When AI hit in the first big way for education in November 2022 (gosh, can you remember those days?! It feels like so long ago now. And so much has changed) I did a lot of reading and learning about the emerging tools and how it would impact our schools and school libraries. I watched with interest as some schools and systems tried to ban the AI tools (unsurprisingly that didn’t work) and was grateful that instead my school leadership decided to embrace it, not scared but ready, not unsure, but knowledgeable. Steps we took included adjusting our academic and assessment policy to be responsive to AI and starting to map out how we could include AI in our teaching and learning. Teachers embraced it and there was positive movement.
Now, January 2026, three years on, school AI readiness and AI literacy is even more important, but it too is shifting. While AI has sped up in exponential rates and AI tools are embedded into pretty much everything, students still need to learn and understand the basics. I regularly work with students on how to approach and use AI, as it fits so beautifully within the information literacy skills that are my core curriculum. Here are some of the ways I’ve taught about AI to students.
Academic Integrity sessions
When I’m able to speak to our students, and particularily our seniors, about academic integrity, it’s the perfect chance to talk about AI. For years now, I’ve run sessions on what academic misconduct is, and how to avoid it. Research shows that plagiarism and cheating drop when good research and academic skills increase, so I balance my sessions between what not to do and what skills students need to build for their increased academic rigour. AI weaves so neatly into these discussions and sessions, as we unpack some of the flaws of AI, the ethical considerations, and how reliance on the tools or using work by these tools when claimed as their own constitutes academic misconduct.
Intro to Machine learning
Understanding something is often so key to using it. So with younger students (actually, often right up until year 10 students in the early days), I start with the basics of what AI and machine learning is. I love using Quick, Draw! as a fun tool for showing students machine learning, as they draw and contribute to a data set and a program tries to identify what they are drawing. It’s a very simple, interactive and visual way to introduce the foundations of how machine learning works. It also helps to unpack datasets and understand how the data AI is built on might contain bias or silence a whole lot of voices and information.
Can you spot AI?
Who doesn’t love a good spot the difference or quiz, and there are lots that I use to demonstrate the work of AI and to test students to see if they can tell the difference between an AI generated art, music, photos and videos. These I use in sessions where I want the students to understand the scope of AI and what it can do and also make students aware that they can’t believe everything they see.
AI mistakes
Sharing AI mistakes, bloopers, and errors is such a fun way to explore the limits of AI. There are some great examples out there that I collect, from the early days when you could convince ChatGPT that N was the third letter of Wednesday to Gemini telling people to add glue to their pizza to make the cheese extra stretchy and the reminder to eat a rock a day for good health. We then unpack why AI might have made these mistakes and learn more about the data and way AI models learn and are created. I also share examples of how AI models have made information up to my own prompt requests, and why it might do that.
Using AI
Of course all my sessions are not just about AI, I also teach how to use it.
Fairytale image generation
Creating images in Canva Magic Media is one way I teach students how to craft prompts and understand AI image generation. I like to do this in a few units, particularly our year 9 English fairytale unit. Fairytales are a topic for which to create images and demonstrate the stereotypical and biased responses, though AI has come a long way in this area over the past few years. The students are so good at picking the images apart, from the colour of the characters’ skin to how thin they are to the gender biases. It’s a great fit for the unit.
Using AI for study
AI is a great tool for study and I regularly run sessions for students, particularly our year 10 and 11 students, on how to use the tool in their study, creating flash cards with Microsoft Learning Activities, and using ChatGPT for creating multiple choice tests, transcribing or summarising pages of hand-written notes. Checking the information from these sources is a great way to test understanding, as you know the information well when you can spot an error in a summary or question what AI has provided, and it’s a great way to reinforce critical thinking.
AI for research
When teaching students good research skills, AI is now a part of my lessons. Students regularly ask, ‘why can’t I just use AI?’ We explore different types of AI tools and why some might be better for research than others. And we work through examples of how to use an AI output for research, how you need to use one that takes you to sources and how to then reference those sources, how to use AI like a search engine and a summariser but not as a source.
Referencing
Another session I run regularly is how-to reference lessons and of course AI is now a major player in that area. I show students how they can get AI to draft references for them but also show the difference between an AI generated reference and one using a tool like the SLASA Referencing Generator and we unpack why AI might might clues like the logo that tells us the organisation’s name or might not find an author’s name in the sidebar or why it might make up information instead of indicating it doesn’t know or isn’t able to retrieve that information.
These are just a few of the ways I incorporate AI into the sessions I run with students and I’m always looking for more authentic ways to do so. How do you teach AI skills to students? And do you think it’s important that we do?