AI is already changing how your district communicates — but is it building trust with your community, or quietly eroding it?
SchoolCEO research shows that 97% of school communicators have experimented with AI tools — but knowing how to use it in a way that protects your brand is a different challenge entirely. In this webinar, we'll cut through the noise and get practical: what AI actually does well for school communicators, where it can backfire, and how to use it in a way that saves you real time without sacrificing the human touch your community expects.
Whether you're curious about AI or already using it daily, you'll leave with a clearer picture of what's worth your time — and what's worth skipping.
Related Resources
Signaling Change: AI in School Communication and Leadership
Our latest SchoolCEO research reveals how AI is changing school communication—and deepening connection
In a world where school communication is more powerful than ever, what do comms pros need to be successful?
When Virtual Insanity Became Reality
Cristina Capretta, APR, shares her experience collaborating with AI in a one-person communication department.
AI is like a table saw: dangerous in careless hands, but useful if you know what you’re doing. We’ll show you how to use it safely.
When Everything Looks Real and Nothing Feels True
AI ethics researcher Rebecca Bultsma shares three AI conversations all schools should have.
Transcript
Brittany Keil: Okay, let's go ahead and get started. If you're just joining us, this is AI and Trust, using AI to build your brand and save time.
Brittany Keil: We're going to be going through, some of our SchoolCEO research on AI today, and talking through some best practices about how to use AI while also building your brand, rather than breaking it, which of course is all of our goal.
Brittany Keil: Me.
Brittany Keil: 2…
Brittany Keil: So in the chat, just to kind of get us started and warmed up, what is one way that AI has saved you time?
Brittany Keil: It can be something you've done for work, it can be something silly and lightweight, it can be something personal, either way.
Brittany Keil: Creating alt text for photos, love it, Andrea.
Brittany Keil: I have a whole bunch of examples, like, stored ups. I was thinking about this this morning. I recently had AI merge two different workout plans for me, along with some PT advice that I got, from
Brittany Keil: my doctor, and so it created a new, like, approachable workout, which was, really helpful, since I am not a strength trainer, and I'm not usually super good at knowing what to prioritize and what to scale, so that was helpful.
Brittany Keil: Okay, Carla's got flares, invitations, worship songs for church to accompany scripture, very nice. Lucy's got comparing job descriptions with resumes for strengths and weaknesses, super-duper helpful there.
Brittany Keil: What I can make for dinner with what I have in my pantry. Lauren's so smart!
Brittany Keil: I wonder if I could build a workflow, because I buy my groceries online with what I've bought, and…
Brittany Keil: what I can make.
Brittany Keil: Hmm, this is fun, because I also use the New York Times Cooking App a lot, I don't know if y'all, like their recipes, I love them.
Brittany Keil: Hmm, this could be… this could be a cool project.
Brittany Keil: All right, so we're going to be talking through, some of these time-saving things, but also just, you know, I want to keep the chat going, so feel free, anytime you think of something you think might be helpful. I honestly think that the best, you know, learning that I've seen happen with AI, and I've been presenting a lot about AI around the country, is when we have communicators talk about what they do with other communicators who are in the same boat. So if you've recently had an aha
Brittany Keil: moment, feel free to share it, we'd love to hear it.
Brittany Keil: I'd love to introduce myself, if you haven't met me before. My name is Brittany, and I love research and education. So, a little bit about me. I spent, 10 years as a classroom teacher, high school special education.
Brittany Keil: Before that, I worked in nonprofit marketing, and then once I saw an opportunity for something that included both marketing and education, I couldn't resist. I applied, and I've been with Apptegy for about five and a half years now, and it's been an incredible ride.
Brittany Keil: My special education journey actually began in Malaysia, so I was a Fulbright there, it was an incredible experience.
Brittany Keil: And Malaysia is super-duper, topical right now, because I actually just got back from taking my family to Malaysia. And by just, I mean this weekend. I'm still pretty jet-lagged, so are my kids. I was telling Barrett, right before this started that mine and my husband's response to jet lag is to be totally exhausted and just want to sleep 24 hours a day, but unfortunately, our daughter's response is to have manic energy 24 hours a day, so y'all can imagine
Brittany Keil: how that is happening, or sorry, how that is going. Speaking of my daughters, I've got both of them right here.
Brittany Keil: So, the big girl's name is Rosemary. This is our last of our, Extra Credit Summer series, and school just started here in Washington.
Brittany Keil: So she started yesterday, this is her first day of second grade photo. She had some really big feelings, but the day went well, so I'm calling it a win. If anybody else has started school in the last couple weeks, y'all know how…
Brittany Keil: difficult and exciting that can be. So, man, just happy to get in the routine of school.
Brittany Keil: And then my little girl here is B. She is 1. She is… we like to call her, like, our little jolly elf. Always giggling, always happy, always with her crazy pigtails.
She is adorable.
Brittany Keil: But yeah, these are my kids. I get to do a really cool thing for Abdiji. I spend a lot of my time researching best practices in school communications and school leadership, and then packaging those findings, for you and for schools across the country.
Brittany Keil: So, all of that goes into what we call SchoolCEO Magazine. So, I hope you're familiar with School Seo Magazine, but if you're not, it is a quarterly magazine for school leaders and communicators. We are going on our 9th year, which is incredible, and we have had, I think, upwards of about 10 research studies by this point, which is really great.
Brittany Keil: We are all about school marketing and leadership. We like to cover every single corner of that, that we can think of, and we're always looking to elevate and share positive stories in public education. So if you've got something really unique happening in your school, happening in your district, please let us know. We'd love to showcase you and share your good ideas to other communicators who are in the same boat as you.
Brittany Keil: We also, and at this point, sometimes I feel like, you know, like a salesperson, like a Q, what is it, QVC? Salesperson. We also have a newsletter. So me and a couple of my teammates write a SchoolCEO Spark newsletter every other week, give or take.
Sometimes we go a little bit lighter for the busy months.
Brittany Keil: We talk about what's new in school communication and marketing. We'd love to see you on our list!
Brittany Keil: Alright, so let's talk AI and trust. And the way that I've structured this presentation, because this is a new one, is we're going to be talking through some research that SchoolCO has done about how school communicators use AI.
Brittany Keil: But then, rather than digging into how you can, you know, encourage AI use among your, you know, your staff, or teachers, or whoever you're working with, we're actually going to be digging to how do you use it specifically to build your brand.
Brittany Keil: And avoid eroding trust, because we know that trust is the most important thing in public education right now. It feeds into everything else.
Brittany Keil: Enrollment, sentiment, everything. So first, how did we get here? Then what builds and breaks trust with AI? And then, what's worth your time and what's worth skipping?
Brittany Keil: So, for me, and this is kind of a vulnerable slide, and I will say I did design the slide myself. Not the best slide designer, so, please forgive me, but I was thinking about that this…
Brittany Keil: this this morning, and I wanted to, share it with you all. So, AI for many people, is a very new thing. It's something, you know, most of us started getting into it maybe in 2022, maybe a little later.
Brittany Keil: But for me, I have some really deep roots with AI. And these three pictures kind of represent, like, the juxtaposition of three ways that I have been influenced in my thinking of AI.
Brittany Keil: So, first, this black and white picture here is my mentor. My college mentor, his name is Dr. Norbert Shedler, and he was the president of my college, that I went to for undergrad.
Brittany Keil: And I had the enormous pleasure of being his, TA in one of the last years in which he taught in the classroom.
Brittany Keil: And that was about, I think, looking back, probably about 2012? I'm sorry, that's gonna date myself. But he became really excited in his very last year of teaching about the possibilities of machine learning and AI.
Brittany Keil: At the time, I just thought it was something quirky, something interesting, machines can learn, like, okay, that makes sense. But he, for me, really sort of
Brittany Keil: you know, set those, those seeds of what AI could do. I remember researching and learning things from him about the artificial other, things I never thought would apply in my years of teaching, and then again in my years of marketing too, but look, here we are.
Brittany Keil: This section… second picture here of the kids is my husband leading a field trip in my daughter's school. One cool thing about living on the coast of Washington is that field trips often mean going to the beach and going to tide pooling.
Brittany Keil: My husband, though, does not lead field trips, tide pooling for a living. He is actually a data scientist, and a big part of his work for the last 10 years has been working with AI.
Brittany Keil: A lot of his research in graduate school, was all about sentiment, community sentiment analysis, which means that he was working with, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to help them monitor, when communities started to notice negative
Brittany Keil: things happening. So, like, what kinds of words were used, what kinds of, you know, imagery could, precipitate a community heading down a negative spiral?
Brittany Keil: This is something that he obviously does a lot quicker and more easily now with AI, but it's been really interesting to see the rise of AI through the lens of his work. Because in some ways, he says he has the most useless degree of anyone, because his degree is what AI can do so well.
Brittany Keil: And yet, he has a really deep idea, and understanding of how the bones of AI work.
Brittany Keil: And then finally, in this bottom picture is my very first US classroom.
Brittany Keil: It was a sunny classroom in Washington, DC, and my big challenge here is that I was a first-year special education teacher with nearly 30 IEPs.
Brittany Keil: And so my challenge, and I know many of you are very familiar with special education, just from its, you know, importance in the K-12 space.
Brittany Keil: Was that each of my students needed a personalized learning plan. Almost everything we did needed to be adjusted just a little bit for them.
Brittany Keil: And I found myself completely overwhelmed by having to tailor not just to my, 20-something students with IEPs, but all of my other students as well, who needed, you know, specialized attention in other ways.
Brittany Keil: And so when I think about AI, I think about these three, sort of facets. I think about the history of AI, I think about the utility, and then I also think about what it can mean, for jobs where you have a lot of duties and very few resources. And that is nothing, you know, that describes K-12 education more than anything else.
Brittany Keil: So, how did we get here? So, in the past 5 years, what new or increased stressors have impacted your role? And you can feel free to mention this in the chat.
Brittany Keil: Something that I've heard a lot is people now have taken on more enrollment marketing, FOIA requests, anything else?
Brittany Keil: So, when I think about the VIN diagram of what school communicators and school administrators share, I think about how we are both building, or both groups of people are building to this idea of trust. And I mentioned earlier that trust is the most critical currency in schools right now.
Brittany Keil: And that's not something that I think is going to change. Trust, you know, influences your actual enrollment, it influences how your sentiment is with your families, it influences every single thing. And so, as we're both building trust.
Brittany Keil: This, this means that a lot of the other roles feel, you know, sort of fuel into this to make it even more difficult. Julia says, enrollment marketing and breaking into new market outside of the established one, absolutely.
Brittany Keil: So, school communicators wear a lot of hats. You are the decision maker. You're responsible for making multiple decisions throughout the day, many of them on the fly, many of them with not as much information as you wish you had.
Brittany Keil: You are the district decision communicator, so not only are you making the decision, you're often having to communicate it as well.
Brittany Keil: So you have to communicate, sometimes internally, sometimes externally, gain buy-in, and sometimes you have to do this with an external audience, which can be especially challenging.
Brittany Keil: You are the operations pro, so you get the role of facilitating moving parts, even on the weekends or holidays, and this means late nights, busy holidays, and being… in the sense of always being on. I actually talked to a school district a couple of weeks ago who, has
Brittany Keil: and their communications team has been tasked with having… with creating and planning and actually holding enrollment rallies, and I was thinking, like, whew, man, what an undertaking, for folks who, at other districts, you know, have very limited roles around school communication.
Brittany Keil: And then finally, you are the paperwork magnate. So, with the work that we do, comes a lot of paperwork, and unfortunately, a lot of that falls in school communications.
Brittany Keil: I was surprised, a couple of years ago when I did some research around what takes up the most of school communicators' time to find that FOIA requests have become especially, especially, you know, difficult and time-consuming, especially in smaller to mid-sized districts who may not have somebody who can be fully tasked with these kinds of legal
Brittany Keil: requests.
Brittany Keil: And unfortunately, even along with these hats, leading and communicating in schools has only gotten harder. So school choice is putting pressure on everybody, and I'm gonna mention some research that we haven't yet released from SchoolCO, but you're going to see on your horizon in the next couple months.
Brittany Keil: So we actually serve families, and found that half of our respondents weren't attending their zoned school by kindergarten, and nearly 6 in 10 students by high school were not attending the school that they were zoned to.
Brittany Keil: School choice is no longer a niche activity that just a few families engage in. A few families going to private school, or homeschool, or charter school. It is now something that the majority of families engage in in one way or another.
Brittany Keil: Budget cuts on the, mean that every tool and position is under scrutiny, and that you may have fewer hands to do the same amount of work as ever, or, more often the case, more work.
Brittany Keil: And then higher levels of politicization means that no decision goes unexamined, and that your trust, as I mentioned earlier, is no longer a given. You have to fight hard for it, and it can be easily lost, even sometimes outside of the district's control.
Brittany Keil: And with all of this pressure cooker, we've got AI. But how can we use AI, strategically in what I think of as a convergence zone? So we've got all of these, you know, stressors and pressers on one hand.
Brittany Keil: And then we have AI coming in at the other hand, and we have them coalescing into this moment for school communications and leadership.
Brittany Keil: What does this mean? This means that the roles of a school communicator and a leader looks more different than ever, and is only more likely to change, as we adjust and react to the different pressures.
Brittany Keil: So, in response to the interests of AI, and I'll admit, like, AI is something that I had wanted to write about for years, I've told y'all about my background in AI, and so this is something that I saw coming and was excited about, and maybe apprehensive about, a little bit of both.
Brittany Keil: We conducted a mixed qualitative and quantitative study, that included hours of in-depth influencer interviews by people in school communications and leadership who were already using AI.
Brittany Keil: And some of you may have seen these, results before, so I'm gonna go quickly through them. If you'd like to, you know, dig more into this research, I'm happy to send a link in the follow-up.
Brittany Keil: So what we wanted to know is how are school leaders and communicators currently using AI?
Brittany Keil: which tools and use cases were most useful in the office, and not necessarily the classroom, and this is an important caveat. There is a ton of good and productive research going into how AI is impacting classrooms, but my team actually wanted to look at how it is impacting the central office.
Brittany Keil: And then third, how is AI changing school administration and communication?
Brittany Keil: So, finding number one. Shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but AI is popular and gaining steam quickly. I think it is more the norm now to meet people who don't use AI, and many of them who don't have ethical or other reasons for not using it, than people who haven't experimented with AI.
Brittany Keil: So you can see at the time of this study, most people were, either very familiar or somewhat familiar with AI.
Brittany Keil: And something that I thought was really cool in this is that participants of all ages believe that AI is important to the future of school communication. I think we make some assumptions about the older workers in the workforce not being as AI savvy, but our research, at least in the field of school communication and administration, did not show this to be the case. Older workers were just as on board as everybody else, just as curious, and often just as
Brittany Keil: excited about where AI, was taking school communication leadership.
Brittany Keil: Interestingly, Gen Z, workers were some… which, it was a very small, dataset of them, so I don't want to lean too heavily, but, they were some of the more resistant, or at least had some pockets of resistance.
Brittany Keil: Finding number two, school… and this is not surprising to me, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's working with incredible school communicators, but school comms is leading the way when it comes to AI adoption. So when we looked at our survey, our school communicators, by and large, were ahead even of the CTOs when it came to AI adoption and enthusiasm.
Brittany Keil: this, in some ways, is not surprising to me, because I think that school communicators have roles that are uniquely, you know, fit for AI. And this actually brought me back to some research that my team conducted alongside INSPA in February 2022.
Brittany Keil: In which we looked at how school communicators use their time.
Brittany Keil: So many school communicators, as we found in this research, are dissatisfied with how they spend their time. So we ask them to agree or disagree to the following statement. You spend the majority of your time focusing on what you consider to be the most important elements of your role.
Brittany Keil: It was close to 50-50, but most disagreed. And then we asked them to list which tasks, took up the most time in their day, and then which tasks they believed to be most important in their role.
Brittany Keil: As you look at this chart, and some of you may have seen this chart before, especially if you're, you know, one of our, you know, repeat offenders when it comes to SchoolCEO research and Apptegy webinars.
Brittany Keil: You should… I want you to think of two things. First, obviously, there is this mismatch here about what takes up the most time versus what is most important to, you know, school communicators' effectiveness.
Brittany Keil: Second, which of these tasks do you think lend themselves most easily to AI?
Brittany Keil: Some really important, and interesting trends here.
Brittany Keil: So what I notice is this. I notice that a lot of the things that are both time-consuming and not that important, or not considered to be as important.
Brittany Keil: are really good for AI. So we've got website management, social media management, internal comms, and crisis communa… or… I'll stop at crisis communications, because I think that's a little bit different.
Brittany Keil: So these three are things that, even in the comments that we had at the beginning of this chat, are really, you know, easily adapted to AI. And I think that this is not just, a good explainer of why school communicators have been so easily.
Brittany Keil: or, you know, quick to take on AI. I think this also explains, you know, why school communicators have,
Brittany Keil: You know, try to relieve some of the burnout that comes with a role, because these are time-consuming tasks.
Brittany Keil: As a re…
Brittany Keil: Unsurprisingly, you know, 75% of school communicators said that they were at least sometimes burned out, and we see this as a result of being the, you know, in the role where you have a lot of tasks, not necessarily that are aligned with how you can spend your time. Again, an important implication for AI.
Brittany Keil: And then finding number 3, and this is gonna play really importantly to, to some of the, like, do's and don'ts that we're gonna talk about later, but general AI tools reign supreme. So 95% of our respondents were most familiar with ChatGBT, Gemini, Claude, or similar.
Brittany Keil: And then a couple of other different tools, including meeting note takers, image generation, and other, you know, more niche tools.
Brittany Keil: Something that I've found really interesting is, seeing how different AI tools become sort of the flavor of the week. I think 6 months ago, ChatGPT, like, was definitely the king of AI. Now, I would say that that's clawed, but I was just reading about the new ChatGPT model that was released.
Brittany Keil: I think at the end of last week, correct, Barrett? And I'm excited to try that out as well.
Brittany Keil: And then finding number 4. Communication was the most frequently cited challenge that AI was used to address, and I think that this
Brittany Keil: Lends, you know.
Brittany Keil: pushes back to some of the information that we had in the chart about what takes up school communicators' time, but also, you know, just the nature of the work that we do. We create a lot of content, a lot of it needs to be personalized, a lot of it needs to be created very quickly, and this is something that AI has turned out to be pretty good at in some ways. Not as good in others.
Brittany Keil: So, other use cases where we saw a lot of AI use include administrative tasks, which is actually, I think, probably one of the most powerful areas for AI use, student support and instruction, data analysis, and accessibility.
Brittany Keil: But how does AI actually change this work?
Brittany Keil: This is what I think is most critical. So AI enhances the potential for more personal connection, and this ties into some really critical, enrollment marketing research that I'm doing right now about what families actually value when it comes to school enrollment.
Brittany Keil: So AI saves time. So, multiple leaders and communicators mentioned the usefulness of using AI for tedious or time-consuming tasks, especially for things like RFP submissions and standardizing school handbooks.
Brittany Keil: I had no idea just how difficult it was to standardize different school handbooks across a camp, you know, across a district, but that is something that AI is able to do handily and quickly.
Brittany Keil: Ai allows, districts to harness data, so respondents were really quick to tout its usefulness in analyzing data such as internal staff pulse polls and broad community surveys. And then it fights burnout, so AI has the ability to make tedious clerical tasks quicker.
Brittany Keil: And easier, allowing more time for face-to-face, meaningful tasks.
Brittany Keil: There's so much potential in this slide to me. Not only around, you know, time saving, but also just how much, you know.
Brittany Keil: how much more data we're able to incorporate into our work as school communicators. I remember working with school districts to do community surveys pre-AI, and the timeline was definitely so much longer than it needs to be now. In many cases, you can analyze data in an afternoon that would have taken you weeks beforehand.
Brittany Keil: Take a quick drink of water.
Brittany Keil: Here's a quote from somebody in our open response. AI has really streamlined my work, and honestly, it's done wonders for my well-being. In a small district where we all wear a lot of hats and don't have much extra help, AI has been a game changer.
Brittany Keil: But, and this really, you know, comes to the meat of this presentation, what's worth your time and what's worth skipping?
Brittany Keil: So the goal with any use of AI is to amplify human connection. This may mean making more space and time for human connection, this may be actual operationalizing.
Brittany Keil: Of aspects that allow for human connection, but this is what, you know, our research shows, and I think anecdotally we know as well.
Brittany Keil: Is what families need the most from our school districts, and internal staff as well.
Brittany Keil: Families crave human connection, teachers crave it as well. This is an important, you know, thing that I think school districts are unique in providing, and this is something that AI is able to assist. I was just talking to a colleague this morning. We were talking about the interesting tension.
Brittany Keil: Between, private schools and public schools, in the realm of special education.
Brittany Keil: So I don't know if, you know, any of you have had a child in special education, but there's, whenever you have a child with, an IEP, an individual education program, they have an IEP team that comes together with the family to make decisions.
Brittany Keil: And my coworker was describing to me how absolutely powerful it was for him to walk into a school district.
Brittany Keil: And, you know, have his son, who he knows has struggled, his son has dyslexia, and to walk in to see a completely competent, prepared team ready to support his son's growth.
Brittany Keil: This is not something that you often see in private school. This is not something that is often capable in other placements as well, and unique to, to public schools.
Brittany Keil: So how do we take moments like that, and how do we use AI to operationalize and to make the space so that more of them can happening?
Brittany Keil: So, a couple of pointers, to keep in mind as you, you know, build
Brittany Keil: you know, build these workup flows is first to know what your community values and dig in. You want to know what is meaningful and what is important to them, and then make that happen as frequently as possible.
Brittany Keil: You want to be transparent and clear about how AI aligns with district values, including how you use AI and how your team uses AI, and how that aligns to your values, and then recognize that the stakes are high, and AI is always and rapidly improving.
Brittany Keil: So, I have a couple of do's and don'ts to make this a little bit more clear.
Brittany Keil: So, do use AI to enhance personalization and quality control. I saw somebody at the beginning of this chat mention that they were using AI for alt text. This is a great opportunity.
Brittany Keil: So if you're not familiar with Christina Capretto's work, she is an Ohio school communicator and is absolutely lovely, and also a SchoolCEO Excellence in School Marketing Finalist this year. She has an incredible article she wrote for us about her own journey with using AI, and I have a QR code to it for, that leads to it here.
Brittany Keil: But a quote from her. Curiosity can show you how to combine what humans do best with what machines can do faster. AI expands our capacity, but it is our judgment, empathy, and creativity that gives the work integrity.
Brittany Keil: more incredible insights, and also just, I think, like, a really great, starting point for an ethics document around AI in Christina's work. I encourage you to check it out.
Brittany Keil: So, AI is really good at logistics, and you can allow AI to run the logistics so that people can do the connecting.
Brittany Keil: So this is a little research preview, and we're gonna be, you know, showcasing this in a variety of ways in the next couple weeks, with SchoolCO. But one of the most critical things for families in choosing a placement for their child is a school visit.
Brittany Keil: If you've been alongside a school visit, or maybe taken one, along your own children, this won't be surprising, but families actually do a lot of their decision-making during and immediately after they do… they have school tours or visits.
Brittany Keil: The problem, and I've seen this from the parent's standpoint and also from a school, you know, leader standpoint, is that those are really difficult for schools to schedule. Many families want to schedule school visits during, times where, you know, it might be the summer, it might be the evening, it might be in the middle of the workday, and so schools aren't always equipped to make that happen. When my family moved from Arkansas to Washington.
Brittany Keil: I… we were looking at rental… rental neighborhoods, and houses in a variety of different areas, and one of the decision-making factors for me was finding a good school for my daughter.
Brittany Keil: So, like any good researcher, I reached out and asked for a tour. Some school districts had, you know, single links I was able to click to schedule a tour, but most of them required me to make a phone call, and some of those phone calls never got returned.
Brittany Keil: I was calling during the summer. Many, of the staff are 10-month employees, and so things fell through the cracks. And it makes me, you know, sad to think that some of the school districts I was considering got knocked off of my list just because I wasn't able to tour them.
Brittany Keil: So, you can use AI to do things like build tour requests, schedule flows and confirmation emails, so that booking an in-person visit takes a family two clicks and not two phone calls.
Brittany Keil: It also allows you to clear your calendar, so you can draft, frequently asked question responses, translations, and routine updates, so that the staff hours move from the inbox to the hallway, which allows for more face-to-face communication with each other, which is what we all want.
Brittany Keil: And then you can allow AI to close the, to close the loop. So AI can, generate, and I do recommend that you, of course, keep the human in the loop here. Thank you notes, reminder sequences, all of these things, that help keep families in the loop.
Brittany Keil: So, for example, if you have a family who no-showed, it might, you know, be left to the principal or maybe the secretary to give them a call, but that is something that AI is able to assist, even if it's just, you know, templates and prompting.
Brittany Keil: So, a couple things that are worth your time are maybe worth skipping. So, AI is really good at first drafts, so newsletters, reminders, routine updates. Let AI take the first draft of this, and then you can use your expertise and your knowledge of your community to edit it, so it doesn't sound like every single district.
Brittany Keil: It is also really good at what we call the tedious middle. So summarizing survey data, standardizing handbooks, scoring RFPs. It is able to take what would take a human hours and do it in just a couple of seconds or clicks. Take another drink.
Brittany Keil: These might seem a little bit obvious, but I thought I'd mention it. Definitely skip using any form of student data into a chatbot. It's not safe. Even when you have something that's proprietary or licensed in your district, it is still not a best practice.
And then, of course, you don't want to use AI for any kind of human moments.
Brittany Keil: Every time I see, you know, something on social media or, you know, something in the news about people using AI to write their wedding vows, like, I just feel, like, such a sense of cringe. Like, I think that no matter how, you know, uncomfortable you are as a writer, like, you want these, you know.
Brittany Keil: human moments to stay human. Condolences, crises, tourism relationships, let AI take a backseat there. You are definitely the better person to lead it there.
Brittany Keil: Again, all of these build toward this idea of trust, so how can AI help us, you know, build more trust with our communities while also, you know, not, breaking it, by, you know, having, like, leading to anyone to have a bad experience?
Brittany Keil: So don't, and I feel like I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but we've all worked with people who don't necessarily think like this. Don't become a sloperator. I think that a slop was the word of the year last year, and I think it's just such an apt word for what we're starting to see, especially across the media, with, you know.
Brittany Keil: like, with all kinds of media and writing that comes out. Everything sounds identical, everything looks identical, and it's all because we're all using the same models, and they're not necessarily as good at writing or as creating as you are.
Brittany Keil: I'm finally happy to see a lot of pushback on the, like, standardized, like, small business poster that, like, every AI seems to cook out now.
Brittany Keil: I think something that's, like, really popular in my neighborhood that I don't love is, all of the babysitters having the identical, you know, AI-generated, like, babysitting posters, because it's so hard to, like, trust those. Like, are you CPR certified, or is that just part of the template that got, you know, carried over?
Brittany Keil: So last May, and this is a good example of sloperation, the Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list, and 10 of the 15 books didn't exist.
Brittany Keil: Kinda sad, some of them sound really good, but also this is the, you know, breaking of trust that we want to avoid.
Brittany Keil: So we have an article about this, and you can see our, like, key, like, image here is this, table saw, which I think is so apt with AI. Really, really powerful tool, but you don't want to lose your fingers. And a QR code here so that you can read it.
Brittany Keil: And, you know, when we talk about AI and we talk about trust, there are 4 ways I could think of, that AI quietly Breaks trust, and this, of course, is what you want to avoid as a school communicator. No matter how hard we try, and no matter how hard you, you know, really…
Brittany Keil: try to train your AI, it's still gonna make things up. So, LLMs would rather please you than be accurate. And what they don't know, they invent, and they make it look good. So fact check anything that AI hands you before it goes public.
Brittany Keil: I recently started volunteering with, an essay writing, you know, organization, that works with young people, and man, let me tell you, a lot of those linked, resources, like, they don't go anywhere. The AI has made them up completely.
Brittany Keil: Ai also carries bias, so it is trained on human data, and humans are biased, but unfortunately, sometimes AI picks up the work… the worst of this. So you can't prevent the bias, but you can recognize it, and make sure that it doesn't make its way to your community.
Brittany Keil: This third one is a huge one that I think every school communicator should be aware of. It makes you sound like every single other district in the country.
Brittany Keil: The game we are talking about right now, especially with school choice, is finding ways to help your district stand out. Unfortunately, AI written copy is gonna sound like every other district. It's not going to stand out.
Brittany Keil: And then finally, AI cannot keep a secret. The moment student data or anything else enters a chatbot, you lose control of it. There are privacy settings, and I've heard so many people say, like, oh, but, you know, I made sure that mine's… my data, my… sorry.
Brittany Keil: my, chatbot doesn't share my data with, you know, the creators, and I'm like, well, there's still data breaches, it is still unsafe.
Brittany Keil: So do be transparent and ready to talk about how you use AI. I've seen a lot of really good examples of districts doing this well.
Brittany Keil: Rebecca Boltma is an expert when it comes to this, and she has 3 conversations to help you get started internally about how to have, be ready for those questions when it comes to your community about using AI.
Brittany Keil: So first is the us conversation. It's how AI, or sorry, adults set the AI norms, not just for the students, but also for the rest of the staff.
Brittany Keil: The them conversation, which is what to do when students improvise, and the oh-no conversation, which is when the evidence falls apart.
Brittany Keil: Michelle Ewing of Kent State University has a really good quote here. She says, let your audience know you used it, why you used it, and what you did to verify the output. That's going to build trust and accountability. I know many schools are using different tools for translation, some of them video translations.
Brittany Keil: And I've seen a lot of really good, vulnerability and honesty about how to use tools like these while also, you know, building trust with your district.
Brittany Keil: I work with a district in Maryland that used a tool where their superintendent can record a video and it will auto-translate his voice into other languages, but they were very intentional in sharing that they were using this tool because they didn't want the community to think, oh, Dr. So-and-so speaks Spanish, or oh, Dr. So-and-so speaks Tamil.
Brittany Keil: That, of course, is not the goal. The goal is accessibility, and they made sure that they had the messaging in place to, you know, address that before it started.
Brittany Keil: And then, finally, don't, give up after one try. And this is something that I see a lot on my own team, and sometimes I see with others. AI is growing and changing all the time.
Brittany Keil: Things we can do now with AI were totally unthinkable two years ago. I used AI to build an entire webpage, that is something I would have never told anybody to do, even, like, 8 or 9 months ago, and yet Claude is able to do it really well.
Brittany Keil: So I… to illustrate this, I wanted to show, a request that I made of AI a year apart. So something that I do a lot is I like to have visualizations in my work, and, don't always want to pester the incredible designers on my team to make these visualizations happen.
Brittany Keil: So, I asked AI a year ago to create a gray and plum-shaded map with certain states highlighted.
Brittany Keil: If you zoom in here, you can see that while this might, at first glance, look okay, this map is a hot mess.
Brittany Keil: Everything is kind of labeled some version of Indiana. There's states that don't exist, there's… I don't know, it looks like an eraser function happened. I don't even know what's going on.
Brittany Keil: And I pushed AI hard to make this happen. I kept telling it, no, this is not good enough, like, Sorcerer's Apprentice, like, back, go back, go back. It could not produce anything better than this.
Brittany Keil: Just on a whim this morning, I asked Claude to do its version, and it popped this out in a matter of seconds. I had actually asked it to label with the full state names, and it was like, honestly, you shouldn't do that for, you know, this kind of audience, because they know the state names.
Brittany Keil: And it looks too cluttered on the map, and I was like, fair enough. That kind of dialogue, that kind of expertise is not something I would expect of an LLM, even, you know, a year ago.
Brittany Keil: A lot of what I'm talking about, you know, in this presentation builds into some of the research that I'm about to share, and so I did want to say, coming soon.
Brittany Keil: So…
Brittany Keil: Families all across the country are, you know, making decisions around schools in ways that we are honestly not caught up to, as school communicators, as school leaders.
Brittany Keil: almost every family is implementing or, you know, exploring some level of school choice, be it an ESA, buying a house in a certain district, everything in between, going to magnet schools. And I think that schools really have to change the way that we talk to families.
Brittany Keil: And I'm excited that my team has researched just about this. So I wanted you to have a quick preview, because I think that the AI is a part of this conversation. I'd love to see you there.
Brittany Keil: This is what I have. I am happy to, you know, as always, make this the start of the conversation rather than the end, and just thank you for coming.
Brittany Keil: As always, we'll be sending a follow-up list of resources with all of these good things. I'll also share some examples I've seen from other, blogs and resources about how to, you know, build trust when it comes to AI.
Brittany Keil: So yeah, thanks, have a great rest of your week, and if it's the first week of school like you, I know we're in the minority, then I, then I hope it's a good one. Yes, don't be a sloperator.
Brittany Keil: Week 5, yes.
Brittany Keil: Alright, bye everybody.
