💡 New UNESCO AI guidance for teachers, students

🔎 New UNESCO AI guidance for teachers, students

Within the last week or so, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released its AI competency frameworks for teachers and students.

Find the teacher framework here.

Find the student framework here.

I’ve gotten to browse them — not fully delve into the details. (And no, just because I used the word “delve” doesn’t mean that I wrote this section with ChatGPT!) 😂

Here were some of the things that caught my eye from both:

AI Competency Framework for Teachers

1) The emphasis on humanity. Everywhere you look in the teacher framework, they’re using the words “human” and “human-centered.” It’s SO important. We know how important human educators are to education. If we outsource all of the important decisions — and the ways that humanity makes learning special — we’re losing the whole purpose for all of this.

2) Debunking AI hype. This is mentioned several times, and we have to keep our guard up. It’s easy for edtech companies to create slick sales presentations and landing pages and social media posts … and teacher ambassador programs to hook them in even deeper. We still have to make sound, rational decisions. Is this good for my students — as humans? Does it support solid teaching and learning? What are we losing out on that’s important if we overuse this?

3) AI pedagogy. This is one of the core aspects of the teacher framework, and I’m glad that it is. It talks about the importance of selecting the RIGHT tools — and finding EFFECTIVE ways to implement them. It also emphasizes a crucial point that’ll be critical to education staying relevant in the future — evolving our teaching practices forward.

4) Acquire, deepen, create. These are the three progression levels for teachers to use to advance through their mindful application of AI. Each of these three has pages of details for each part of the teacher framework.

• “Acquire” supports teachers in their efforts to reach basic AI literacy levels. (LOTS of teachers are still here!)

• “Deepen” supports teachers becoming fully competent or master teachers in using AI.

• “Create” supports transforming teaching and learning practices to become expert teachers and agents of change.

AI Competency Framework for Students

1) Focus on critical thinking. I’m glad this was the first key principle mentioned in the student framework, because it’s crucial. It’ll be multi-faceted, too. Students will need to think critically about the ways they want to use AI — and whether they should. But they’ll also be aided in thinking critically with AI tools.

2) Vision for AI use. The big-picture goals for student use of AI include: “for self-actualization; to evaluate its social, economic, and environmental impacts; and to contribute, at a level appropriate for their age or grade, to the development of AI regulations, helping to shape our relationship with technology in society at large.”

3) Ethics and impacts of AI. This framework isn’t just about finding ways to save time and be more creative with AI. It encourages us to explore — with students — the impact that AI can make if it isn’t used responsibly. I was glad to see environmental impact — something that many of us (myself included) don’t consider enough. There will be TONS of ethical use-case decisions to be made in the coming years. We can help prepare students for it.

4) Understand, apply, create. Immediately, you can see some similarities and differences with these three levels when compared to the teacher framework.

• “Understand” includes knowing what AI is AND interpreting values, ethical issues, etc. and their uses.

• “Apply” is about becoming “responsible, active and effective users of AI.”

• “Create” focuses on not just consuming or using AI products but creating them with datasets, programming, etc.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Take a quick look — or a deep dive — into the teacher and/or student frameworks.

Then, in the discussion board, let us know what stood out to you. I’ll share your observations in next week’s newsletter.

🗣 DISCUSSION BOARD

Here are some of the highlights from the discussion board this week:

• “I love this saying "When AI cheapens the product, focus on the process" and I will be referring to it in my future AI trainings with teachers in my district. I think there is so much focus on what we have done in the past and not enough focus on how this could improve learning outcomes for students.” — Diane Lawson
  

• “Our district went through a strategic direction process […] to focus more on authentic learning. […] This year we're wanting skills over content. I think those those two elements will help us in the classroom on the process and less on so much content. Focus less the idea that there's one right answer and more on how they got to their solution (some are also doing PBL work, which really helps process over content).” — Chad Sussex

Access the discussion boards to share new ideas — or to read others’ ideas — here.

👨🏼‍🏫 How I used (and didn’t use) AI in my classroom

This summer, I shared an hourlong online presentation during Wakelet Community Week.

Topic: How I did (and didn’t) use AI in my classroom.

• 📺 Watch full video of the whole session here (1:04:56)

• 📊 Check out my presentation slides here

• 💼 Get the resources page with lots of links here

• 📺 Watch full video of other WCW sessions

✅ 5 ways I used AI in my classroom

1. 💡 Lesson plans and teaching ideas — When I needed a boost of creativity (or something quick), I used an AI assistant. Teacher tools like SchoolAI and MagicSchool are good for this, but I eventually opted for the major AI assistants (like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc.).

2. 🖼 AI image generators — I created custom images for my students to describe using tools like Ideogram and Adobe Firefly. This saved me tons of time from image searching.

3. 📘 Sub plans — If I had to create sub plans quickly, AI assistants like ChatGPT helped. More: How to create sub plans in 15 minutes with AI

4. 👾 Review games — I used AI to generate practice questions for online review games like Kahoot! and Blooket. Then I had AI format them into spreadsheets so I could import them. Here’s how to do it.

5. 🤖 Student chatbots — I used SchoolAI Spaces to make chatbots that would interact with my students in Spanish. It was OK, but if I kept getting better and writing instructions for the chatbot, it’d probably improve a lot. This quick video shows how.

❌ 5 ways I did NOT use AI in my classroom

1. 💬 Online translators — I wanted students to produce Spanish language from their brains. That meant breaking them of relying on translators — which were standing in the way of them developing language skills.

2. 🕵🏻 AI writing detectors — They’re wildly inaccurate. And when their results are inaccurate — and educators blame students incorrectly — they can do irreparable relationship damage. Here’s more about AI detectors.

3. 🛠 All of the tools — I didn’t use every AI tool out there just because it’s new and cool. I learned about some, but I only used the ones that would support learning in MY classroom.

4. 📖 Creating student readings — I thought AI assistants would do this really well. But to create leveled readings in Spanish — using only concepts and vocab my students had learned? I was never happy with the results. So I wrote my readings myself.

5. 👆🏻 Text adventures and virtual characters — These would have been REALLY fun, but honestly … I just ran out of time and wasn’t able to try them. Here’s how to do a text adventure.

🎙 Quote of the week

“Chatbots don’t make sense, they make words. Artificial intelligence creates words devoid of thought — dead things to which we attribute meaning.”

— Leon Furze via a post on his site 

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ The Homework Apocalypse (via Ethan Mollick): Homework is going to be disrupted. (In some ways, it already has.) What will it look like after the apocalypse? Ethan Mollick wrote about this in July last year.

2️⃣ Post-apocalyptic education (via Ethan Mollick): And now, Ethan has written the follow-up. AI can ace most tests. But very little has changed. What do we do post-apocalypse?

3️⃣ Teacher gets outsmarted by Snapchat AI (via Aaron Makelky): A student fact-checked this teacher with Snapchat AI during class. This highlights a lot of big-picture questions. Will teachers be able to adapt their roles away from the “sage on the stage”? As AI tech becomes more ingrained in the world (i.e. AI glasses, AI in earbuds, etc.) how does our definition of “knowing something” change? (Or should it?)