Planning with AI 101: From Curious to Competent

Welcome to Teacher’s AIed: the newsletter about AI in the K12 Classroom.

How AI will affect K12 Classrooms is complex. Each week, we curate knowledge for educators about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of AI and K12 education.

This week’s edition is an introduction to leveraging AI support lesson planning.

When I was a teacher in the classroom, I immediately recognized the different readiness levels of my students. Some of my kids were learning how to add and subtract within ten while others were itching to try out repeated addition (a.k.a. multiplication for my non-early educators). By the end of the year, regardless of what prior knowledge or skills they came with, all my students needed to make a year and a half worth of growth. I needed to “meet each of my students where they were and take them where they needed to be.”

This quote is the frame of leveraging AI tools to plan lessons. We have readers who are comfortable using voice AI like Siri or Alexa, while others are itching to get their hands on the latest tools, like Advanced Data Analysis. We want to meet you where you are at in your AI integration journey and give you the steps to go further.

For the next three weeks, we’ll explore lesson planning in three tiers: AI-curious, AI-informed, and AI-fluent. In each tier, we’ll give you a model for using the existing AI tools to optimize your pedagogy.

• Tier 1: AI-Curious
  This tier is for teachers who want to understand AI tools better and explore them before radically transforming their pedagogy. This tier will explore leveraging AI tools to create lesson plans, resources, and refine objectives.

• Tier 2: AI-Informed
  This tier is for teachers who have played with AI tools and are ready to begin differentiating the learning experience for students. This tier will explore creating differentiated lesson plans and leveraging different AI tools to create unique student learning experiences.

• Tier 3: AI-Fluent

  This final tier is for teachers who know the tools in the AI-K12 space and when and where to use them. For this tier, we’ll explore creating individualized learning plans for students that leverage their interests and skills.

Today, we’ll focus on strategies for our Tier 1 teachers, those who are AI-Curious but don’t know where to start.

TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) Summary:

For AI-Curious educators, we will explore current AI tools that will help you plan better and more efficiently. We will introduce you to a simple mnemonic to help you remember the key components to prompt AI tools to create lesson plans and interesting learning activities for you. Finally, we’ll show you how to “coach” tools to give you exactly what you need and provide recommendations for tools to fulfill certain planning goals.