As a data scientist and software engineer, I already know AI intimately, not as a buzzword but as systems I build and reason about daily. So when our last topic in Foundations of Educational Technology was about “AI in Education,” I was eager to know what my colleagues would share. I was the outsider, after all: Most of my classmates are professional teachers, and I pursued this Master’s degree precisely to intersect my technical background with education. I came eager to learn from their point of view to understand how AI lands in a classroom.

Human-centered AI

AI can shape teaching, learning, and school management. But regardless of its application, AI must be human-centered. It is a support tool, never a replacement. Genuine teacher-student interaction stays at the center.

AI offers powerful potential. It can lighten a teacher’s workload by drafting lessons, questions, and assessments. Moreover, AI can simplify difficult topics without losing accuracy while supporting a teacher’s own professional growth. It can personalize explanations and push them to become critical, ethical, creative participants rather than passive users. For example, a well-built prompt that specifies the role, aim, audience, and context turns AI into a genuinely useful planning partner.

However, the risks are just as real. AI can quietly replace the cognitive struggle that actually produces learning. It generates confident answers that are sometimes wrong, so outputs must be verified. Aside from hallucinations, concerns about AI include equity, bias, privacy, and academic integrity. Unfortunately, many teachers are not yet formally trained in AI. Many have clear gaps in prompting, conceptual depth about AI, and confidence in using it.

Guidance and standards for AI use in education are vital now more than ever. Fortunately, UNESCO and the Department of Education (DepEd) released frameworks, which were discussed during our session.

UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Teachers and Students

UNESCO’s framework for AI competency (Miao & Cukurova, 2024)↗ has five aspects: human-centred mindset, ethics, AI foundations, AI pedagogy, and professional development. These grow across three levels: Acquire, Deepen, Create.

I was struck by its philosophy: even though AI can support a teacher’s work, meaningful teacher-student interaction must stay central. Teachers cannot be replaced; it even calls for protecting their rights and working conditions. As someone who builds these systems, I found that framing important; it defends the human role rather than treating it as an inefficiency to optimize away.

UNESCO’s AI competency framework for students (Miao et al., 2024)↗ mirrors this but asks more than tool use: it aims to grow responsible citizens, ethical users, critical thinkers, and creative problem-solvers across three levels of its own: Understand, Apply, Create. The lesson I took is that the goal is not to teach students to operate AI but to help them question it, use it responsibly, and eventually create with it.

DepEd’s Foundational Guidelines on AI

DepEd Order No. 003, s. 2026, the “Foundational Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence in Basic Education” (Department of Education, 2026)↗, grounded all of this in response to uneven access, data privacy, misinformation, and weak readiness. Its policies stayed with me: teachers must keep professional autonomy and verify any AI output before it touches instruction. The guidelines also reiterate that AI must support and never replace students’ thinking.

To do so, it has specific rules for different student demographics: Kindergarten to Grade 3 may not use AI independently, and those aged thirteen and below need supervision and parental awareness. AI may help build materials, assessments, and feedback, but only with human judgment central and the teacher accountable; AI use must be disclosed, and detection tools alone cannot prove misconduct. That last rule is a welcome development—I know firsthand how unreliable AI detectors are, so seeing policy catch up to that reality was reassuring.

My commitment

As I finish my first semester, I want to lead with the human-centered principle and resist the engineer’s instinct to automate for its own sake. I want to keep learning the pedagogy and see the value of explicit classroom AI-use policies with clear allowed uses, disclosure rules, and consequences.

AI’s effect on teaching and learning is powerful but conditional. It helps when paired with critical thinking, ethics, and training, but it becomes dangerous when it substitutes for them. I further understood that AI literacy goes beyond the technicalities: teachers must always keep the human at the center. That is our responsibility.

References

Department of Education. (2026, February 20). DepEd Order No. 003, s. 2026: Foundational guidelines on artificial intelligence in basic education. Republic of the Philippines.

Miao, F., & Cukurova, M. (2024). AI competency framework for teachers. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-competency-framework-teachers

Miao, F., Shiohira, K., & Lao, N. (2024). AI competency framework for students. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-competency-framework-students

AI Declaration: I used Claude to only proofread this article. I am responsible for its content, style, and narrative.