🤖 Hot AI topics from the FETC Conference

📢 I’ll be at the TCEA Conference!

It’s coming up! I’ll be presenting at the TCEA Conference in San Antonio Texas in two weeks. (If you’ll be there, I’d LOVE to say hello!)

I have two official TCEA sessions:

• One Size Fits None: Differentiated Instruction with AI (10am Sunday, 217A)

• AI and Cheating: Real Talk from the Classroom (9:30am Monday, Hemisfair C1)

BONUS: There will be book giveaways and signings right after BOTH of those sessions where you can get a free copy of my book, AI for Educators!

I’ll also be presenting in the expo hall:

• Book Creator / Kami booth #853 (1pm Sunday)

• MagicSchool #1424 (2pm Sunday)

• SchoolAI #562 (3pm Sunday)

• Brisk Teaching #872 (ALL DAY Monday)

Won’t be at TCEA? Make sure you’re subscribed to my Ditch That Textbook email newsletter, where I’ll be sharing my session resources AND recorded video from the conference!

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ Microsoft innovations and programs to support AI-powered teaching and learning — Microsoft unveiled new initiatives recently.

2️⃣ The “Two Truths and AI” game (via Common Sense Education) — This game lets students practice identifying what’s real and what’s artificial.

3️⃣ AI Isn’t the Main Problem — It Just Shows Us What That Problem Is (via Edutopia) — It’s an overemphasis on grades and points and not on learning.

📢 Your voice: AI in elementary grades

Last week’s poll: Should students use AI in K-6 classrooms?

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes -- let's prepare them for the future (21)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Only with appropriate guidance and supervision (58)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Let's teach AI literacy without hands-on student AI use (26)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ K-6 is too early for AI (16)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other ... (6)

K-6 is too early for AI: Most adults can't understand the technology behind AI. How are children supposed to understand it? It seems like magic, but it is simply predicting what comes next based on training data. Adults with all their life experience have a difficult time comprehending this. How can we expect children to understand what is happening under the hood? — M. Mueller

Let's teach AI literacy without hands-on student AI use: Begin K-6 with character development strategies to prepare them for success. Build foundational knowledge and embrace the active-learning question: "What if?" Embrace imperfection. Cultivate critical curiosity and adaptability as a way of doing life in the classroom. Get creative with non-device AI activities. Provide parents with resources to explore AI at home under critical oversight. Be patient and don't rush our children! Let kids be kids. — R. Joslyn

Let's teach AI literacy without hands-on student AI use: Teaching students how to use AI responsibly in K–6 helps them ask better questions, understand that AI (and things they see online) aren't always right or true, learn about digital responsibility and ethics, and build healthy habits around technology early. — R. Nathrani

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🗳 Poll: What would you do first?

Instructions:

1. Please vote on this week’s poll. It just takes a click!

2. Optional: Explain your vote / provide context / add details in a comment afterward.

3. Optional: Include your name in your comment so I can credit you if I use your response. (I’ll try to pull names from email addresses. If you don’t want me to do that, please say so.)

✍️ A surprising benefit of AI writing feedback

At a dinner conversation with some leaders (of an edtech company, a district, and a tech conference), the topic of AI feedback came up.

There’s been lots of mixed dialogue around AI feedback — especially writing feedback. It can provide students more timely feedback and it can save teachers time in grading. However, it can be impersonal and low-quality.

Someone at the table suggested that AI feedback can actually make students better critical thinkers.

I sat up and leaned in. (This was a different line of thinking than I had heard.)

She said: When a student gets feedback from an AI model — and they know that it’s AI-generated feedback — they’re likely to look at it through a critical lens. (At least we hope — if they’ve been taught to critique AI.)

Why? Because the student knows that the AI model makes mistakes. Its feedback might not align exactly with what the teacher or the curriculum prescribes.

It’s up to the student to decide if the feedback is any good — and how (and if) to apply it.

This is different than when students get feedback from the teacher.

When they get teacher-generated feedback, that critical lens is often nonexistent.

Why? Because the student trusts the teacher. Because the student implicitly knows that any feedback provided by the teacher should be used.

This is good in many ways, but in one way, it isn’t developing a critical eye in the student that causes them to weigh whether the feedback is high-quality.

Does this mean that we should throw out all human feedback and only go with AI feedback because of this? Absolutely not.

But the more that we use AI and see its implications in teaching and learning, the more we see new sides of it — good and bad.

In some instances, if students know that feedback is generated by AI, it gives them the freedom — the permission! — to question that feedback in a way that they might not with their teacher.

🏠 Building a foundation of academic integrity

I got the pleasure of leading a full-day AI literacy workshop with Ken Shelton and Holly Clark, my fellow co-creators and founding faculty of The AI Fluency Lab.

We split the workshop up two hours at a time. Ken led the first block with foundational AI knowledge, leadership, and bias issues.

I followed with prompting, instructional design, and academic integrity.

Holly finished the workshop with examples of student/AI co-creation — and apps that support it.

In my presentation about academic integrity in the age of AI, I used a new metaphor that really seemed to work.

I explained it in terms of the foundation of a house.

The foundation is what holds the whole house up. When there are cracks in the foundation, it would probably be nice to come up with a single, easy-to-implement solution.

This is where lots of educators find themselves. They see the symptoms. They see the evidence. What they want is a quick fix or a hack that will make the symptoms go away — and the evidence stop coming in.

That’s why so many have turned to AI detectors. It feels like a singular solution to a complex problem. (And let’s be honest … in the world of educators, there are so many complex problems that we don’t need a new one!)

Unfortunately, AI detectors are adding more problems than they’re solving.

And all of the other possible solutions to the academic integrity situation that education is facing? They’re not enough by themselves.

If we really want to solve the problem, we’re going to have to start laying bricks — one by one.

Understanding how students are misusing AI might be one of the bricks in the foundation. But it’s a small one … and it doesn’t solve the problem.

The reality? It’s going to take a combination of lots of steps … lots of efforts to change the culture and the practice around teaching and learning in the AI age. They also might include …

• understanding why students turn to AI in the first place

• adapting assignments to incorporate AI — or to adjust to its existence

• modeling (and discussing) appropriate AI use

• co-creating norms and expectations around AI use (and non-use)

• discussing how it’s used (and avoided) in the workforce and world

It would be nice if we could just drop in a new foundation — one simple, easy-to-replace piece — and our academic integrity issues would be solved.

But that isn’t reality. It’s going to take a combination of efforts — from a combination of people.

Little by little we’ll get there. But if we’re looking for a quick fix, unfortunately, the “quick fixes” we have now aren’t doing the job on their own.