USF is helping bring AI to Pre-K-12 classrooms

By: Cassidy Delamarter, University Communications and Marketing

Preparing students for a world driven by artificial intelligence starts long before college. The University of South Florida is collaborating with Pre-K-12 educators to integrate AI into classrooms in Tampa Bay and across the nation, ensuring that future generations develop essential skills early on.

Zafer Unal, a professor in USF’s College of Education, created TeacherServer, an online platform with more than 1,000 free AI tools for teachers. Since the launch of the platform in 2024, its users have skyrocketed. Now nearly 1.25 million teachers are using the tools in their classroom to help with a variety of tasks, including lesson planning, assessments and presentations.

“We surveyed teachers across Florida and Georgia and learned many educators are already using AI to streamline grading and presentations, but they were hesitant to incorporate it directly into classrooms due to data privacy concerns and lack of formal training,” Unal said. “Now I’m working to bridge this gap and provide them with the proper support and resources.” 

Building on these efforts, collaborations within USF’s Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing are tackling similar challenges, exploring ways to address common concerns surrounding AI integration. USF College of Education Professors Ilene Berson and Michael Berson are exploring several research projects to advance ethical use of AI in early education.

“Our research emphasizes the importance of centering children’s voices and developmental needs in AI design, ensuring that these technologies empower young learners while upholding their rights and well-being,” Ilene said.

The Bersons’ most recent work, published in Springer Nature, emphasizes the need for global standards prioritizing transparency and data security, alongside active involvement from educators, parents and children to align AI with developmental needs. 

“It’s important to ensure students have equal opportunities to develop digital literacy and engage with AI in meaningful and responsible ways,” said College of Education Interim Dean Jenifer Jasinski Schneider. “We have faculty in every discipline exploring AI; I am challenging our faculty to take this on because this is where we need our focus to be to prepare for the future.”

Through partnerships with the Tampa Housing Authority and local community groups, Schneider and doctoral candidate Leah Burger are providing after-school programming for fourth and fifth grade students to explore how they use generative AI in authentic digital writing environments. The students critically analyze video games and then create, write and code their own game. In that process, they use generative AI for drafting game names, plot ideas, images, dialogue and research to develop a stronger ethical understanding of AI and its applications. 

“When students write augmented reality games with generative AI, they also must navigate many of the important issues prominent within the tool, such as misinformation, and prompt engineering and revision strategies,” Burger said. “The students do not just take the generative AI outputs at face value, in fact, many of them use the outputs as the launching for critical thinking toward the tool.”

Burger will continue this program throughout the summer during a summer camp for Tampa Public Housing Authority.