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VOL. 100 NO. 38
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Districts assess AI’s potential to change education By HERNESTO GALDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
Courtesy Michael Amorgianos
Students in the Social Emotional Learning room at Lawrence Middle School last year, working on socializing and arts and crafts.
Schools seeing the effects of anxiety By HERNESTO GALDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
Leaving for school in the morning is a newly appreciated blessing for most students these days, who not long ago languished at home, learning remotely — or trying to — in front of their computers. They didn’t have to get dressed for school, but as the pandemic dragged on, they discovered all the things they missed about being there. “When we talk about students coming to school every day,” Lawrence Public Schools superintendent Ann Pedersen said. “It goes
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under the category of a sense of belonging.” But with Covid limitations long since lifted, school attendance has become an issue, researchers have found. According to data compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee, during the 2022-23 academic year, an estimated 6.5 million students across the United States were chronically absent. New York state saw a jump in chronic absenteeism from 19 percent in the 2018-19 school year to 33 percent in the year that ended in June, according to Dee’s research. ContinuEd on pagE 8
Whether they will incorporate artificial intelligence into their curriculums — and if so, how — continues to be a hot topic of discussion in Five Towns schools. AI, the ability for a computer program to think and learn substantially faster than humans, processing language and solving problems, is now in the spotlight, though the technology is hardly new. Smart speaker voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, and automated phone services, have been around for years. Children attending school are growing up with technology. So how much of a role should it play in their education? According to an EdWeek Research Center survey, 33 percent of educators view AI tools as “fairly important” when it comes to teaching students. Lawrence Woodmere Academy, in Woodmere, is fully embracing AI, according to Hank William Sr., the school’s headmaster. “We’re looking to embrace it, because I think the reality is — and it can be very debatable — that I don’t think it’s going away,” Williams said with a
chuckle. “If we can expose it the right way, and have students understand it and use it the right way and embrace it enough, I think it would benefit the kids in the future.” LWA, which completed several renovations and upgrades throughout its Woodmere Boulevard building in preparation for the new school year, also brought in tech expert teacher John Tiliakos to acquaint students with the technology. Tiliakos has taught children and adults computer programming, and will lead students in grades five through 12 in a new class called “How Artificial Intellig ence Works in our World,” which can be taken as a semester or full-year course with activities/assignments changing based on grade level. “When we speak about artificial intelligence, we want a machine to ‘think like an individual,’” Tiliakos said. “So we must guide the machine to do things.” But there are concerns about artificial intelligence’s impact. Most likely troubled by sky-isfalling stories in the media and their own worries, 54 percent of Americans view AI as a threat to humanity, according to a recent Quinnipiac University survey. ContinuEd on pagE 16