🤷♂️ Why all this talk about AI in Edu?

🚌 Back to School Prep? TeachAid’s AI is the Solution

As the new school year begins, we know you're busy planning to meet your students' diverse needs. TeachAid is here to help.

Meet TeachAid: The Complete Curriculum & Pedagogy AI Solution

TeachAid streamlines unit creation, allowing you to:

• Develop Unit Plans: Effortlessly create detailed unit plans aligned with your standards.

• Generate Assessments and Rubrics: Craft thorough assessments to evaluate student learning effectively.

• Create Lesson Plans: Produce interconnected plans that scaffold learning and meet diverse needs.

• Design Activities and Presentations: Generate dynamic activities and presentations.

• Support Tiered Instruction and Differentiation: Provide tailored instructional materials for all students.

TeachAid’s mission is to create equitable curricula, enhance teacher efficiency, and support tiered and IEP instruction.

Transform Your Teaching with TeachAid Today

• Effortless Planning: Create scaffolded lesson plans aligned to your standards.  Start Creating Now

• Comprehensive Assessments: Craft assessments easily. Sign Up for Free

• Interactive Presentations: Generate engaging presentations. Discover More

• Equitable Activities: Design activities that promote active learning. Learn More

Get Started for Free and experience the future of education with TeachAid.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🤷‍♂️ Why all this talk about AI in education?

I've been talking a LOT about artificial intelligence over the last 20 months or so. 

Maybe you're starting to ask yourself that same question in the headline …

“Yeah, why all this talk about AI, Matt? I have classes to teach. Student work to grade. I don't teach computer science. Artificial intelligence isn't in my content standards. Why worry about it?”

In short: It's all about our students. And it's all about making sure they're prepared when they leave our care.

My friend Holly Clark, a National Board Certified Teacher in English as well as speaker and author on AI, first introduced me to this shocking stat …

… that the students in our schools right now will retire in the 2070s and 2080s.

Ever consider that? Let me pause for a moment and let your brain stop spinning. 🤯

That means that a student who is 10 years old today will ...

• Graduate high school in 2031

• Graduate college in 2035 (assuming no overhaul of our postsecondary system)

• Hit their professional peak in maybe 2060

• Retire at +/- 65 years old in 2079

If you haven't noticed, AI has been advancing rapidly in the last couple years.

Even if you don't put AI in the equation, the rapid advancement of technology in general — and the ways we implement it and depend on it — continues to grow.

There are certain inflection points that could come in the not-too-distant future (like quantum computing) that could make it roll out even faster.

In the past, we've been able to project a general idea of what students will need to survive and thrive in the future. 

But this is different.

We've never seen the projections for the future change so quickly. 

Some of the things we’re doing in schools today to prepare students for the future? Put simply, they're NOT preparing students for the future. 

This is what I call teaching through our "today glasses." We're looking at education in light of today. The skills and requirements of today. What today's world and today's workforce demands.

Today glasses.

The problem with this, of course, is that our students' future isn't today. 

Our students' future is tomorrow -- this rapidly changing future that's hard to predict. AI and tech futurists make predictions, but that's all they really are -- predictions.

To prepare our students for the future, we can't continue to look at school through our "today glasses."

We need to look, instead, through our tomorrow glasses. 👓

What are our tomorrow glasses? It's looking at our schools, our policies, our curriculum ... our lesson plan books! ... through the lens of tomorrow. What will students need to thrive in this quickly changing future?

But how do we even do that? We can't predict the future.

True. But we can look at trends that show us the direction that technology and the world are headed ... then work our way backward to identify what our students will need.

(I'm getting a glance at that future by reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer. He's making evidence-based predictions of advances in medicine, changes in our economy, and even biological interfaces with AI in the next 20 years that will make you lose sleep when you first consider them. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say ... it's eye-opening and insomnia-inducing.)

Teaching with our tomorrow glasses is all about asking: If this is the vision of the future, what can do I do today — right now! — to start preparing students for it?

I don't think the answer is a simple "use more AI." You'll hear some people advocate for it. "Use more AI! Get students using AI! Teach with AI! Teach students about AI! It's the future. We need to get them using it now!"

There are several problems with this line of thinking:

• Today's AI models are the most rudimentary ones our students will ever use. 

• A majority of them won't work in the computer science field.

• Today's AI models are fraught with inaccuracies, biases and skewed models of what students really need to learn.

So ... what IS going to prepare students for the future? What can we do today -- things that fit in the confines of our traditional education system, curriculum and standards that truly DO prepare students?

From time to time over the next several months, I'm going to write about this right here in the Ditch That Textbook email newsletter and blog.

⚠️ Spoiler alert: I wrote about “6 ways to prepare students for an AI future.”

I'm also working on a new book -- tentatively called "Tomorrow Glasses" -- that gives today's educators some concrete strategies to prepare students for this high-tech, AI-driven future -- no matter what field of work those students pursue.

In the meantime, here are some questions I'm wrestling with -- that you can wrestle with, too, if you feel like wrestling -- to start to solve this problem ...

1. What are the top 3 most important things that I want my students to gain while they're with me?

2. Why do I hold those things sacred? (In fact, you might try the "5 Whys" method to get to the true root cause of your reasoning.)

3. How will those most sacred things support students in a future where technology is more and more capable?

4. What are the things about teaching that most depend on my humanity as a teacher?

5. How can I protect those things from the overreach of technology and artificial intelligence?

6. What are things that must be done in my work as a teacher that are least impactful -- and depend least on my humanity?

7. Are there ways to streamline or automate those things with technology / artificial intelligence so I can dedicate more of my human faculties and time to them?

🎯 QUICK TEACHING STRATEGY 🎯

🧠 The “Two and a Crayon” brain break

Students need a quick break from work? Try the “Two and a Crayon” brain break.

Fourth grade teacher Kyle Cohen shared this on TikTok. (Thanks to Bored Teachers for writing about it and TCEA for sharing it on Twitter!)

• Students get into pairs and grab ONE crayon and ONE piece of paper.

• They both grasp the one crayon at the same time.

• They have three minutes to draw WITHOUT talking to each other about what they’re doing. (They also can’t come up with a strategy ahead of time.)

Watch Kyle explain it in a quick 00:54 video here!

👋 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!