🤖 Unpacking the state of AI in 2025

🧪 COMING SOON: The AI Teacher Readiness course

Students are using AI. Teachers have lots of AI options. And there are so many implications — positive and negative — to consider.

How can teachers be ready for AI this school year?

Introducing: The AI Teacher Readiness online course, hosted by The AI Fluency Lab.

It’s an asynchronous (on-demand, recorded video) online course — with tons of additional resources AND interaction with fellow course members through discussion boards.

It walks educators through core, fundamental AI readiness topics:

• AI Educator Workflow

• Cheating and AI

• AI Responsible Use

• Prompting and AI Images

• Assessment and Feedback

• Student AI Co-Creation

The course officially is released on July 7, 2025 … but because it’s asynchronous, it can be started and completed any time.

Have professional development funds to spend soon? If you’re interested in this course but need to make a purchase ASAP, just hit “reply” and let me know. (I’ve been in touch with several who want to do this already!)

Want to take this course individually yourself? That’s perfect! We’ll have a link to enroll in the course soon. Stay tuned!

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ Nvidia CEO: If I were a student today, here's how I'd use AI (via CNBC) — And it doesn’t matter the profession, says Jensen Huang

2️⃣ A.I Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12 (via The New York Times) — This article has been making the rounds on social media and is evoking strong opinions.

3️⃣ The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis (via Humanities and Social Sciences Communications) — This new paper makes suggestions on using AI in learning.

📢 Your voice: My new AI keynote

Last week’s poll: Which big idea from my new keynote speech resonates the most?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Teaching through our "tomorrow glasses" (2)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ AI will change doing, thinking, knowing (4)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Embedding AI literacy in classroom teaching (13)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Focus on questions (2)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Focus on the process (4)

Embedding AI literacy in classroom teaching: aaa I believe AI literacy is critically important and educators need more concrete guidance about what it encompasses and preparation for how it is going to evolve. — J. Smith

Embedding AI literacy in classroom teaching: That was my big takeaway from the ASU+GSV Summit. — Rachel Jeffrey

AI will change doing, thinking, knowing: Agreed! We have to think about teaching and learning differently and how we can leverage AI to improve both. — Susan Moore

What would you like to read in AI for Admins?

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🗳 Poll: Teachers saving time with AI

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.)

📦 Unpacking the new “State of AI in Edu 2025” report

It’s been 2 years, 5 months, and 20 days since ChatGPT was released to the world on November 30, 2022.

Since then, there’s been a meteoric rise in the use of AI everywhere — including in education.

Where are we today — and how have things changed?

Carnegie Learning released its report called “The State of AI in Education 2025”, where it gathered the perspectives of K-12 educators in the United States. More than 650 responded, including 49 states and Puerto Rico.

The results are in a slick 24-page PDF file — pretty easy to browse!

Here were some of their findings — along with my observations …

1. Educator AI use is growing

📈 ANALYSIS: It appears that the question was simple: something like “Do you use AI in your work?” The “rarely” and “never” answers dropped, while the “often” and “always” answers rose. It’s pretty clear that educators are identifying that they use AI more.

💡 OBSERVATION: It seems like we’re asking the same questions we always have with technologies like the internet and laptops/Chromebooks. The more important question is: What are they doing with it? Are they using it to generate mindless worksheets — or are they using it to push thinking, to increase classroom creativity, to level up student learning? If teachers use AI to make tired, traditional practices more efficient, then we’re not making any progress. It’s like using a sledgehammer to kill a spider. It’s this really powerful, capable tool … and we’re using it for so much less than we could.

💡 OBSERVATION: The question expects teachers to be able to identify when AI is at play or not. Here’s a follow-up question: Do they know that they’re using AI when they’re using AI? AI models are at work in so many places. They’re analyzing data in the background in some apps. They’re optimizing news feeds. They’re making suggestions and providing insights. Teachers could be benefitting from those without even knowing it.

2. Use of several AI tools is growing

📈 ANALYSIS: ChatGPT is still the top tool for educators, and the top 5 tools haven’t changed. There hasn’t been much rise since 2024 in ChatGPT usage … but lots of other tools have come on strong with educator usage. Educators are using Google Translate a lot more than they used to (even though it’s been available since 2006!). MagicSchool and Canva grew by about 25 percentage points each.

💡 OBSERVATION: The fast rise of MagicSchool fascinates me. All of the other companies in this list — OpenAI, Google, Canva — are major corporations. MagicSchool didn’t exist before ChatGPT was released. But it serves a purpose that the others here don’t — translating AI into very clear, easy tasks that can save teachers time.

💡 OBSERVATION: The other interesting finding here, to me, is the appearance of ChatGPT and Google Gemini — two general purpose AI assistants / large language models (LLMs). One knock against teachers in AI education circles is that they don’t know how to prompt a powerful AI assistant like ChatGPT and prefer filling in blanks in the MagicSchool teacher tools. But these numbers show that teachers are increasingly willing to ask a powerful model for exactly what they want — rather than using a pre-made teacher efficiency tool like MagicSchool. Maybe that’s a sign of growing AI literacy among teachers. (Small steps!)

3. Educators are using AI as a time saver

 📈 ANALYSIS: Of those educators that use AI tools, the vast majority chose “reduced time on administrative tasks” at 70 percent. (They could choose multiple options in this survey.) Personalized learning experiences was second (47%), followed by improved student engagement (37%) and enhanced learning outcomes (32%).

💡 OBSERVATION: Saving time is still #1. And honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We’ve had a teacher burnout crisis in education for a long, long time. Time is a valuable currency for teachers! When they have time, they’re able to spend it on things that matter — connecting with students, planning meaningful activities, and even improving their own mental health by going home sooner at the end of the day. (And we know that benefits students, too!) Some people criticize using AI just for efficiency purposes, saying that it’s capable of much more than that. But if it makes the teaching profession more tenable and good teachers are more likely to stay in teaching, I’m all for it.

4. AI policies are growing but mostly nonexistent

 📈 ANALYSIS: In 2024, 20% of schools and districts identified as having AI policies in place in this survey. This year, that number has doubled to 40% — a significant rise. But that also means that 60% of schools/districts in the survey reported not having AI policies.

💡 OBSERVATION: Educators and students need AI guidance. Without any sort of guidance, everyone is left to fend for themselves … making decisions on a very new, fast-developing technology without the facts and understandings necessary to make judgments. Give them something. Give them anything! If you’re not going to give them professional development on AI in education, at least point them to online resources they can check out. Guidance is a crucial first step.

💡 OBSERVATION: Well-meaning yet wrong-headed AI policies can do more harm than good. The survey just asked if schools/districts had a policy. That doesn’t say anything about the details of the policy — whether it is a block/ban policy or a supportive policy or anything in between. Setting a policy is a start. Putting a good, well-researched policy in place that does what’s best for students and their future? That’s progress.

5. Teachers are still concerned about cheating

 📈 ANALYSIS: Cheating still the biggest challenge/concern on this list. In fact, it’s distancing itself from the pack a bit. In 2024, cheating was neck-and-neck with “lack of training and support.” Now it’s 10 percentage points ahead. Also in the report (but not in the graphic above): privacy concerns at 27% and technical issues/glitches at 25%.

💡 OBSERVATION: There are two schools of thought on the cheating issue. One side — mostly talking heads at education conferences and on LinkedIn (I qualify for this one!) — are ready for us to evolve forward in the cheating conversation. Instead of trying to catch students “cheating with AI,” let’s figure out how it fits in learning. Let’s see how it can support students — and how we can prepare students for the future. The other school of thought? It’s classroom teachers who want to keep students learning but aren’t thinking about significant change to how they teach. We must find a way to bring these sides together! There’s a huge chasm between these schools of thought. The “evolve forward” camp and the “I just want to teach” camp need to find some middle ground and work together. 

6. Teachers are talking about AI more with students

 📈 ANALYSIS: AI isn’t as taboo in classrooms as it was this time last year. And that’s a good thing. Nearly 3 in 5 teachers discussed proper/improper use of AI with students this year — a 22 percent rise.

💡 OBSERVATION: As I stated earlier, everyone needs guidance. Students ESPECIALLY need AI guidance. If we aren’t willing to talk to them about the place of AI in learning, they’ll learn about it from their friends — or on TikTok. And they won’t be learning the responsible, ethical uses that drive learning forward. Students need respected, trusted adults to help them understand this new AI landscape. (Even if not all of them will listen … and even if they don’t listen all the time!) Thankfully, that doesn’t mean that teachers need advanced degrees in technology or artificial intelligence to talk to students about AI. They just need to be willing to try AI tools out — and talk to kids about their experiences with it. Just discuss what’s beneficial and what to avoid — and approach the whole thing with an open mind. If we can get some real talk about AI and learning between teachers and students, we’ll move forward very quickly.