Written by: Elisabeth Lepert, Educational Technology Director
Silicon Valley’s pioneering spirit of innovation has always inspired our school’s approach to education. Decades ago, Silicon Valley International School students were exploring the Minitel, a pre-internet network device with the then-impressive ability to get weather updates from across the globe or look up phone numbers in Paris. Contrast that with today’s students growing up in a world with chatbots, machine learning models, and other forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As technology continues to advance, INTL understands the importance of evolving alongside it, ensuring that our curriculum remains cutting-edge and relevant by integrating new technologies to fuel creativity, exploration, and learning.
While AI is not new, its recent growth and accessibility have prompted conversations about its role in education, including how it may influence academic integrity and writing practices. History shows that similar concerns have always arisen with emergent technologies, from the printing press, to personal computers and the internet. While requiring careful consideration, attempting to ban new technologies outright would neither be practical nor beneficial for our students.
With this openness to innovation comes the responsibility to establish thoughtful parameters for technology’s role at INTL. To that end, we have integrated AI literacy into our curriculum, equipping students with the skills to effectively use, evaluate, and critically engage with AI-generated content. These efforts are part of a broader commitment to embedding responsible technology use and digital citizenship across our curriculum.
AI literacy begins early, even when the technology is not the central focus of a unit of study. Kindergarteners learn about perception through activities like observing patterns or sorting objects. In time, this knowledge helps lay a framework to learn about how AIs perceive the world.
In the unit “Human Innovations Transform How People Live”, 5th Graders learn how AI models are trained using data. They dive into why the quality and amount of that data really matters. Along the way, they also talk about the ethics behind it all, having discussions to help them fully understand the impact of what they’ve learned.
In High School, a discussion arose in a department meeting about identifying AI deepfakes in the news and on social media. The impact these faked pieces can have on our students made us realize how much we needed to reinforce in our students the skill of assessing sources when doing research. Critical analysis and evaluating the credibility of a source is an essential part of knowledge in today’s day and age.
Additionally, how to interact with AI can be thought of as learning another language: how to speak to it, and how to program in the appropriate parameters to get the answers that are being sought. Becoming fluent in this AI language will help set students apart and will likely become another branch of technological education.
INTL’s forward-thinking approach to technology integration ensures that our students are not only prepared for the evolving digital landscape, but also equipped to engage with it critically and responsibly.
By embedding AI literacy across grade levels and within the context of the IB curriculum, we empower students to navigate the ethical, practical, and innovative aspects of AI.
