THE PREP PERIOD

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

AI Literacy Lessons That Are Actually Fun to Teach and Learn | This week's tip comes from Experience AI​

Experience AI is a free AI literacy curriculum from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind. Besides the fact that the lessons themselves are super cool, nothing in Experience AI requires a student login or collects any student data, which I love.

I recently watched the webinar linked below highlighting their new resources. My favorite part was learning about and playing with their new Themed Resources!

Lessons are organized by theme (environment, creativity, ethics, and critical thinking) so they can be used for subjects other than just computer science. The webinar demos two of them live:

• AI and Social Media (starts around minute 31). Students scroll through a simulated social media feed in a closed classroom session, liking and commenting as they normally would. Then they see what the system recorded about them: how long they looked at each post, the interest tags it assigned them, and a heat map of what it plans to show them next. The teacher can pause every feed at once and project how the whole class is connected. Later lessons cover engagement bait, including rage bait.
• AI Detectives (around minute 50). Student teams get a printed case file. In "The Case of the Clever Claim," they read marketing copy for products like Friendbot, a toy robot that "loves spending time with you," and flag every word that makes a machine sound human. They finish by writing a report advising the company on how to describe its product accurately.

In the webinar, the lesson author runs both demos himself, so you hear why each activity was designed the way it was. And every lesson has a version that works without students using generative AI tools, just in case you or your district have established AI limits or bans.

I really enjoyed learning about these lessons. They create a safe environment for students to learn about how AI and social media are built to nudge or even manipulate them, helping them to become better digital citizens.

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SARAH'S PICK

The 74

​Inside Alpha School's 'Bootcamp': Heart Monitors, Unpaid Labor & Many, Many Tweets​

Alpha School, a Silicon Valley Darling, is a private K-12 alternative school network that skips traditional classroom lectures in favor of two hours a day of AI-driven, adaptive software instruction.

In at least one charter application budget, Alpha reportedly spends half as much on marketing per pupil as it does on actual academics. Its Bootcamp students have to tweet about their school experience and gain 100 real followers on X or they fail (read: free marketing). Alpha doesn't have to follow state standards and are so underwhelming they couldn't even get charter status in Texas.

To be fair, I will say I liked the idea of giving students the chance to learn how to facilitate their own learning.

One student tweeted that they were given five days to teach themselves an entire AP unit with zero lectures and no study guide. They were instructed to pull the official AP syllabus, use AI to break down concepts, and build their own study system.

Another student described this approach thusly: “Most schools test how well you remember what someone told you on Tuesday. When you know how to build your own syllabus and teach yourself college material, you realize traditional classes just move too slow.” Fair on the memorization piece.

But from what the bulk of the students describe, there's no one to turn to when they get stuck, and the message from the adults sounds to me pretty much like "eff you, don't fail." I don't see how that's best practice.

Kids need a place to start and someone to bounce their assumptions off of, someone to guide them to that "aha" moment, and that someone shouldn't be an obsequious AI.

To top it off, Alpha students are also reportedly being subjected to humiliation rituals involving their own parents?

This Kafkaesque nightmare reminded me of another story by NPR this week about an alternative school in Dayton, Ohio. Many of its students would otherwise be suspended or expelled. Some of them spent part of last year chatting with a social-emotional learning chatbot from SchoolAI named "Jordan".

One student (pseudonym K) told NPR the chatbot helped because he has nobody to talk to at home and that thinking through self-talk with the bot has helped him with his own self-talk.

Disturbingly, K also said, "I built a little relationship with him. So I don't really see it as like an AI on a computer. It's Jordan — like, I'm texting somebody. That's how I see it."

K and his classmates deserve a safe adult. Throwing a chatbot at them is lazy and unimaginative.

For one thing, we're woefully understaffed in this country when it comes to counselors and school psychologists:

School counselors

• Recommended by the American School Counselor Association: 250:1
• Actual: 372:1 (2024–25)

School psychologists

• Recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists: 500:1
• Actual: 1,065:1 (2023–24)

So, to Alpha School I say, yes, we need to move away from memorization and high-stakes testing and toward rich, project based learning. To SchoolAI I say, yes, we have limited and underfunded mental health services and programs. But divesting from humans while throwing AI at problems isn't the same as solving them.

While I'm worried about the kids inside Alpha, I'm just as worried about the students outside Alpha. The current Education Secretary likes what she sees in Alpha and wants to look at bringing their methods into public schools. IDK maybe there's a unit on body-slamming.

So, my plea to all of you is simple. When a new tool (AI or otherwise) is under consideration (or introduced without your input) at your campus or district, ask questions! What is this solving for? Could this be solved by investment in humans / staff? What guardrails are in place for students? What shortcuts might we be taking in implementing this?

Like today's lounge reads suggest, yes, there are frameworks, but the most important framework is the one the educator brings into the room in real time.

LOUNGE READS

The AI headlines that matter for your classroom

Teachers are being asked to play referee in a game they're still learning - eroding trust between student and educator. EdSurge shares frameworks for evaluating AI efficacy, while Education International questions the efficacy of the frameworks themselves.

Education Week

​How AI Suspicions Are Undermining Student-Teacher Relationships​

AI cheating fears are damaging the classroom trust teachers work hard to build.

"The uses that are invisible to us aren’t just the bad uses... They are good uses, too. Like, this student has built an entire system to help them with their executive functioning to make sure that they never miss an assignment. What could everyone learn from that?"

EdSurge

​Study: Edtech Is Rushing AI Integration Before Proving It Works​

A new study finds most AI edtech tools have no real evidence they help students learn.

"The EdReports brief also states that while existing frameworks frequently analyzed AI integrations for privacy and safety, there was a lack of consistent ways to determine if AI can strengthen learning or preserve curriculum coherence. This can present a roadblock to creating evidence of educational efficacy."

Education International

​Are AI Frameworks Complicit in Turning Schools Into AI Testing Grounds?​

A sharp critique asks whether school AI guidelines protect students or vendors.

"This raises a simple question: how human-centred is a framework in which the human actors are primarily defined through their relationship with AI? The answer becomes more troubling when we look at students."

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!