The Peninsula School District is rolling out personal AI agents for educators so they can spend more time “being human.”
The Washington school district is taking a top-down approach to AI education before pushing student-centered AI policy, says Chief Information Officer Kris Hagel.
“One of the things we realized was we didn’t do a great job getting our principals and our instructional leaders on board to lead our teachers so they can do the deeper work with kids,” he says.
Part of the district’s effort to ease educators’ hesitancies toward the technology is to provide it as a personal assistant.
The agents operate using agentic AI, a system that can operate independently to achieve an assigned goal. Unlike normal chatbots that rely on users to input their next steps, agentic AI can use web tools or software programs and fix its own mistakes without user feedback.
“Agentic agents can run on a schedule. They can do proactive work,” says Hagel, who will be speaking more in depth about the initiative at the Future of Technology Conference in Orlando next year.
For example, one of his high school chemistry teachers used the AI to create science simulations about the cell membrane and interactive learning games. The technology has a place in every area of education from career and technical education to financial literacy.
“We have a new aeronautical academy where kids can learn to be a pilot,” he explains. “Our CTE folks said, ‘We have all of these ideas for airplane simulations.’ So, they started building simulations.”
“We’re fascinated by what we can build, and we’ve got a really strong foundation here,” he adds. “Now, it’s just getting it in front of people so they can use their creativity to see what they can come up with, which is what we’re hoping and planning for this year.”
Addressing modern challenges
Innovation often moves faster than school districts can plan, Hagel says. For many parents, technology evolves uncomfortably fast.
Nationwide, there continues to be pushback against harmful technology and excessive screentime in K-12 classrooms, an issue the Peninsula School District acted on during the pandemic.
In 2023, the district banned students from using cellphones except during lunch. It was a direct response to concerns about screen addictions exacerbated during COVID.
The policy was a “knee-jerk” reaction to a digital literacy gap that cellphone bans can’t close, according to Hagel.
“We’re nearly four years into this now. Not every teacher enforces it consistently,” he says. “When you don’t have consistent expectations, students will work and find every hole around it.”
However, technology has its purpose in the classroom. The district spent roughly $4.5 million on MacBook Neos for student use as educators prioritize “intentional use” cases for technology in instruction.
“There are a lot of bad practices that take place or bad experiences that kids have on technology in school,” he says. “Our big focus, and the reason technology is out and in front of kids this year, is that technology use needs to be based on an instructional practice or goal that the teacher has in the classroom.”
Teaching digital literacy
Hagel’s concerns mirror those previously expressed to District Administration about whether educators are correctly responding to the issue.
Children ages 8 to 18 spend roughly seven and-a-half hours a day watching or using screens, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
However, instead of banning screens altogether, educators must teach students how to safely navigate technology and the online world, Jamie Nunez, senior manager of outreach and training at Common Sense Media, told DA in May. This includes guidance on using AI.
“There needs to be an understanding about how kids are accessing information and evaluating that information,” he said. “Media literacy, information literacy and, I would add, AI literacy—the ability to understand a tool like AI and what its outputs are—are just as important.”
