Mondays with Maria - 11/2/26
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Maurice Draggon, AI: Hi, I am Maurice Draggon.
Maurice Draggon, OCPS Chief Information Officer: No, I'm the real Maurice Dragon. You're watching Mondays with Maria.
Announcer: Presented by Addition Financial Credit Union. Here's our OCPS superintendent, Dr. Maria Vazquez.
Dr. Vazquez: Hi, everyone. Today we're talking about a hot topic: artificial intelligence, or AI. AI is part of our daily lives, from how we work and communicate to how students learn and prepare for future careers. As with any new technology, parents understandably have questions about privacy, safety, academic integrity, and how AI fits into the classroom. To help answer all those questions, I'm joined by our incredible Chief Information Officer, Maurice Draggon. Maurice, welcome to the show.
Maurice Draggon: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Vazquez: All right, so let's just jump right into this, right? So how are we using AI in the classroom?
Maurice Draggon: You know, I think it's important to start by talking about how we are not using AI in the classroom. So, number one, we are not using AI to replace teachers. Teachers are the core folks in the classroom that help our students to learn, and we need every single teacher in the classroom doing their work every day. The second thing that we're not doing is we're not using AI to replace the core instruction or the feedback that students receive, because that feedback needs to come from a teacher, and it needs to be something that is personalized to the student based upon what the teacher knows about the growth they're seeing lesson to lesson. So how are we using AI? When we talk about the ways we're using AI, it really leans into areas such as personalized instructional support for students, especially if you have a student who's doing independent work, they may need some additional tutoring beyond what, when they're directly working with the teacher.
Maurice Draggon: AI can give them targeted instruction that is specialized to where they are at and help them with any learning gaps they are experiencing. And that will be followed up by the teacher to help make sure that whatever was shared and what they learned during that time where they were using AI is still something that the teacher can make sure is leading them through what they need to learn as part of the lesson.
Dr. Vazquez: So, it sounds like it's important that we ensure students are still learning critical thinking skills.
Maurice Draggon: Absolutely. Critical thinking skills, that is the core part of the work that we, that we have to do. And when you think about critical thinking skills, the framework for the critical thinking skills, or the directions, if you want to call it that, we follow really are the standards. And the standards help us to understand what a child needs to know at this point in their learning. And when you look at the standards, teachers do this all the time, and it's part of the skill set of being a teacher: you look at the standard, and you say, "Where are the things that I can use to help make sure that my students are learning the standard and that they're individually learning the standard in the best way they can?" And that may include the use of AI, and it may not.
Maurice Draggon: And I think in the places where it does, the teachers are appropriately applying AI, and in the places where it does not, then they're not using it as a tool.
Dr. Vazquez: So, another important concern that I hear, not just from parents, but I hear it from teachers, I also hear it from students, is around misuse and academic integrity, right? So, they are missing out on the learning.
Maurice Draggon: Yes. Yeah. You know, I think about cheating, and I think there's a lot that's going on right now with AI and cheating. One of the things though, I'm a parent and I've talked to other parents, and we've had conversations around cheating and AI. We've never had a conversation where it was said, "You know, I think I'm okay with my child cheating as long as not with AI. Yes. You know, no one likes cheating overall, right? And I think it's what makes cheating with AI unique, because it's two layers there. The first layer is that you are getting the work done and you didn't do it, which is traditional cheating, but there's this other piece that I think folks intuitively understand, which is that you're also cheating yourself out of the process, the learning process itself, which is also critically important.
Maurice Draggon: And I think there are a couple of ways that as a district, we, we work on that. So, number one, inside of our AI policy, we have language that states that if you are doing an assignment, you can't use AI unless the teacher says it's appropriate for you to use AI as part of this assignment. And the second piece is actually being really intentional about the tools that we're using to make sure that the tools are not tools that will just give you the answer like consumer AI tools will do, but they're actually tools that will use things such as the Socratic tutoring method to help make sure that you're getting help, but you're not just shortcutting the learning process.
Dr. Vazquez: I think that's important for our families and our students to understand. Additionally, we spent a lot of time on our policy, almost a year really, in conversations with various stakeholders so that we could develop a policy that took into account the concerns, but also how we would be using AI to help our students become better learners. So, the focus really is not just on enforcement, but on teaching them how to be responsible digital citizens, right? And so that they have this tool. They know what the guardrails are; they understand how it can be helpful, but then they also understand the dangers, really, of being too reliant. So, another major concern that I hear deals with privacy, right? Families want to know that their child's information is protected. So, could you speak a little bit about what Orange County Public Schools does to ensure the data is secure?
Maurice Draggon: Yeah.
Maurice Draggon: I think it's an important question because the experience that most folks have with AI when they're using it in the consumer AI tools is that what makes those tools really powerful is that they get to know you, they get to know all of your information, they use that to come back and make things personalized towards you. Most folks, they don't want that for their child when they're using an AI tool in school. So, I think it's important, number one, that we're not using just the consumer version of any of the AI tools that are there. We're using education versions that have guardrails, that have filters built in. And these are tools that we are creating contracts with the companies that we're working with. And inside those contracts, we're saying, "You can't train on our data. You can't use this data to personalize and create something that's going to track students.
Maurice Draggon: And if we no longer have a contract with you, you need to delete our data." And we're taking those steps and being also very considerate and specific, and when we're adopting tools to make sure that we are really putting things in that are going to make an educational difference for our students and not just adopting AI tools to adopt them.
Dr. Vazquez: Wow. We're out of time, and I didn't get to all of my questions, so we're definitely going to have you back on the show. Thank you for sharing all of this information. It's a very important topic. And as we continue exploring emerging technologies, OCPS remains focused on three important commitments. Student privacy, ensuring teachers remain in control of instruction, and using technology to enhance instruction. So, thank you so much for being here on the show. If you'd like to learn more about how OCPS is approaching AI in education, visit OCPS.net, speak with your child's school, or find more in our code of student conduct. Coming up on our podcast: more of our conversation on AI in the classroom. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like, follow, and subscribe. Have a wonderful week.
Announcer: For an extended conversation on today's topic, listen to the Mondays with Maria Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. Mondays with Maria is presented by Audition Financial Credit Union. Count us in for every step on your financial journey. Learn more at Additionfi.com. For more OCPS news and information, visit TheSlice.ocps.net. I'm your announcer, Jamir Jones, a student at OCVS. Thanks for watching and have a great week.