Artificial Intelligence in Educational Settings: Benefits, Challenges, and Concerns

Opening Essay | MediaEd Insights | AI: Educator Perspectives Edition | June 2026

Written by Sarah Eckerstorfer

In 2022, I had just graduated college and began working as a program assistant at an after school program focused on connecting students to technology and careers in STEM. When I started this position, I wouldn’t consider myself a very techy person. My skills included turning off a computer and turning it back on when it wasn’t running reliably and showing the team of millennials that I joined what Canva was. But within the first few months of working there, I had learned everything from 3D printing to flying drones and coding robots. Skills that I never once considered learning were now a part of my every day. I was learning how to operate all the tech around through YouTube videos and Reddit forums, but in the fall of 2022 a new tool became publicly available that changed the game.

Dalle-2 and ChatGPT were launched within a span of two months of one another, altering the way that users interacted with the internet and media. At the start, I was enthusiastic about the new tools. In an instant I was able to generate a portrait of raccoons playing poker in a surrealist cubic style. I had heard of artificial intelligence of course, often picturing it as a robot like C-3PO, but I never fully understood the mechanics behind the technology. I was eager to use generative AI to increase accessibility for students doing complex projects, like coding a video game or 3D modeling a sneaker. Before long, though, we recognized that there are costs to this increased accessibility, and I found my students split by the AI debate.

It’s true that having AI at our fingertips created an ease of access that transformed the student experience in many ways. However, students also talked about their fears surrounding AI. We no longer had to dig through the forums of yesteryear to find solutions; we could get instant answers, albeit answers that weren’t always correct. At the same time, students’ social media feeds were full of stories about newly built data centers impacting the surrounding communities with consequences like decreased water quality. These stories prompted them to think about their own community’s water sources and all the ways in which their lives could change if a data center popped up nearby. Other students worried about how it would affect the future of art and creativity, devaluing originality and possibly exploiting their own work. I hadn’t realized that to make that cubist portrait of the raccoons, I was using real artists' work to inform that one I had envisioned. Still, there were students who were unfazed by these worries and loved to have the quick answers at their fingertips.

Balancing varied perspectives amongst students is always a challenge for educators. With every new tool, educators are the active researchers trusted to investigate and support student understanding, access, and skill levels. In an afterschool space, we do our best to ensure that our students are building skills with new technology without becoming overreliant. In an effort to support our students in the age of AI, we have partnered with experts who held workshops that introduce and explain the many AI tools available to them as well as giving students a chance to develop their own machine learning tools (machinelearningforkids.co.uk). Even having provided this level of deeper learning, we found our students continuing to feel torn; they need the knowledge and skills, but they still found their fears and concerns unaddressed.

As we are all learning to integrate AI into our daily lives, we will continue to adapt, learn, and understand along with our students. What we can do now is make sure our learners understand exactly how AI functions and that it is not a humanless tool – there is still a person behind the machine, teaching it the difference between a blue and green ball, and there are people that will continue to be affected through environmental and creative exploitation. We will be the ones informing AI’s lasting impact and the more we discuss it now, the more our students will be cognizant of its role in their future.

The other pieces in this issue of the MediaEd Insights explores the many questions and experiences that arise for educators when it comes to AI. We hope that as you read them, you'll think about your role as a user, a learner, an educator, and a member of your community when it comes to artificial intelligence.