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We’ve officially passed the three-year mark on the wide availability of ChatGPT, and across the educational landscape, everyone’s feeling the impact. These incredibly powerful tools are at our disposal and in our students’ hands, and it’s all happening so quickly. AI will shape the careers and lives of Pomfret graduates, and we have a responsibility to prepare them thoughtfully.

“So, what is Pomfret doing about AI?”

It’s the question I get asked most frequently these days, and in a number of ways, my new role is the answer. Once the new VISTA science center was built and it was time to hand over the Science Department head reins, I was given the opportunity to describe a new position: Director of Technological Innovation.

In many regards, my life events and professional experience have primed me for this moment. I earned my master’s degree from RIT with these systems over a decade before the wide release of AI, and Pomfret’s capacity for innovative ideas has allowed me to transform my classes to respond to these technologies.

It’s in my nature to seek out puzzles, challenges, and optimization problems. For many years now, I’ve been partnering with fellow teachers and administrative colleagues on small but impactful tech projects. Last year, I joined the leadership team of the interschool AI Co-Lab, a group of teachers with an AI focus from around the world. The group explores practical and pedagogically sound ways to use AI with students, and I’ve authored a couple of the experiments that we’ve produced. 

This school year, I’ve met with program leaders and department heads to show them new ways to use Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and I’ve introduced many to Cursor, an AI-empowered coding tool that can be used in many office settings.

As I review my list of tech-based projects from this fall, I am struck by how quickly time flies and how much we were able to accomplish!

• Mapping campus buildings using drone footage, AI processing, and a relatively new technique called Gaussian Splatting. Students have already been able to use the models for architectural independent studies.
   
• Building a private, on-campus app where students and teachers match faces to names. The fun competitive modes allowed many people to learn everyone’s name early in the school year.
   
• Sorting students into the optimized groups for Project: Pomfret with many dimensions of preferences, requirements, and availability.
   
• Working with the Advancement Office to better understand our alumni community and connect with them more effectively.
   
• Developing a fresh way for students and teachers to view and understand the new Competency-Based grading system (a work in progress).

Of course, the central purpose of the School is educating students, and each academic department has been tasked with creating an outcome that focuses on AI literacy and/or ethical usage. I’ll be a resource for those departments as I try my best to stay on top of new developments in the field, filtering for the most important changes amidst the huge volume of noise and hype.

I am also advising a new Civic AI Club, a group of more than twenty students devoted to using AI to help the adults on campus, started by one of my top Advanced Coding students. Students have a lot to teach us, and the education truly goes both ways.

Ethics continues to be at the forefront of my mind, and I’ve been able to share my AI Ethics card game, Codes Against Academy, at a number of conferences. I was delighted to hear that many schools were using it as a springboard for faculty meetings, and it’s now available on Amazon. 

So what is Pomfret doing about AI these days? The answer is ... a lot.

The last three years at Pomfret have been among the most fulfilling of my career because of the sheer volume of collaboration, discussion, debate, and vitality on display in staff meetings and classrooms. Colleagues and students alike approach me nearly every day with interesting ideas, projects to demonstrate, and intriguing challenges. Without that campus-wide energy, I’d just be a guy in a classroom, staring at a screen.

Pomfret has a long history of adapting to new, disruptive technologies. Our alumni will remember the arrival of hand calculators replacing slide rules, computers supplanting typewriters, and the internet augmenting physical books and periodicals. This AI revolution is another major change to be sure, but we are here for it, ready to innovate, develop, and teach. The future of AI development at Pomfret feels very human.
 

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Josh Lake is the director of technological innovation, the director of the Olmsted Observatory, a science teacher, and an astrophotographer whose images have been published by National Geographic. In 2012, one of his images was selected for the top prize out of more than 3,000 submissions by the European Space Agency in its Hubble Hidden Treasures contest.
 

 

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