Empowering Students to Understand & Use AI Responsibly

Excuse me while I jump on a momentary parental and teacher soapbox. As a blended learning specialist and parent of one late millennial and one gen Z-er, I often compare personal tech use for children to skiing. If a person hasn't skied before, there is no magical age at which they could head on up to a double black diamond. As someone who learned how to ski as adult, trust me, I know! There are appropriate steps that parents and teachers take to teach children how to ski. All the early stages involve doing it together with an adult, often tethered by those funny looking harnesses, modeling the right way to do the pizza and french fry, riding up the magic carpet to the safe-fall teaching hills, then with adults on greens, later leveling up with adults, and finally independent skiing...all the while practicing safety and wearing helmets.

Without modeling and scaffolding at an age-appropriate level and in a purposeful learning context, tech is a double black diamond for kids at best, a solo backcountry experience at worst. What's hard is child-tech interaction doesn't look like the double black diamond it is. It looks easy, like they were born to do it, and yet we are already seeing the impact of unleashed black-diamond, consumption-based tech on children. Examples of this are captured thoroughly in recent works such as Jonathan Haidt 's The Anxious Generation.

I find it remarkable that we are shining such an important light on the dangers of young technology use at the exact moment we are experiencing the next evolution of technology in generative AI. I also believe we have the opportunity to get in front of it in a way we did not with social media and video streaming. There is a lot that must happen on the AI policy side, and there are incredible groups such as EDSAFE AI Alliance and TeachAI working to that end. There are also commitments that need to be made on the AI creator side. As one such innovator who has contributed to the creation of Yourwai, an AI pedagogical tool, this has been forefront for us as we develop Yourwai to be human-centered and safe, and for our team to be conscious and active contributors to the policy work being done.

But for today, I want to talk about the student in the mix. At an age appropriate time and manner, we need to include students in learning about AI and co-creating shared agreements for when and how they use AI. This is aligned with similar guidance Haidt gives parents about social media and screens, "Talk with your preteen about the risks, and listen to their thoughts (Haidt, 280)." Anyone who has taught in a classroom knows when we engage students in thinking critically about what the rules should be, they often bring more awareness and consideration than we anticipate, and are far more likely to act in an aligned manner having contributed to a shared agreement. Further, this nurtures the kind of problem solving skills that are required for children to grow healthily and confidently towards independence.

I remember when my son was in 6th grade and asked me if he could set up a Facebook account, and I said, "Well, let's look at Facebook's rules." I shared the policy with him and he said, "Aw man, it says I have to be 13." And we had a great discussion on whether it was ok to just lie, and why that rule was in place, and what he might gain if he didn't have a Facebook account. Together we came to the agreement to hold off and revisit the conversation in a couple years, and he upheld his end of that agreement.

Here are a few steps we can take the empower students and our children in similar conversations whether at home or in our classrooms:

1. Build Knowledge: At an age-appropriate level, we must build literacy of what AI is, including how it works and what it helps us do, and the downfalls of it such as false information, safety and privacy, and inherent bias. There are great resources such as Common Sense's AI lessons, and the upcoming National AI Literacy Day on April 19th organized by aiEDU AI for Education & EDSAFE AI Alliance - we are contributing several open sessions that day. I also built an AI literacy activity tool in Yourwai to help teachers generate lessons to discuss different components of AI.
2. Harness & Helmet: In the same way we strap kids in when they are little in order to help them ski and ensure they've got safety gear, what could it look like to use AI alongside our students to model the "right way to do it"? Maybe that first step is being logged into a teacher account to use AI as a class brainstorming tool, or for preliminary feedback when conferencing with students, or on the smart board for students to interact with safely in a group and with teacher supervision.
3. Shared Agreement: As we build AI literacy with students, we can also engage them in co-creating a set of commitments for responsible use of AI. I created Yourwai Collaborative AI Contract Activity tool to help teachers generate activities to lead this process as various grade levels.

The biggest thing we need to do is align on the importance of these steps. I love the movement of the "4 new norms" for children and tech being shared by Jessica Seinfeld for creating tech-free play space. But norms only work if they are widely adopted and shared, so how can we collaborate to set some shared norms, alongside our students, for the use of AI in classrooms, then commit as an education community to upholding them? If we were to create a short list of widely shared "Norms for AI Classroom Use" what would they be?