This Colorado school district just banned ChatGPT. Here's what they're doing instead.

The Boulder Valley School District is banning ChatGPT on school Wi-Fi for all of its students. This follows BVSD's policy to ban cell phones during the school day last year. Earlier this year, Denver Public Schools limited its use of ChatGPT, and now Boulder Valley School District is doing the same.

At Nevin Platt Middle School, Gabrielle Fuqua teaches multimedia and Spanish classes and is always working to check in with every student. But when she can't be everywhere at once, she uses technology to help.

"One thing that AI can do with students, as far as like versus a worksheet, is like with the chatbot that I built, it has all of the standards, it has all of the information I have given the student, it can identify places where the student may have missed a day in school, maybe they missed something in understanding and it can personally explain them to them on the spot," Fuqua said.

BVSD aims to have better control over how students utilize AI, so school administrators have blocked ChatGPT on school Wi-Fi for students and are exclusively using the AI platform MagicSchool instead.

BVSD's Director of Academic Services, Lynn Gershman, says the district is balancing AI's function as a tool with concerns around ChatGPT's privacy policy and adult mode.

"For the first time, I feel like we're being proactive. We're not reacting. We got ahead of ChatGPT," Gershman said, "One of the things we were watching for was when they were going to create chat rooms. Those private chat rooms are not something we can moderate, and while many of them are probably very innocent, if there is bullying going on inside those chat rooms, we wouldn't know, and that's not OK."

Leading up to this decision, the district started meeting this fall with about 50 parents, teachers, and students every month. The district plans to continue these meetings as they form more written AI policies.

Gershman explained in the current AI program MagicSchool, "The teachers have full control over what the kids can and can't use in terms of the AI tools; they have similar tools. They might have idea generators, sentence starters, chatbots for with like a historic character."

Chat GPT's creator, OpenAI, sent CBS Colorado a statement, "OpenAI offers a free version of ChatGPT built for teachers and districts. It has education-grade privacy, security, and compliance features..." Chat GPT for teachers is used by 150,000 teachers and staff, with none in Colorado. BVSD says they began using the MagicSchool before ChatGPT had an educational option, and they are happy with the current platform.

Using the AI platform, teachers like Fuqua are working to develop lessons with the advancing technology.

"When you are able to implement new teaching strategies or refresh your lessons or incorporate new ideas that you're learning, your students are more engaged. That reduces teacher burnout. You're not spending hours and hours redoing lessons," Fuqua said, "By giving it to them in many ways, that's how you're going to reach the most students."

The district plans to have more public meetings about its AI policies in March.