent survey from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found that 6 in 10 teachers used AI for their work<\/a> in the 2023-2024 school year. Those that used AI weekly \u2014 about a third of the teachers surveyed \u2014 estimated it saved them about 6 hours each week, which, in the best of circumstances, could mean that\u2019s 6 more hours of face time with students.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not plugging students in front of computers, engaging with a chat bot,\u201d Chris Agnew<\/a>, director of the Generative AI in Education Hub at Stanford, said. \u201cThis is supporting teacher practice and then enabling this trained, experienced adult that\u2019s in front of kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, giving teachers some time back doesn\u2019t necessarily curb AI cheating. The savviest educators have clear guidelines for when AI can be used and when it can\u2019t, as well as a good system in place for discussing the technology\u2019s evolving role in school. After all, this is hardly the first time<\/a> a new technology has swept into schools and upended old ways of doing things \u2014 educators used to worry about calculators in the classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went from the phase of, \u2018Ban AI, it\u2019s a cheating tool,\u2019 to now, the majority of the market really is, \u2018How do we leverage these tools in really productive ways?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This also isn\u2019t the first time a new technology has opened up a huge business opportunity for tech companies to reach young, inquiring minds and make a lot of money in the process. Google, for instance, now offers its Workspace for Education with Gemini built-in for up to $66<\/a> per teacher per month. In a school district of 500 teachers, that could easily add up to an extra $400,000 a year. For school districts that use a learning management system, like Canvas by Instructure, or an AI-powered tutor, like Khanmigo by Khan Academy, the cost of tech-centric education could keep growing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went from the phase of, \u2018Ban AI, it\u2019s a cheating tool,\u2019 to now, the majority of the market really is, \u2018How do we leverage these tools in really productive ways?\u2019\u201d said Ryan Lufkin<\/a>, vice president of global academic strategy at Instructure, whose Canvas software is used by half of North American college students and over a third of K-12 students.<\/p>\n

What the classroom experience will look like in a decade, much further into the AI revolution, is anyone\u2019s guess. In corporate America, companies are pouring billions of dollars into AI, hoping for transformative profits. So far, that\u2019s not going great<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a parent, you might feel a bit powerless in this situation. Tech companies and school districts are making decisions that will impact your kid, who may or may not be using ChatGPT already to do their homework. But because we\u2019re in the early days of this technology, now is the time to learn about how it works and what your school district is doing with it.<\/p>\n

Beating the cheating problem<\/p>\n

If you set aside the idea that large language models could reinvent the American education system \u2014 which is not great, by global standards \u2014 you might be curious about the ChatGPT cheating problem, especially if you\u2019re a parent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to tell just how many students are cheating with robots. A Pew survey of teens found that 26 percent of middle and high school students<\/a> were using ChatGPT \u2014 for both nefarious and less nefarious purposes \u2014 in 2024, a percentage that had doubled since 2023. Another study from 2024 that tracked high school students\u2019 cheating from before and after ChatGPT\u2019s release found no indications that it had \u201cdramatically changed the prevalence of cheating.\u201d Regardless, a New York magazine feature earlier this year declared that \u201cChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Proposed solutions to the cheating problem, however serious it is, are kind of funny. As the use of ChatGPT has increased on college campuses, for instance, so have the sales of blue books, according to the Wall Street Journal<\/a>. Students can\u2019t use AI when they\u2019re locked in a room with nothing but a pencil and paper, after all. Then there\u2019s the call to bring back oral exams, including proposals to use video conferencing software to conduct hundreds of them at once<\/a>. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology even invented a platform for oral exams that, somewhat ironically, uses AI to grade the students<\/a>. There are other creative workarounds, too, like requiring students to show their work by tracking changes in Google Docs or asking them to generate ChatGPT essays and then critique them.<\/p>\n

Banning AI completely is increasingly unpopular. New York City Public Schools, the nation\u2019s largest school district, banned ChatGPT<\/a> not long after its release in 2022 and then lifted that ban a few months later. \u201cThe knee-jerk fear and risk overlooked the potential of generative AI to support students and teachers, as well as the reality that our students are participating in and will work in a world where understanding generative AI is crucial,\u201d then-chancellor David Banks wrote in an op-ed<\/a>. \u201cWhile initial caution was justified, it has now evolved into an exploration and careful examination of this new technology\u2019s power and risks.\u201d<\/p>\n

That exploration period seems to be ongoing for many K-12 schools. By the end of last year, the city\u2019s comptroller, Brad Lander, called on the city\u2019s Department of Education to pull nearly $2 million in funding<\/a> for AI software, because it had not studied the efficacy of AI in the classroom.<\/p>\n

The next edtech gold rush<\/p>\n

Schools are nevertheless spending money on AI tools, whether they\u2019re for teachers or for students. This represents just the latest raft of investment in education technology, or edtech. For the past four decades, putting computers into classrooms and screens in front of students has promised to transform learning. And for 40 years, it\u2019s failed to fulfill that promise<\/a>. Student performance has remained flat, while spending on edtech and training teachers how to use it has grown.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear if AI can change this trend. Once you look beyond trying to stop students from using ChatGPT to cheat, you can get pretty creative with how AI might play a role in the classroom. You could imagine, for instance, that students will write fewer essays and might instead interact with a chatbot the way they\u2019d talk to a human tutor. Khan Academy, a major edtech company, is piloting a chatbot it built with OpenAI called Khanmigo<\/a> in 266 school districts nationwide. Khan Academy founder Sal Khan recently told Anderson Cooper that his dream is to give every student a private tutor<\/a>. Khanmigo currently costs $4 per month per student.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more promising in the near future is giving teachers access to AI that can lead to new classroom experiences. Aside from its private tutor powers, Khanmigo can help create lesson plans and then integrate the chatbot into them, according to Kristen DiCerbo, chief learning officer at Khan Academy. She explained a scenario to me in which several Khanmigo agents essentially worked like teacher\u2019s assistants, checking in on groups of students during a lesson. \u201cWe think of it as like a force multiplier for the teacher, giving them just a little more reach in terms of what they can get done in the classroom,\u201d DiCerbo said.<\/p>\n

Aside from powering tools like this, OpenAI recently announced an education effort of its own in ChatGPT called study mode<\/a>. This effectively turns ChatGPT into a tutor that replies to questions with more questions rather than answers. This is in addition to ChatGPT Edu, which launched last year and offers a version of ChatGPT built just for universities<\/a> at a discount. Google is similarly marketing its Gemini Pro plan to students, who can currently get one year for free<\/a>. Anthropic is selling a version of its Claude chatbot to universities<\/a>, too. All of these education-specific products work a lot like the consumer versions but don\u2019t train their models on student data.<\/p>\n

That all sounds good in theory, and it all costs money. It goes without saying that schools with more resources will be able to take better advantage of these new AI tools, possibly improving teachers\u2019 lives and student performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology is not and never has been a silver bullet to address some of these more structural issues that exist in our education system,\u201d said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media.<\/p>\n

This is assuming that AI in education actually delivers the desired results, which would defy the decades-long trend in edtech. Despite initiatives that date back to the \u201990s<\/a> to give schools cheap and easy access to the internet, a quarter of the school districts in the US don\u2019t even have broadband that\u2019s fast enough<\/a> to support some of these applications. It\u2019s hard to have an education revolution when the page won\u2019t load.<\/p>\n

So, for a number of reasons, chatbots won\u2019t be replacing teachers any time soon. More teachers may enlist AI to mix up their lesson plans, and students will inevitably try to find high-tech ways to get homework help. A chatbot that refuses to tell them answers might be their best hope.<\/p>\n

A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here<\/a> so you don\u2019t miss the next one!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everyone in education, from K-12 teachers to university presidents, is well aware that AI is transforming the classroom.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,526,20660,4530,271,1343,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-116190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-education","12":"tag-even-better","13":"tag-innovation","14":"tag-life","15":"tag-policy","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}