OpenAI's partnership bringing its known artificial intelligence systems into schools nationwide has now made its way into Wyoming, as ChatGPT for Teachers is now active for Laramie County School District 1 (LCSD1).
"This is all about the idea on helping teachers kind of take care of the managerial parts of their day,” said OpenAI Editorial Director Mark Murray. “This isn't interfering at all with what they're doing with the students."
Built for K-12 school system educators and leaders, ChatGPT for Teachers is said by OpenAI to allow for support, as the workspace can help everyday tasks from building lesson plans, crafting worksheets and more.
In speaking to LCSD1, ChatGPT is not a new tool for local teachers, but now being contractually offered in conjunction is dedicated training, direct oversight and protection of data.
"When they put their information in, it doesn't train these large language models, that data doesn't go outside of this sort of protected bubble, and so we're not concerned with it escaping and some of those things at first folks are worried about when the ChatGPT and other large language models came,” said LCSD1 Executive Director of Technology Kyle McKinney.
McKinney said thoughts revolving around technology to provide more data structure and governance started within months of the public release of ChatGPT-3 in late 2022.
Currently all LCSD1 employees can use ChatGPT for Teachers through their own free accounts on any smart device they have available, but sources told Wyoming News Now it’s just another tool in the toolbelt and is not a requirement.
"For a lot of teachers, we've actually heard from them that this saves them sometimes, on average, four to five hours every single week," said Murray.
"They're the ones educating our kids,” added McKinney. “We want to help them. We want to provide technology tools to assist. And this is just another one of those tools that can help make teachers’ lives easier."
LCSD1 is the first school district in Wyoming to partner with OpenAI for ChatGPT for Teachers, but McKinney said he would not be surprised to see other districts around the state also look into doing partnerships of their own.
Republished with permission from Wyoming News Now, a TV news outlet covering the Cheyenne and Casper areas.
