Greenville County Schools now allows middle and high school teachers to utilize MagicSchool AI in the classroom.
The generative artificial intelligence platform offers educational tools for both teachers and students. The school district’s board of trustees attended a workshop on Oct. 14 to learn more about MagicSchool AI and its tools.
“AI is being utilized in public education everywhere,” said Board Chair Carolyn Styles. “As board members, we’re responsible for understanding what is taking place in our schools and what we need to inform our communities about.”
Pilot programs testing MagicSchool AI were completed at Rudolph Gordon School and Fountain Inn High School last spring. GCS allowed the AI platform to be used in middle and high schools across the school district starting the 2025-26 academic year.
Tuesday’s workshop included a demonstration of how teachers can use MagicSchool AI to create activities for students to further engage with the curriculum they are learning in class. The board also had the opportunity to test some of the tools available on MagicSchool AI, including a quiz generator and an AI tutor.
“We have a lot of teachers who are really in love with this tool because it is engaging for students,” said Susan Stevens, GCS’s associate superintendent of academics. “It allows students to have a very differentiated experience, a very unique experience. It also encourages students to do a lot of self-reflection.”
Teachers are required to complete two hours of online training modules for MagicSchool AI in order to incorporate it into their classroom. Students must also complete MagicSchool training and sign a student appropriate use contract before using the AI platform. Board Trustee Anne Pressley stressed the importance of the district continuing to ensure that robust teacher training on MagicSchool AI continues.
“The level of intentionality that is going to be required to ensure that this thing does what we want it to do is huge,” Pressley said. “There are a million ways that this could not do what we need it to do.”
Read more about the use of AI in Greenville County Schools
Students’ access and use of MagicSchool AI is monitored by their teacher. Teachers are responsible for uploading the information that will be utilized by the AI tool to learning activities for the students. Students cannot use the platform for free search like other generative AI platforms, such as ChatGPT.
Stevens explained that MagicSchool AI is not something that the school district would have teachers use as a graded assessment for students. Instead, teachers can use the student engagement data from MagicSchool AI to guide their instruction and identify what information needs to be further reviewed.
“AI is simply a tool to use to enrich learning for our students,” Styles said. “I think it’s a great tool because it allows students to go at their own pace and to build their own conceptual framework of a skill.”
