Notes on AI and teaching

What we are reading about AI in schools, and what we make of it.

What is an AI anyway? A vendor's answer, and a classroom's

Mustafa Suleyman, TED

Microsoft's AI chief could not answer his six-year-old nephew's question at breakfast, and offers the audience a metaphor instead, a new digital species that will be tutor, coach and friend. Two and a half years on, states are writing rules against that framing for children. The nephew's question is still the best opener for an AI literacy lesson we know of.

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Twenty studies, and none in an American classroom

Lee V. Gaines, NPR

NPR finds districts running AI experiments on students with no agreed way to measure them. The Stanford review behind the piece went through more than 800 papers and found twenty that can show cause and effect, none of them in a U.S. K-12 classroom.

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Cognitive surrender, and where the habit forms

The New York Times, via GV Wire

An MIT committee reports that AI use is producing "cognitive surrender" and an illusion of learning. Universities are going three different directions about it. The students they are describing learned the habit in high school.

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Students asking for instruction

Tony Frontier, Educational Leadership, ISTE+ASCD

Focus groups with more than 250 high school juniors and seniors across 20 schools. About 85 percent use AI for schoolwork, and what they say they want from teachers is instruction rather than a ruling.

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