🗑 Our new online course is available!

🚨 50% off Teacher AI Literacy Level 1

The AI Fluency Lab has released its first online course, and it’s starting with a bang! 💥

We’re offering a 50 percent discount to Ditch That Textbook readers who enroll in the course before July 7!

This early bird rate gets you the full course — instructional videos, learning activities, pre-written prompts, discussion boards, and tons of valuable resources.

It’s taught by The AI Fluency Lab faculty — Matt Miller, Holly Clark, and Ken Shelton — so you know you’ll get experienced, practical training.

Take advantage of this opportunity before it disappears!

Interested in enrolling multiple people? Email [email protected] for pricing on bulk orders!

🗄 TEMPLATE 🗄️

🎧 Use the Spotify Wrapped template at the end of the year

Spotify Wrapped is a fun campaign that music service Spotify does for its listeners at the end of the year.

It wraps up your listening preferences — top artists, top songs, minutes listened, favorite genres, and more.

It’s a great way to summarize and “wrap” up a chapter or unit.

It’s also a great way to wrap up the year!

In our post — Spotify Wrapped-style learning: Free template + class activities — we share fun ways to incorporate this template into learning.

You can get a copy of the template to use with students for Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Canva.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

📚 Inside the Teacher AI Literacy Level 1 course

More and more schools are talking about AI literacy.

Students need AI literacy so they know how AI should/shouldn’t be used in academic settings — and to prepare them for the AI-integrated world where they’ll work and live.

But teachers need AI literacy, too!

We need to understand how AI works so we can make smart judgment calls around it.

We need to know how it can help us do our work — and where we should leave it behind in favor of our own human abilities.

We need to know where to be cautious — and what questions we should be asking for the sake of ourselves and our students.

That’s AI literacy — for teachers.

Our first online course for The AI Fluency Lab is Teacher AI Literacy Level 1, and it’s all about getting teachers “AI ready” for the coming school year.

💥 EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT 💥 — Get 50% off Teacher AI Literacy Level 1 through July 7!

👀 Get a peek inside Teacher AI Literacy Level 1

I’d like to give you a little taste of what you’ll learn in Teacher AI Literacy Level 1.

Below, I’ll share a quick summary of each of the six main modules of the course.

Then, I’ll pull a quick idea out of one of the lessons in that module.

That way, whether you enroll in the course or not, you’ll still learn a couple quick things about AI — and you’ll boost your own AI literacy.

Module 1: AI Educator Workflow

Summary: Learn how to use AI as your personal teaching assistant to plan and differentiate instruction, streamline communication, and more.

• 💡 Idea from this module: Strategies to make learning relevant to students. You’re already good at building relationships with your students. You get to know them, what interests them, what makes them tick. Now, we can use AI to take that to the next level. Do a student interest survey at the beginning of the year. Use AI assistants like ChatGPT to provide insights and suggestions from the results of that survey. Also, use it to suggest analogies and other ways to inject student interests into learning.

Module 2: Cheating and AI

Summary: How does AI play into academic integrity? How do we create an environment where students learn, think, and develop skills responsibly?

• 💡 Idea from this module: Citing AI isn’t good enough. For ages, we educators have beat the drum of “cite your sources.” Unfortunately, AI isn’t a valid source. It’s just a “best statistical average guess” of what you’re looking for. You can use AI to work your way back to a valid source. But AI models aren’t made for providing accurate, precise, valid answers. Because of that, they make terrible primary sources.

Module 3: AI Responsible Use

Summary: What are the ethical concerns we need to be aware of with AI -- and how do they impact our decisions as educators but also as human beings?

• 💡 Idea from this module: Ask who might be helped and who might be harmed. AI models (like the ones that power ChatGPT) are trained on tons and tons of data — websites, online books, journal articles, even Wikipedia and social media. Because that data is created by humans, AI models learn about the world through human eyes — and that includes our biases. As you learn more about how AI works and how AI models are developed, continually ask yourself who is helped and hurt by the way the AI model is constructed.

Module 4: Prompting and AI Images

Summary: When we know how to communicate with AI models -- and some best practices, we can generate text and images that support teaching and learning.

• 💡 Idea from this module: Understand what AI image generators are made for. The AI models that create images are called diffusion models. They’re different from the large language models (LLMs) that power text-based AI like ChatGPT. Diffusion models look at tons of images and pull your request into focus pixel by pixel. That means if you ask them to create text, they’re not looking at it character by character like we do in documents. That’s why image generators struggle with text. You can always generate an image and then put it in a tool like Canva or Google Slides to add text to it more accurately.

Module 5: Assessment and Feedback

Summary: AI can help us, as educators, to support students in their learning journey. Learn how to use AI the right way to keep students thinking and growing.

• 💡 Idea from this module: Balance feedback carefully. Research on feedback shows that timely feedback matters and is effective. AI can provide quick and timely feedback. But you have to be careful! There are limitations to its effectiveness — and your students don’t get the benefit of hearing from their highly trained teacher that they have a relationship with. Feedback isn’t all about corrections and instructions. Students benefit from coaching from a human teacher, too. Beware the urge to provide all of your feedback with AI.

Module 6: Student AI Co-Creation

Summary: When students use AI the right way, it can push their learning and help them to demonstrate understanding in new and exciting ways.

• 💡 Idea from this module: Teach students to detect hallucinations. When AI models provide incorrect information but pass it off as correct, that’s a hallucination. It’s something we adults are better able to identify because of our life experience. But students can be too trusting — or might just want a quick answer regardless of accuracy. Show students how you evaluate an AI response so they can see concrete examples of AI hallucination detection. Show them examples of flawed AI responses so they can evaluate them themselves.

Ready to level up your teacher AI literacy?

Our Teacher AI Literacy Level 1 course is available for enrollment right now.

You’ll learn directly from me, Holly Clark, and Ken Shelton — seasoned presenters and authors of books on AI in education.

You’ll get the type of practical resources you’ve come to know and love from Ditch That Textbook.

You’ll interact directly with other educators in our discussion board communities, learning alongside others from around the world.

And you can get all of it for an incredible 50 percent off — until July 7, 2025.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!