👋 AI for Admins is back!

How AI for Admins works …

Since it’s been a little while, here’s a refresher about this email newsletter (and its supporting community) …

This group is called “AI for Admins,” but it isn’t just a group for admins. It’s for anyone who is a leader or leading discussions about AI and their classroom/school/district’s direction.

AI for Admins is made up of two parts:

• I send the weekly AI for Admins email newsletter with new articles and resources — plus a recap of what our members have shared in the community.

• The AI for Admins community is hosted in Teachable, my online course platform. It’s a free spot for us to post and reply to each other about topics of interest and post resources.

If you’re new (or if you’ve been here a while), be sure that you:

• Sign up for our AI for Admins community (where our discussion boards are)

• Introduce yourself in the “Welcome / Get to Know You” section

• Check out our resources posted in the community

• Read any back issues you missed in our newsletter archive

• Share AI for Admins with anyone who might appreciate it

NEW POST: Lesson planning with AI

Asking an AI assistant for lesson plan ideas is a common starting point for AI with educators.

They start to see how they can get new ideas quickly — ideas they can use right away, saving them time for other important things.

And when they see that? They start to naturally see other ways to use these tools.

Looking for a starting point for AI lesson planning?

In our post on AI-assisted lesson planning, we share 15 ways to enhance existing lessons …

… plus we give 10 tips to plan new lessons with an AI assistant!

Read: Lesson planning with AI: Save time and get ideas

🗓 This week’s discussion topic

Here’s this week’s new discussion topic (posted under Discussion Boards / Other Topics):

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new topic/question for the community to discuss. So this seemed relevant …

How have your views changed on AI and its implications on education over the last year?

(Or how have they stayed the same?)

We’ve seen lots of new AI tools — and lots of ways that teachers and students are using AI to teach and learn.

(We’ve also seen some ways that haven’t been great …)

It’s time to reflect on how we have changed our views — or how our views have stayed the same (which is a good thing, too!).

Click here to respond to this question!

(You’ll need to log in — or join the community if you haven’t yet — to participate.)

PS: Hit reply to this email if you want to suggest a future discussion topic!

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ Education Hazards of Generative AI (via Cognitive Resonance): AI large language models (LLMs) have provided plenty of hype in education. As promising as some of the use-cases have been, there are also some hazards we want to avoid. This resource provides some food for thought.

2️⃣ OpenAI’s new text watermarking tool, and its implications on “cheating” (via Tom’s Hardware): OpenAI is thinking about releasing an already-developed watermarking tool that allows it to detect whether text was crafted by ChatGPT. The problem: it only works on text generated by ChatGPT, not other AI assistants. It still isn’t a “silver bullet” to solve the cheating conversation.

3️⃣ Conversation starter: the Google Gemini “Dear Sydney” ad (via The Verge): If you watched coverage of the Olympics, you couldn’t miss the “Dear Sydney” commercial from Google. It featured a father encouraging his daughter to use AI assistant Google Gemini to write a letter to her Olympic hero. It sparked backlash. Google pulled the ad. The commercial can be a great conversation starter about what we do — and don’t — want AI to do for us.