Welcome!

Let's start with what you already know: AI is everywhere and education is not an exception. For some, the future is bright and the coming technologies will allow to make education available to all, and might even help when there are not enough teachers. It will permit the teacher to spend more time on the noble tasks while the machine will take over all the ‘boring’ ones such as grading, organizing the classroom, spending time with each pupil individually or rehearsing the lessons.

For others, these AI algorithms represent a huge danger and the billions of dollars the industry is prepared to invest prove that education is now viewed as a market. Which it is not.

Somewhere in the middle between these very different positions, there are researchers, educators, policy makers who are aware of a number of things: Artificial intelligence is here to stay and will be in the classroom if it is not there already. And no minister -let alone a teacher - will be able to stop this. So, given this fact, how can the teacher harness the beast and use artificial intelligence for the better? How can the teacher make the AI work for the classroom ant not the inverse?

This textbook's purpose is to support the teacher in doing this. It has been built in the context of the Erasmus+ project AI4T (Artificial Intelligence for Teachers). Teams from Ireland, Luxembourg, Italy, Slovenia and France have worked together to propose learning resources for teachers to be able to learn about AI and specifically AI for Education. The learning material and a presentation of the project and its results can be found on AI4T's webpage.

Training teachers is an essential task for all the ministries involved. In the case of Artificial Intelligence it comprises at least the following aspects:

1. Making the teachers aware of why such a training is a good thing: it can’t be an imposed decision: it has to be shared.
2. Introducing AI: from our experience of many conferences and workshops, there are always some participants who have explored the topic, have read and digested. But the vast majority has not.
3. Explaining how AI works in the classroom. What are the mechanisms? What are the key ideas?
4. Using AI in educative tasks.
5. Analysing what is happening in the field and being an active actor of the future changes.

We hope the textbook will be able to help you with most of these questions: We analyse the current situation and link AI with the experience of the teachers, and by doing so we hope to encourage them to further stay interested in these questions: there will undoubtedly be new challenges, mistakes made, possibly some strong opposition and some controversies. We have sections called ‘AI Speak’ in which we try to explain why the algorithms work, how the algorithms work. Our goal is to help teachers be informed citizens who can fully participate in the debates and discussions on education and artificial intelligence. Some of the reasons for preparing this material can be found in the video prepared by AI4T.
We believe in the following:

• Some Artificial intelligence literacy is necessary. Let's explain this as it is often argued that ‘you don't need to know how engines work to drive a car’. This is not entirely true: most of us don’t know how engines work but accept there is science and technology involved. We accept this because in school we have received lessons in basic physics and technology. In the same way, we wouldn't be satisfied with a book telling us not to smoke, based on statistical arguments about the number of smoking related early deaths. We are again able to understand why smoking is harmful because at some point we have had a teacher explain to us how the respiratory system works, what are lungs, etc. With AI making today a huge impact in society, we believe that the same applies: finding out about the effects of AI is insufficient. Teachers need to have an understanding of how it works. And in the same way as the goal isn't to make each person into a biologist of a physicist, the goal here is solely to make us understand the principles and ideas.
• Teachers are extraordinary learners. They both will be even more critical when something is not explained the right way and engage more. They want to understand. This textbook is for people who are prepared to go the extra mile and will not be satisfied until they do understand.
• Next, AI has to be used in a safe environment: the computers or devices will be connected to the web, applications will run on the cloud. A huge security issue exists here and a teacher should be ensured that the environment is safe for them and their pupils to work. It should be added that computer security is a highly complex question and that a teacher will not be able to check specifications and find that this software is safe. A trusted source will need to do this.
• AI can help, provided it is used in a well defined and controlled learning environment, for a task which the teacher has identified as important. For obvious economic reasons the teachers will get more and more products pushed by the industry to help them solve a task which sometimes wasn’t even one that they had been concerned with. But since it is cool and well sold, it could be seen as important. A good teacher should be aware of this and in this textbook we are hoping to introduce enough elements for the teacher to identify such products or situations.
• When preparing this courseware, we did have a serious problem. The idea was to use AI software which we could recommend to the teachers, so that they would rapidly be able to use them in the classroom. Unfortunately, this is not the case: a lot of software is still immature, there are a lot of ethical concerns and in most cases the different ministries and governments have not approved lists of software.
  We have therefore chosen a different approach: we will be mentioning software in the textbook. We have chosen it because we believe it explains a particular point of AI in education. But we do not endorse any particular software here. There are reasons to believe that in a close future international agencies like UNESCO, UNICEF or the Council of Europe will come up with concrete elements.

At this point, and before letting you enjoy the reading, we should thank the many who have helped with this textbook.
First and foremost, we have benefited from reading Wayne Holmes’ works and enjoyed many hours of discussions with him.
Discussions also took place within the AI4T consortium in which we organized workshops to get the topics to emerge.
The teachers themselves have been an essential source of information: through seminars and webinars we have been able to exchange our ideas with them, understand which were confusing or plainly wrong.

Whereas many gave valuable opinions, proofread, suggested links and texts, some have added sections to this work:

• Manuel Gentile and Giuseppe Città helped us understand the issues of management systems and writing applications.
• Azim Roussanaly, Anne Boyer and Jiajun Pan were kind enough to write the section on Learning analytics