Southern Cross Catholic College is proud to celebrate the achievements of our English Curriculum Leader, Victoria Snell, who recently presented at the Next Ed Conference hosted by Immanuel Lutheran College. Her presentation, titled “A Playbook for Teaching Literacy Using Multimodal AI", showcased her pioneering work in integrating artificial intelligence into literacy education.
Victoria's research explores the power of multimodal AI—systems that can understand and generate responses across multiple formats including text, images, audio, and video. For educators and students alike, this technology opens new doors for creativity, accessibility, and personalised learning. In the classroom, multimodal AI can read texts aloud, generate writing prompts, create visual summaries, and suggest sentence improvements. These tools not only support differentiated learning but also help students build structure, vocabulary, and comprehension in engaging and inclusive ways.
However, Victoria's approach is grounded in ethical responsibility. She emphasised the importance of aligning AI use with the Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools and the Rome Call for AI Ethics, ensuring that privacy, bias, and misinformation are addressed with care. She also acknowledged the support of Brisbane Catholic Education in training and preparing staff for the rollout of Microsoft Copilot, earlier this year.
“Unethical use of AI in schools can lead to serious issues such as privacy breaches, plagiarism, misinformation, bias and over-reliance," Victoria said.
“It is essential that any use of AI in education is guided by clear ethical principles."
Victoria's presentation was a call to action for school leaders to explore how multimodal AI can help close literacy gaps in reading and writing. Her vision includes a future where every student has access to a personalised AI tutor, allowing teachers to focus on designing rich learning experiences and nurturing critical thinking.
“In the future, I imagine that all students will have a personalised AI tutor which automatically differentiates the learning according to the needs, strengths and learning goals, allowing teachers to focus even more on designing rich learning experiences and nurturing critical thinking," she said.
Victoria is clear however, that AI will never replace the teacher.
“I want to stress that AI will not replace the teacher and our complex roles and responsibilities in the classroom," she said.
“It will enhance the teacher's role, requiring new approaches to assessment and a shared understanding of AI literacy across subjects."
We congratulate Victoria on her inspiring work and thank her for leading the way in shaping the future of literacy education.