AI Chatbots Are Coming to BC Classrooms

Students need to learn to use it responsibly, the school board says. But a few youths are pushing back. … Article written by Katie Hyslop.
At some point before the end of the school year, the Vancouver School Board will roll out artificial intelligence chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and up.
The district, joining other public districts such as Langley, will team up with Microsoft Canada to provide students with school accounts for Copilot, the software giant's AI chatbot.
Copilot may not be the most popular of the AI chatbots available, with one tech critic going so far as to call it a "mistake."
But the Surrey school district is also exploring Copilot accounts for students. At the moment only teachers use the program.
Chatbots are a form of generative AI designed to mimic human thinking and learning.
Generative AI tools can create original text, sounds or images based on the existing information they are trained on: vast digital libraries of news reporting, fiction and non-fiction books, music catalogues, films and other open-source and copyrighted works — the subject of several lawsuits.
The goal is to "leverage" Copilot so that students can access AI in "a safe environment, where teachers can help them through their learning journey," da Silva told The Tyee.
Eventually, after students and teachers have used and shared feedback about using Copilot, the district will establish administrative procedures and policies around AI use in schools, da Silva said. But not until the district understands the impacts of using AI in schools.
"Our responsibility as an education system is to provide environments to prepare students for life after school. And those environments are going to be using AI. We need to get on that, and we need to do it in a safe way."
But some students — including Henry van Iersel, in Grade 10 — are pushing back.
Citing generative AI's impact on the environment, student safety, privacy and the negative impacts of chatbot use on learning, van Iersel and three other students created a petition to stop the adoption of Copilot in Vancouver's schools.
"We're normalizing this technology that has a fairly limited scope of applications, and a fairly large and broad implication for the environment," van Iersel said.
Van Iersel, 15, said he's been coding for fun since he was 10. So he's not anti-technology — but he told The Tyee he doesn't understand the district's rush to roll out Copilot.
"We're trying to suggest a moratorium to pause for two years to make sure that we really understand the technology," he said. "And then we can come back and make a final decision on whether we should really be using this in our schools.
"I don't think it's a good idea to beta-test on our student population," van Iersel added.
How Copilot might show up in schools
Da Silva disagrees with van Iersel's characterization of their AI rollout as "beta-testing" on students.
The planning to gather feedback and input on AI chatbot use in schools began two years ago, da Silva told The Tyee.
Students have told the school district via feedback sessions about AI and even the recent district budget that they are already using AI chatbots outside school. They want to talk about how to use them in their education, da Silva added.
Copilot is a "safer" introduction to an AI environment for students, da Silva said, than other chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini, which lack the privacy and data protections of Copilot.
Providing students with a safeguarded chatbot "gives us an opportunity to lean into the learning," da Silva said, "and help the students in the journey through a very system-altering technology."
Student data collected by Copilot will stay in the district, he added, on Microsoft servers based in Canada. And Microsoft won't use students' "prompts" — their questions or statements to the chatbot that initiate tasks — to train its chatbot.
Teachers will have autonomy over how and if they implem...