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Last Friday we started to ask the community: what's one thing you learned this week?

We’re going to ask this question every week on Friday.

This first time around, it was great to see that people were giving honest answers even if what they were telling us was difficult or confusing. Some highlights:

We are so proud of this group for choosing honesty and the admission of what sometimes can be wild messiness. This is what we are here to witness for each other, and this is why community is SO important!

Here are a few specific thoughts that stayed with us:

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

We will also have a new thread on Friday to reflect on this past week.

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.

If you teach in a 1:1 device environment (which many of us do), you know the struggle: you start talking, but half the class is still staring at their screens, typing, or scrolling.

Instead of raising your voice or counting down, try Professional Courtesy.

How it works:

It shifts the dynamic from a power struggle ("Close your laptops right now!") to a real-world digital citizenship skill. It respects their work while keeping your instruction front and center.

The big question I’m really curious to answer — “Can I use AI/tech to give students more help without losing the thinking?” — is actually a complicated, multi-faceted question.

That’s because there are different answers depending on when and how you use it.

So let’s dive into one area that I think is particularly promising …

Prework.

Pre-writing. Brainstorming. Organizing. “Getting your ducks in a row.” 🦆🦆

Students have a big writing assignment. Or a multi-step project. Something where they need to follow a set of steps to get to the finish line.

Often it starts with a topic …

Students might think: “Oh, I know exactly what my focus is!” … and it’s just not a great fit to the project.

Or they might think: “I have no idea what to write about … and I don’t even know where to start.” That’s where procrastination sets in.

After they have a topic, the process goes from finding a broad concept (the topic) to making it narrower and more focused.

They might need an outline. Or a set of subtopics. Questions to answer.

Part of the whole thing are the executive functioning tasks of knowing how to organize it, what steps to do in what order, how to pull it all off.

All of this is hard. But most times, it isn’t even the thing that we want to assess! We want to know how well the student understands the topic … what observations they made, what conclusions they drew, what new ideas they’ve learned.

To get to the good stuff, they might need some support … and in some instances, and AI chatbot might help them get there.

Really, we want the student to be responsible for the good, important thinking and work. But if the chatbot can help bring out their own good human thinking and work, we’re probably good with that, right?

Honestly, that’s the kind of support we usually provide students as teachers … assuming that we can get that one-on-one face time with them (and that they ask for it).

So, imagine if we create an AI chatbot that …

A common misconception for getting AI support on student writing: creating a broad “writing coach” chatbot.

Don’t get me wrong … the “writing coach” chatbot is great sometimes. I use them on little short writing assignments in my Spanish class and they’re GOLD.

But on a bigger project like this, it’s better to create very specific AI chatbots with very specific tasks. In this case: A pre-write brainstorming chatbot.

In this example, I used Spaces (their student-facing AI chatbot feature) in SchoolAI.

For the instructions, I just told it that it was going to support students in finding a topic for an essay … some details about the assignment … the role I wanted it to play (ask questions, identify interests, help them judge whether it would be a suitable topic, etc.).

In these examples, I created a standard, normal “what you would expect” pre-write chatbot …

But then I had some fun with it. I created three others, using the same base instructions but telling them to give the same pre-write feedback BUT with a BIG personality.

Here are the ones I created (click a link to try one out):

You might be looking at this going: “I have no idea how to write instructions for these chatbots. I can’t code. How will I do this?”

First of all, you can write these chatbot instructions in your natural language, just as if you were telling a human teaching assistant how you want (and don’t want) them to interact with students.

Secondly, you don’t have to write them at all. You can use an AI tool like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude or something else. Just tell it that you want to create instructions for a student AI chatbot (tell it which tool you’re going to use) and what you want to accomplish. Keep going back and forth with it until you get what you want.

Third, you might not even need to go to a different app in the first place. SchoolAI, the tool I used to make these pre-writing chatbots, offers TWO places to help you write instructions (see image below): the blue “Create my Space” button (where AI takes your instructions and improves them for you) OR the “Brainstorm with Space Designer”, an AI chatbot that helps you write instructions for AI chatbots.

(And yes, I realize how ridiculous it sounds to have AI write instructions for AI. But it works!)

There are a few things I really like about this.

For one, this prework chatbot scales nicely. I teach a class of 31 high school juniors and seniors. As much as I’d like to provide them adequate face-to-face interaction, I’m very limited as one single human teacher.

But if I can create instructions that preserve what I would tell students anyway, it’s a way to expand that out to everyone — and not just the students who raise their hands and ask for it.

Also, by picking the tiny part of the project / assignment that can use some AI support, we’re not handing the whole thing over to AI. We’re picking ONE part where we hand AI a VERY SPECIFIC role … then we’re doing the rest of it with our human capacities.

Finally, it uses one of my biggest rules for students AI interactions: human thinking before AI. The AI tool is actually prompting students to THINK, not doing the thinking for them.

If you’re designing the learning task and you realize that you want students to do this thinking themselves — or talk it out with a partner, then don’t use AI for this part.

But if you have problems that traditional approaches like that can’t solve — like a mass of students who are stuck looking at a blinking cursor on a blank screen with no idea where to go next, then this could be really helpful.

This is just one part of this series on finding places where AI can actually support student thinking — instead of doing the thinking for them.

And remember, I’m not encouraging you to use more AI for the sake of using it.

But when it can help us achieve our goals and get students thinking in ways that we couldn’t otherwise, we have to at least give it a shot.

What should I look at next? If you have suggestions — or something you really want to figure out, just hit reply and let me know!

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