THE PREP PERIOD

Quick tips, tools & tricks you can take to the classroom on Monday

What School and District Leaders Need to Know Before They Invest in AI | This week's tip comes from an op-ed by Stephen Aguilar in The 74​

Purchasing season runs through the spring and summer, and most of us find out what we are using in August.

District leaders want the best available for their students and many are concerned (or pressed into concern) about their students falling behind the "AI-curve". Unfortunately, the don't have a ton of time to vet new products either.

There are also a lot of AI-powered ed tech companies going straight to teachers these days as well (see last week's issue on Anthropic's free* Claude offer).

Stephen Aguilar taught in classrooms before he designed ed tech products that were sold to schools, and he now studies AI adoption at USC. He put together a set of questions district leaders should ask vendors before they sign anything. Several of them work just as well for teachers as they do central office.

Some of my favorites:

1. What evidence exists that students improve on the targeted skills? Request pilot study results, raw performance data or an independent evaluation report — nothing less rigorous will do.
2. Which student populations were included in testing the product? Look for data on age, language proficiency, special education status and socioeconomic background. Biased data means biased performance.
3. Where is student data stored and processed? Identify the physical location of servers (domestic versus overseas) and any third-party processors involved. Ask how data breaches are handled and communicated.
4. Will our data be used to train future versions of the AI? If yes, require an opt-out clause and a clear explanation of how opting out affects service quality.
5. What filters prevent misinformation or harmful content from reaching children? Get access to a live example of the system handling ambiguous queries that could lead to falsehoods. Stress-test it!

SARAH'S PICK

Dr. Joe's Substack

​Anthropic Launched Claude for Teachers. We Blocked It for Our District.​

A district technology director walks through what happens on his end when a free teacher tool shows up without district approval.

Last week I wrote that the compliance call belongs to your district no matter how solid a vendor's terms look. Joe Phillips is the one making those calls for his district.

He blocked Claude for Teachers across his district.

Personally, I love Claude as a product, but his reasoning is solid. He argues that the district offering should have come first, because a product that encourages teachers to work with assessment data, attendance information, and IEP meeting notes needs governance in place before teachers get access. When an unapproved application receives district data, his team handles it in the same way they would handle a breach.

In other words, the teacher, feeling assured by Anthropic's promise of "FERPA compatibility", clicks upload, and the district now owns the investigation and the parent communication.

I agree with him about the risk. Where I want to push back on is how district's arrive here in the first place.

The instinct when a vendor routes around the district is to lock everything down harder, and that leaves teachers even further from a decision they are already mostly excluded from.

Priten Soundar-Shah made this point in eSchool News last month. He cites ISTE data showing that more than 60 percent of teachers believe they should be the primary decision-makers on classroom technology, while only 38 percent say they were consulted during procurement. Bottom-up adoption works as a sales strategy because of this gap!

What I want to see from districts is co-vetting

• Publish the approved-tools list somewhere teachers can find in under a minute, with a plain-language note on what makes a tool approvable.
• Teach the vetting process. Spend at least one PD session walking staff through how to read a vendor's terms against district policy, using a real product as the example.
• Put teachers on the evaluation panel!! Soundar-Shah goes further and argues the needs inventory should be written by teachers and students before any vendor is contacted, then used as the first document in the RFP.
• Give teacher requests a real intake path with a response time attached.

The resources for this are thin and almost all of them are written for district IT staff rather than teachers. This is a real gap, and I think it is one worth filling.

If your district has a vetting process you actually like, hit reply and tell me about it. I would love to write about what works for real educators!

— Sarah

LOUNGE READS

The AI headlines that matter for your classroom

Surveys show most teachers and students are already using AI, but formal training is still rare and many educators are figuring it out on their own. A real debate heating up about whether AI is actually raising the bar for students or lowering it. A major academic medical center releases an AI acceptable use framework.

EdSurge

​We Must Stop Using AI to Level Down Our Students​

A direct argument that AI in classrooms is too often reducing rigor rather than raising it.

"My gut and everything I had learned about teaching reading told me this was wrong, but this was a well-respected educator with decades of experience working with students with disabilities; surely she knew better than I did. I figured that since I was a general education teacher, I was clearly missing something about teaching reading specifically to students with disabilities, so I trusted the veteran educator at the time."

K-12 Dive

​AI embraced by more students and educators, Instructure finds​

New survey data shows AI use is now the norm in schools, but teacher training lags far behind.

"Instructure recommends that school leaders launch efforts to teach AI literacy and responsible use, helping students, educators and parents learn to 'use AI well, not simply restrict it.'"

Medical University of South Carolina

​MUSC AI Acceptable Use Framework for Academic Tasks​

An institutional AI acceptable use framework from MUSC can be requested via a short form and used as a reference by districts as they grapple with developing their own K-12 AI governance guardrails.

"At the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), we strongly believe that AI tools should not replace the human connections, expertise, and critical reasoning that are foundational to the educational experience. To help educators and students navigate this evolving landscape together, MUSC developed the AI Acceptable Use Framework for Academic Tasks which is included in the Plagiarism and Artificial Intelligence Guideline."

A NOTE BEFORE YOU GO...

I'm glad you're here! If something resonated this week, hit reply and tell me. If you know a fellow educator who would find this useful, forward it their way. The village grows when educators share with other educators.

Never hesitate to send me an email if you're looking for some human-forward, AI thought partnership!