Tag Archives: AI

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Gen AI in Teaching and Learning Overview & Resource Collection (2026-27)

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has become a major discussion point in research, teaching, and learning due in large part to the emergence of tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot and also more education-specific tools such as MagicSchool and Eduaide.ai. In simple terms, GenAI “refers to algorithms and models that can generate new data, be it text, images, music, or even complex designs” (University of British Columbia: Generative AI, 2024).  Over the past few years, many of these tools have evolved to be multimodal and include the ability to produce text, audio, music, images, illustrations, animations, video and code.

Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

AI is not new and has been integrated into software, websites, and social media platforms for many years. The development of tools like ChatGPT, which generate large amounts of content very quickly based on a user’s prompting, and the incorporation of tools into web browsers, has led to a rapid rise is use and has made these tools almost ubiquitous.

In your work as a teacher, you may be thinking of using these tools for planning and assessment tools. You might also be considering how to integrate these into your teaching practice and for use with students (as tutors, to create games, presentations etc). Your students are also likely to be experimenting with AI which leads to additional teaching considerations (especially related to assessment).

With this in mind, it is important to be thoughtful about how and when you might use GenAI. Remember, you are modeling for your students.

If you are considering using any GenAI tools in your teaching context, below are a few recommendations (this is not an exhaustive list):

1. District, School, Ministry Guidance – Start by ensuring that you know about any expectations in your jurisdiction about the use of GenAI. Your school librarian or admin may be a source of information. Your district resource portal likely has information.  In particular, there are special considerations for protecting student data Privacy. 

2. Accuracy – Although you can get often-accurate (or accurate sounding) answers and information from GenAI tools, they are also known to regularly produce hallucinations and provide false information. The way these models are trained can actually encourage them to provide you with ‘any’ answer if it doesn’t find a ‘correct’ answer. Further, the data they are trained on may not be the most currently available information. AI’s can be quite insistent and confident sounding; leading us to potentially accept what they provide without critically evaluating it. It is also important to remember that GenAI is trained on specific sets of data, and that data is not always current to the day you are using the tool. Knowing that GenAI is not always producing real, accurate, or timely content, here are some questions to consider when using these tools (from UBC Education Library Inquiry Research guidance):

  • Is the generated response accurate? Do you have the knowledge of this topic/concept to identify inaccuracies? What steps can you take to ensure the information is true?
  • What information/data is the AI trained on? Is that information accurate? Is there any way to verify this?
  • Is the AI trained on current information? If not, what is the cutoff date for its training data?

For teachers, an additional consideration when using AI to support lesson planning or assessment, is to carefully prompt, review and revise to ensure appropriate pedagogies are employed and that connections to curriculum, local context, inclusion, diverse representation and classroom make up are incorporated. This can take some careful prompting and reprompting. Some recent research and reviews are showing that many AI generated lesson plans using some of the K12 teaching specific tools are quite teacher-directed and lack active learning and inclusive approaches.

While it makes sense to seek out tools to help with efficiency and to support improving our practice, it is important to do so in a way that does not interfere with agency including the personal and creative nature of teaching. 

3. Ethical considerations – Knowing how GenAI tools are built (who builds them) and how they operate is essential in order to make informed decisions about use. These are just some of the questions you can consider when deciding (from UBC Education Library Guidance for Inquiry Research):

  • Who created the AI? Is it profit-generating, and for whom?
  • Does the AI collect personal information? How is this information stored and used? (in particular, ‘free’ use often is far less than free considering the data collected and how your inputs are gathered and help train the machines)
  • From where does the AI retrieve its training data? Does the AI itself, or does your use of it, violate copyright, intellectual property, or fair dealing guidelines?
  • How does your chosen AI tool–or the increase in overall AI use–impact the environment?
  • What biases and limitations affect the content generated by this AI?

It is also essential to consider the information you are inputting into a GenAI tool before using it, especially when it comes to inputting personal information, student information and copywritten, cultural or other sensitive material.

UBC Resources:

AI Litearcy in K12 Context

Means having the knowledge, skills, and judgment to understand how AI works and involves how to:

  • use AI tools responsibly and for effective teaching and to support student learning,
  • recognize risks and limitations,
  • model and students engage with AI critically, creatively, ethically, and safely.

The following are important related elements for teachers:

  • Technical understanding: knowing the basics of what AI and generative AI are, how tools such as chatbots or image generators produce outputs, and why those outputs may be inaccurate, biased, or incomplete.
  • Pedagogical use: understanding when AI can support planning, differentiation, feedback, accessibility, inquiry, creativity, and assessment, while keeping teacher professional judgment at the centre.
  • Critical and ethical awareness: recognizing issues such as bias, misinformation, privacy, data protection, copyright, academic integrity, environmental impact, and unequal access.
  • Student guidance and safety: helping students use AI in age-appropriate ways, ask better questions, verify information, protect personal data, and understand when AI use is helpful or harmful.
  • Human-centred decision-making: using AI to support, not replace, relationships, inclusion, cultural responsiveness, Indigenous perspectives, student agency, and meaningful learning.

Resources

A small selection of curated resources with a focus on more recent and relevant to K12 teaching contexts *I will be adding some additional resources over the next few weeks… stay tuned! Aug 2026

Guidance Documents

Ref: BC Ministry of Education AI in Education

Digital (AI) Literacy

For Teachers & Students:

  • The MET AI Literacy Hub shared by the UBC Master of Educational Technology Program as an open Canvas resource for educators. It includes a wide variety of well-researched and curated resources including ‘What is GenAI’, Policies and Guidelines, Academic Integrity, Ethical and Pedagogical considerations and more.
  • MediaSmarts is a Canadian-based open educational resource that includes research, articles, videos and lesson plans to support digital literacy (including integrated and AI specific literacy) across the curriculum in K12. The website has a powerful search engine that can be filtered by topic, grade level, subject area and more. This What is AI resource may also provide some good basic background for educators.
  • ISTE and ACSD AI in Education hub includes 8 Core Principles for enhancing student learning & self-assessment tools, a profile of an AI ready graduate and a variety of literacy-focused resources.

As we consider literacy and the impact of AI on students, we are reminded of issues including student agency and learning impacts. Having open communication with our learners is essential. When we model and openly share with students about our own AI use, our questions, our successes and concerns, we help them develop their literacy. Below is a video I found to be a powerful example of student inquiry shared with their permission on Youtube by their teacher, Danny Leeming, at Mt Sentinel Secondary in SD8 Kootenays. You may be surprised by the skill level, depth of thought and the conclusions the students came to:

For Parents:

  • It is becoming more and more important for parents to be aware of the impact of AI on education and how their children are being exposed. To help parents develop their own digital literacies, some districts have offered information sessions and are developing parent-facing AI resources. Below are a small selection.

Prompting

*coming soon…

Tool-based

*coming soon…

Research: Open Publications

*coming soon…

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by | August 19, 2026 · 5:46 pm
by | July 7, 2023 · 11:12 am

Generative AI: Possibilities and Challenges for Educators

“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”
~ Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” challenges traditional notions of identity and boundaries between humans and machines. It invites us to view ourselves as “cyborgs” – entities that merge human and machine elements. In the context of generative AI in education, Haraway’s perspective might encourage us to explore the symbiotic relationship between humans and AI technologies. Rather than fearing AI as a replacement for teachers, we can envision a future where educational cyborgs, consisting of humans and AI working together, empower learners to thrive in an interconnected world.

While this may seem an overly optimistic viewpoint, it is clear that generative AI presents numerous opportunities and, at risk of sounding cliche, might even help to transform education. Generative AI has the potential to support personalized learning, assist with content creation, provide language support, and, even foster creativity and critical thinking.

Of course, if we are to harness the full potential of generative AI in education, it is essential to address the challenges of ethical use, data privacy, teacher-student relationships, and assist educators in developing essential AI competencies so they can effectively utilize AI, design assessments and assignments and guide their students.

Perhaps, by embracing generative AI responsibly and ethically, we can help to create a future where education is more inclusive, engaging, and tailored to the needs of every learner.

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate a panel discussion on this topic at UBC. Below you will find resources, including a recording and links shared by presenters as they responded to our prompt:

What is the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge you’ve found with respect to Generative AI’s, such as Chat GPT, in your context?

  1. Reid Patterson, BA Cognitive Systems: Professional Development Educator, UBC Geering Up
  2. Emma Gray, Product Manager, Microsoft Education
  3. Wendy Traas, Education Research Librarian, UBC Library
  4. Danny Leeming, UBC WKTEP Instructor, Classroom Teacher, Nelson, BC

A concise resource describing ‘what is AI’ and what are some potential implications on education, shared by Reid, Geering Up

A few links shared by presenters:

Some Tools mentioned:

Further Reading:

Please continue to watch this blog for future posts about Artificial Intelligence as I work with colleagues across campus and in K12 to learn more about this emerging edtech issue.

My first post on this topic Winter 2022: Preliminary Thoughts & Resources

NOTE:

I have recently begun some research into the environmental impacts we need to consider (and address) as part of an essential global response to climate change (more on this in another post!). A starting point is this article in Scientific American, A Computer Scientist Breaks down Generative AIs Hefty Carbon Footprint. 

 

Reference:

Haraway, D. (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Femi- nism in the Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York, 149-181.

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Filed under AppliedDesignSkillsTechnologies, Assistive Technology, Blog Posts, Curriculum, Digital & Media Literacy, Inclusive Practices, Not Subject Specific, Open Educational Resources, Planning, Resources

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by | February 17, 2023 · 11:47 am

Chat GPT: a few thoughts and resources

If you’ve been following the media in the past while related to generative AI (artificial intelligence) including ChatGPT (links to external resource), you may find the following resources of value as you consider the impact on teaching and learning. Many teachers are already incorporating or considering how to incorporate teaching about these technologies in their classrooms as a way to build students’ digital and information literacies. Below are a few resources that may help as you consider how/where this fits in your context.

AI is quickly revolutionizing the way teaching and learning is done in classrooms around the world. From providing personalized instruction to using natural language processing to measure student progress, AI is making it easier than ever before for teachers to quickly assess and respond to the needs of their students.

The potential of AI to improve teaching and learning is tremendous. AI can provide personalized instruction to students based on their individual needs and abilities. AI-based programs can also generate data that can be used to measure student performance, allowing teachers to easily monitor progress and adjust course content accordingly. AI can also provide students with feedback in real-time, allowing them to quickly identify and address potential problems.

AI can also help teachers save time and effort by automating certain tasks, such as grading and tracking attendance. This can free up teachers to focus more on engaging and interacting with their students, allowing for more effective learning.

However, there are also potential challenges associated with AI in the classroom. For example, AI-based programs may not be able to recognize and respond appropriately to nuances in student behavior, leading to inaccurate assessments. Additionally, AI-based systems can be expensive, and may not be accessible to all schools.

Overall, AI has the potential to dramatically improve teaching.

*The quoted text above was created using the following prompt submitted to ChatGPT in November 2022: Write a blog post for student teachers about how AI is impacting teaching and learning and include the positives and potential challenges

NB: important to note if there are age limits for the use of particular tools and/or consider privacy implications and district/school policies if asking students to sign up for accounts or engage with such tools.

Workshop Resources: ChatGPT in the Classroom

Danny Leeming (WKTEP instructor and secondary teacher in the West Kootenays) presentation Jan. 2023 for the Cobblestone Collective

This workshop is designed to help teachers understand how they can use ChatGPT, a powerful language model developed by OpenAI, in their classroom. Through hands-on activities and interactive discussions, participants will gain a deep understanding of how ChatGPT works and how it can be used to support language learning, facilitate student engagement, and enhance writing instruction.

  • Webinar Recording on Youtube
    • In addition to some practical ways AI is and can be incorporated in various learning environments, the session also includes interesting info about ‘what it is NOT good for’ (min. 11) bringing up inherent issues with the current tech – things KIDS and Teachers should know…

UBC Geering Up AI for Educators:

Reid Patterson (Cognitive Systems graduate and UBC Engineering Geering Up Educator) facilitated an interactive hybrid workshop on Feb. 2023 for UBC Teacher Ed teacher candidates. Below are resources from his session:

The first half of this session is a hands-on exploration of machine learning and AI using freely accessible, open resources online, that can very easily be incorporated into any middle or high school classroom.

What I learned from talking with a Robot:

Dr. Charles Ungerleider, professor emeritus, UBC Faculty of Education, recently shared his thoughts and experiences: “ChatGPT and I have been discussing morality, jokes and what it can do for my field of study, education” with the Tyee. Read the article on the Tyee website.

VSB PodCast:

Jeff Spence, District Principal, Information Technology along with Aaron Tarbuck, Secondary Teacher, both with the Vancouver School District, provide a concise overview and share their thoughts on ChatGPT in K12 contexts in the “Matter of the Month” segment on this “After the Bell” podcast episode (min. 9:25). Highlights for me included how teachers might leverage these technologies to support students in developing their questioning skills and to uncover and support the writing process. Some specific examples provided. One of the key messages here is, “Do not be afraid – learn!”

Citations and Chat GPT:

Microsoft recently launched a beta version of Bing enabled with ‘chat search’ that will, “deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content.” Apparently, this will also respond to the concern that ChatGPT is ineffective at referencing sources.

Citing ChatGPT itself as a resource in a reference list is also a popular topic of discussion among academics and, I think, is an emerging discussion among K12 educators as well. According to the Guardian, Feb. 27, 2023, the International Baccalaureate® (IB program) recently permitted use of ChatGPT as a source for IB essays. Several post-sec institutions have published guidance documents and it is notable that APA style guide is under revision to reflect this emerging technology/trend. For now, UGuelph has provided citation examples and summarized some of the changes. UBC has posted a guide to academic integrity and ChatGPT.

Chat GPT and Academic Integrity:

 

*See Blog Post July 2023 Scarfe Digital Sandbox for a panel webinar on the possibilities and challenges for educators along with some additional recommended resources (including Microsoft EDUs latest resources)

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