After a period of skepticism and initial bans, schools across the country are beginning to embrace artificial intelligence tools—and Miami-Dade County Public Schools is leading the charge. As the nation’s third-largest school district, Miami is now at the forefront of a national experiment to integrate generative A.I. into education at scale.
At the heart of this effort is a groundbreaking program that introduces Google’s Gemini chatbot to over 105,000 high school students, making it the largest deployment of its kind in any U.S. school district. Over the past year, more than 1,000 educators in Miami have been trained on using A.I. tools in teaching, signaling a major shift in how technology is being embraced in the classroom.
One example of this transformation is playing out at Southwest Miami Senior High School, where social studies teacher Tracy Lowd is using A.I. to breathe new life into history lessons. In an April class, Lowd had her 11th-grade students interact with Google’s chatbot by prompting it to “act like President Kennedy” and explain the “New Frontier” economic and social policies.
The chatbot responded with paragraphs mimicking Kennedy’s tone and rhetoric—phrases like “my fellow Americans” included. Students then compared the A.I.’s simulated speeches with real ones they had studied in class. While the students described the chatbot’s responses as “awkward” and “weird,” they also found them surprisingly credible and informative.
“It did a very good job of impersonating J.F.K.,” said Ashley Acedo, 17, one of Lowd’s students.
This classroom experience illustrates how generative A.I. can serve as a powerful tool to engage students more deeply and critically in subject material. Instead of simply reading about history, students are interacting with it—questioning the authenticity of A.I.-generated content and deepening their understanding through analysis.
As more school districts look to the future of education, Miami’s initiative stands as a bold example of how technology, when thoughtfully applied, can enhance learning while encouraging students to think critically about the digital tools that increasingly shape our world.
