Chatbot 'Ed' will tell LA parents how their kids are doing in school
- Joanne Jacobs
- Aug 11, 2023
- 1 min read
An interactive, multilingual chatbot named "Ed" will tell parents about their child's grades, test results and attendance" and serve as a student advisor, reports Howard Blume in the Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced Ed as part of a back-to-school extravaganza at Walt Disney Concert Hall, writes Blume.
Artificial intelligence and district data will help create an Individual Acceleration Plan for each student, said Carvalho.
To be useful, such data should should be aligned with confidence in district intelligence, which I lack (and please note, I graduated from the Los Angeles Unified School District, and spent years teaching for them, including attending numerous LAUSD meetings on its assessment data, which wasn't used by well by the teachers, and wasn't reliable or valid, largely because California's state assessments were mediocre at best).
Sounds potentially scary because what is going to prevent the computer system (assuming it is AI) from making up data. At least one law firm was caught (Mata vs Avianca) when the lawyer thought that the program was merely a search engine vs one that made up non-existent cases.