Artificial intelligence is moving into Slave Lake classrooms faster than the province can write rules for it, leaving local teachers to figure out how to embrace the technology without letting kids cheat their way through school.
The High Prairie School Division is tackling the issue head-on. While teachers are using AI to save time and build custom lesson plans, they are fighting a parallel battle against students who use the software to do their homework for them.
Tara Boyle, vice-principal of Roland Michener Secondary School, says the technology is a great resource for staff, but the school has to draw a hard line between how adults and children use it.
“Students are using AI in many different ways, from creating visual assignments, study tools, creating helpful review and practice test questions, assistance with editing their work and brainstorming essay topics,” Boyle says. “Unfortunately, AI is also being used as a full creation tool where students offload the work process and have AI complete the learning task for them. It is tempting, easy to use, and readily accessible.”
Boyle, who co-chairs the division’s AI steering committee, warns that skipping the struggle of learning hurts kids in the long run. She points out that students need basic skills before they can tackle complex problems—just like you can’t learn trigonometry if you don’t know basic math.
To highlight the school’s mindset, Boyle points to a quote by education expert Jared Cooney Horvath: “Teach someone how to use a tool, and they’ll be able to use that tool. Teach someone how to think, and they’ll be able to use any tool.”
To put this into action, the school division is putting together an AI handbook with rules based on a child’s age. Under the new plan, kids from kindergarten to Grade 6 won’t use AI tools directly at all.
Instead, their lessons will focus on understanding what AI is and how to spot it. As students get older, teachers will slowly introduce the technology for specific classroom activities.
The rise of AI has also forced an immediate shakeup in how teachers grade students. Roland Michener Secondary School recently updated its academic integrity policy to make it crystal clear what counts as cheating.
Because computer programs designed to catch AI cheating are often inaccurate, Boyle says many schools are using them with caution.
A recent Stanford University study found that commercial AI detection tools are highly unreliable and systematically biased, falsely flagging essays written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated more than 60 per cent of the time.
Instead of relying solely on flawed software, local schools are leaning on teachers knowing their students’ writing styles, and moving toward heavily supervised, in-class tests.
“If we can’t verify who did the work, we can’t actually assess student learning,” Boyle says.
The push for local rules comes as school boards across Alberta wait for the province to update the standard curriculum. While the Alberta government recently teamed up with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute to hand out basic learning kits, individual school districts are mostly left on their own to figure things out.
“It’s tough because AI is moving at such a fast pace, we are just learning about it ourselves and yet we’re supposed to be miles ahead of the students,” Boyle says. “We’re building the plane in the air, so to speak.”
To help teachers catch up, the school division is launching an AI training program next year. But local officials stress that keeping kids safe online is a community effort that requires help from parents.
Boyle is especially worried about modern AI chatbots. She notes that some kids are forming deep emotional connections with these online programs, which leaves them vulnerable to digital harm.
“We need to work as a community to teach our children the importance of real-world relationships and person-to-person interaction,” Boyle says. “It genuinely does take a village, and Slave Lake is a community that shows up for its kids.”
The cautious, managed approach to AI taken by local educators mirrors how other regional services are adapting to the technology. At the Lesser Slave Regional Fire Service, for example, personnel see AI acting as a tool for planning and education.
In fact, AI is already making an impact in their own training classrooms, where firefighters use programs like ChatGPT to better understand complex textbook materials. “AI is great at assisting people in understanding things in a better way, or describing things better than what the textbook said, because everybody learns differently,” senior firefighter Mitchell Mann says.
Much like the school division’s focus on ensuring students do not offload their actual work to a machine, Mann says the physical and human demands of firefighting cannot be automated. “When it comes down to actually doing the job of physical labour, no, it’s not something that we need to really worry about at this point in time,” he says.
Ultimately, whether in a secondary school classroom or an emergency response vehicle, Mann views AI as a vast resource that is already quietly helping emergency responders, but the core of the job remains firmly in human hands. “I would say AI in the fire service right now is at an assist point, and it probably is going to be an assist point for quite some time,” he says.
Armaan Khanna
Local Journalism Initiative
Reporter