A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Topic: tech/AI: education

A.I. Updates

    • Mike Caulfield
    • 04/17/25
    “I mention this because it relates to the tools I build for fact-checking. For almost a decade I have believed in supporting what I call the antibodies of discourse — those rare individuals who are willing to call out lies, provide fuller context, and work to keep the discourse environment free and clear of fake […]
    • No More Marking
    • 03/31/25
    “We now have results. Our headline finding is that AI is very good at judging student writing and is a viable and time-saving alternative for many forms of school assessment. Here are the details… We have been running similar tasks since 2017 for students at primary and secondary, and have assessed nearly 3 million pieces […]
    • New York Times
    • 02/20/25
    “John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence. The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes. To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few […]
    • OpenAI
    • 02/15/25
    “College-aged students aged 18-24 primarily use AI tools for starting papers and projects, summarizing texts, exploring topics, and brainstorming creative ideas, according to our recent survey. For ChatGPT users who belong to this age group, just over a quarter of all messages are education- or learning-related (which means those messages are tagged as tutoring- or […]
    • EdWeek
    • 02/14/25
    “As an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition teacher, Garbarg has to read dozens of student essays. Providing targeted feedback for every student can be time-consuming. So she started experimenting with using AI tools to expedite the work of providing personalized feedback for students’ writing. Now, Garbarg reads all her students’ essays to get an […]
    • ASCD
    • 02/01/25
    “[I] developed an eight-step process that educators can use to unpack a learning standard with ChatGPT (or a similar chatbot). This process supports a number of objectives: Reflects a purpose-driven approach by including clear assessment criteria and rubrics. Combines effective educational practices with new technology. Affirms the important role of the educator. Works with a […]

ADMISSIONS

ADOLESCENCE

ASSESSMENT

ATHENA

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

HUMANITIES

LEADERSHIP

    • MIT Sloan Management Review
    • 04/07/25
    • Leon Furze
    • 05/01/24
    “This first post lays out a general strategic framework that any faculty leader can adapt to bring discussions of this technology into their domain. In subsequent posts, I will be inviting faculty leaders from across a range of disciplines to contribute ideas on how AI can be used in their disciplines.”
    • Rooted
    • 03/21/24
    “It’s safe to say that AI is exactly the kind of “emergent novel reality” that brings new structural uncertainties to our schools and beyond, structural uncertainties that no oracle or expert system could predict with complete accuracy. That’s why the topic demands a systems-thinking approach (like the 5 P’s framework), or a new mental model […]

LEARNING SCIENCE

    • Center for Curriculum Redesign
    • 01/01/25
    “The goal of this paper is to: 1. Determine which types of cognitive processes and procedures (aka “modes of thinking”) are used in human reasoning. 2. Determine which forms of human reasoning can be mimicked/reproduced by Generative AI–specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). Hereinafter, it will be referred to as “GenAI” unless otherwise indicated (in the […]

PD

PEDAGOGY

    • Medium
    • 04/21/25
    “They looked at 90 lesson plans from MagicSchool AI, SchoolAI, and straight OpenAI GPT-4. They didn’t set out to embarrass anyone — but the results speak for themselves… Here’s what the researchers found: MagicSchool leaned heavily on quiet, individual work — often defaulting to instructions like “assign a worksheet and ask students to work quietly.” […]
    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 11/08/24
    “Spoiler: my findings underscore that until we have specialised, fine-tuned AI copilots for instructional design, we should be cautious about relying on general-purpose models and ensure expert oversight in all ID tasks.”
    • Carmel Schettino
    • 11/03/24
    “We need to make it so that what students are being asked to learn is not how to factor, but why you might factor a polynomial. Instead of focusing on how to graph trigonometric functions, questions should focus on what affects the graph and why.”
    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 09/29/24
    “Imagine the possibilities if we could use AI to simulate learner responses during the instructional design process. What if you didn’t need to conduct endless interviews, waiting for learner feedback that sometimes never arrives? What if you could have instant conversations with virtual learners and rapidly generate reliable data to inform your design?”
    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 08/22/24
    “The big question I’ve been exploring this week is: what should a partnership of human instructional designer and AI look like in practice, and what does this mean for our key skills, roles and responsibilities? …According to a lot of research published in the last few years, there are a number of tasks which are […]
    • Dan Meyer
    • 04/17/24
    “The skilled teacher, one who loves kids and loves math, will ask, “What does this student know about this one big mathematical idea?” Khanmigo asks, “What does this student not know about these many small mathematical ideas?””

READING/WRITING

    • Learning On Purpose
    • 04/27/25
    “In two years of intensive work on generative AI, I have seen nothing to convince me that writing is an obsolete skill no longer worth learning. It is changing, but it still matters, and it’s worth fighting for. That’s where I’ll start.”
    • New York Times
    • 02/24/25
    “Sure, there’s a difference between writing a poem and cleaning up a garbled email, between writing a love letter and a Google ad. For some tasks, employing the use of an A.I. assistant might save time without levying a commensurate cost in humanity. Maybe.”
    • No More Marking
    • 01/26/25
    “Suppose you are learning to drive, and during a lesson, your instructor says very little. At the end, he hands you a lengthy and specific written comment… This is all true, but it is not very helpful. And, crucially, even if you doubled it in length or added even more detail, it would still not […]
    • Chronicle of Higher Ed
    • 12/12/24
    “This time, she fed PowerPoint slides, self-produced YouTube videos, and course notes from previous iterations of the class into an AI platform called Kudu, which consolidated them into one text that she reviewed. Nothing in the book is actually written by AI. “It’s my words, my writing,” she said. The images in the book, like […]
    • AI for Education
    • 11/26/24
    “At the elementary level, GenAI tools should be used primarily by teachers for lesson planning, preparation, and selective modeling… Until there is compelling evidence of positive impacts on learning through direct student interaction with GenAI tools at the elementary level, as well as adequate safeguards in place to completely eliminate the risk of exposure to […]
    • EdWeek
    • 10/08/24
    “About half of the 130 teachers who said they used AI to help with their recommendation letters did so to take the stress out of the task, according to foundry10’s survey. And about a third of the 130 said they believed AI tools improved the quality of their letters. Far more teachers, 267 in all, […]

STEM

TECH

    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 11/08/24
    “Spoiler: my findings underscore that until we have specialised, fine-tuned AI copilots for instructional design, we should be cautious about relying on general-purpose models and ensure expert oversight in all ID tasks.”
    • Dan Meyer
    • 10/16/24
    • AI and Education
    • 07/24/24
    “Claude AI recently introduced a free feature called Artifacts, which enables users to create standalone content such as interactive games, diagrams, websites, and more using simple prompts. It goes beyond generating code but also allows you to view and interact with what you generate.”

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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