digital divide Archives

GenAI: Will It Deepen the Digital Divide in Australian Classrooms?

Edtech advocate and promote generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools as transformative, offering personalised scalable, and interactive learning experience. That only works for some schools. While some experiment with AI-driven platforms and policies, others lack basic digital infrastructure. The risk is clear: GenAI may not democratise education. Instead it might deepen existing divides unless we have targeted policies and equitable implementation.

From “AI for ALL” to Unequal Access

GenAI has potential. It can adapt explanations to student needs, offer 24/7 academic support, and automate repetitive tasks that are very time consuming for teachers. The major assumption in the use of GenAI is that all students and teachers are equipped enough, have access to the technology, the skills to use it, and the literacy to question it.

The UNESCO report on Global education Monitoring Report, 2023: technology in education:a tool on whose terms? revealsaccess to AI-enhanced learning tools remains highly unequal across socioeconomic lines. Many students in rural and remote communities, as well as those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, are less likely to benefit. Reasons? Limited access to devices, patchy internetand language bias in AI systems. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite internet once installed offers a promising solution for bridging the digital divide in rural areas.

The OECD Education Policy Outlook 2024 reports on building equitable societies, includinghelping manage teacher workload through the support of AI. However, it also suggests that students without digital literacy may rely on AI outputs without critical understanding, leading to superficial or inaccurate learning. Australia’sdigital divide is already evident more pronounced between urban and regional schools. Some private and well funded schools are integrating AI literacy into their classroom practices, while public schools in lower SES areas are still navigating foundational digital inclusion.

What’s Happening in Australian Classrooms?

A range of state-level and system-wide GenAI pilot programs are already underway. These examples illustrate both innovation and inequality.

In Western Australia, a $4.7 million AI pilot program funded by the federal and state governments is exploring how AI can reduce teacher workload through lesson planning and administrative support. Eight public schools are involved in this initial phase.

In South Australia, the Department of Education partnered with Microsoft to launch EdChat, a generative chatbot trialled in eight high schools in an initial trial completed in August 2023. Designed to support inquiry-based learning, the chatbot raised questions around student data privacy, accuracy of feedback and classroom integration.

In NSW, the government developed NSWEduChat, an AI assistant being trialled in 16 public schools. Unlike ChatGPT, it prompts students to reflect and reason, rather than delivering direct answers. The tool aims to align with pedagogical goals, but requires teachers to mediate use and guide students’ understanding.

In Queensland, Brisbane Catholic Education developed Catholic CoPilot, grounded in Catholic teaching, tradition and theology. Teachers use it for lesson planning, report writing, and generating resources, showing that customised AI is feasible within institutional values.

In Victoria, an independent school in Melbourne, Haileybury Keysborough , embraced ChatGPT and created school-wide protocols to teach students ethical and effective AI use. These include critical thinking tasks and assessments designed to discourage AI overreliance.

These examples show the growing momentum but also risk of a two-speed system. Well-resourced schools move quickly, underfunded ones lag behind, potentially widening the gap in both learning outcomes and digital literacy.

AI Literacy:The New Divide

One of the most overlooked challenges in this debate is the literacy gap around AI. Knowing how to access GenAI is not enough. Students and teachers need to understand how these tools work, their limitations and how to verify output generated by these AI systems.

A 2024 Australian Education Union Survey Victoria Branch revealed 1,560 underfunded public schools in Victoria. Public schools, particularly in regional and low-income areas, have limited opportunities. According to the Australian Education Union’s (AEU) 2024 article on future skills for educators, teachers are “left to navigate the ethical and pedagogical risks of AI on their own”, often without clear national guidance, curriculum-aligned training, or digital infrastructure to experiment safely.

This leads to a two-tier system. n one, students and teachers are supported to use AI thoughtfully as a scaffold for learning collaboration, and innovation. In the other, they are either excluded from AI use altogether, or exposed to it in ways that lack context, clarity, critical literacy, or alignment with pedagogy. This new two-tier of inequality will produce students who can interrogate technology critically, and those who treat it as an unquestioned authority.

Even more concerning, the AEU notes that “students already at a disadvantage are most at risk of falling further behind” if AI adoption is left to market forces or uneven state-by-state initiatives.

Design, Governance, and Inclusion

GenAI tools are not culturally neutral. They reflect the data they are trained on, mostly English language, Western centric internet sources. Without careful consideration, they can reinforce linguistic, cultural, and cognitive bias.

Bender, in On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, warns that the large language models (LLM), on which GenAI is based, often reproduce harmful stereotypes and misinformation unless explicitly mitigated. This risk is amplified in educational settings where students may lack the critical skills to identify inaccuracies.

Equity in AI use means more than access, it demands representation, transparency, and contextual sensitivity. We need AI tools aligned to local curricula, respectful of cultural knowledge systems, and available in accessible formats.

What Can Be Done?

Invest in infrastructure for underserved schools to ensure that all public schools particularly in regional, remote and low SES areas have reliable internet, updated devices, and tech support.

Moving beyond one-off briefings. Teachers need ongoing training that is curriculum-aligned, classroom tested, and critically reflective. Professional learning communities, and microcredentials in AI pedagogy could help bridge the gap.

Engage learners, families, and communities in conversations about AI use in education and developing investing in open source AI that reflects Australia’s educational and cultural diversity.

As educators, researchers, and policymakers we have a choice. We can let technology set the pace, or we can slow down, ask critical questions, and build systems that centre human dignity and learning equity. Let us ensure that GenAI supports the public good, not just private innovation.

Let us ensure no learner is left behind in the age of artificial intelligence.

Meena Jha is an accomplished researcher, educator, and leader in the field of computer science and information technology, currently serving as Head of the Technology and Pedagogy Cluster at Central Queensland University (CQU), Sydney, Australia.

‘Click bait’ hijacks the real story about technology in Australian schools

A recent education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said, among many other things, young people first “need to be equipped with basic literacy and numeracy skills so they can participate fully in the hyper-connected, digitized society of the 21^st Century”. It went on to make tenuous links between too much technology and falling literacy and numeracy, but first warned, quite early in the report, that “the findings must not lead to despair”.

That was all it took. What followed was a media frenzy, here and overseas, which produced a range of very negative stories. For example: “Are iPads a waste of money? OECD report says yes” stated The Age; in the Huffington Post in the United States: “Putting more technology in schools may not make kids smarter: OECD Report”; and in the United Kingdom the title of a BBC News story “Computers ‘do not improve pupils results says OECD”.

If you look closely at the report Students, Computers and Learning, which uses results from the 2012 PISA computer-based assessment of ICT literacy of students aged 15 in 31 countries across the globe, it is saying there is much good news. The leaps of logic in the interpretation and application of findings in the report picked up by various media outlets are considerable and unfortunate.

The examples I gave are just three of at least twelve damaging stories I read after the report’s release. They show how complex education issues in schools, and for principals, teachers, students and jurisdictions are increasingly reduced to the ‘education sound bite’. This kind of reportage serves as click bait for online readers.

Politicians may then take what reporters say as ‘gospel’. However, far more insidious, is the harmful effect such headlines have on teacher morale and the public’s view of education and schools more generally.

The real story about technology in Australian schools

In 2015 teachers’ work in technology-enhanced learning in classrooms in NSW is exciting. I have carried out research in a number of Australian primary and high schools since 2011 and my research shows there is good progress with technology enhanced learning and the pace is hastening. This research is ongoing.

Students are doing tech well in many Australian schools. They are stepping up to embrace the challenges that learning effectively with technologies demands. Results in student assessment in these schools show this. However connectivity in many schools is still far from ideal and even within major cities it is variable.

I agree with the OECD report where it states, “young people do want to be taught how to search more effectively”. My recent research indicates that. It also demonstrates that in some high schools in particular classrooms, students want teachers to leave behind the industrial model of “talking at them”, using “mindless work sheets” and “copying endless notes off the board”. Students desire many more opportunities to problem solve, work in teams, carry out long-term real-world projects, create films/animations, and use inquiry and project-based learning. The OECD report says this too.

I know from first hand experience that technology inequities exist in our schools and the “digital divide” is real. I also understand most schools make provisions for providing computers and other mobile devices to students who cannot afford them.

Something that has not been reported widely is that groundbreaking programs like the Digital Education Revolution (DER) meant for the first time every student from Year 9 onwards in an Australian public school had access to a small technological device. The program was not perfect but what it did do effectively (and there are evaluations that show this) is it placed technology in the hands of students who could not normally afford it. DER served to ‘whet the appetite’ of technological things to come, like educational apps, augmented reality, 3D printing, maker labs, geo spatial technologies, code and digital games. It enabled tech-savvy ‘early adopter teachers’ to play with technology, to see how it changed core concepts and how learning inside classrooms could be more engaging and motivating for young people, whose ‘digital bedrooms’ at home were a parallel universe to their lives at school.

Technology hardware and software is expensive. Governments must replace outdated equipment. Provide more time for professional development. This is vital investment that will allow teachers, as the OECD report contends, to become “active agents of change”.

I am about to start teaching a digital technologies course in a doctoral program for teachers in the School of Education at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in the United States. This is relevant because yesterday the school received a $5.6M gift from an alumnus. The donor, who wanted to remain anonymous, hopes the philanthropic commitment will inspire others. “Without properly trained teachers, our country would not have an educated population. Teachers are critical if we want a strong and vibrant society,” said the donor.

We need the Australian public and politicians to understand, and actively support, what is going on in our schools and in teacher education in universities, but how can we do this when complex issues are reduced to the lowest common denominator in the media? We are doing all educators a disservice when stories about technology in schools are hijacked as ‘click bait’.

Dr Jane Hunter teaches pre-service teachers in curriculum, pedagogy and technology enhanced learning in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. She is a researcher in the Centre for Educational Research at the same institution. Jane is the author of Technology integration and High Possibility Classrooms: Building from TPACK, New York: Routledge published earlier this year. In March 2016 she is a keynote speaker at the Future Schools Conference in Sydney.