At the end of this week, October 5th, we come together to celebrate you on World Teacher’s Day – a day created to recognize the dedication, passion, and impact that you bring to your students and communities. This year’s theme, ‘Valuing teachers’ voices: towards a new social contract for education,’ couldn’t be more timely. With the rise of AI, your voice is crucial in shaping how this technology will serve, support, and enhance your work.
Your voice in the EdTech landscape is essential so that the tools designed for your classroom genuinely support you. If developers are not designing from and for the identified needs of teachers, the products created for you will not help you to do your jobs with more ease and they may hurt our students.
When I work with teachers on evaluating AI tools, there are three suggestions I make for how to ensure that their voices are a part of the AI tool development process:
- Ask yourself, does this tool solve a problem for me? (if not, why use it?)
- Does this tool support me working and inputting information in a way that is intuitive or do I have to rearrange how I teach to have it work? (This could be good or bad – but if we must change to fit the machine, this is a tell in the design process that teachers may not have been consulted.)
- If there’s a tool you really like, but it doesn’t do something that you think would be really helpful, contact the company and ask them to add the adjustment for you. Most of these organizations are really new – about a year old – and they are still small enough to respond to requests and questions.
As educators, many of us have watched technology shape our classrooms—sometimes for better, sometimes with unintended consequences. This time, with AI, we have a chance to influence that shift. For this tech revolution, let’s make sure that our voices are, indeed, heard and valued.
Happy Teacher’s Day!
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