“AI allows me to be more present with my students.”

Randy : It wasn't so much about limitations as a teacher. I wanted to leverage AI to augment a teacher's ability to reach more students individually. The technology landscape is moving really quickly, and AI, used intentionally, can be a skill augmentation rather than a skill replacement.

As math department chair, I wanted to give my teachers and myself the ability to provide more individualized feedback than we can humanly do. The old joke used to be: "I need a robot to grade practice assessments." A properly trained AI can be that robot.

On top of that, I believe it's important to teach students what proper use of AI looks like: an enhancement of your skill set, not a replacement for it. Ed.ai is a classic example of that.

Randy : Right now, mostly as a quiz generator. Our math program is standards-based: each skill has a title, and that title carries a cascade of mathematics with it. One skill I'm assessing right now is factoring a polynomial using the fundamental theorem of algebra and all the theorems attached to it.

Students take the assessment, then they can practice the skill further and reassess. Writing those standards quizzes has always been laborious. I have a suite of about five per topic, and having more gives students more opportunities to show mastery. So I drop several of my quizzes into Ed.ai and generate multiple variations. I still review every question to make sure it's reasonable, but I'd do that with any resource.

That's fifteen more minutes I can spend preparing my courses or, more importantly, with the human beings in the building. What I'm looking for in any platform, Ed.ai included, is to be freed from independent work so I have more time for human collaboration and mentorship.

A lot of times in technology, we gain efficiencies and then use them to just do more. We forget what's important, especially in teaching: the human beings in the room.

Randy : It hasn't, because about nine years ago we adopted standards-based grading. In about 90% of cases, we've removed the artificial economy around point acquisition. We still have point-based summative assessments, but standards are about skill accumulation.

When we made that switch, student questions during our tutorial time (office hours we hold three days a week) changed from "How do I get more points on this?" to "I don't understand how the complex number system articulates with factoring polynomials." That's a profoundly different question. It's exactly the kind of question we want kids to pursue.

Ed.ai aligns with what we've been doing for years. It enables qualitative assessment, like having a graduate-level TA look over students' work. I have 120 students. I humanly can't review their practice assessments with the same meticulousness I give their standards assessments and still have time for other tasks and for my family.

Randy : Our school is in Santa Cruz, California, notoriously a bastion of progressive thought and action. There's a big discussion in this town, even among youth groups, about AI: its impact on the broader economy and on job markets in the public and private sectors, the environmental impact of data centers, and AI safety.

Ed.ai is not a general LLM. You're not generating cat videos with it. That immediately puts it in a different category, and it's a talking point you get to share with students. This is a specifically trained instrument for a classroom where learning mathematics is the objective. I had already asked Ed.ai where their servers were located, to check whether they were in a water-scarce area. They weren't.

That opened a broader discussion, which I made time for in class, about the economic impacts of AI. A big part of my class is about understanding fear and moving it from the realm of fear to the realm of analysis. In Santa Cruz, a coastal town, is getting attacked by a shark a reasonable fear when you go in the water? When you look at the empirical probabilities, you're more likely to drown, or to die in a car accident on your way to the beach.

Is AI going to destroy all employment? I'm not convinced. And schools? People like to learn from other people. Khan Academy didn't replace me. The AI era has the potential to remind us what it actually means to be human.