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AI Education

How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future 61

Posted by msmash from the embracing-AI dept.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school district, is now deploying Google's Gemini chatbots to more than 105,000 high school students -- marking the largest U.S. school district AI deployment to date. This represents a dramatic reversal from just two years ago when the district blocked such tools over cheating and misinformation concerns.

The initiative follows President Trump's recent executive order promoting AI integration "in all subject areas" from kindergarten through 12th grade. District officials spent months testing various chatbots for accuracy, privacy, and safety before selecting Google's platform.

How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future More | Reply

How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future

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  • deserving (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Couldn't happen to a nicer state. What could possibly go wrong.
    In other news, a Florida chatbot was destroyed when it tried to cross the median on I-95 north of Miami after having 14 gin martinis.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, next year's news: "AI self-destructs after trying to teach Florida man to pass the Turing test and failing".

    • Between deaths outpacing births [newsweek.com] and people fleeing due to rising costs due to climate change [bloomberg.com], Florida is losing population. No amount of AI will change that when science denial is mandated from the top [thehill.com].

      • Between deaths outpacing births

        Florida is known as "God's waiting room". Thousands of elderly move to Florida each year, and replace the thousands who died.

        and people fleeing due to rising costs due to climate change,

        Your link says nothing about population decreasing.

        Florida is losing population.

        Totally wrong. Totally ignorant.

        No amount of AI will change that when science denial is mandated from the top.

        Oh, you're a political hack. Pro-Tip: If you want to sway people, don't start off with easily proven lies.
        (BTW, your /. ID is 404ing)

  • I'm a teacher (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @11:59AM (#65387603) Homepage

    The way teachers are dealing with this is by going entirely to in-class assignments done on paper and pencil. I'm Gen X and I didn't even turn in pen/paper big assignments, totally ridiculous. Nothing done at home or around a computer is to be trusted. And there is NOTHING to learn from teaching 3rd graders to be effective at using ChatGPT to do answers for them.

    Giving the students the ability to cheat on their school computers seems backwards to me, but I guess when you can't trust anything that was possibly completed within range of a cell phone or computer, it doesn't really make any difference.

    I'm also a big nerd. I believe in ChatGPT for certain uses. I've even tried to motivate my students to use it as a personal tutor. There is ZERO interest from students in doing this. Like, I specifically taught this in my class, and I believe 0 of my 150 students have gone on to use this on their own. I dunnow, maybe in the future it will change. B

    • This is exactly what my teacher wife is doing. She has asked me to find a way to force Chromebooks to be completely offline so they can be used as simple word processors.

      • I don't know if network can be completely disabled, but you can lock them down to a specific Wifi network during setup and then simply turn off the network. They should be unable to connect to any other network.

        I haven't tested this, but it should work from what I know about the feature.

        https://support.google.com/chr... [google.com]

        • Yeah, but Chromebooks are always 1:1 so students can do computers at home if they're sick/have homework/etc. Can't lock the network.

    • The way teachers are dealing with this is by going entirely to in-class assignments done on paper and pencil. I'm Gen X and I didn't even turn in pen/paper big assignments, totally ridiculous. Nothing done at home or around a computer is to be trusted. And there is NOTHING to learn from teaching 3rd graders to be effective at using ChatGPT to do answers for them.

      Giving the students the ability to cheat on their school computers seems backwards to me, but I guess when you can't trust anything that was possibly completed within range of a cell phone or computer, it doesn't really make any difference.

      I'm also a big nerd. I believe in ChatGPT for certain uses. I've even tried to motivate my students to use it as a personal tutor. There is ZERO interest from students in doing this. Like, I specifically taught this in my class, and I believe 0 of my 150 students have gone on to use this on their own. I dunnow, maybe in the future it will change. B

      I am also a GenX, I did a lot of pen/pencil paper assignments, until I was able to handle the mechanical (not electrical, mechanical) typewriter at home. It wasn't until 1983 when my cousin got a computer (with printer) that I was able to use that. My first computer came in xmass 87 (Commodore PC-10-II, the only good thing was the graphics card, the rest was severely outdated) 1,6 years before I got to the Uni...

      The answer is simple, let the kids use the school provided computers/laptops/tablets with intern

      • But then everything becomes test based. What about writing a long essay for english? A research paper for history class? A project for science class? A program for Computer Science?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dvice ( 6309704 )

      Students are not in the school to learn stuff. Most are there only because they are forced to or to see their friends, this includes also those A students. Only some really rare individuals might actually go to school just because they like to learn things at school, I think I have met one of those in my life. The A-students might be willing to do extra work if it can earn them extra score. But it is pretty obvious no-one is interested in doing any extra work that is not mandatory and which offers no extra

    • Homework was always a horrible idea whether involving LLMs or not, as explained by Alfie Kohn in 2012: https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... [alfiekohn.org]
      "After spending all day in school, our children are forced to begin a second shift, with more academic assignments to be completed at home. This arrangement is rather odd when you stop to think about it, as is the fact that few of us ever do stop to think about it. Instead of assuming that homework should be a given, or that it allegedly benefits children, I've spent the la

    • going entirely to in-class assignments done on paper and pencil

      This is a side effect I'm happy to see. For decades, schools have assumed that more homework was better than less homework. AP classes often aren't actually more advanced than regular classes, they just require more homework.

      I've long felt that it wasn't necessary for schools to try to fill every waking moment with homework. There are other ways to learn, and other things to do. When I graduated from college in 1988, I felt a huge sense of amazement how much free time I suddenly had!

      I'm thinking this isn't

  • Should we be alarmed?
    I'll rephrase: Shouldn't we be alarmed?
    Maybe we can see it play out in Florida before the rest of the world adopts it.
    Will students be smarter? have better outcomes?
    Thank you 105,000 high school students for being guinea pigs.

    I'm guessing that this will favor the nerd/geek stereo types that make up this site. Our nerd offspring, good in math, bad at social skills, will become the next generation of Tech Bro's, and then we'll get our robots to stuff the Quarterback into locker. Ha! Take

    • "Should we be alarmed"

      Nah. This is what's great about a federal system. The states can experiment for the benefit of all.

      Now, if "we" includes Florida parents, then yeah, maybe you should be alarmed. But you're not going to be because you live in Florida. That ship sailed long ago.

      • Miami-Dade is only one county in Florida (one that's heavily populated). The rest of Florida will wait and see.

  • During covid, red state kids actually pulled ahead of blue state kids because their school lockdowns ended faster. This has been quantitatively documented. IIRC, the data shows that kids in red states pulled several months ahead, educationally. The highly-unionized school districts in California that maintained lockdowns for 2 full years did the very worst.

    Crap like this will RAPIDLY correct for that.

    • Lol, did Mississippi move up from 50th place?

      • I don't know if they moved, but recent rankings put then above places like Arizona and Oklahoma for education.

      • They moved up to 30th. Whats even more surprising is how "Mississippi's success is attributed to various factors, including increased investment in early childhood education (Pre-K), teacher development, and evidence-based policy reforms."

      • I don't know if you're Archie Bunker or an Archie Bunker parody, but in Mississippi's public schools, the student population is predominantly non-White, specifically Black (48.5%), Hispanic / Latino (5.2%), and two or more races (3.3%), comprising 57% of the student body. White students, while the 2nd largest group, are a minority (43.0%).

        Now, which of these groups is the target of your smack down of Mississippi?

    • Lockdown had negative effects on learning, but red states did not pull ahead of blue states (primarily because red states are poor and being rich matters more than schooling).

      And it wasn't a two year blue state school lockdown. Schools closed in March 2020. Red States generally re-opened in September 2020 (next school year). Blue states re-opened in maybe March 2021 - second half of the next school year. I can't believe there was a single school district that didn't re-open until March 2022.

      It's also di

  • Weird coincidence (Score:3)

    by bensafrickingenius ( 828123 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @12:11PM (#65387649)
    I am RIGHT NOW sitting in a regional public education task force meeting where we are trying to decide how to guide our schools through the AI minefield. The only thing I can do is remind everyone that *if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.*

  • Who needs to think? That thar computer machine be done doin' a good'nuff job, YEE HAW!

  • Education in the US is run primarily by dimwits. Dimwits follow the latest fad, largely due to fomo.

  • ... so that those AIs did not make the same mistakes some human teachers do, like this one:

    https://www.gocomics.com/doone... [gocomics.com]

    and said AIs behave EXACTLY like this human teacher in the last vignette here:

    https://www.gocomics.com/doone... [gocomics.com]

    Google Won!

  • FloridAI-man (Score:3)

    by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Monday May 19, 2025 @01:48PM (#65387995)
    Just what we needed.

  • It's like Wikipedia, there comes the point one cannot ignore it and one cannot enforce a policy against it. So one needs to embrace it.

    The problem is, that it makes grading assignments harder. A few years ago it was a nice exercise to ask students to spot the mistakes in an AI generated solution. You can't do this anymore as the AIs of today can solve the assignments perfectly. An assignment that you can't cheat using AI is also (too) hard for humans.

    As one also cannot completely rely on AIs and stop teachi

  • What a great way to deprive children of the process of learning how to do anything useful. Training AI to be as impetuous and naive as grade schoolers is the bonus. The whole country has gone mad.

  • If it's Miami-Dade, there is grift somewhere in this deal.

  • The stupid is strong with these people...

  • They will learn all they need to know to keep shovelling coal into the furnaces to keep the AI fed with electricity...
  • Using this AI to cheat on tests will fail. All the answers will be wrong. AI halucinations.

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