How Canadian teachers are adapting to Artificial Intelligence

It’s a cold, snowy afternoon, in Moncton, N.B., at Lou MacNarin School. About 18 kindergartners stand in line in the school hall, waiting to enter the Grade 4 classroom. Robert Brant Guimond, a Grade 4 teacher, welcomes the younger children. As they enter, he asks them which of his students they want to partner with. As soon as everyone is paired, Guimond gives instructions: each pair will write a story together on an iPad.

The class bursts into excitement and chatter. For the next 35 minutes, imaginations run wild. Once time runs out, Guimond asks who is ready to share their story.

Every hand shoots up.

The chosen pair stand in front of everyone. Guimond takes their iPad and plugs it into the school’s speaker.

He hits play on the iPad. A narrator speaks:

“Awww!” the students exclaim in unison. They want more from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered storyteller.

Guimond is among the growing number of Canadian educators adapting their classroom teaching to include AI. It’s no small task. AI is a proverbial moving target, with novel opportunities and fresh challenges emerging almost daily. Many educators say they haven’t had time to assess the technology’s classroom potential; as a result, some teachers are embracing AI, while others are more resistant.

The new kid on the block: ChatGPT

AI is already in the classroom whether teachers like it or not — thanks to students. 

“Educators didn’t have a choice.” said Myke Healy, a researcher from the University of Calgary with over 20 years’ experience in elementary and secondary school education. “We had to adapt.”

ChatGPT burst onto the scene in November 2022. Developed by OpenAI, this chatbot could generate and respond to users’ input with responses that initially appear human and accurate. ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) — a computer program that processes and understands human language while also generating responses. LLMs are probabilistic, meaning they only predict what word or sentence comes next. It accomplishes this by training on large amounts of data. GPT-4, the current iteration of ChatGPT, has been trained on one petabyte of data — about one million gigabytes.

Students quickly realized they could turn to ChatGPT for their homework. They could easily ask the free chatbot to generate an essay on, say, the role of Canadian soldiers during World War II, and it would spit it out in seconds.

Jeffrey Zhang, a senior high-school student and student trustee with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said he heard about ChatGPT back in the ninth grade from his friends who were playing around with it.

“But then they also started to apply it to schoolwork and at school,” he said.

A 2024 survey by KPMG LLP, showed seven per cent of Canadian high school students use AI for schoolwork.

Zhang recalls his French teacher explaining the acceptable ways ChatGPT could be used for schoolwork, but the teacher also encouraged students not to use it on a daily basis.

The initial response from some North American school boards was to ban AI from schools. The New York City Public Schools — the largest school district in the U.S. — banned ChatGPT in January 2023. A few months later, it rolled back the ban. David Banks, former chancellor of New York City Public Schools, said the ban was justified as it gave them time to understand the technology. Educators were given learning resources about AI and how to teach and discuss it with students.

“Our nation is potentially on the brink of a significant societal shift driven by generative artificial intelligence,” Banks said in an op-ed published on Chalkbeat, a news education website. “We will also ensure our students are supported by AI’s opportunities and prepared for the jobs of today and the future.”

Not all teachers agree. Some have adjusted their assignments so that students can’t use AI to help them.

Cathy Quinn is one of those teachers. For more than 25 years, she has taught high school English literature in Halifax. Last summer, Quinn felt she was in “this delusional world” believing AI wasn’t making an impact in education.

Reality hit her at the start of the 2024-2025 school year.

AI made her feel “a little out of control” because she couldn’t be certain which students’ work was authentic and not AI generated. In the past, she allowed her students to do their assignments at home. Now, she instructs students to handwrite and submit their assignments in class.

“Critical thinking requires being challenged, and it requires going outside of your comfort zone,” Quinn said. “And (ChatGPT) is not forcing them outside of their comfort zone because it’s just right there.”

Healy warns teachers about AI detection tools and says they can’t be trusted.

“They’re the worst way to go, (the AI detectors) are highly flawed,” he said.

AI detector tools identified only 39.5 per cent of unfiltered AI-generated content, according to a 2024 study from the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. However, the detection rate dropped to about 22 per cent when the AI-generated content was slightly altered, such as adding spelling errors and lengthy sentence structures.

“I’ve had students come up to me in my office and say, ‘You know, sir. I’m worried that my work is too good. And my teacher is going to think that I used AI,’” said Healy.

AI is developing so quickly that it is hard for detection tools to keep pace. A study published in the Journal of Academic Ethics in 2023 cautioned that this “arms race” is not sustainable, predicting that students will continue to find ways to fool the detection tools. For example, students can use Automated Paraphrasing Tools (APTs) to make their generated content sound more human.

CanCode is a federal government program that invests in non-profit organizations that teach K-12 students digital skills, aimed at setting students up “for future success in the 21st-century economy.” In 2024, CanCode received close to $40 million to fund non-profits that teach AI digital skills, with a particular focus on serving underrepresented communities, such as Black youth, Indigenous youth and girls.

“There’s less of an emphasis now on things like academic honesty and more of a sense of AI as an educational technology,” said Matthew Johnson, director of education at MediaSmarts, a federal charity focused on digital media literacy.

The Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB) started the school year with new AI guiding principles. Teachers and students are encouraged to think critically about AI and use the technology in a way that enhances learning.

“A strategic commitment of being innovative means you don’t block things right away,” said Tom D’Amico, the OSCB’s director of education. “You learn about it. You run pilots, you experiment, you network with other districts that may be ahead of you.”

Erin Doak is an OSCB high school teacher who teaches Grade 9 geography and religion. She had a student who was struggling with research and applying concepts from a lesson. Doak worked with the student for two days with little progress. She also had the student work with a special education professional who supports students with learning disabilities. The student still struggled.

“And after 17 years of education, I have to admit, I was stumped,” said Doak.

She then tried an AI chatbot called Sidekick to assist the student. Doak provided the chatbot with the concepts, assignment, student’s profile, and asked it to speak to the student in an informal tone. A day later, the student successfully completed the assignment. Doak said the chatbot was able to engage the student and help them learn by turning it into a game.

“For me, it’s really not about the tool. It’s about the outcome,” said Doak. “To see the student have success and to be able to use AI as a scaffolding tool…helps me as a teacher.”

OCSB is part of a cross-country movement to teach students how to effectively use AI. The C21 Canada CEO Academy – a Pan-Canadian professional network of school system superintendents – recently released its AI Use Case Initiative for Canadian Education. School boards and districts were asked to share their experience with AI in the classroom to encourage collaborative learning. School boards from Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and New Brunswick participated.

A new educational tool: AI

It’s day two of the 15th Canadian EdTech Summit at the University of Toronto (UofT) Scarborough. Everyone is eating lunch and networking on the main floor. Attendees are eating lunch and networking on the main floor. As students, teachers, school administrators, tech entrepreneurs and international guests discuss AI as an educational tool, the collective chatter is deafening.

After lunch, everyone heads to a circular lecture hall that seats 500 people. In its centre is an open space with a podium and six LED screens above. Attendees settle in as the organizers prepare the Dragon Den’s EdTech Start-Up Challenge, based on the CBC TV show with a strikingly similar name.

Contestants will deliver a two-minute pitch about their educational technology (EdTech) startups to a panel of judges. The reward: a one-year mentorship with Robert Martellacci — founder of Mindshare Learning and chair of the summit — and an exclusive booth at Future of Education Technology Conference 2025.

Among the six contestants is Mallory Maynard, founder of Gibbly, an AI tool she says helps teacher burnout by reducing lesson prep time by 30 per cent. It can generate quizzes and lessons within seconds. According to Maynard, teachers spend five to eight hours per week on lesson prep during evenings and on weekends. Gibbly can help teachers feel less likely to burnout or quit, she adds.

“Imagine what that would do to the student experience,” said Maynard. “Happy teacher equals happy students.”

The other participants each get their turn to impress the judges. Some pitched teaching students real-world skills, while others pitched using AI as an assistive tool for learning, teaching and administrative work. One of the participants even pitched an AI that could evaluate students’ learning based on the skills they acquired in the classroom.

In the end, Maynard wins the competition.

From a teacher’s perspective, it’s easy to see how big and lucrative the education market is for new AI tools. “It doesn’t seem like a gold mine when you’re actually in the middle of it,” said Johnson, the director of MediaSmarts. “But from the outside, it is.”

According to the Toronto Business Development Centre, the Canadian EdTech industry has seen major growth. In 2023, total revenues reached more than $2.3 billion. Close to 60 per cent of that market value comes from the pre-primary through to Grade 12 markets. There are over 1,500 AI startups in Canada alone, so more and more AI education technology companies are emerging to respond to the growing interest in using the tool in education.

It’s good for teachers to look for tools to make their teaching more effective, Johnson says, but cautions teachers and administrators to think more critically of corporations trying to “get their technology into schools.”

AI’s potential and pitfalls

Schools are adopting AI, but we still don’t know its long-term impacts on kids. Chris Kennedy, superintendent of schools and CEO at West Vancouver Schools, said he wonders what chunks of learning students may miss out on with AI around.

“What are the skills that we really will require students to have, in the world, going forward and which ones maybe not so much?” he asks.

What students do need to know are the ethical issues surrounding the technology.

First, it can be biased. The data used to train AI can reflect harmful stereotypes or assumptions. For example, Amazon once used an AI to help recruit more talented workers by examining resumes. Unfortunately, the AI favored men over women. It assumed, based on previous recruitment data, men were more qualified because they were hired more than women.

Second, AI can hallucinate. That’s the term used when it produces false or nonsensical information, usually based on limited data. One notable example is how ChatGPT answers the question, “How many ‘Rs’ are in the word ‘strawberry’?”  In 2024, users noted that ChatGPT’s consistent answer was two, not three.

Lastly, AI cannot reason like humans. It can only predict what word or sentence comes next based on the data it’s given. Benjamin Riley, founder of Cognitive Resonance, co-authored the Education Hazards of Generative AI, which explains the predictive nature of AI and explores the overall limitations and potential pitfalls of the technology in education.

“What makes us special as a human species is our ability to learn from one another and hold that central,” Riley said in an interview. “Don’t be bamboozled by some newfangled technological development.”

But to learn, students must comprehend what they’re being taught, and that’s where AI can assist students whose mother tongue is not English.

D’Amico, the education director of OSCB, recalls observing a Grade 4 student interacting with a math tool called Magma Math, and noticing it was responding to the student’s native language of Vietnamese. Since September, students from OSCB have asked for and received information from the app in 99 languages.

“That’s another transformative use of AI,” D’Amico said. “Because we can’t do that on our own. We don’t have 99 interpreters that can go around and help kids.”

Ron Darvin, an assistant professor in the department of language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia, said AI is good for “simulated conversations.” These tools allow for translanguaging – using multiple languages to communicate and learn. For example, if a student is studying in Canada, but their first language is Filipino, they can use AI to have practice conversations. And, if the student is unable to recall a word in English, the AI can respond back in Filipino instead.

“You can effectively shift between simulated conversation to actively asking the tool for reasons why these sentences had to be constructed a certain way,” Darvin said.

He also says teachers and students need to have conversations about AI in the classroom. Teachers must know how their students are using AI and how to best “steer students” into agentive practices that contribute to their learning.

Teachers vs time

Guimond, the Grade 4 teacher, first demonstrated how to build a chatbot using SchoolAI to show his students what is expected of them. After the demonstration, the fourth graders spent four days developing the chatbot before welcoming the kindergarteners into their classroom. Guimond said they were pretty “vague with what we asked of it” at first and did not get the responses they wanted. They eventually settled on making the chatbot help students create a story.

Kennedy Longaphie, the kindergarten teacher, spent a week teaching her students the parts of a story — character, setting, and conflict — to prepare the kindergartners for the upcoming activity with the Grade 4 students.

On the day of the activity, both kindergartners and fourth graders worked together with the chatbot by providing prompts and creating different stories.

It then generates the story about Layla the Unicorn that delights the kids.

Guimond asks the class “Who was the character in that story?”

One student answers, “Layla!”

“Layla, the pineapple?” he asks.

“No!” some students yell.

Another student says, “Layla the Unicorn!”

The students get loud and rowdy, but Guimond asks them to quiet down.

“And what was Layla’s problem?” he asks, “Does anyone remember? What happened?”

The room becomes quiet like a whisper.

“She got lost,” a student says.

“Does anyone remember where she got lost?” Guimond asks.

“In the forest!” another said.

After the kindergartners leave the room to go to their next class, Guimond speaks to his students. He asks them to think about the chatbot’s performance. The students point out that it uses words like “conflict” or “obstacles” in its questions, which is confusing to some of them. They suggest adjusting the chatbot to use simpler words for next time.

During class, Guimond had made sure to check whether students were attentive and understood their parts of the story, and that they were not just distracted on their iPads.

“The goal of it was mostly to help the kindergarteners learn their character, setting and plot,” Guimond said. “But also for my class just to get comfortable using the AI bot.”

Jordan Smith is leading the charge in bringing AI into the classrooms in the Anglophone East School District of Moncton, N.B. As the subject co–ordinator for K-12 educational technology, artificial intelligence, and innovation, she and her team spent the last year providing in-person sessions and also online resources on AI use to their educators.

“Professional learning and getting in front of that has been part of our plan,” Smith said.

Her team is currently working with Lou MacNarin School. For the unicorn story activity, Smith emphasizes digital skills as the main takeaway for the fourth graders. She says SchoolAI is a great tool for students to practice skills taught to them in class.

Guimond agrees. He said that during the story creation exercise, there might have been a kindergartner who didn’t quite understand the parts of the story.

“But then, by using the technology, it really hit home for that kid,” he said.

Guimond initially found preparing for this learning activity to be overwhelming. At home, he spent the majority of his free time learning about the chatbot. But his stress eased knowing he had help from Anna Doucette, an education support teacher for the school district. She works with 14 schools in the district to help teachers plan and deliver lessons on technology. For this activity, Doucette helped Guimond understand how to build the chatbot in SchoolAI and was present when the fourth graders were developing the chatbot. She usually builds the chatbot with the teacher, before introducing it to the class, so Guimond’s plan or idea was unique.

“I really like his approach of bringing the students into the process of building it with him,” said Doucette.

In Nova Scotia, the president of the provincial teachers’ union, said there is enough support and resources for teachers on how to use the different AI tools.

“Any pressure that I’ve heard of is totally self-inflicted as far as wanting to raise their level of teaching,” said Peter Day.

Quinn, the English literature teacher in Halifax, sees the benefits of AI and believes it could help students create outlines or summarize large texts. However, she is still unsure as to how to teach these skills properly and wants guidance.

“As a teacher, we’re always fighting against no time,” Quinn said. “I would love, maybe over the summer, to teach myself a little two-day workshop on AI.”

Quinn’s not the only teacher who feels that way.

Christine Emberly is a high school drama teacher in Halifax who recently taught a Mi’kmaw Studies course. She asked ChatGPT to write a five-paragraph essay on spirituality because she was curious about how students would use ChatGPT to complete her assignments. The resulting essay was filled with errors. She became concerned about relying on ChatGPT for her lessons, knowing she might mistakenly teach misinformation. Since then, she has stayed away from using it in her class but does see its benefits. She has used it to help her organize her thoughts and write emails.

The Halifax Regional Centre for Education (HRCE) provides professional development sessions for teachers on ethically using AI. However, these sessions usually take place outside of Emberly’s regular work hours.

“I have a family, so in my case, it just hasn’t been super convenient to be able to attend something like that,” she said.

According to a 2023 survey by the Alberta Teachers’ Association, about 60 per cent of its membership “do not believe their schools are adequately prepared to harness AI technologies effectively for the benefit of both students and teachers.” Despite that finding, the nearly 30 per cent of respondents who see AI in a positive light called for more professional development, training, and exposure to the technology.

Teaching the next generation

It’s a cold January morning. Falling snow can be seen through the classroom window at Riverview Middle School in Moncton as technology teacher Tara Earle instructs her sixth-grade students to get their iPads from the charging station. For today’s lesson, Earle has Steve Bampton, an education support teacher, helping her lead the learning activity.

Bampton starts by saying they will “learn about AI in school.” He adds they will be using a chatbot and asks the class if anyone has used a chatbot.

“ChatGPT!” one student says.

“My AI!” another says.

“What do you use that for?” Bampton asks.

“For Snapchat,” the student replies.

Bampton then says they will be using SchoolAI, to learn about AI. They go over the do’s and don’ts of using AI before Bampton displays two QR codes on the big computer screen in front of the class. The first brings them to the SchoolAI app, the other brings them to Padlet – a virtual post board for educational purposes.

Everyone decides whether they will work with a classmate or alone. Most of them then point their iPads at the first QR code, leading them to the chatbot in SchoolAI.

Bampton tells the class he can see their chats on his iPad. It’s his way of monitoring and making sure the students stay on task.

As the students open the chatbot, they are greeted with the same message:

SchoolAI: Hey there! Welcome to our chat about AI in school. Do you know what AI is? Have you ever used it? Let’s explore how AI is a part of our everyday lives!

At this point, the students start answering the chatbot’s questions. Here’s an example:

Another student asks, “Why’s my chat paused?”

“Why’s your chat paused? That’s weird,” Bampton said with a smile. “Someone must’ve paused your chat because you kept saying the same things over and over again.”

Earle and a few students giggle as the student’s chat remains paused.

Bampton goes to the student and asks if they’re ready to be un-paused. He asks the student what questions they’ll ask the chatbot going back into it.

Bampton said the technology will continue to permeate the space and his team thinks it’s best to get ahead of it with students.

New technologies, Bampton says, don’t go away. “So, it’s best to equip the kids with the proper skills and knowledge.”

About the author

Dheif Daniel Yunting

A Filipino reporter now based in Halifax, N.S. Awarded as one of the outstanding interns at the newspaper outlet 'The Freeman' in 2021. Graduated...