During a recent demo, a custom AI chatbot answers student questions as if it’s abolitionist Harriet Tubman: “I am here to share my experiences and answer your questions about my work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, my life, and the fight for freedom. What would you like to know?"
It’s built using Magic School, one of the most popular AI platforms designed for schools. Last year, Rockford Public Schools paid over $200,000 for several years of Magic School’s premium service.
The district’s educational technology coordinator Susan Uram says elementary students are learning about the Underground Railroad with this chatbot.
“It wasn't about fantasy," said Uram. "It was about being engaged in a conversation with somebody in a way that we couldn't have done without this technology.”
When asked how they stayed safe while leading slaves to freedom, the AI Harriet Tubman chatbot responded: "When we needed to be quiet, I'd carry a bit of ginger root in my pocket to give to babies to keep them from crying."
One problem: there’s no evidence to support that Tubman actually did that. It’s an example of an AI “hallucination.” The chatbot also mentioned that she had a $40,000 bounty on her head, which is a common legend about Tubman that’s also not accurate, but is a mistake a student might make.
As those examples show, this technology isn’t flawless. That’s before considering generative AI's heavy environmental impact and the ethics of AI image generators scraping work from artists for training data.
But AI is already in classrooms across Illinois, whether teachers like it or not. It’s one reason why Illinois State Representative Laura Faver Dias introduced a proposal establishing a State Instructional Technology Advisory Board to give schools guidance on how to use Artificial Intelligence.
Faver Dias is a former teacher. She says cell phones have been an issue in schools for years and the state’s just getting around to crafting policy, so it’s crucial they don’t wait that long with AI.
“They're able to act nimbly and quickly to pull together experts, including classroom teachers in terms of practice, and then that first guidance will be issued July 1, 2026," said Faver Dias.
At this point, she says the state really doesn’t know how local schools use AI. In Rockford, Susan Uram says they started training teachers on AI a few years ago after students started using ChatGPT to write their essays. But they knew the tech wasn’t going anywhere and teachers needed to better understand it.
“How do you understand bias? How do you understand privacy and security? How do you understand the idea of hallucinations or quality of output? And then on top of that, be a good prompt engineer," she said.
They went with Magic School because it was created specifically for the classroom. It has templates for teachers; and it allows them to monitor how their students are interacting with the AI.
She says there are tons of ways Rockford teachers use Magic School, from those historical figure chatbots, to building IEPs, and lesson plans.
It also has a tool called “text leveling” where teachers can upload a book like "The Great Gatsby" and it’ll simplify words to make it easier for younger students to read. It, however, raises the question of, if you change the words on the page, are you still reading the same book as the author intended?
Douglas McArthur is an English teacher at Jefferson High School. Right now, he says tools like Magic School are useful, but not quite revolutionary.
He lets his kids use it for brainstorming topic ideas and cleaning up grammar, not for original writing.
“If you have the machine do the thinking for you, then you're not growing as a person, and therein lies the problem," said McArthur.
Some English teachers make their students write the first draft of essays by hand to make them AI-proof.
McArthur uses it mostly to generate quick feedback and to come up with multiple choice questions, which he says can be very tedious. But he always tells his students when a question or prompt was created with Magic School or Google’s Gemini.
Brent Fritz is an engineering and math teacher at Roosevelt High School. He used to spend weeks at home after school overhauling curriculum; days of copying and pasting into spreadsheets. He uses AI to increase his efficiency.
“I did that again just recently, and it went from like three weeks, let's say, to about six or seven hours," he said.
Fritz says it also helps customize assignments. Got students who love Minecraft? Great, here are four Minecraft-themed word problems.
He says that AI’s integration into the classroom has made him reflect on which parts of his job are essential, and only can be done by a human, and what he’s comfortable outsourcing to AI.
“AI is not going to build relationships for you. But, as an educator, that's the most powerful tool I have— the relationship I have with my students," he said. "If they don't trust you, they're not going to buy what you sell.”
But Fritz says he’s also been AI-proofing assignments. AI can already do their math homework. But he says critical thinking skills will help you forever, no matter how fast technology changes.
“A lot of oral check-ins with kids [are] like, 'walk me through this,' but also strategizing, like, 'what strategy would you use to solve this problem, as opposed to solving it? Tell me how you would solve it,'" he said.
Fritz says AI could revolutionize education, who knows what these tools will look like in 10 years? But, honestly, he just hopes it cuts out busy work to give him more time to pay attention to what matters most: building relationships with his students.
