At my AI workshops, school leaders talk about navigating student-facing AI chatbots.
School leaders have so many AI-related decisions to make and issues to consider.
When I do workshops at schools and districts on AI in education (and the classroom), school leaders ask me about lots of the same things …
How do we get AI policy right?
How do we select tools?
How do we effectively train teachers and help them to understand the implications of AI?
How much should it be used by students — and in what ways?
How do we help prepare students for their future — where AI will impact it?
The question that has the fewest concrete answers among leaders I talk to?
The student AI issue.
That’s why I want to try to find some answers — in front of my own two eyes in my own classroom.
This week I shared my vision for finding answers to this question: Can AI chatbots actually help students learn?
The Ditch That Textbook community had a lot to share … and I think it’ll be illuminating for your leadership work in schools and education.
In this week’s newsletter:
💻 Free AI Literacy Course: Personalized to Your Classroom
📚 New AI resources this week
🏆 6 conditions for successful student AI chatbot use
💻 Free AI Literacy Course: Personalized to Your Classroom
This message is sponsored by Flint.
A free AI course built specifically for teachers (and it actually adapts to you 👀).
Most AI training talks at you. This one starts by listening. It asks what you teach, how familiar you are with AI, and what genuinely worries you about it in the classroom. Then it builds a learning path around your answers. Your subject. Your comfort level. Your concerns. No two teachers get the same course, because no two teachers are starting from the same place.
It's completely free, platform-agnostic, and over 8,500 educators have already taken it. When you finish, you earn a certificate automatically (no hoops, no fees). Just proof that you showed up for your own growth. 😎
📚 New AI resources this week
1️⃣ Frederick County School Board Questions Google Gemini on Student Devices (via Government Technology) — A Maryland district enabled Gemini for middle and high school students before its school board had finished adopting an AI policy, prompting concerns from teachers and board members.
2️⃣ Headlines Warn of an AI Apocalypse. How Should Schools Respond? (via Education Week) — Looks at how schools should navigate increasingly alarming claims about AI risk without either dismissing legitimate concerns or letting worst-case scenarios dominate the conversation.
3️⃣ School Districts, Slowly, Build Guidance Around AI Learning in Classrooms (via District Administration/WBUR) — Massachusetts districts are developing very different rules around AI for translating, writing, summarizing, and other classroom tasks, while many districts still lack clear guidance.
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FYI: No poll or results this week since the results of last week’s poll are included in the post below. Please check out and contribute to the discussion post about it!
🏆 6 conditions for successful student AI chatbot use
Educators share tips for success with student-facing AI. Image: ChatGPT
This week, in my Ditch That Textbook newsletter, I shared something I want to try in my classroom … a puzzle I want to figure out …
I want to know if AI chatbots can actually help my students.
And for you, a member of the AI for Admins community, I thought this would be really relevant.
When I work with schools and districts all over the United States, even some of the more forward-thinking districts are still hesitant and slow-moving when it comes to the student AI connection.
Lots of schools have shared AI tools with teachers.
Teachers are using them to create teaching materials and to get new teaching ideas.
Some are even using AI tools to support them in providing student feedback and leveling texts.
But students using AI chatbots directly? They’re uneasy. They’re unsure. They haven’t provided much guidance — because, honestly, they just aren’t sure what guidance to provide.
I totally get it. And honestly, it’s fair. The last thing we’d want to do is subject students to technology that has any sort of adverse reactions to students. There’s a LOT to unpack … data privacy, bias, inaccuracies, anthropomorphism, the impact of data centers, etc. … not to mention getting the right balance of human teacher vs. AI support.
So … I want to see it with my own two eyes.
Remember: I teach high school Spanish — dual credit Spanish 3, to be specific. To high school juniors (aka grade 11 … ± 17 years old). I teach at a fairly rural, small high school in west central Indiana.
Context matters. I’d be much, much slower to roll this out to younger students … especially without laying some foundational understandings about what they’re working with. Also, how parents and the community and the students feel about it matters, too.
But as the opportunities present themselves … as edtech companies put AI options in front of schools more and more … we have to start answering this question:
Can AI chatbots actually help students learn? And in what context?
You can read my post here …
I’ll be sharing my results in my newsletters and social media posts in the coming weeks and months. (PS: If you don’t already, consider following me on Facebook and/or Instagram and/or TikTok and/or LinkedIn for posts there!)
And, as I have been doing regularly over the past 6 months or so, I asked the Ditch That Textbook community to share their thoughts and experiences.
They showed up! Several people shared very nuanced, detailed responses to the prompt: Can AI chatbots actually help students?
You can read them — and share your own perspectives! — below …
I summarized their responses into six categories, which you’ll find below with my thoughts …
1. How you design the chatbot experience is important.
There’s a huge difference between students cruising ChatGPT for answers and a custom-created student AI chatbot on one of the major K-12 platforms (MagicSchool, SchoolAI, Brisk Teaching, Flint) … and even a custom Gem chatbot in Google Gemini.
The former? Students get what they WANT — quick answers, less thinking, offloading cognitive struggles that help them grow.
The latter? Students are more likely to get what they NEED — guided support, just-in-time feedback, all funneled toward goals outlined by the teacher.
That doesn’t mean that the results will be great, though. As Loree D. Evans said in her community response: One thing everyone forgets to say is that your output is only as good as your prompt.
I appreciate James Bender’s response below. Read it in full here.
If the walls are built properly, chatbots can really enhance student thinking. Examples here would be FlintK12 or student rooms in MagicSchool. The teacher builds the chatbot around a particular set of learning goals and established the rules. That is a vastly different experience from a student jumping on ChatGPT or Snapchat AI to ask it how to complete their homework. In short, chatbots are a tool that, when deployed with purpose, can level-up a classroom. But, without that intentional design, they replace student thinking and are the enemy.
2. Students need the right kind of training.
Throwing students into an AI chatbot experience without laying the proper foundation can be harmful in many ways. (We’ll explore a few more of those later.)
Mollie Pitrone has used SchoolAI Spaces (their student AI chatbot feature) in her math classes. Read her comment in full here. She and her students have taken it slowly …
Saying this sounds funny but as a high school teacher, freshman should not be allowed to use chatbots without supreme training. I use SchoolAI in my math class and we spend a lot of time pending a little time using the chatbot feature because they need to be trained on the outcome. […] The outcome for me is that students are building the executive functioning skills along with self discovery to want to utilize Ai as a tool, not the whole thing. I witnessed a junior take a picture of her math review and have Gemini create a 20 question quiz that had hints and explained why she was either right or wrong in her response. This was a great way to help her review the information, create a notecard, and clear up any misconceptions. This was incredible. I am slowly training my freshman to do something similar but for little things.
Chris Bach has seen what I’ve witnessed with students who are newly exposed to academically-focused AI chatbots with tight guardrails.
They want to pressure test the system. (I had a student confidently tell me: “I’m going to gaslight this chatbot to see if I can convince it that 2+2=5.” And I let him try it for a bit! The guardrails in place kept the chatbot focused and on task and the student flamed out after a bit.)
Here was Chris Bach’s experience. Read it in full here.
Most students initially try and mess with the AI to see how far they can push it and what the limitations are. However, the behaviors die down with frequency of use and with coaching from me. These spaces can be quite useful in helping students to expand their thinking and or to continue working when they need help, and I can’t get to them. However, it takes training to make this happen.
Another side of this that I think is important: teaching students to push back against an AI response when they think it’s wrong or misguided.
But, of course, to do that, you need the necessary understanding to know that it’s wrong or misguided, which brings us to the next point …
3. Develop the foundational skills first.
We talked a bit above about developing AI literacy skills.
I think it’s also crucial that students have a firm grasp on the content they’re learning before interacting with AI chatbots.
Why? It gives them the necessary discernment. Scott Wigenton shared about that. Read it in full here.
All the HoDs (heads of department) at my school are reading The Digital Delusion together this year. If you've read this book you know about the unfavorable views on AI tutors. I recently read about the concept of “never skilling" as an AI induced extension of deskilling. AI can short circuit productive struggle and perseverance. Still with a very well defined set of resources and goals they can be extremely helpful. It seems they are far more healthy for experts than novices. The results must be vetted and novices do not have that ability yet. [AI chatbots] are probably not a good thing for young novices.
I agree with Scott but also think that “more healthy for experts than novices” is a matter of teacher judgment.
I’ve seen elementary teachers who will use student-facing AI chatbots (with supervision and proper foundational understanding) to great success. Their students understand it’s a computer and take time to unpack how AI responded and how they should view those responses.
On the other hand, without that intentional design and understanding, it could be a recipe for disaster.
4. Design for and focus on human judgment.
This is something that’s so crucial that has everything to do with HOW the AI chatbot is implemented in instruction.
The role we ask it to play is important. Instead of using it as an answer-generating machine …
It can ask follow-up questions.
It can critique and poke holes in student arguments.
It can play the part of a different perspective we haven’t considered.
It can ask metacognitive questions that get students thinking about their thinking.
In that case, we’re designing learning to center and focus on human thinking and human judgment.
The key I always emphasize in my AI workshops at schools and districts: Human thinking before AI.
Plus, when learning activities emphasize that — and teachers talk about why it’s important — it starts to slow change students’ beliefs and the school culture around the role of AI. It doesn’t eliminate misuse completely, but it develops that strong AI literacy for students.
I don’t feel it can identify what’s most important as it doesn’t know the students personally. It’s generic.
There is so much good that AI can do. We can personalize education in a way we couldn’t before. However, we have to balance that with ways students are struggling with AI use, too. Obviously, cognitively offloading isn’t what we want, but also need to empower our students to use it in ways that benefit them.
Whenever something AI-generated is part of the learning process, students can question it … critique it … analyze it. They start to slowly learn that AI should be interrogated every single time. That’s AI literacy, AND it creates strong independent thinkers.
5. Cover your bases before you start.
We’ve alluded to this throughout, but we can’t go with just any old AI use.
At a school where I worked recently, teachers told me that they had students download ChatGPT on their phones (!!!) and use the free plan to do certain school-related tasks.
Yikes! That’s a data privacy nightmare AND it leaves students exposed to unfettered AI with no guardrails.
(One teacher also used images of his students to generate pictures of what they’d look like in the future using an AI image generator. Again … images of students fed into an AI model? Another breach of data privacy.)
Judson Birkel outlined these three questions — and went into further detail in his full comment.
I do have plans to get students to use AI in my classroom, but there are a lot of hurdles that teachers need to be aware of before they allow students to use AI.
1. Does your district have a list of approved AI tools?
2. Do you, as a teacher, have a good understanding of all the potential problems with AI and what literacies both you and your students need to know?
3. Have you provided any instruction to your students on AI literacy and what appropriate and inappropriate use of AI in your class looks like?
6. Seeing some examples can open up new possibilities.
So many people talk about AI in generalities …
“It’s going to change the future!”
“It can revolutionize education!”
“It can personalize and differentiate learning right down to the student!”
… but they fail to show how — and in what context. Then teachers are left asking that ages-old question after a poorly-run PD workshop …
“How do I do this in a [insert grade/subject] classroom?”
Chris Bach shared some concrete examples from his students — and outlined them in more detail in his full comment.
I have had my students use AI in a variety of different ways:
First, I have used a number of different School AI Spaces for my students. I have used them for everything from start of the year chatbots designed to help the students learn about my classes and for me to get to know them to activity specific spaces designed to probe student’s thinking and to provide feedback.
Second, I often leave a Magic School room open for my students with a variety of tools for them to use. I teach them to use the room at the start of the school year and then remind them to use it if there is a need. For example, I ask my students to rewrite emails using the email tool if they send me an email that is full of spelling and usage errors or if it is not professional.
Third, I design projects where students interact with AI tools, games and or experiences as part of the project. For example, I curate resources in a Gemini Notebook notebook and share it with my students, so they can use it to explore those preselected resources and the resources I have had the notebook create.
Fourth, I also try and support my students in developing their understanding of how to prompt and the limitations of AI and where AI might have bias or represent incorrect information as correct.
What else?
What are the other conditions that are necessary for student AI use to flourish? How do we discern when we should use them — and when we shouldn’t?
Share your thoughts in our discussion so others can see …
I hope you enjoy these resources — and I hope they support you in your work!
Please always feel free to share what’s working for you — or how we can improve this community.
Matt Miller
Host, AI for Admins
Educator, Author, Speaker, Podcaster
[email protected]
