staff member wanting ai in the school

[xicor]

Has anyone deployed AI tools for staff across their school?
 

We currently have Microsoft Copilot, but staff are increasingly asking for something closer to the ChatGPT like being able to easily group chats into projects, keep related work together, and generate images etc

 

The problem I’m finding is that ChatGPT becomes very expensive once you move into the versions with proper management and security controls. ChatGPT Business/Teams seems more affordable, but from an IT admin point of view the controls still feel quite limited. For example, I can't seem to centrally/bulk disable plugins or properly lock down some of the features I wouldn't want staff using.

 

I'm interested to know what others have deployed for staff if any ? or if you using Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or something you've built yourselves using an API?

 

[3s-gtech]

Copilot only - laid out in our AI policy. This is for Data Protection and budgeting reasons, and also for things like SARs - we need data in places that we can audit and manage. If they really want to use another AI service, they'll need to lay out the business case and resolve these questions.

[xicor]

39 minutes ago, 3s-gtech said:

Copilot only - laid out in our AI policy. This is for Data Protection and budgeting reasons, and also for things like SARs - we need data in places that we can audit and manage. If they really want to use another AI service, they'll need to lay out the business case and resolve these questions.

did you have to pay for extra data controls for copilot or is this the standard license included A1 ?

[DalekSec]

Not a school but:

CoPilot for general use, free tier (that comes with out licesning)

Claude for heavy users, paid for business tier 

[3s-gtech]

15 minutes ago, xicor said:

did you have to pay for extra data controls for copilot or is this the standard license included A1 ?

A1/A3. I spend enough on MS licensing yearly; paying extra for this guff is money in the wind.

[andy_b]

Struggling with this a little.  Chatgpt is demanded as people are unhappy with Copilot's output.

[xicor]

8 minutes ago, andy_b said:

Struggling with this a little.  Chatgpt is demanded as people are unhappy with Copilot's output.

yeah this was another complaint along with lack of project and chat grouping

[ITGuyNW]

Just say yeah we can have chatgpt but costs will be shared with departments..

[nicholab]

Has anyone considered a product like Netwix DLP?  As that could control anywhere that data is going to.

[sigma]

So how many schools are still using free or other non-enterprise versions or have not enabled ZDR policies on the enterprise version? 

 

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-ai-with-your-privacy-intact/

“When you start typing into one of the big three AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini—it’s safest to start with a baseline expectation of approximately zero real privacy from anyone who is determined to access your conversation records and has a legal path to obtaining them. That includes the owner of the service, advertisers or other companies they partner with, contractors who help fine-tune the systems, law enforcement agencies, or even someone who manages to subpoena the records as part of a civil lawsuit.

The simplest, strong exception to that rule is a contract between you—or more likely, your employer—and an AI provider that legally prevents them from retaining those records, a provision that’s come to be known as zero data retention, or ZDR. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all offer ZDR policies for their enterprise versions, which when enabled generally require that they immediately delete records of users’ interactions with a chatbot as soon as they’re processed.

Even these ZDR policies, which are only available for paid enterprise and developer accounts rather than for average users, have significant exceptions. Anthropic, for instance, doesn’t offer ZDR for its most sophisticated “Mythos-class” models like Fable 5.1, due to what it describes as the potential for misuse like scamming or hacking and even “autonomous misbehavior,” such as AI agents independently hacking targets to carry out their unwitting users’ requests, as has occurred in several high-profile AI-driven breaches.

OpenAI also announced last month that its ZDR implementations will analyze user activity prior to deletion—on the customer’s systems rather than its own, it says—and, if it detects abuse, flag it for the customer organization. OpenAI says its system, known as Private Safety Processing, will even alert OpenAI’s staff if it detects abuse in some cases, though without revealing the content of the conversation to them. Google, too, warns that it logs some Gemini prompts for abuse monitoring even with ZDR enabled, but without the user’s Google ID or IP address included—though that “sanitized” data can in some cases still pinpoint a particular person when the request itself includes identifiable information.”

[jmak]

Also not a school, but I'd advocate getting away from staff signing up to free accounts and using them for work. The school should have a policy prohibiting it - and regularly remind staff. You all know this already, but for the record school days should only be entered on platforms whose privacy policies you've vetted. 

 

I'm possibly being unfair, but my experience of Copilot was so poor compared to any of the free products, it was causing half the problems by driving users to free ChatGPT accounts. Check what you can get for free or low cost from Google as a school. Gemini is pretty decent and Gemini Notebook (previously Notebook LM) is really good. We decided Claude was enough of an improvement that we set up a Team subscription and users who can justify it to their manager will be given a seat. It's paid for by the users cost centre - it's not (yet) part of basic IT provision.

 

I think the difference between the platforms for day to day activities is small, although I prefer the style of writing Claude uses in responses and draft documents (technical documentation I only care about content and clarity; I wouldn't use the output unedited for documents to be shared widely), but we selected it on the preference of our coders. They ran various tests and at the time we selected it, it was significantly ahead of the others. I think now it's closer.

[psydii]

Officially we're all in on "teachmate".

 

All staff have Copilot Chat (or is it "Copilot 365 Free tier" they keep changing its name)

 

10 staff have M365 Copilot 365 Premium (including me - which is why i can't just glance at the correct name for "Chat" in the corner of my screen).

 

Most of the staff who are paying attention are begging for Claude.  Which we could (technically) give them it via their M365 Copilot Premium licence, if not for unanswered GDPR querries.  Its sitting with our DPO at the moment, and has been a good long while.

 

That said, in casual conversation with people familiar with the overall strategy, I'm told a lot of people are happy enough with copilot chat, they've figured out their prompts and it does what they need. It has come a long way in the last two years, and seems to offer GPT 5 (5.5?) even for those on the basic Chat licence.  Its getting stuff tuned and baked into some of the edu specfific tools. But even so the Notebook feature of the Premium version seems like a game changer.. perhaps. Certainly Google appears to offer that for free to edu customers.

Nobody is asking for the OpenAI products because (for us) they are available in Copilot.  Those that want to do more are asking for Claude.  We have some people using Claude and MIstral and githib copilot with very clear guard rails that they must not include any PII. I do have to say that having a coding ai working on scripts has got somethings done 10x faster than without, and claude has helped people streamline and automate processes both on the technical side and on the business case side. Copilot is doing a lot of triage assistance across middle leadership.

 

From a T+L perspective there is some below the radar use in Teams classrooms, but officially we're all in on "teachmate".

Just to be clear, I am not "voting" for Microsoft / Anthropic  instead at least one "other" is a vote for the combination of TeachMate/CoPilot Chat + a smattering of M365 CoPliot Premium, with the understanding that GPT is part of the CoPilot offer.

I should point out that we have M365 A5, and strong a history  RBAC built from group membership which supported  us further secure things with Sensitivity labels and DLP policies. RBAC dates back to the dawn of our AD, and the labels and DLP since about 2018 (with a review to the more modern implementation a few years ago).

[hardtailstar]

Not a school but.....

 

Speak to Open AI and you can get your ChatGPT plan/license so it does not send data to Open AI from any user.

 

We use ChatGPT/Codex like this.

 

You can also set spend limits per person so that you can budget accordingly. 

 

 

[DavR]

Getting real "Zoom vs Teams" vibes from this threat - staff like the crappy home user tools, and are resistant to the proper enterprise ones we're pushing 😂

 

We don't have any approved AIs, we're still working on getting our AI policy in place. In the meantime, all AI tools are blocked for students, but we've left the big players available for staff.

 

Ultimately I'm leaning on getting CoPilot and Google Gemini as our main approved AIs, but I suspect we'll have to include ChatGPT as an option with some very strict usage rules.

[xicor]

23 hours ago, DavR said:

Getting real "Zoom vs Teams" vibes from this threat - staff like the crappy home user tools, and are resistant to the proper enterprise ones we're pushing 😂

 

We don't have any approved AIs, we're still working on getting our AI policy in place. In the meantime, all AI tools are blocked for students, but we've left the big players available for staff.

 

Ultimately I'm leaning on getting CoPilot and Google Gemini as our main approved AIs, but I suspect we'll have to include ChatGPT as an option with some very strict usage rules.

You haven't blocked AI sites for your staff ? but if they are not approved and not blocked won't that mean they will just use them ? 

[xicor]

23 hours ago, hardtailstar said:

Not a school but.....

 

Speak to Open AI and you can get your ChatGPT plan/license so it does not send data to Open AI from any user.

 

We use ChatGPT/Codex like this.

 

You can also set spend limits per person so that you can budget accordingly. 

 

 

their licensing model prices are crazy

[xicor]

On 23/09/2026 at 14:31, psydii said:

Officially we're all in on "teachmate".

 

All staff have Copilot Chat (or is it "Copilot 365 Free tier" they keep changing its name)

 

10 staff have M365 Copilot 365 Premium (including me - which is why i can't just glance at the correct name for "Chat" in the corner of my screen).

 

Most of the staff who are paying attention are begging for Claude.  Which we could (technically) give them it via their M365 Copilot Premium licence, if not for unanswered GDPR querries.  Its sitting with our DPO at the moment, and has been a good long while.

 

That said, in casual conversation with people familiar with the overall strategy, I'm told a lot of people are happy enough with copilot chat, they've figured out their prompts and it does what they need. It has come a long way in the last two years, and seems to offer GPT 5 (5.5?) even for those on the basic Chat licence.  Its getting stuff tuned and baked into some of the edu specfific tools. But even so the Notebook feature of the Premium version seems like a game changer.. perhaps. Certainly Google appears to offer that for free to edu customers.

Nobody is asking for the OpenAI products because (for us) they are available in Copilot.  Those that want to do more are asking for Claude.  We have some people using Claude and MIstral and githib copilot with very clear guard rails that they must not include any PII. I do have to say that having a coding ai working on scripts has got somethings done 10x faster than without, and claude has helped people streamline and automate processes both on the technical side and on the business case side. Copilot is doing a lot of triage assistance across middle leadership.

 

From a T+L perspective there is some below the radar use in Teams classrooms, but officially we're all in on "teachmate".

Just to be clear, I am not "voting" for Microsoft / Anthropic  instead at least one "other" is a vote for the combination of TeachMate/CoPilot Chat + a smattering of M365 CoPliot Premium, with the understanding that GPT is part of the CoPilot offer.

I should point out that we have M365 A5, and strong a history  RBAC built from group membership which supported  us further secure things with Sensitivity labels and DLP policies. RBAC dates back to the dawn of our AD, and the labels and DLP since about 2018 (with a review to the more modern implementation a few years ago).

does it give you chat gpt style projects/folders to group chats ?

[TwistedHelixis]

We have the basic education version of Gemini enabled for some teachers.

[xicor]

On 24/09/2026 at 20:42, TwistedHelixis said:

We have the basic education version of Gemini enabled for some teachers.

does that allow project folders similar to gpt and can you generate images ?

[psydii]

34 minutes ago, xicor said:

does that allow project folders similar to gpt and can you generate images ?

Copilot, no. People have a library of prompts they develop and copy/paste as needed.  It's just about 'good enough' that I don't have a revolt on my hands.  People deeper into AI use have got the full 365 Copilot licence and that does offer this functionality.

From what I understand Gemini on an education Workspace account does offer this functionality.

 

Side note: I suspect that Notebooks functionality might be coming to k12 tenants without the full 365 CoPilot licence - I've seen the feature light up (and then go dark again) for several people.  The notebook functionality is  game changing, and if Gemini continues to offer it in the free tier for edu Workspace accounts, I can't see how Microsoft can continue to gate it behind the monthly 365 Copilot add on.  Where as I can see them being forced to drop their edu AI support tools inside Teams Classroom etc since they are competing against little startups - and crushing them attracts unwanted attention from regulators.