This Calgary school is embracing artificial intelligence for report cards, lesson planning

One Calgary school is using artificial intelligence to help teachers with some of their most time-consuming tasks: creating lesson plans and writing report card comments.

It's just one example of how AI is becoming more common in the school system, as high school students turn to it for ideas and researchers debate the best ways of addressing it in the classroom.

Connect Charter School, a grade 4 to 9 school in southwest Calgary, worked with a University of Calgary researcher to develop two generative AI tools aimed at reducing the cognitive load for teachers while completing those two tasks.

Brett Toner teaches a class called creative technologies to grade 7 to 9 students and said he loves getting help with lesson planning. But his principal continually stresses that teachers still have full responsibility for the students' learning.

"A lot of the time, you're just looking for that spark of an idea where it's like, where should I take this lesson? Where should I take this unit? And that tool has really been helpful with that," said Toner.

"It really can give you that spark in one minute rather than brainstorming on it for days or weeks and finally having that aha moment."

Connect Charter School in the neighbourhood of Lakeview follows the Alberta curriculum but with an emphasis on science and technology. That's all been programmed into the tools.

So when Toner needs a new idea, he sits down at a computer and types in the desired outcomes, length of the unit and other elements, such as whether it should be hands on. He gets a suggested lesson plan back within minutes, then tweaks all the material to fit his teaching style. Or, if he doesn't like the idea, he just submits his request again. 

The tools — called Ally and Harmony — were introduced last year.

For report cards, teachers enter student grades and other assessments. The AI tool generates report card comments for each student on its own. The teacher's job is to review, spot errors, edit the content to make it sound like their own voice, and add anything additional. 

"That's such a time-consuming process that any efficiencies you can have go a long way," said Toner.

AI is now present in many people's lives, from Microsoft Copilot giving summaries in email inboxes to Google giving summaries before search results. But the tools are still developing. Some researchers say it's still too early to incorporate AI into classrooms where students use it directly, but there's a danger because older students are using it already.

From recipes to schoolwork, students use AI

To hear from students directly, CBC Calgary visited two high schools in northwest Calgary. 

All eight students who spoke with CBC outside the school after class said they use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek to varying degrees.

Some said they use AI to find good shows to watch or to help calculate ratios in recipes. Others admitted to using it for schoolwork and passing off that work as their own.

A couple of students said they'd gotten in trouble for using AI on assignments in the past but found ways around getting caught — like rewriting the content to make it sounds like theirs, or using online rewriting tools to get the text past AI detectors.

Grade 12 student Ava Grenkow tries to use AI as little as possible — she said she doesn't want to become dependent on it. She worries about the harms, like how AI makes it easy to spread misinformation online.

"More and more technology is becoming a part of our lives, so we should be taught about AI and how to be safe and use it carefully," said Grenkow.

Starting with educators

Soroush Sabbaghan played a key role in developing the tools for Connect Charter School. But he turned down their first request — to help them get students using AI.

He's an associate professor at the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary who specializes in generative AI in education. He knows students are using AI tools in high school but still believes teachers shouldn't teach it in the classroom yet because they're still working to understand the best approach.

But Sabbaghan said he was happy to create the lesson planning and report card tools because it will help the teachers understand the potential and drawbacks of AI. Now he's in touch with several other schools interested in using it.

As for introducing AI to younger students in the classroom, there are ethical challenges, he said.

"Students tend to accept what an AI says, sometimes just because the AI uses bigger words … and it just sounds so intelligent. We need to teach our students first to look beyond the words … and really focus on what the AI is saying," said Sabbaghan.

"Once we ramp up those critical thinking skills so that our students are equipped with the knowledge of, 'Yes, it's beautiful, but what exactly are you saying? Are you amplifying a particular voice while silencing a different group?' … Then that's probably a good time where we could introduce students to this technology."

When that time comes, Sabbaghan said, he wants to see simplified tools created so students can learn about the challenges and opportunities of AI before they use a full-fledged tool like ChatGPT.

Sabbaghan said he predicts a curriculum for high school students in Alberta will be developed in the next year or two.

Is ChatGPT hallucinating?

At the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, manager of AI literacy Jill Kowalchuk said Connect Charter School has been much quicker to embrace the technology than many other schools and school districts.

"In the public school space, there's still a lot of trepidation when it comes to teachers and how they're using it," said Kowalchuk.

She taught at Elk Island Public Schools before going back to university to work on a PhD focused on how generative AI affects teachers' moral agency.

The Calgary Board of Education and the Calgary Catholic School District say teachers are allowed to use only AI tools approved by the school boards. For the Catholics, that includes Magic School AI, Copilot and Gemini. The CBE has approved Brisk Teaching, ChatGPT and Magic School.

When it comes to students, the CBE said kids can use approved AI tools on activities and assignments only when their teachers explicitly allow it. The Catholic school board said it doesn't promote AI use for students.

Kowalchuk said nuanced discussions around the use of AI are important, especially given concerns with plagiarism and cheating at the university level.

But like Sabbaghan, she said there are risks that come with exposing AI to students too early.

"Setting up students with AI without the fundamental skills that they need, I think, could lead to things like cognitive atrophy or the lessening of certain cognitive processes that we want students to be able to develop in the absence of technology."

First, she said students must build their critical thinking skills and learn things like how to detect when a generative AI like ChatGPT is "hallucinating," a term used for when AI creates false information.

Kowalchuk also wants educators to maintain their moral agency as the technology evolves. She pointed to the "rubber stamp phenomenon" — the fear that professionals will become "rubber stampers" to ideas and decisions made entirely by AI.

"My biggest fear is having students create everything with AI and then a teacher using AI to grade everything. And basically it's just two AIs communicating and the humanness of that relationship is completely gone," she said.

"I don't necessarily have the answer to this, but the question is how do we ensure that the relationship is maintained and nurtured even as this technology advances?"

In the meantime, Kowalchuk said any educator who knows or suspects their students are using AI should start having conversations about it in the classroom.

Informing the broader school system

Back at Connect Charter School on a Tuesday afternoon, the halls are crowded with students in their various option classes. It looks like a regular public school, with some clues that it's technology-focused — including plaques hung near the front office naming it one of 16 Apple Distinguished Schools in Canada.

According to Apple, that title is given to "some of the most innovative schools in the world."

Superintendent Chris Gilmour said one of the school's pillars is all about being innovative with technology to improve the learning environment.

"With the evolution of artificial intelligence … we really thought that the field would open up and provide new opportunities for our teachers," said Gilmour. "What we want is our teachers using their time where it's most important, and we feel that's with the students in the classroom."

He said AI tools have involved a lot of trial and error, and he's prioritizing teachers' feedback to ensure the technology improves with each iteration.

"We're hopeful that by sharing what we've learned here that that will help inform the greater public system with the tools that we have today in Harmony and Ally."

And while Gilmour understands there's still more to learn about the ethical use of AI among kids in the classroom, he said he does see a day "in the near future" when that will happen.