About 50 Cardinal Hayes High School teachers took their initial steps into the future on Friday, January 24, with professors from Iona University presenting the first of five classes on artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom.

Teachers from subjects as diverse as algebra and personal finance, theology, Spanish, and health participated in the program, which seeks to educate teachers about the AI tools that are currently available, how students are using them both correctly and incorrectly, and how teachers can use them most effectively.

Four of the five sessions will take place at Hayes’ Bronx campus. The final class is scheduled for Iona University in New Rochelle in May. The program is offered by Iona’s Gabelli Center for Teaching and Learning, which seeks to build community partnerships, especially with Catholic schools, according to Diana Costello, senior director of communications at Iona.

Friday’s session was led by Rob Kissner, Clinical Lecturer at Iona University’s Hynes Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Kissner demonstrated a range of publicly available AI resources that use large language models (LLM) to produce human-like responses to questions and searches. He provided an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of popular tools such as Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude.

Kissner demonstrated that unlike a Google or other online search, AI results can be molded and improved with additional feedback and information. For example, he requested a lesson plan on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” tailored to ninth-grade New York City high school students interested in basketball. ChatGPT provided a lesson plan with in-class activities and suggestions for group work, homework, and independent study, comparing the character Hamlet to major NBA players, along with using basketball positions to understand the function of others who appear in the play.

In a later session, the Iona professor raised questions about the ethics and morality of AI use, including the potential for plagiarism and biases that the AI tools may exhibit. “The big ethical concern with these AI models comes from how they are trained. The material they’re trained on may include bias, and that may manifest itself in the response. The problem is that the responses sound so good, you may accept it as truth without really questioning whether it is biased information or not,” he told The Good Newsroom. Students and teachers must be aware of the potential for bias, and verify the information that they plan to use for accuracy. He also pointed to privacy and copyright issues as concerns for AI use in the classroom.

Kissner hopes that teachers understand that students are already using AI, whether they admit to it or not. “We need to educate educators about what the landscape looks like, so they can talk about whether they should use [AI] or not use it. Students are using these tools, and they’re using them poorly; they are not being educated on how to use them and how to write great prompts. They don’t even realize the potential,” he said, adding that the program is seeking to “equip both sides with fluency in AI.”