Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

This week has emphasized that now is the time for reimagining what critical AI education might look like in the coming months and years, an education that eschews industry-captured AI literacy lessons for an expansive, interdisciplinary civics education with an emphasis on digital degrowth and data center resistance.

A tutorial on how to use the just-launched Microsoft Teach Module — an AI-powered tool built into all versions of Microsoft 365 for Education. The Teach Modu...

Designed for Education, Useful for Everyone

"Can you tell me where we're headin'? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?"

We keep hearing over and over that generative AI is causing massive problems in education, both in K-12 schools and at the college level. Lots of people are worried about students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, and that is a problem. But really, the issues go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself. We sat down and talked to a lot of teachers — you’ll hear many of their voices throughout this episode — and we kept hearing one cri du coeur again and again: What are we even doing here? What’s the point? Links: Majority of high school students use gen AI for schoolwork | College Board Quarter of teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork | Pew Research Your brain on ChatGPT | MIT Media Lab My students think it’s fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they’re on to something. | Vox How children understand & learn from conversational AI | McGill University ‘File not Found’ | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part…

AI is warping our understanding of what public education is for

I've been thinking about Alpha School and yet another article - this time it's "Parents Fell in Love with Alpha School's Promise. Then They Wanted Out" by Todd Feathers published today in Wired at https://lnkd.in/gNCAx47s - detailing the school leaders' saviorism and their vision of education as a dystopian surveillance hellscape. What other visions of education should we pursue with teachers, students, and caregivers? A few years ago, I read, "Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures" by Shandell Houlden and George Veletsianos. They challenge speculative education researchers to shift focus away from apocalyptic futures and instead engage students in hope because "Imagining these hopeful education futures is necessary, to avoid reinforcing structures of injustice and inequality such as settler colonialism and to invite more radical imagination into our work as a means to seed the worlds we want to create and live in." You can read their excellent article at: https://lnkd.in/gKUGVjzc I took inspiration from Houlden and Veletsianos for one of my dissertation studies. I challenged a group of high school students to design a speculative educational technology for collective thriving at their school. We discussed how Mariame Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, Seamus Heaney, and others conceive of hope. We watched sava saheli singhs' short film on speculative ed-tech #tresdancing. (Watch and teach the film at: https://lnkd.in/gNiCNXHJ). We prototyped, provided feedback, and revised. What emerged were projects that align with previous research findings that students often reproduce existing hierarchies in their speculative technologies - and powerful possibilities for civic action in the here and now grounded in community and justice. Anyway, I reject Alpha School and its profiteering, dehumanizing education. Instead, I'll be working with teachers, students, and caregivers to imagine - and enact - otherwises "as a means to seed the worlds we want to create and live in."

When teachers know their students are gaming the system and students know their teachers know, the relationship frays

Earlier this year, I covered Google’s LearnLM, an experimental AI model trained specifically on learning science principles. Since then, I’ve had a flood of ...

Today, Hannah Rozear and I will share the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit with faculty at Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment. Our workshop will center the question "Is AI Sustainable?" and we'll explore a section of the toolkit with conversation starters, learning activities, and resources related to AI, sustainability, and environmental impacts. As we note in this section of the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit, "Instructors may encourage students to be mindful of the environmental impact of AI as they explore its applications and reflect on the balance between convenience and sustainability." One way to encourage student reflection is through conversation and, today, faculty in our workshop will engage with questions we suggest students should discuss: 🌱 In what ways do you think AI technologies impact the environment, both positively and negatively? 🗣️ Who should be responsible for making AI environmentally sustainable? Why? 🪴 Can AI be made more eco-friendly? How? 🌏 Have you seen/heard about examples of AI being used to help the environment? We'll also have our faculty partners review some of the resources and research currently included in the toolkit, such as: 🟠 "The Environmental Impacts of AI -- Primer" by Dr. Sasha Luccioni and colleagues: https://lnkd.in/gcngznNC 🔴 The Scientific American article "What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment?" by Allison Parshall: https://lnkd.in/gcuU4yww 🟡 The open library "Against AI and Its Environmental Harms" curated by Charles Logan: https://lnkd.in/gYjwMjT5 🟢 The "Cartography of generative AI" map created by the Estampa collective: https://lnkd.in/gQpNpvRU And we recently updated this section of our toolkit to include: 🔵 Hugging Face's EcoLogits Calculator, "a python library that tracks the energy consumption and environmental footprint of using generative AI models through APIs" available at: https://lnkd.in/gFFk_gtW 🟣 The recent technical paper "Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale" by Cooper Elsworth and colleagues: https://lnkd.in/gUdmWuZM Since the semester began, Hannah and I have been sharing the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit with various departments, groups of faculty, and other constituencies at Duke, and we're very keen to connect with both our Duke colleagues and other academic communities. If you'd like to get involved or contact us, please visit: https://lnkd.in/gN4rEBeR Finally, a reminder that Duke's AI Ethics Learning Toolkit is publicly available here (link also in comments): https://lnkd.in/gkc4ansf Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education Duke University Libraries Duke Climate Commitment #Sustainability #Environment #AIeducation #AI #HigherEd

It can take years to collect evidence that shows effective uses of new technologies in schools. Unfortunately, early guesses sometimes go seriously wrong.

Commentary on The AI Tsunami Is Here: Reinventing Education for the Age of AI by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more

Learning is a complex process — and so is measuring it. Though research shows we have cause to be concerned about what happens when students use AI, the devil is in the details.

The end of critical thinking in the classroom

AI is doing students’ homework, writing their essays — and probably replacing a lot of their future jobs. Is it time to rethink what schools are for?

Research on 74,000 educator conversations shows how faculty use Claude for teaching, research, and building interactive learning tools.

GPT-5 is now here and freely available to all.

Kids can't be expected to learn what adults haven't — or can't — learn

The moonshot to nowhere

25 Colleges. One University.

Whether students and faculty are actively using AI or not, it is having significant interpersonal, emotional effects on learning and trust in the classroom.

The downsides of generative AI are growing like wildfire

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.