Teachers in Prince William County, Virginia, are helping launch a new artificial intelligence tool exclusively for educators.
Prince William County teachers are helping launch a new artificial intelligence tool exclusively for educators, a step leaders in the Northern Virginia suburb expect will give them more time to spend working with their students.
On Wednesday, OpenAI announced a new version of ChatGPT that is exclusively geared toward teachers. Prince William is part of the cohort helping to roll it out.
Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said of the 800 million people who use ChatGPT each week, teachers are among the “earliest and most active adopters.”
The launch will give schoolteachers access to the tool for free through at least June 2027. The tech will feature an environment built just for teachers, and includes unlimited GPT-5 messaging, web search, image generation, deep research combined in a workspace designed just for schools, Belsky said.
The tool includes prompts specifically for educators and is for teachers exclusively. Students won’t have access.
The rollout comes as school leaders said many teachers have already been using ChatGPT to help with their day-to-day tasks. In Prince William, Superintendent LaTanya McDade said educators are using AI to design lessons, create tests and in some cases analyze writing samples for students to provide feedback.
“We think that this is going to be a game changer for our educators toward teacher empowerment,” McDade said.
Teachers will have access to free, two-hour webinars that will include tips for how to use the tool.
The tech “opens up a world of collaboration, where they have an open workspace, where they can share. What we know about the ways that teachers learn and build teacher agency and teacher self-efficacy, is they learn from each other.
The opportunity to share best practices across the school system and across the nation, quite frankly, opens up a door of opportunity that doesn’t necessarily currently exist,” McDade said.
Through the partnership, the school district signed a data-processing addendum, McDade said, emphasizing ChatGPT met all division standards for safety and security, including for securing student data and privacy.
Because teachers are already using artificial intelligence, McDade said “it should bring comfort in the fact that now they will be getting more formalized training, so that they can even use it more effectively and responsibly.”
Kerri Holt, chief technology officer for Houston’s Independent School District, also part of the cohort, said all information uploaded will be owned and controlled by the school divisions themselves.
By using the new ChatGPT for educators, McDade expects teachers will have more time “to engage in meaningful and thoughtful ways with their students.”
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