A free AI course built specifically for teachers (and it actually adapts to you 👀).

Most AI training talks at you. This one starts by listening. It asks what you teach, how familiar you are with AI, and what genuinely worries you about it in the classroom. Then it builds a learning path around your answers. Your subject. Your comfort level. Your concerns. No two teachers get the same course, because no two teachers are starting from the same place.

It's completely free, platform-agnostic, and over 8,500 educators have already taken it. When you finish, you earn a certificate automatically (no hoops, no fees). Just proof that you showed up for your own growth. 😎

A CS teacher in the community, Anna-Marie Robertson, had a lesson-grading epiphany this week.

In about 8 years, high schoolers will walk in having never known a computer that wasn't conversational.

So Anna-Marie asked the community: what else are we not thinking about? And how prepared do we actually have to be?

The thread is turning into a rich discussion expressing the imbalances between the many generations that now make up even a single school building, and how we all handle our responses to advancement around us. Just because you want to be optimistic, doesn’t mean you have to love everything as it seems you are meant to.

Here’s a peek into what people are saying so far…

What do you think? Open this discussion and add your thoughts here …

Not a member yet? Join the free DTT Community to read ideas like this, connect with other educators, discuss, and share ideas of your own.

Want to get 100% student participation in your classroom without spending hours grading speaking and writing tasks?

Let's talk about Snorkl.

In standard whole-class discussions, usually only one or two hands go up. Snorkl changes that by combining a visual whiteboard, audio/text responses, and instant AI feedback so every single student can explain their thinking at the same time.

Here is why it has earned a permanent spot in my tech toolkit:

Students aren't limited to just one way of showing what they know. They can use whiteboard recording (drawing while speaking), audio-only, whiteboard-only, or text.

Students open the canvas, record their audio or drawings, and describe what they see using their target words. Plus, with instant translation and support for languages it’s a game-changer for multilingual learners.

My absolute favorite feature in Snorkl is the simple "Respond Again" button.

Traditional grading often delivers "autopsy feedback"—critique given on a finished product long after the learning moment has passed, when students can no longer change the outcome. With Snorkl, the AI provides immediate feedback on their recorded explanations or written work. Students can review the critique, hit "Respond Again," re-record or rewrite, and resubmit immediately while the learning process is still active.

Read more: 10 ways to provide instant feedback to students with Snorkl

With Snorkl, you can assign rich speaking, drawing, and writing tasks while you’re out. The AI steps in to guide and give real-time feedback to students even if the sub can't.

You don't even have to build these activities from scratch. The Snorkl Library acts like a free "Teachers Pay Teachers" repository. You can browse ready-to-assign content across various subjects and grade levels and drop them right into your class with a single click.

Try it out: Head over to Snorkl, grab a pre-made activity from the library, and see how your students respond to instant AI coaching!

Educators can try Snorkl by creating a free account. Free accounts allow you to use Snorkl with your students (up to 20 activities) to see and experience Snorkl's impact.

This year, I’m teaching a high school Spanish class with 31 students.

It’s a LOT of students.

(Quick aside: I was aware the class would be this bit when schedules were made and I agreed to it. It’s not something imposed on me by my admins. But it’s still a LOT of kids.)

And with all of those students come some challenges …

In some ways, my class still feels like a class from 1987. I’m stuck with some of the same barriers we’ve had for ages with teaching.

It begs a question that I want to try to answer this year …

Can I use AI/tech to give students more help without losing the thinking?

Now, to be clear … I’m not an “all tech all the time” kind of guy.

I write a lot about integrating tech in the classroom here and on social media. It’s not because I use it for everything or think that it’s some sort of magical solution. We still do LOTS of non-tech stuff in my classroom.

Tech is still something we teachers struggle to get right. If we see lots of examples, we can pick and choose from them — and we start to learn what we like.

I’m hopeful that this discussion will serve in that way, too.

I’m not nearly as interested in questions like “what are the tools” and “what features do they have” as …

Here’s another bigger question — one that I started asking in my new book, AI Literacy in Any Class:

Over the last year or so, I’ve already started using AI chatbots — and I’m analyzing how much they actually help. (Provided with a rating out of five stars.)

LEAVING BETTER SUB PLANS: When I’m not at school (doing a presentation or speech at a school/district/event), I have to leave sub plans. Lots of us leave packets of paper worksheets as sub plans. However, I’ve found that activities with a built-in AI chatbot give students just-in-time feedback (which paper worksheets can’t do). ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

HAVING SIMULATED CONVERSATIONS: I was hopeful that chatbots would let my students interact in natural spontaneous conversational Spanish — and get more repetitions. However, I suspect that most of them operate in English and translate things over to Spanish. That makes it hard for them to analyze the intricacies of the language to put the activity right on my students’ level. The results have been less than inspiring. ⭐⭐

AI ANALYSIS OF PAPER ASSIGNMENTS: In this case, I (the teacher) am interacting with the AI chatbot. Students complete an assignment on paper. I scan student work with the school’s photocopier (it has a scanning feature). I take the PDF and get AI analysis with an AI tool like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc. Read more about it here. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

PROVIDING WRITING FEEDBACK: This is something I want to test out further. I’ve been using Brisk Boost by Brisk Teaching (their student-facing chatbot tool). Students can write in a document with a little chatbot next to it. The chatbot can analyze their writing and provide them with feedback. It helps to provide feedback at scale — which I like! But student interactions get a little too transactional — and they still can look words up with Google Translate a little too easily. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

CHATBOTS WITH A VERY NARROW FOCUS: Instead of creating a general chatbot that reviews student writing as a whole, I’ve found some success making what I call “precision bots”. These chatbots interact and give feedback on a very narrow task. In writing, that could be brainstorming a topic or playing the part of a skeptic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

As I dive deeper into my AI chatbot experiment, here are some things I want to try …

WRITING PRACTICE WHEN I’M THERE: Lots of those writing activities have been done with a sub. But what if I’m there? Usually, I don’t do this. I like to provide personal support as the teacher. But I just talked about the “one teacher to dozens of students” barrier. Would students get MORE feedback if they worked with a chatbot than they would just with me?

STUDENTS ANALYZING AI-GENERATED WORK: When you create an AI-generated image or story, if you tell students it’s made by AI, it becomes an exercise in analyzing it 1) from the perspective of class content, but also 2) from the perspective of AI. How did it handle its business?

PAPER WRITING, AI ANALYSIS: Students don’t need to type their writing into a document to get AI feedback. I’m experimenting with the Brisk Boost whiteboard tool, where you can upload an image of student paper work and get feedback on it, giving them the best of both worlds.

REFLECTION AND QUESTIONS: When I wrote my recent AI literacy book, I used AI to ask my questions about my work and to push my thinking. That put my human thinking at the center. I want to see how that fits in the classroom and if it works.

I don’t have to be the only one thinking about this — or trying new things!

I just opened a new discussion in our DTT online community — Can AI chabots actually help students?

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