From textbook to a second teacher: How AI has changed study

Saturday, 18 October 2025

The use of artificial intelligence in schools has grown in different ways in the past two years along with a growing divide between those who embrace it, how students use it and those who turn away. Hanna McCallum reports.

When Eleanor Royson first started taking history in year 9, she learned from textbooks, and videos; exams were done on paper.

Five years later that has remained largely the same, except her teacher recently inserted the slide shows she made into generative artificial intelligence (AI) to turn into a podcast for her students to use to revise.

While videos and podcasts were already used, the difference is how specific the resources can be, Royson says.

“A video can cover the First World War, it doesn’t necessarily cover it in the context that you're looking at it, like New Zealand or a specific group.”

For the 17-year-old, AI is an extra resource and grown to become part of her life over the last two years at Wellington East Girls’ College.

AI has meant she has a teacher at hand around the clock when she needs to ask questions. Her fellow technology prefect, Holly James, 18, calls it her “second teacher”.

But Royson believes there is a balance. AI is helpful to digest or interpret information but it can be harmful when not used in the right way, she says.

As technology prefects at Wellington East Girls’ College, Royson and James bring a student voice to the the school’s digital information group, which regularly meets and discusses plans for the future of AI within the school.

Their principal, Gael Ashworth, says the college’s approach has been to be open to engaging with it and to prepare students and staff to be critical and effective with its use.

“It's a bit like Pandora's box; once it's open, you can't really pretend it's not there.”

The school is currently developing its strategic framework for AI and plans to implement it at the start of next year, focused on professional learning development for teachers and digital literacy for students.

There are varying degrees of confidence in its use among staff so the challenge is to create a baseline of skill for them, and for students, to be able to become discerning users of AI, Ashworth says.

“I think fundamentally, it’s about teaching young people to be able to use the tools effectively and not developing an over reliance, just like any other tool.”

In the meantime, Royson and James have also been teaching other students about its benefits and how it can be used effectively for learning.

It has become widely used though there is still some shame around using it, James says. But increasingly, there is a divide between those that do and don’t.

“The people who aren’t using it often seem a little left behind or are asking questions that everyone else knows the answers to, because they have the resources to use AI.”

Royson says there are two ends of the spectrum, one where students overuse it in a way that stops them doing the learning and the thinking, and the other end where students haven’t been taught how to use it or where it can be used as a resource, meaning they fall behind.

She thinks it can open the door to a lot more learning. Calculators, for example, allowed people to look at far more complex maths equations, she says, and she hopes AI will allow more in depth learning at a high school level.

Broader issues like the climate impacts of AI do concern her. “But I don’t think that means not using it at all, just using it to a limited extent.”

Meanwhile, James still likes to use physical notes but uses AI to facilitate her learning.

“I really like it. I see it being a really big thing for the future and definitely something that should be included in learning.“

‘Really scary’

For Geronimo LaHood, a year 13 student at Wellington High School, ChatGPT has been a way to occasionally get a head start on his assignments, like asking it where to find research or list artists he should look at for feminism.

He has even used it for inspiration, “like, write me a short essay on the principles of this theory”.

But compared to his friends and peers, the 17-year-old thinks he uses it a lot less and generally finds it “really scary”.

Over the last year at high school, he has found himself trying to use it less and less.

“I like taking a step back and seeing how I’m being challenged, seeing how I'm succeeding in some ways and failing in others, and learning from that,” LaHood says.

But getting rid of obstacles through using AI made him feel less fulfilled.

Using AI does not reinforce knowledge, “it just means I don't have to go out and find this website, it tells me where to go, or I don't have to go out and find these quotes, it tells me”, he says.

“What you're missing out is that journey of maybe not having the best essay, struggling with research, maybe putting in all the work to find websites and struggling and that is what really helps you as a student, are those obstacles.”

As a student representative, he has observed how people at school – from students to teachers – have reacted to AI in different ways.

People have not caught up with its fast development, unsure of where the balance is and what to do, which is reflected in the fact there is no national policy for AI in schools, he says.

Among teachers, some embrace its use, while “some just don't even talk about it”.

For students, particularly towards the end of their senior years, he can see why it is easy to “jump on the bandwagon” and use AI to do their work when they are burnt out by assessments.

The biggest cheat is getting it to do their work, while it is also commonly used by students inserting their work into AI along with the marking criteria and getting it to mark their work to improve on.

“Overall I think there's very little consequence if you can do it smartly, which students have figured out how to do.”

At Wellington High School, staff and students are allowed to use AI and it has adopted its own policy. Principal Dominic Killalea says it has an AI working group and has done some professional learning development for teachers.

“But we have to be very careful with it,” he says, “we’re just testing things basically”.

The cognitive impact of AI ‘depends’

Dr Simon McCallum, a senior lecturer in software engineering at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, has worked in game development and taught AI courses in Aotearoa and Norway over the last 25 years.

At the university, he is starting to see a gap between students who have come from schools which have thoroughly adopted AI over the last two years and those which have banned it.

“There’s a massive gap – or massive variation that’s starting to open up,” McCallum says.

Depending on the type of AI people use – mostly if it’s a paid version ‒ there is no longer any way of telling when students have used it in essays, he says.

Meanwhile, the cognitive impact of AI “depends”.

He is seeing divided usage around those who use AI to make their task easier, while others are using it to accelerate their learning.

It’s as if electric bikes were introduced to a group of traditional cyclists, he says; some may use the electric bike to travel the same distance with minimal effort, while others may see it as a way to go up the steepest hill or go five times the distance.

“They've got the same fitness because they haven't used it to decrease their exercise, they've used it to increase their range of possibilities and I think that's what we're seeing.

“You are learning much, much faster than we could have ever hoped previously. But there are people who then are able to avoid learning.”

Therefore it becomes a choice to do the additional work, he says. “If you have someone who is passionate about what they’re doing, they’ll use it to go further.”

But research has shown “unmanaged adoption of AI leads to the average person thinking less about a task”.

Educators want to understand students’ processes by measuring their output because that used to be a way of guaranteeing the process, McCallum says.

But now, a pivot is necessary when the output can be artificially created without any process.

Teaching gaming development, McCallum often works with very passionate students who are engaged and like being challenged.

It means when something that used to be a two-week assessment has now turned into one line of code, he can adjust the goalposts.

But he acknowledges, it’s not as simple across all university courses, or in secondary school settings which have a set curriculum and assignments.

“How do we work with students and help them understand that if they want to develop their brain, they have to put time and effort in? Because we're not interested in the artefacts they create, we're interested in the process that they go through and the time and effort required, because just like building muscles, you need to build cognitive fitness, right?

“You need to build that critical thinking. You need to challenge yourself.”

McCallum says the human brain and how it processes hasn’t changed just because technology has.

Time spent on tasks therefore remains as important, regardless of whether it’s digital or on paper, not just taking short cuts.

He is worried about a third of the population will become more apathetic as a result of AI.

Learning happened from having to compare the “unimportant things with the important things”.

“Then you learn all of them because you had to read all of them, and you had to think about them all … you had to spend time to differentiate it.”

AI, the devil or angel on your shoulder?

For LaHood, the potential impact of AI in lessening people’s thinking concerns him.

“There's a lot of scary and detrimental things, but there's also a lot of benefits – I'm just quite overwhelmed by how much it can change our society,” he says.

But while he tries to use it as little as possible, watching other students use it and get rewarded through good grades also evokes a feeling of unfairness.

“It takes so much away from the hard work.”

His study at the start of NCEA used to be a lot more thorough and he would start earlier.

Even when he wasn’t working on an assignment, it would sit at the back of his mind and encourage him to get back to it.

But now, AI is like a backup – “a little friend on your shoulder”, to reduce stress and help make any changes, because it’s possible, right at the end, with far less work.

AI also enforces the narrative that having good grades and producing good work “makes you a better person, gives you more success in life”, he says.

“That's so common for young people with awards and endorsements and scholarships and everything and I think AI doesn't do anything to help that, because it's offering you a better grade.”

He sees it adding another issue to his teachers’ plates and it feels an impossible task to know how to deal with it with its pace of change.

Some teachers work hard to preserve printed sheets or whiteboard explanations but for the most part, classrooms have become almost entirely digitalised.

Workbooks for chemistry and earth and space science were the last textbooks LaHood used, with none this year. Overall, science subjects are some of the few remaining classes with paper and handwriting but even that is starting to shrink.

Exams are becoming more digital too. Within the span of a few years in English, LaHood says it has gone from students being able to request a computer to being required to use one.

“Even if we can get good things out of AI, it's going to take so long to respond to it and find a balance.

“The more that AI can just be taken away completely from education, the better.”