Unlocking AI in the Classroom: Safe & Smart Implementation with Magic School AI

Bethany
Dec 8, 2025
3 min read

Discover how Magic School AI empowers students to explore AI in a safe, educational environment! This session will showcase practical strategies for integrating Magic School AI into instruction while maintaining student privacy and fostering responsible AI use. Learn how this tool enhances creativity, critical thinking, and efficiency for both students and educators. Walk away with ready-to-use ideas and best practices to confidently bring AI into your classroom in a meaningful, engaging way!

The conversation around Artificial Intelligence (AI) in K-12 education often brings a mix of emotions, from joy and excitement over new possibilities to fear, anxiety, and concerns about cheating. This presentation outlines a clear, multi-year strategy to navigate this complex landscape using a dedicated educational platform, Magic School AI.

The goals for integrating AI center on three critical areas:

Practical Application: Exploring safe, creativity-boosting activities.
Teacher Control: Utilizing a program with a student-facing side and backend teacher access for monitoring.
AI Literacy: Defining what meaningful AI literacy means for a successful K-12 rollout.

Why Magic School AI?

Magic School AI is a platform explicitly designed for education. Its primary purpose is to help educators spark creativity, save time, and improve student outcomes with standards-aligned tools that protect data and personalize learning.

The district chose Magic School because it "checked all the boxes", offering:

Compliance: Adherence to FERPA/COPPA and the Wisconsin Data Privacy Agreement.
Performance: Consistent performance in trials compared to other educational AI options.
Control: Inclusion of both a teacher and student side with monitoring capabilities.
Features: Translation, leveling, dictation/read aloud, custom tools, a district admin console, and the ability to export to Docs.
Professional Development: Provides both live and asynchronous training options.

Rethinking AI: Three Tools in One

Instead of worrying about cheating, the district encourages teachers and students to view AI as a thought partner, drafting assistant, and creativity booster. Magic School is comprised of three distinct tools:

Teacher Tools: These tools are designed to take the pressure off general prompting by asking for exactly what criteria the AI should use to craft its responses. They help bring various instructional initiatives together under one roof, saving teachers valuable time in areas like lesson planning, grading, and communication with families.
Student Tools: This component is designed to create independence for a student. Students can receive real, instantaneous feedback, instantly have content translated or read aloud, and utilize built-in dictation. Teachers design the virtual "room" and control when and how students interact with the tools.
Raina (The Chatbot): Raina is Magic School’s generic chatbot, perfect for questions when a specific tool is not available. It uses ChatGPT’s Large Language Model along with others, providing teachers with unlimited, education-in-mind access to a powerful LLM.

The District AI Launch Strategy

The district implemented a structured, multi-year rollout for AI integration:

Year 1 (Step 1): Teacher-Side Focus The launch started with the teacher side to immediately give time back to staff by offloading tasks like grading, lesson planning, and classroom management.
Year 1 Summer (Steps 2 & 3): Optional Student Launch - We provided optional PD for staff who wanted to implement MagicSchool with students, and optional paid PD sessions were provided through the Summer Institute for staff to earn Magic Certifications and prepare for launching with students.
Year 2 (Step 4): Required Student Launch Required sessions were introduced for teachers to launch with students, with the goal of increasing student use.

To support the launch, the district established clear policies and resources, including a required AI Literacy Video for both staff and students. They provided clear expectations for usage and developed a policy to ensure the entire team understood the district is AI-forward. Resources are housed in a dedicated Module in Canvas for Staff.

Key Takeaways

The presentation concludes with the following key takeaways for successful AI integration:

Magic School empowers creativity and efficiency for both staff and students.
Implementing AI literacy side-by-side with Magic School is crucial for success.

The platform provides a safe and teacher-guided environment perfect for educational use.