Professor Miles Berry

Miles is a professor of Computing Education at the University of Roehampton

Workshop Information:

AI for accessibility and inclusion is about empowering pupils to access and flourish in their studies, irrespective of any special needs or language barriers.

Vygotsky saw learning as taking place in a 'zone of proximal development', where what a child could do with support from a 'more knowledgeable other' today, would become what they could do independently tomorrow. 

Prof Berry presents AI as potentially taking on the role of the more knowledgeable other, particularly for learners who might normally struggle to access the curriculum. 

He offers some insights into how pupils can learn about the concepts on which AI is built, and then explores some practical ways in which free tools can support pupils with the language demands of the school curriculum, from text to speech and speech to text tools, through machine translation to the potential of ChatGPT and generative AI tools. 

He concludes with some thoughts on the ethical and long term implications of these technologies.

• Using AI to support pupils with a range of SEND

• Using AI to bridge language barriers and support pupils with language acquisition for learning

Biography

Miles is Professor of Computing Education at the University of Roehampton, where he runs the secondary PGCE in computing course, teaches on the University's digital media and social science research methods degrees, and is a member of the University's AI development and innovation group. Prior to joining Roehampton, he spent 18 years in four schools, much of the time as an ICT coordinator and most recently as a head teacher. 

Over the years he has contributed to a number of computing related projects including England's national curriculum computing programmes of study. He gave evidence to the House of Lords AI select committee, was an expert advisor to the US-based AI4K12 project, has supported Georgian universities in developing academic integrity policies. He chairs the BCS England computing curriculum committee, and until recently was chair of England’s National Centre for Computing Education's academic board.