Teacher Adam Gravenor hands out lesson sheets he created with the help of AI technology to accompany the class textbook at Coronado High School in Colorado Springs on Nov. 17, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
COLORADO SPRINGS — As Adam Gravenor’s world history class settled into their seats one day in November, he handed out worksheets with questions about social class changes that occurred during the mid-to-late 1800s.
Turn your textbooks to page 571, Gravenor told his students at Coronado High School in Colorado Springs.
The pupils, with only their textbooks and pencils, began answering questions about how industrialization and colonization changed society, from literature to the role of women.
Not a single student used a computer as the teens wrote their answers that morning, and yet their worksheet was created with artificial intelligence.
The rise of AI in education has spurred fears of students cheating and not developing critical thinking skills. But K-12 teachers like Gravenor are also turning to the technology to help draft lesson plans, track students’ progress and create assignments.
“AI has reframed how we think about the classroom,” Gravenor said.
The Colorado Springs School District 11, which runs Coronado High, piloted AI with a small group of teachers two years ago. Now, about 100 of the roughly 1,800 teachers in the district use AI to create lesson plans, classroom activities and other academic content.
Gravenor can use AI to draft lesson plans based on class curriculum and state academic standards, which he said helps make both the teacher and his students more present in the classroom.
The teacher now leads discussions that teach pupils about certain subjects as well as interpersonal and other skills instead of just having students complete worksheets on their laptops. This has helped students get off their laptops and into their textbooks, Gravenor said.
Teens are also using good old pen and paper to complete assignments more than they used to when Gravenor started teaching at the start of the pandemic, he said.
“AI is getting my students off their computers,” he said. “… It is actually way more hands-on.”
Schools are still in the early stages of embracing AI, but research published by the College Board in October found that high school students are increasingly using generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to brainstorm, edit essays and conduct research.
More than half of the students who responded to the College Board’s survey said they use AI to complete assignments. But only about 13% of educators said their schools encourage AI use in all classrooms.
Proponents argue that students need to learn how to use AI so they are successful in the future when they move on to college and careers. Students also need to learn how to use AI responsibly, similarly to how previous generations were taught to use the internet and Wikipedia when they were first created, Gravenor said.
“AI has been let out of the bag and is part of our world now,” Gravenor said. “…In a way, it’s teaching them to work with the tools they have without doing the work for them.”
Others have criticized AI systems for being inaccurate, creating privacy concerns and being tools students can use to cheat on assignments.
Generative AI uses information from the internet to create text, image and sound responses based on a user’s request. (The Denver Post is among a group of newspapers that have sued Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly using millions of copyrighted articles to train their AI products, such as ChatGPT.)
One of Gravenor’s students is among those who are wary of using AI.
Coronado junior Emily Park, an artist, has used AI to find resources for class assignments and to proofread her essays, but she also worries about the technology hurting the art industry.
“I find an ethical dilemma using it,” the 17-year-old said. “You can’t trust everything it gives you.”
Coronado High specifically uses PowerBuddy, an AI technology that is built into PowerSchool’s software for K-12 institutions.
PowerBuddy has guardrails in place that protect student data and make sure the material shared with students is suited for the classroom, said Trip Kucera, vice president of innovation and research for PowerSchool.
“It really is an important learning and teaching aid,” he said.
More than 150 school districts in Colorado use PowerSchool. As AI is built into the platform, the company doesn’t track how many schools use AI specifically in the classroom.
Other districts that use the software’s AI technology in schools include Broward County Public Schools in Florida and Torrance Unified School District in California.
In Colorado, the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts have also started teaching educators how they can use AI.
“It’s cool to see our leaders and schools really start to tackle this,” Jason Kelsall, St. Vrain Valley learning systems strategist, told the Daily Camera last year. “They can dig in with other educators. We want to create time for teachers to explore how they can use these tools to make what they already do even better.”
Gravenor’s students can use PowerBuddy for brainstorming and formatting essays. Pupils can also use the technology to ask research questions, but PowerBuddy won’t write the paper for them, and Gravenor can see their chat history to make sure work isn’t copied, he said.
The key to using AI, he said, is to teach students that the technology is not a “clutch” that can do their schoolwork for them, Gravenor said.
“If we just copy-and-paste this, students aren’t learning,” he said. “…Both students and teachers cannot over-rely on these tools for our thinking.”
By Jessica Seaman | jseaman@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
