Future Fluent: Teaching Students Essential AI Literacy Skills

Generative AI in Uncertain Times: How Teens are Navigating a New Digital Frontier

Student Self-Reflection Checklist for Strategic GenAI Use

GenAI Literacy 101 for Students Course

Future Fluent: GenAI Literacy for Students Course

Free course for educators

AI Toys & Companions: What Educators and Families Need to Know webinar

Amanda Bickerstaff

Amanda is the Founder and CEO of AI for Education. A former high school science teacher and EdTech executive with over 20 years of experience in the education sector, she has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities that AI can offer. She is a frequent consultant, speaker, and writer on the topic of AI in education, leading workshops and professional learning across both K12 and Higher Ed. Amanda is committed to helping schools and teachers maximize their potential through the ethical and equitable adoption of AI.

Corey Layne Crouch

Corey is the Chief Program Officer and a former high school English teacher, school principal, and edtech executive. She has over 20 years of experience leading classrooms, schools, and district teams to transformative change focused on equity and access for all students. As a founding public charter school leader, she ensured that 100% of seniors were accepted to a four-year college. Her focus now lies in assessing the broader K-16 edtech ecosystem, uniting stakeholders at all levels to build a more equitable and abundant future for all. She holds an MBA from Rice University and a BA from Rowan University.

Wendy Morrey

Wendy is a Curriculum & Content Developer at AI for Education. With over a decade of experience in K–12 education, she brings deep expertise in foundational literacy, instructional design, and technology integration. She has served as a classroom teacher, professional learning facilitator, and EdTech content developer, with a passion for creating engaging, accessible learning experiences for all students. Wendy is currently focused on developing AI literacy programs that empower students and educators to use generative AI tools safely, ethically, and effectively.

‍ 00:00
Amanda Bickerstaff
Hi everyone. We're so excited to have you here with us today. We'll give everyone just a moment to come in, but I cannot tell you how excited I am to share with you all our approach to student AI literacy, but also to be joined by two of my favorite team members, Lindy Mori and Corylane Crouch. It's very rare that we get to spend this good time together on a webinar or just in general because we can tend to be pretty busy. So to be able to do this together is great. And as always, we'd love you to say hello. If you don't mind sharing the next slide. Tori, as always, please say hello in the chat. We'll make sure that is turned on correctly.

00:37
Wendy Morrey
It is.

00:39
Amanda Bickerstaff
We are so unbelievably lucky to have such an amazing webinar culture. Please always say hello. Share Resources if you're doing AI literacy with students already, we love anecdote. We love an opportunity to, like, dig into what's actually working on the ground. Share resources. Please do ensure that you're that you have your chat set to everyone. Otherwise, only Corey, Wendy and a couple of us at the team will see it. Also, if you have a question specifically for Corey, Wendy or I, please put that in the Q and A because that's where we'll know we'll see it. We have a couple hundred people already. We should, we should be a big group. So it's always good to be able to really elevate those questions you have for us. But we're going to go to the next sl.

01:24
Amanda Bickerstaff
And one of the things that has been really meaningful to us at AI for Education is that when we started back in 2023, our mission was AI literacy for a million educators. And were very, very focused on educator AI literacy. And that has changed. In fact, we changed our mission last year to a million educators and students. And the reason being is that we know that young people are the main users of generative AI. If you want an internal metric from OpenAI is that 40% of their 900 million monthly users are under 25. That is almost half of all users of ChatGPT are under 25. We know that this is happening across all types of AI use, not just schoolwork, but personal companionship. In fact, it's quite funny.

02:16
Amanda Bickerstaff
I was talking to a elementary school teacher yesterday or her third graders keep every time they see something that's a video, they say that's AI, Ms. That's AI because it's actually much more part of what young People are experiencing than we think. And we have here is, we have this wonderful statistic from generative AI at uncertain times from last year that say that 3 in 10 teens say they're most responsible. Teaching ourselves about generative AI, I would say I think that seems low from what we've seen. We have not seen really many schools, especially in K12, make inroads into intentional AI literacy. And this is the same thing. If you want to look at a mirror image, this is similar to what we saw in 2023, where there was not a lot of AI literacy educators.

03:00
Amanda Bickerstaff
And what we did in response is we created a free course. So we've had that free teacher course available for the last two years. And so what we did was like, okay, we're going to take that same approach. And what we did is we came together and we wrote two courses. One is a fully free course for our 13 and ups, and then one that can be done more in a classroom setting. And so if we want to go to the next slide, for us, if you want to think about how we are really digging into what we think about when thinking about AI literacy, but also where we're hearing more and more people talk about AI fluency is that for us, AI literacy is that foundational knowledges and the practices of AI use.

03:39
Amanda Bickerstaff
And we're going to talk about our C framework about safe, ethical and effective, because. But we believe that AI literacy, especially for students 13 and up, should be applied. It should be something that it's not just about talking about it, but something that students are learning how to use these tools in meaningful and safe ways with intentional support. But then, like when we have our second course, our larger course, we're trying to start thinking about this term of AI fluency. And this is up. I will say right now there's a big debate about is AI fluency the same thing as AI literacy? Is it different? For us, we believe it's the next step. It's the applied step.

04:11
Amanda Bickerstaff
If AI literacy is your foundations, AI fluency is the decisions that you make, the critical, the skillful, the responsible decision making that you make when using AI tools. And so we think a lot about this is that we've seen, I would say I don't know about Corey and Wendy, but I've seen my life change over the last two and a half years from being AI literate to being more and more AI fluent. And I see myself growing in that way consistently. And that was what we wanted to think about for our young people, is that it should be a continuum and something that we can do to build that over time.

04:43
Amanda Bickerstaff
If we go to the next slide, the way that we've been thinking about this, for us, the goal of AI literacy is that students learn to use AI in a strategic and intentional manner. Here's the thing, everybody, the vast majority of young people are using generative AI and AI systems in an incredibly passive way. They'll go to ChatGPT and say, Help me write my essay. And instead of ChatGPT asking, what help would you like, it writes their essay. And if you ever want to try this at home, try it at home and see that these tools are designed to give you answers and that students don't just passively get those answers and be like, oh my gosh, you can do it maybe better than I can. What's the point?

05:22
Amanda Bickerstaff
Or that these, you know, that these outputs are right, that they're fully, like, quickly, like, we can say, yes, it's right. I can trust it. It's not going to have inaccuracies. It's not going to have bias. It's not going to be something that is it quite my voice, which is something that I think is even more intensely important now. And so if you think about everything that we do is it really is like, AI literacy cannot just be, I know how to open a tool and go, but like, I know when and how to use these tools, when not to use them. But also, I just don't trust AI outputs because I shouldn't. Like, I should always be a critical user of these tools.

06:00
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so the next slide that we have is we're going to talk about the ways we think about AI literacy. And if you have examples of this in your own context, please share. But this is what we use to actually create our AI literacy courses. And therefore, we have learner centered, which is probably unsurprising. Corey and Wendy and I have all been educators and teachers. And so it's unsurprising that the thing we started with was learner centered. We also want it to be framework centered. And the reason why we wanted to be framework centered is that we wanted this to feel practical and applicable. Meaning, like, I could take this and apply it in other parts of my life. Third part is practical and reflective. Like, you know what, if you've ever seen anything we do, we love a practical moment. We love anecdote.

06:46
Amanda Bickerstaff
We love a way to be reflective as well. And in fact, one of my favorite parts about our educator guides is that it actually has this modeling reflective practice that teachers are using to set young people up for success. And then finally it has to be future ready. We cannot be designing AI literacy instruction for today. It has to be for what's going to happen in the next three to five to 10 years. And I think that becomes so important to our work. So I'm going to hand it over to Corey, our chief program officer, who's going to take you through that first design principle of learner centered.

07:18
Corey Layne Crouch
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you Amanda. And it's great to be here with you all. The first as Amanda shared design principle, when we think about this work and design AI literacy for students is that learner centered component. Because at the core this has to be about the development, the cognitive development and social, emotional, healthy social, emotional development of our young people. So it's not tool centered. It is about strengthening that student thinking, that creativity, the independence and not replacing that. And if you have joined any AI for education workshops or other webinars, you'll also hear us talk a lot about the importance of students valuing their own voice.

08:09
Corey Layne Crouch
We want this to be about them really developing their sense of their perspective and how they see the world and continue to believe that their voice is, and their opinions and the way that they are creative and the way that they shape outputs and their thinking is more valuable than what a chatgpt or Gemini or whatever tool is going to spit out for them. And this learner centered focus is really also about ensuring that they are maintaining a sense of agency and ensuring that they're thinking about how they're beliefs, their values, their voice and identity is what guides their use of the tools in order to go toward the outcomes that they're trying to achieve.

09:08
Corey Layne Crouch
And so yes, this is about building AI literacy, but we want it to be grounded in those important components of healthy learners as they develop throughout, you know, their K12 education experience as well as throughout their higher educational experience. And so Wendy's going to share a little bit about how we actually make this about that student agency and the understanding that the purpose of using the tools is to strengthen but not replace that thinking and that voice. Wendy, you want to share about the personal gen AI code?

09:52
Wendy Morrey
I love to. This was one of my favorite activities that we built. It's more of a principle that we built throughout. We are guiding them through building their own personal gen AI code. And during this time it's just such a powerful activity. Throughout the entire course they create these personal guidelines, not rules that they're just given to them, but they write these commitments for themselves. One way that we help support them do that is giving some examples of what other students. So this one's a strategic scholar. We have one that's a creative, more minded student. Like there's about four of them. And we help them ground these goal, their goals and their values in these real student identities. So that way it's not abstract for them that these ethics and these ethical questions aren't abstract, but really personal and deep meaning for them.

10:47
Wendy Morrey
And this code covers privacy independence, their authenticity and their, and even transparency. We want them to be able to have all of those kinds of facets as they dive into their own deep work into personal, their personal gen AI code. There's a lot of good questions in here that when I was like, oh, I need to really think about this for myself as I was building it out and I was like, I, I need this reflection too. So I went through and did my own and it was very impactful and then I watched it be impactful for other our, you know, pilot students that did it. And really we just wanted these, you know, personal codes that create conviction for themselves in their, you know, ethical gen AI use.

11:31
Corey Layne Crouch
So yeah, and I love, and you mentioned this here, Wendy. It's about making it principles based and in their own way versus being rules based and about just what's allowed and what's not allowed. It's about them deciding what matters to me, what do I know about the technology and what does that mean for how I'm making decisions moving forward. And along with that learner centered. And again, if you are not new to us, this won't be surprising. This is also framework centered. The way that the materials are developed is about supporting students with building the knowledge, skills and mindsets so that they understand what generative AI is and can use it safely, ethically and effectively. And Amanda was hinting at this some earlier. This is not about a singular tool.

12:32
Corey Layne Crouch
This is about building that foundation that is going to have a longer shelf life than just knowing how to use the tools as they currently exist today. And we believe that is important. Excuse me, because it allows students again to have this foundation of knowledge and skills and beliefs and mindsets that can evolve with them as the tools evolve. And we call this our C framework, safe, ethical and effective use. And I'm sure many of you have seen this from us before and we love thinking about the C framework as an action lens. Get it like lenses on your glasses and you can see responsible AI in action. That applies across contexts. So we want our students to have this regular thinking ability and thinking habit of, okay, is my use of the technology in this moment, am I being safe?

13:42
Corey Layne Crouch
Is it also ethical based on what I'm trying to achieve? And then is it effective? Does it, does it actually move me forward? Because you can be safe, like not share any of your personally identifiable information or not be leaning toward over reliance, but it might not be effective in, you know, increasing their progress towards understanding a learning objective or pushing their creativity or getting feedback or whatever it may. On the flip side, they could be doing something really effectively. Say they are getting some brainstorming feedback or whatever it may be from Gemini, but they also got the direction that they need to do all of their initial thinking independent of AI tools. Maybe they're being effective and safe, but it wouldn't actually fall within ethical if it's not in alignment with the academic integrity, policy and expectations for that assignment.

14:45
Corey Layne Crouch
So we think of this as a layering of those lens to help students make the right decisions about, you know, what does it look like to continue to use AI tools responsibly?

15:03
Amanda Bickerstaff
I give anecdote as well, because I think one of the things that we want to go back, Corey, to that safe, ethical, and effective. One of the things that's really interesting about the approach that we take is that we take the same approach with educators as we do with students. So this safe, ethical, effective framework and lenses are what we do with adults. So yesterday I was with almost 600 lovely educators at Scotch Plains out in New Jersey, and I pulled this up and I'm like, who in here is using ChatGPT? Claude or Gemiini, raise your hand. And I want you to keep your hands raised. If you have turned off training data for the models and everyone but four people. Yes, Shakira. Yes, people. I love this. If you don't know how to be raising their hands, one of the things that is.

15:48
Amanda Bickerstaff
It's so remarkably like a good kind of moment. We do this with students in the course as well, because you just don't think about it. You don't. It isn't even written in the model saying, like, training data. It says, help me improve Claude. Like, why do I. I don't need to improve Claude. Thank you, though. But like, it's something where I think that this framework becomes incredibly practical. And one of the things that I love about the course is that it really does dive into, like, essentially there's a set of, in both of the courses, the, the one that's the two hour course and the longer course. This is constant reframing of like, what does this mean for your safety, what does it mean for your ethical practices? And what does it mean for you to actually use these tools effectively?

16:29
Amanda Bickerstaff
And it's so interesting is because we're going to watch it. I'll give you a spoiler alert. We're going to see an awesome little video in a moment with Wendy's kids. But it's something that came up in their video too, is like they're thinking about their use in so much more robust ways. And we see that happen. And there are a lot of AI literacy frameworks, so don't add us too much. We know that this is not the only one, but we do find that it's probably the most practical. Like you can ask yourself at any time, I can look back at my AI transcript and was I safe, ethical and was I using it effective? And that can be a lens that you could take to any or any community that you're working with.

17:09
Corey Layne Crouch
And this, Amanda, is how you can start to see how this framework and that practicality is how we're going from that being a passive consumer of these technologies to a more intentional consumer where it gives you those decision points each time and those reflective points.

17:29
Wendy Morrey
And I wanted to add that this is a new skill and mindset for these students and for us. And so it's built in from the very first lesson all the way through. But these questions aren't just a repetitive, exactly what you see here. We kind of dive into each scenario, each, you know, task that they're given and then we are helping them with their metacognition and their depth of response to what their, what they're looking at, what they're building, how they're collaborating with AI throughout. And so it gives them this practical skill over repeated practice that for the most part, I mean, you know, sometimes learning is hard as it should be.

18:10
Wendy Morrey
A little bit of, you know, cognitive, you know, load is good to build in that resilience and learning, but it's not in a boring way where they're like, this isn't practical for me. It's very student centered to their own personal lives and what they're going through in the moment. So it's, I saw a pretty good impact through that and was very, it was very satisfying.

18:36
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah.

18:37
Corey Layne Crouch
And then Wendy, do you want to keep sharing about that, the practical and reflective components here?

18:43
Wendy Morrey
Yeah. So as went through, the idea here was to make sure that it was practical and reflective. We wanted them not to just kind of go through the course as fast as possible. We built in a pretty robust student workbook that goes with it for their own personal reflection and a place to gather all of their thoughts and their work as they're going through. That way they can go back and refer to it later for their own guidelines, their own frameworks and their own reflective perspectives throughout. And we really wanted to make sure that even though were giving them all this great knowledge, were also giving them the application because we know that with knowledge without application fades over time. And we really wanted them to do something and then reflect on that work that they were doing.

19:30
Wendy Morrey
So these activities are really grounded in those personal tasks, research, writing, studying, so that students could really see the immediate revelance of to their own lives. And we wanted to make sure that was built in all the way throughout. And our very first one that we have, very first activity, the very first lesson is this 24 hour AI detector challenge. And they come in and examine AI in their own use. And we wanted them to, you know, track and analyze at least three different AI interactions. And the questions that we, they asked throughout the day is how did the AI interaction impact my behavior? How did this AI interaction affect how I felt about myself? What did I actually accomplish through this AI interaction?

20:21
Wendy Morrey
And as they track those behavioral impacts, emotional impacts and their actual accomplishments throughout the day, they start to realize how often AI actually makes decisions for them in their own life, from navigation to music, their social feeds. And then without that awareness that they are kind of passive consumers or users of AI instead of really proactive in what they choose to do with AI. And we really wanted to shift that student. The student's mindset from AI is something that I use to AI something that I need to understand so that way I can use it effectively and safely. My son's really big about the safety part of it, so it was really important for him. So one of the, and we have this on our website, we'll drop this link in the chat.

21:14
Wendy Morrey
But one of the ways that we wanted to do this was this reflection structure was the student self reflection checklist for strategic gen AI use. And they can use this checklist to go through and evaluate their strategic use of genai and also identify opportunities for growth. And it talks about several places, it talks about, you know, their academic thinking and several others. And we wanted to do this so that way we can surface patterns that students might not often notice, like turning towards AI first before Trying to do the work independently and brainstorming on their own before going in and getting feedback on an outline or things like that. So we really wanted to frame this reflection as identity building and not judgment. And this is this idea of this is who I want to be with AI as they go through.

22:11
Wendy Morrey
So that's one of my favorite ones that we built.

22:15
Corey Layne Crouch
And it's something. And I'm sure many of you here have the opportunity or perhaps if you haven't taken the opportunity, you should just start asking some of these reflective questions of students. One of the great privileges that we have in our work is to do some focus groups and have conversations with students about how do they feel about AI, what do the generative AI, what do they know? You know what opportunities do they see and what do they appreciate or what are they excited about and then what are they concerned about? And with that prompting, I have heard students said at some of the schools, you know, that we're working with there's.

23:00
Corey Layne Crouch
They quickly get to a self awareness that even though it's a conversation for me to learn about what their experiences are, even just asking the question about when they're using it and what they think about the impact triggers that reflection where they will say yes, I'm using it a lot and I am worried that it's making my brain lazy. I would never call students lazy, but they self described. I am very worried me lazy. And I do start to recognize when I'm sitting down with some learning or with an assignment, the temptation to go to ChatGPT or to go to a tool. So even just that increased awareness and then as were seeing that like aha, you know what?

23:53
Corey Layne Crouch
This isn't fully my idea versus I just got some feedback to enhance my idea already helps some of those students be more nuanced again shifting from that passive to that more intentional and strategic use.

24:10
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah. And before we go on, the first thing is that we. The link of course isn't working right now. Everybody but this is part of our resource bank. So even though it's not working today, Dan hopefully is fixing it right now. But if not, it'll be in the resources that we share. It's important for us as we go through the courses, there'll be more resources. We know that the course isn't right for everybody but something like these reflective structures because there's been a couple of places in here about how do you get students thinking more critically about their own use? Is that what we do in a really great way is continuously having the students go back to these big problems and these big rocks and then taking a moment.

24:55
Amanda Bickerstaff
And I know there was some feedback that first of all, how amazing is it that people have already started using the course, it's only been live for about three weeks. Is that we're in a process too where we're doing updates and love that like, you know, these are the areas in which the feedback that you give us will help us develop a better course. We do have some limitations for the free course because of COPPA and FERPA compliance law. So we can't do as much as we do in the larger course. There's actually a portfolio which we'll talk about in a moment which goes a lot deeper that allows us to get much deeper into what is going to change, what commitments are going to be made. And yeah, and so we, and there's, we'll answer some questions more about the course itself.

25:34
Amanda Bickerstaff
So if you have other questions about who it's for and how to use it, we're happy to do that. But now we're going to move on to the fourth part, which is our future. Ready and man, if you look online right now, how many there's like there will never be an entry level job again or like there's no benefit for AI system. It is a wild world out there. And so we want this course to lower the temperature and to be designed in a way in which it feels like the skills that matter going forward are the skills are the ones that you probably already really want to build. So those are those durable skills. We talked about it actually in our prep call.

26:14
Amanda Bickerstaff
You can look at America Successful succeeds for the real framework definition or you might have heard soft skills, 21st century skills. There's a lot of those hanging about. But those critical thinking, those analytical skills, those creativity, collaboration, communication, like those are incredibly important and will only be more important moving forward. But also are we building young people's skills in a way that they're agile but they don't feel like it's I'm going to learn AI literacy today and then it's going to be exactly the same tomorrow. Like this, these frameworks, this course is trying to build better practices and mindsets instead of skills. This, like this is how like we have a 5s prompting framework. But it's not like do this every single time. It's like learn how and when to use these strategies and so that you're being agile.

27:05
Amanda Bickerstaff
Even your own AI literacy and Then the last piece is human centered. It's never been more clear how important human centered learning is going to be. Like, what's going to set you apart in the future is not how much data skills you have or how like it's going to be. Like, do you have a passion? Is there something you want to do? Is there a place that is, that's uniquely yours that you care about, your voice, your interest, your, like a thing you want to do the most? Like, that is going to be more important than ever. And we try, we do it, I would say more limited in the free course because it's literally 90 minutes everybody, so it's not nearly as robust.

27:42
Amanda Bickerstaff
But we do go into that more significantly in the future fluent course because it is so important for the young people to start making plans, start thinking about what it means for them moving forward. So if you want to go to the next slide, Wendy, you know, we have such great things in the course, but one of the things, and I'll let Wendy talk about this, one of the things is there's so many new things happening all the time. So instead of giving them, it's one of our, probably most like, tell us which ones you like the best. And our response is, whichever one you like the best, whichever one meets your needs. And people are like, amanda, that is a cop out. It's actually like the real real, so to speak.

28:21
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so what we have here, though is instead of giving kids the Chatbot cheat sheet, what we're giving them is a framework and evaluation process. So when do you want to walk us through this? This process?

28:31
Wendy Morrey
Yeah. So they go through and they develop this evaluation kind of it's a work, it's not a worksheet, but they go through and they research safety and privacy and then test with real tasks and then they compare alternatives and then they decide if that tool is useful or necessary. And then they can do that kind of same step by step framework with each tool that they come across. And that way that the students leave with, you know, this ability to evaluate and truly dive into exactly what the tool can do for them and keep themselves safe as well with the privacy questions we have in there.

29:11
Wendy Morrey
That way when a tool launches next year or five years down the line, they don't need a teacher or a parent or anyone else to tell them what to think about it, but they know how to figure it out on their own. We wanted to give them those tools to be able to figure it out on their own and then also go and ask for, you know, guidance as needed. But we wanted to make sure that they had some dexterity in and being adaptive and critical and confident in their choices and to keep themselves safe, but also really to make sure that they know that they're using, you know, which tool is best for, you know, the moment. If It's Claude or ChatGPT or some other unknown tool in the future to give them those critical thinking skills and, you know, just guidance.

30:00
Wendy Morrey
Sometimes you don't know the questions to ask until you're guided. I'm always like, what questions do I ask? I'm not sure. So this was a great way for us to be able to help support the students in their future right now and future endeavors.

30:14
Amanda Bickerstaff
So, and if you are an adult, we're getting some questions. We actually had quite a few adults take the course. And of course it has, we have like a dancing cat, everybody, like this Instagram cat, which may not be quite for all adult, but I think that one of the things about this is that we're actually going to be updating our teacher course. And some of the things that we used and developed for this course will be updated for a teacher and educator audience. But something like this, though, could be an amazing opportunity. This is where that larger course is going to have these educator resources because this could be something you guys can do together, including you. You'd be like, okay, you know what?

30:53
Amanda Bickerstaff
We're all going to look at Notebook LM together today and we're gonna practice it, we're try it out, we're gonna read the terms of service, we're gonna understand where my data goes, we're gonna understand how it works. We're gonna do some, like, really thoughtful opportunities to maybe push some buttons and see, like, what happens. And for example, NotebookLM, like, the chat might be really beneficial, but maybe the audio overviews of the podcast might have some hallucinations in them, right? And so we have this opportunity to do that together. And because in a lot of these cases, the tools that you're using, the tools that students are using, there's no need to do it separately. You can actually do this kind of learning real time together.

31:32
Amanda Bickerstaff
But then one of my other favorite parts about the future Fluent course is that it has this portfolio option. But one of the, we talked about voice and choice already. So if we want to move next slide, Corey, is that the students actually get to pick whatever, like out of six, they get to pick. And I would say the way that we've designed this is. If you wanted to assign more, you could. But we wanted it to feel really meaningful, especially since we have two versions. We have a high school course and we have a college course that are very similar, but they do have slightly different perspectives. Is we want you to have this opportunity to build the things and to show your learning and your thinking in a way that is truly meaningful to you.

32:12
Amanda Bickerstaff
So when do you want to talk us through some of those ideas, like some of those portfolio options that they have?

32:19
Wendy Morrey
Yeah, sorry, I just kind of was thinking about the next thing I want to talk about. But one of the very first things that we have them do is do a deeper dive into their gen code. That's one of them. They also will evaluate and build their own tool. Toolbox on. On. I'm sorry, I'm blanking out. Oh goodness, you're good.

32:48
Amanda Bickerstaff
So there are a couple of them, right? So there are going to be one that's going to be more about like your actual like personal code and academic code. You've got some that are more focused on how you're going to actually do this within your like your own practice. But the idea of the portfolio is so much more about like, how do I see this work and where am I going to, where am I actually going to do it? So am I going to do it in my academic code? So when you go ahead. Yep.

33:13
Wendy Morrey
Yeah, they have an AI literacy plan and that also includes how to be transparent with their peers and also their parents and teachers because that can be a really scary part for them. We also gave them teaching resources because we know that peer to peer teaching for students can be so impactful for them, not only for their peers that they're helping, but also just kind of internalizing the work that they're doing on their own. And we really wanted to make sure that they had like just a quick reference of all the work that they've been doing if that's the choice that they did. And so we really wanted to give a lot of choice here because everyone's strengths and interests can make a difference as we go through.

33:56
Wendy Morrey
And yeah, my favorite one was the teaching resources because it helps me to be able to talk things out with somebody else and to kind of bounce back ideas and thought processes and things like that. So we wanted to make sure we kind of helped each child and how they learn and how they would like to present the work that they've been working on for the entire course to show their expertise and their new learning that they have so.

34:26
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. And you know what? We. It's really cool because like, one of the things that we're. We're starting right now is that we have a whole bunch of partners starting to review and evaluate the longer course because the longer course has been designed for schools. And so we're in this like process of getting feedback from that too. But one of the things that's really nice about this is that with the. Essentially with their certificate, they come out with products, they come out with next steps. They come out with that actionable component which we just think is really pop, like positive. And so we're going to move to the next component which was. This is the reason why Wendy got a little bit distracted is the last component is her children and her. So we wanted to. We actually had some beta testers.

35:09
Amanda Bickerstaff
I love a beta tester. And so we have two amazing beta testers that way before we ever launched this. Well, we only launched it three weeks ago. But Bo and James are two lovely young men that are Wendy's kids who really were the people. They helped us time it, they helped us identify what quotes and quite working. So what we did is we tapped them to do a short video. So you want to tee us up for that, Wendy?

35:32
Wendy Morrey
Yeah. And James is the reason why we have a really robust workbook. He was like, I need to write my thoughts down. Where am I writing my thoughts down through this. And that was for the shorter course. So, Corey, do you mind going to this?

35:44
Amanda Bickerstaff
Ready? Yeah.

35:46
Wendy Morrey
Yeah. So these are my boys. Let's meet them. They're so funny.

35:53
Speaker 4
Hello, I am Bo. I am a junior in high school. Oh, I'm James and I am an 8th grader. One thing I really thought was really impactful from this course was my ability to prompt. It was really improved by what I learned. I learned how to make more cohesive prompts for the AI, how to keep my prompt safe. So it didn't learn anything about me. I didn't want it to. And I learned how to get more from the responses from the AI with less prompts. And what I learned from the course that we took is that the AI will hallucinate and try telling you what they think you want to hear and not tell you the complete truth.

36:45
Speaker 4
You know, also, if I were to suggest this to this course to a student or another peer of mine, I would probably tell them that it is a very important course for our day and age. We are surrounded by AI and we really need to know how to keep ourselves safe and how to do it ethically, you know, and that would be very helpful and beneficial to anyone, I think. And if I were to recommend this to another student, I'll probably say that no matter what level of AI usage you're at, this course will help you, no matter what. Really all levels has something for everybody. Yeah.

37:38
Wendy Morrey
And the reason why I, Amanda, asked and I asked my boys to do this was I have had so many deep conversations with them as were going through the course together. But what's really interesting to me is that sometimes I'll just be hearing my boys talking while they're doing the laundry or something like that. And one of my son James in middle school was like, I was talking to my friend and he was telling me that if he just told the AI that it was wrong, then it wouldn't ever get it wrong again. And he was like, I had to tell him all about how that is not true and the training data and it's not. And I just sat there and this was before were really diving into building the course and I just thought, there's so much.

38:24
Wendy Morrey
These kids are already using it, talking about it with each other, they're not talking about it with the teachers nearly as much as we would hope, but how can we help support them throughout? And that's the biggest part of these courses was how do we provide these tools for these students because. And how do we help the educators to guide them through all this really new, really fast changing kind of technology that is one of the fastest adopting technologies that we've ever seen come through the school systems and felt very passionate about being able to do this for the kids and knowing that they're not going to be perfect their first time around. Right.

39:04
Wendy Morrey
So having it there for them so they can go back and reference and talk about it with their peers as they go through it was a pretty impactful experience just to be able to go through this and see how it changed the thinking. So my son James actually has decided not to use AI as like hardly at all. He's like, I don't want to use it because I feel like it doesn't give me, you know, the answers that I'm looking for. And, and I just want to use my own thinking. Fantastic. While my other one, who's taking college courses and things like that, we've talked a lot about. Well, I'm, I told my, you know, I told my professor, hey, I had these five ideas for my personal essay that you asked me to do.

39:51
Wendy Morrey
And then I Asked, you know, Claude to rank it on the most impactful one. And then he's like, okay. Then it helped me decide what to do because I couldn't decide what to do my essay on. I picked it and then I made my own outline, I wrote my own thing, but it helped guide me through. And so he's using it in a different way where it's not copy and paste, where it is more of a thinking, like back and forth kind of companion, talking companion. So it was interesting to see how it changed their perspectives in totally different ways and how it impacted each one of them differently and kind of on their own age journey too. And development, which is so important.

40:26
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah. Because James is an eighth grader. Right. And so he still has a lot of foundational skills to build. Things that we talk about in the course is like you shouldn't be using these tools for things you don't know how to evaluate. And so he's, he clearly has internalized that. He said that AI lies to you. So I mean like, I mean we don't say that in the course, but we do talk about inaccuracies listenations there. I will say we do more of that in the longer course. So if you're wondering about what we've created. And so The Gen Literacy 101 course is our free course. It is something in which it is designed for 13 and up. And there were some questions of why. Couple of things.

41:02
Amanda Bickerstaff
Number one is that we really don't think that young people should be using these tools on their own without AI literacy in place. And so 13 seems like a 9th grader, seems like a good space for this, this course. I will say there are some limitations because of student privacy. So there are some things we would have loved to be able to really prop up in this free course. But instead of doing that, what we have is a workbook that the students can use that's very reflective. Although we're going to take all the feedback and we'll work, we're working our best on like always thinking about engagement and upping that.

41:33
Amanda Bickerstaff
But I will say there are young people we already are seeing measurements with even in this two hour course is that kids are using, are thinking more critically about their use, that they are feeling more confident that they are changing their approach. And even some ninth graders that this has been required for would recommend it to their peers. So I feel like we have, like we've won a little, like won something there. But then the second and the second piece is that it really is Introductory. And I just want to say, like, if you are feeling like it's a good start, it really is a good start. We didn't want to make this overwhelming. If anything, it is your like introduction, it is your basis, but it's not enough.

42:11
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so what we wanted to do, in fact it actually wasn't going to be two courses we started, but we decided to do the second course because we essentially wrote the second course first. And then were like, this is too long. There's no way a ninth grader is going to be like, you know, what I want to do on my weekend is this course. And so what we wanted to do is make sure that genitaliteracy even we have students that are being required to take it, but we have students that are not being required to take it. And we wanted it to work for both those audiences.

42:36
Amanda Bickerstaff
On the other end though, for those that are thinking about school implementation, where this is something in which you want this to be cohesive, it can be for eighth graders, you know, we have eighth grader, eighth grade leaders that are thinking about this because it's going to be structured and supported. It's a longer course, it has more interactivity, it has a portfolio option. There are things that are required. But it also goes so much deeper into not just how the technology works and the technical AI literacy, but it's so much more application based. It is so much, we go deeper into prompting techniques, even like building your own context block of like I want the AI to work like this. I don't want it to give me the answer. So I'm going to put this into the system instructions.

43:22
Amanda Bickerstaff
Like, we really go that deep. And then it also has that real focus on like how I'm going to use this in my academics, in my creative work, in my studying work. There's some reflections on like, Corey, Wendy and I are completely different when it comes to what we need. And the same thing for students. Some students will need it to help them organize their thoughts and some students will need it just to help them proofread and finalize. And that is totally okay. Also, the last thing is that we do have educator guides and additional resources. So we didn't do lessons because we didn't want this to feel like a curriculum. We still wanted to feel like a course. But every single educator guide has discussion questions. It has modeling and reflective exercises that are done by the teacher which we find so effective.

44:08
Amanda Bickerstaff
Like, like let's talk through my own thinking about responsible use or my day in the life of AI, it's got also activities that can be done in the classroom and then common misconceptions and resources. And so those are being designed to act as supplements so that you could bring this into a classroom. And I know one of the biggest questions we have is like, where does this fit? Because there's not an AI literacy block that exists right within a school, even in colleges. And so Corey is going to talk about this because she's been thinking a lot about this on the ground, but these are the places. And I will say we don't have a perfect answer. Right Corey?

44:42
Corey Layne Crouch
Now we don't have a perfect answer. And it certainly is the million dollar. Well, maybe not a million dollar. Who has a million dollars in education? But the biggest question we get as we start talking about the critical importance of building this into the student experience is where does this fit? You know, there are full scopes and sequences and full schedules already that we're moving students through. And I, I absolutely get it. Trying to figure out like, okay, who's responsible for making sure students are taking and mastering some of these, the foundational knowledge and skills of these components and where can we make space for it is something that you will have to consider with implementation. And there are some spaces as you start to look at the materials where there is organic connection, like in ELA and media literacy, the computer science.

45:50
Corey Layne Crouch
If you do orientation programs or advisory or seminar type courses that are about study skills and setting students up for success, you know what types of different time blocks and experiences you have for students. And this is starting to think about what are the key ideas and the skills and how can they overlap? And the other thing that I would say about this, especially when I get deep into conversation with some of our partners, there is the foundation, like essentially the 90 minute course. But this initial foundation that is a unique, like what is generative AI, that learning goal is a very new one and doesn't exist in most ELA curriculums, for example.

46:43
Corey Layne Crouch
But you can invest that initial foundation, find that 90 minutes or that two hours initially, and then you'll, as you're building as a school community, you will start to see natural overlap between content standards in courses like these and the types of things that students are getting to as they're shifting from that foundational knowledge to fluency in using the tools to enhance their learning, their thinking and really amplifying their voice. I totally get it. That like a crosswalk of key ideas and existing standards and where does it fit? Can Feel like a bigger project. Which is also why, you know, one of the key things that we want to say to you today is start where you can.

47:33
Corey Layne Crouch
Don't let this idea that, you know, this feels like a bigger, you know, redesign or integration of our core curriculum or scope and sequence hold you back from getting started somewhere with your students. Because as we know, the data that we shared, students are already using the technology, and they're learning about it from themselves and their peers. So we don't. Sometimes we wish in education we could say, okay, pause. Everything stands still so that we can figure out, you know, how we want to reintegrate some of the new technologies. But as we know, the reality is we have. Have students and educators showing up in our classrooms every day. So we can't let perfect, you know, be the enemy of good. Excuse the. Excuse the cliche. But you get my idea, right? Amanda?

48:33
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah. No, and you know what? I think that this is. You know, when we thought about doing this, it is a little bit scary, right? Because you're like, this doesn't really exist. And what is our area of focus? And we. I promise you, Wendy, myself, Joe, who's not here, Tanner and I have gotten in circles at points and, like, what was appropriate, how technical to get, not how not technical to get. Like, where is a teacher in this? And I think that what we decided upon was, let's put something into the world that gives a start, that we feel confident that if a student takes this, that by the time they leave, they will feel more confident in their own safety, that they're. That they'll feel more confident in. I can make my own decisions.

49:17
Amanda Bickerstaff
Because the thing about AI literacy and AI fluency is not just about how to use AI, but when to use AI and when it's okay to say no. How to advocate for yourself if teachers are saying, I can't, well, I don't have a tutor at home. I use AI as a tutor. It does not give me the answers. I'm willing to show you the transcripts of how I do it, and maybe you'll learn something, too. But you shouldn't penalize me because I don't have the resources at home to be able to do this. Like, those types of. Like those. Those tools in your tool belt are going to be more and more important. And that's why we have the college and the.

49:52
Amanda Bickerstaff
And the high school versions of the Larner course, because there are a lot of colleges that are significantly more restrictive than our K12. And so the ability to be an Advocate for yourself is going to be really important. But we're really excited. The free course is free. It's designed for you to be able to use it. It's not perfect, everybody. Because I know that we're an organization that's eight people doing crazy things. So it might have some limitations. We'll be thinking about accessibility. Absolutely. Going forward. But you're more than willing to take it. The longer course is really decide. Sorry, we apparently have meetings coming up, everybody. But the longer course. Corey's busy. But the longer course is really designed for that more in depth piece and we have pilots and people trying it out right now.

50:39
Amanda Bickerstaff
But the last thing is that we're really excited about continuing this work. So our webinar next week. Look at us being so structured. How long has it been since we've done a webinar? We can tell you what the next one is. It's our next week webinar is actually with Common Sense Media with Robby. He's a cool dude, I really love him. But they did two pieces of research around AI toys and AI companions, which is such a good way to think about AI literacy and not just academic integrity. And I will say it's for educators and families. I would highly suggest sharing this with any family members that you have that if you're in a like, especially elementary schools, if you work with elementary schools, but also any teacher, this will be meaningful.

51:19
Amanda Bickerstaff
There's so many resources, so much that you can do for this. As always, sign up, you'll get the recording. But I just want to say thank you. As always, we cannot tell you how much we appreciate your time with us today. And we just want to say thank you. And I also want to thank everyone that helped with this. So Wendy and Joe Rosenbaum, we had Tanner on our team. We've had first readers like first reviewers like Jason and Bo. We had women from our AI and education community that checked out the course early. And so Dan and others and Casey, who is done a yeoman's job of making sure everything is clickable and works and is the right format and the right content.

51:57
Amanda Bickerstaff
So I just want to say thank you everybody on our team and we just hope that everyone has a lovely day and hopefully we'll see you next week, everybody. Thanks everyone.

  Transcribed by https://fireflies.ai/