For the past few months I have been working with Kubrio as it redesigns its educational platform.  For many years now Kubrio has set itself apart as a schooling option for self-directed learners who work with their families and Kubrio to identify 21st Century skills that best suit each child to design a personalized educational experience.  The community of Kubrio is a mix of innovative, adventurous educators with expertise in a range of subjects and educational philosophies and a passion for doing education differently.  Many students at Kubrio are worldschooling or homeshcooling with their parents.  It's exciting to build something transformative with this group and have a visionary leadership that embraces AI to build a unique platform and educational community.  As educators we have been challenged to create Pods that allow students to learn and develop as a small learning community while each student pursue unique pathways of learning and demonstrating growth.  At Kubrio, I've been working to develop two pods that I think are timely and important for students to explore.  The first is AI Adventures which allows students to create their own adventure as they explore the exciting world of AI and complete interactive projects related to the topics they are exploring.  Digital Culture and Citizenship is a pod geared towards having students reflect on the societal and ethical impacts of an increasingly digital world to help inform how they navigate this constantly changing landscape.  I am excited to be able to offer these two innovative options and am also thrilled to be building a storehouse of quests students can do independently to earn badges and points as they build a portfolio that showcases the skills they are learning.  Kubrio is working hard to build a suite of tools for educators, students and parents powered by AI to craft creative learning experiences for a range of students and bring them together in learning communities built on similar passions and interests.  I invite you to check out the video below about my AI Adventures pod or check out the Kubrio website to learn more about how to sign your child up to begin exploring the many exciting pods and quests that keeps on growing.

Image source:  AI generated on Freepik

When I think about teaching my children about AI, I am admittedly nervous. What if they start using ChatGPT to do all their homework and school assignments? My kids are 10 and 12, and I certainly have many worries. Won’t AI prevent them from developing the critical thinking and literacy skills they need to succeed academically? Do they have the skills to critically assess whether the information provided by AI is factual or accurate?

While it's easy to become protective when it comes to AI and consider not letting them use it, AI is here to stay and continues to grow in its capabilities and presence in our society. Kids will be exposed to AI either through their peers or their use of technology. So, what is the best path forward, and what exactly do kids need to learn about and do with AI? Here are some important topics and essential questions that will help provide kids with an intentional grounding in AI to prepare them to use it productively and responsibly.

What is AI? Many kids have heard about AI, but when asked what it is, they might struggle to explain it. A foundational understanding of what AI is and what it is not will help them identify and understand the various types of AI and how it is being used across different fields and industries.

How is AI built and how does it work? Large language models, neural networks, and machine learning are key components of AI. Understanding what happens behind the scenes with AI will help kids think critically about how AI works.

How does AI use data, and what are the ethical implications? Kids must understand the limitations and characteristics of the data used for AI. It's crucial for them to see that data can be biased and imperfect, and to recognize the impact this has on AI outputs.

How is AI being used and impacting society? Understanding the diverse applications of AI will help kids see the risks and benefits of AI and encourage them to think critically about its best uses.

What can I create with AI, and how do I use it productively? Experimenting with various AI tools for different tasks is a fun and engaging way for kids to learn about AI. It's important to scaffold these experiences with age-appropriate tools and tasks. They should also explore prompt engineering, or the art of writing effective prompts for AI, to get the best outputs.

How do I build AI? There are numerous projects for students to build AI, such as creating recommendation engines or chatbots. This helps solidify their knowledge of AI by understanding what goes into building AI systems.

While this is certainly not an exhaustive list, it helps me to think about developing thoughtful and varied learning experiences about AI aimed so students have foundational skills related to this  ever-evolving field.  I am currently working on developing a framework to support self-directed learners learn about AI called the AI Adventures Pod.  It is not a linear curriculum, but rather a dynamic one based on developing personalized pathways and a curious and passionate learning community around a technology that is taking the world by storm.

I got a notification in LinkedIn for a position titled, Senior Writer Editor.  It was with a company called Outlier and the goal seemed to be to improve AI prompt responses.  It sounded interesting and aligned to the type of work that I was interested in pursuing.  After submitting my resume, I was given the go ahead to start the onboarding training to learn more about the position.  The training started off interestingly enough.  I was given this doc to explain how I would be rating prompts.  Basically, I was given two responses to prompts and had to determine which was better and give a rationale based on criteria provided.  This part of the training was manageable and enjoyable.  I liked picking apart prompt responses for elements of quality.  The training identified responses along a spectrum of creative to logical/factual.  They also provided rubrics that were helpful for each type of writing.  Here are some examples.

Once I completed a few of the rating exercises, I was then given the instructions that I would be challenged to write a response to a prompt based on my expertise in K-12 education to help train the models.  Here is the prompt that I received:
Delving into Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and recent findings in neurodiversity, how can educators ensure they are differentiating not only based on ability but also on cognitive processing differences? Discuss the interplay of content, process, product, and learning environment in this context.

When I showed it to my husband, he said it sounded like something you could write a PhD thesis on and I couldn't disagree.  But I decided to go ahead and give it a shot thinking I would only have to write the one.  I wrote what I felt was a decent response and it took me a couple of hours.  Click here to read my response.

When I finished, I was provided another prompt to respond to and that was where I stopped.  Who knows how many more prompts I would have had to respond to in order to finish the training?  It was clear at that point that I  would be required to do a lot more work than it was worth. Nonetheless, this is a new movement in AI, getting the expertise of real humans to make the AI models better.  It was an interesting exercise in being an AI Chatbot and I don't regret doing it.  However, I will be wary of future opportunities such as this and you should too!

As part of my exploration into AI, I was really interested in exploring how AI is being used to do good in the world, so I completed the AI for Good Specialization offered by DeepLearning.AI on Coursera.  It is a 3 course specialization that looks at how AI can be used in Public Health, Climate Change and Disaster Management.  The courses are taught by Dr. Robert Monarch who uses his deep expertise in AI and also disaster management to explain important concepts related to AI for Good.  The definition of AI for Good as Monarch explains is the application of AI to solve some of the biggest problems of the world related to the environment, health, justice and humanitarian action with the goal of using AI to prevent, mitigate or resolve problems affecting human life or the environment.  One important principle that Monarch discusses at all stages of AI for Good is the Do No Harm Principle which is the understanding that everyone impacted by the project is left better off.  You can tell Monarch cares deeply about ensuring that communities and individuals get the help they need.

The courses look at a range of case studies in the real world ranging from detecting baby's cries to provide medical diagnosis to air quality monitoring, wind and solar power forecasting, biodiversity monitoring, and emergency response translation applications.  For each of the case studies Monarch uses the following framework to explore the process practitioners take to develop solutions.

Additionally, there are labs to run AI models in Jupyter notebooks to help participants get a sense of the steps taken in each of the case students to use the data collected  and processed through machine learning using predictive AI.  We also hear from researchers around the world with spotlights on global organizations like Microsoft for Good and Haiti on the Rise where practitioners explain their research and the impact it is making. Dr. Monarch is a patient host and through the repetition of applying the framework to each of the case studies you really get a sense of the possibility and process for using AI for Good.

Educational, school and district leaders are scrambling to come up with policies and guidance regarding AI in schools.   Students especially high school and college students are already using AI and there is no detection system available to adequately assess when AI has been used.  Luckily there are a number of organizations working together to provide leadership and guidance.  TeachAI has created an AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit that is the result of 60+ global organizations working together.  It is designed to "help local, state, and national education systems worldwide develop guidance on the responsible use of AI, ensure compliance with relevant policies, and build the capacity of all stakeholders to understand AI and use AI effectively. "  It provides a framework for implementing AI in an educational system and many resources for policymakers and educators to consider.
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Code.org, ISTE, Khan Academy, and ETS have partnered together to create an AI 101 page to help educators think about how to use AI.  There are a series of 30 minute videos that provide wonderful guidance in terms of thinking about using AI for teaching and learning and specific examples of teachers using generative AI to create content for their classrooms.  This intro video below of Hadi Partovi of code.org and Sal Khan of Khan academy is a great place to start to think about all of the risks and benefits of AI in schools

In addition to the series of videos for educators, there are high quality videos explaining various topics related to AI and a growing collection of professionally designed curricula that students and teachers can access from Code.org.  There is a link to ISTE's course for educators on generative AI and two AI tools specifically designed for students: ETS has developed a writing tutor for students and Khanmigo is Khan Academy's chatbot designed specifically for students.  

The AI toolkit and AI 101 page offer thorough and well thought out ideas for implementing AI into school systems and both leave space for room to grow as the field of generative AI advances.

Prompt Engineering has come onto the scene as an important means to use generative AI to its fullest.  What and how you ask for information in a generative AI app can play a big role in the information you get.  One big suggestion by many is to just play around with it and try it out.  You can go to ChatGPT and just type in a prompt or click on one of the prompts that are listed.  Because generative AI uses natural language models, there is no learning curve for initial exploration.  It's also a good idea to compare different generative AI apps such as BIng Chat which uses the premium version of ChatGPT and can deal and has the most up-to-date information available or Perplexity.ai that includes sources with the information provided.  Another possibility is Google's AI assistant known as Bard.  The screenshot below shows how Perplexity.ai provides sources.

The next step would be to get the AI assistant to refine the information it provided.  For instance, in the above example about dolphins you might want to know more about the ways dolphins show self-awareness.  You can continue to refine content and chat assistants do remarkably well with follow-up prompts remembering the history of your interactions.

Chat assistants have proven to be quite remarkable in the education space for lesson planning, assessment construction and differentiation, and there are a number of sites that offer pre-written prompts for educators.  Code.org has two great prompt libraries the first one titled LLM prompts for educators. It offers a collection of prompts organized by beginner, intermediate and advanced and provides useful guidelines for creating prompts.  The second library include prompts for using with students called AI prompts for transforming student learning.  Another great place for educators to see a wide variety of prompts is  AI for Education's prompt library.  On this site prompts are organized by type such as lesson planning, administration and professional development.

There are also a growing number of courses available to help one learn how to write prompts.  I recommend the free course, Innovative Teaching with ChatGPT, to get started.  Vanderbilt professor Jules White uses very teaching specific prompts to show how to create and refine lesson plans and activities as well as differentiate for different types of students.  I recently took another course by White called Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT which takes a deeper dive by exploring some of the patterns that are useful in creating different types of prompts.  

AI is absolutely going to change the educational landscape and an easy way for educators to get started is to try their hand at prompt engineering.  I think they will immediately find that chat assistants have the potential to really save them time. 

image source:  ​https://medium.com/the-ai-education-project/introducing-the-ai-education-project-3c1f1fc31fd2

As I continue my journey exploring AI and its implications for teaching and learning, I spent some time reviewing the curriculum available at The AI Education Project.  Their site has free curriculum available for students and  educators as well as information for advocates.  They have partnered with some of the big tech companies including Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and GitHub and have a mission to create equitable learning experiences that teach foundational AI skills.  There are high interest, flexible lessons and activities that range from 5 minute warm ups to a semester long Introductory course.  The AI Education Project implements culturally relevant pedagogy and project-based learning as a foundation for their curriculum and the content choices reflect a broad range of topics that teachers of any subject matter can find relevant.  

AI Snapshots offer 180 five minute warmups organized by the four core subject areas:  English, Math, Science and Social Studies.  Each warm-up starts with a slide that asks students a thought-provoking question or design challenge.  Then there is a second slide titled:  Things You May Have Considered. That helps students and teachers explore the topic more deeply.  It's a great way to get students to begin to think about the complexities and impact of AI in various disciplines and aspects of our lives.  There are also AI Challenges that students can work through on their own that challenge students in timely tasks such as proving they are smarter than ChatGPT and  improving their TikTok algorithm.  These are wonderfully engaging independent lessons for curious high schoolers to try. 

For Computer Science and Technology teachers who are interested in bringing AI into their curriculum, the AI Education Projects offers a Project Dashboard  that provides project-based learning on a variety of topics related to AI.  One of my favorite projects on the dashboard is The 29 A.Is of Washington D.C. where students follow the journey of individual citizens and see how their lives are impacted by AI.  It is a memorable, equity-focused lesson that drives home the problem of bias inherent in AI systems.

The Intro to AI course is an incredibly thoughtful and well-designed course  that provides foundational skills in AI while having students create their own AI recommendation system using Hugging Face.  The course includes lesson plans, a teacher's guide, a slide deck and a student workbook.  While this course is recommended for 10 weeks, it could easily be built out to last an entire semester.  This course is one of the best examples of culturally relevant pedagogy in the field of computer science that I have seen.  It gets students to consider AI in ways that are based in the real world.  It has them explore biases inherent in data and gives students ample choice to explore their own interests.  Furthermore it provides teachers with explicit guidelines to teach the course in a way that makes it accessible to those who may feel a bit intimidated to teach a course in AI.

Finally, the AI Education Project offers live professional development and toolkits for educators and advocates who are interested in getting AI implemented in their classrooms, schools, and districts.  The AI Education Project is doing incredible work in the field of equity focused and civic-minded computer science education.  I highly recommend it as a place to go to find curriculum and guidelines related to teaching AI.

I recently completed the IBM Skillsbuild Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals program which is a 10 hour program designed to help you understand what AI is and how it is being used in a variety of industries.  I thoroughly enjoyed this learning experience, not only because of the content, but it is an example of genuinely well-crafted instructional design as well.  There are 6 course in the program along with two optional bonus courses.  The lessons are easy to work through, engaging and broken up in a way that maximizes impact and interest. It would work well for high school students and educators to understand fundamental AI principles.  IBM Skillsbuild also has content and courses specifically for high school students and educators related to AI, but I have yet to explore those.

The first three course provided a clear explanation of AI, LLMs and machine and deep learning.  These courses provided lots of engaging activities, thoughtful examples and reflection questions to help cement an understanding of concepts covered.  One of my favorite courses in the series was Run AI Models with IBM Watson Studio.  The course is a simulation using IBM Watson Studio and you get a chance to see how a financial business might run an AI model.  It was fun to go through that process.  I also enjoyed the AI Ethics course that involved scenario based learning to help you think through some of the ethics issues related to AI.  Finally, the Your Future in AI course featured two videos of employee involved with AI, one of whom was an instructional designer for IBM.  I am excited to do a new certification soon on Sustainability and Technology.  I recommend the AI Foundations Course to anyone interested in getting a solid grasp of Artificial Intelligence.

Image Source:  ​https://cs.illinois.edu/broadening-participation-computing/programs/ai4all

AI4ALL is a nonprofit based out of Stanford University whose vision for AI focuses on building a pipeline for a diverse and inclusive workforce in AI, utilizing people with diverse backgrounds, voices and perspective to make better AI and making more tools for social good by redefining who can be a leader in AI.  They have 3 programs:  Changemakers in AI, AI4All Ignite, and their Open Learning curriculum.  The AI4All Ignite internship program and Changemakers in AI are geared towards preparing undergraduate students from diverse communities for careers in AI.  They provide mentors, support in technical interviews and internships as well as community support for students selected for the program.  The Open Learning curriculum is foundational curriculum for high school students to help them learn about AI and how it works in various disciplines.  They are focusing most of their energy on the college and career readiness programs, but their open learning curriculum is a solid starting place for any high school educator interested in getting their students started in AI regardless of subject area that is taught.  The curriculum aligns to the following National Standards:
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• NGSS Engineering standards
• ISTE standards
• Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
• CSTA standards

image source:   https://AI-4-ALL.org

There are  lessons focused on explaining the more technical aspects of AI:   "How Neural Networks Work", "How GANS Work", "How CNNs Work" and "How RNNs and Transformers Work".  There are also lessons tied to specific topics and disciplines:  "AI and Drawing", "AI and Facial Recognition" "AI and Deep Fakes: "AI and the Environment", "AI and Dance" and "AI Ethics".  The lessons range from 1-10 hours long.  Each lesson contains a detailed Teacher's Guide, Google Slide Deck, as well as a a study guide and google form for students to complete as they go through the lessons.  The lessons are filled with experiential activities, explainer videos and discussion questions to allow students to grapple with the implications of how AI is changing our society.  Each lesson also contains a spotlight on professionals from diverse communities who are involved in AI work related to the lesson.  Most lessons have a project for students to complete once they have gone through the lesson.  There is flexibility in how the lessons are taught and a thoughtful Online Strategy Guide and Discussion Strategy Guide provided in each lesson.  They also recommend which subject areas each lesson can be taught in and provide relevant standards that are met with each lesson.  It is a very thoughtfully crafted set of lessons on AI that intentionally provide detailed guidance so that those who might not otherwise feel comfortable  teaching AI can quickly get a handle on AI topics to bring to their students.