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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 | October 16, 2023 · 11:48 am

Integrating Math and Literacy

Language arts can be weaved into Math to disrupt the disconnection between the subject areas, encourage interdisciplinarity, and to improve students understanding of Math.

Why Integrate Math & Language Arts?

 

Resources:

Picture Books

Why is it Effective?

  • Books allow students to create connections- making math meaningful and relevant to their lives.
  • Math children’s books are a powerful vehicle for demonstrating to children that math is all around us!
  • Children’s books can provide a context for various math concepts learned.

Applications:

  • Mathical: Math is more than numbers and equations! The Mathical Annual Book Prize and Resources seek to inspire children of all ages to see math in the world around them. Each book has a reading guide that includes both math-centric and narrative activities to start discussions and activities with one child, a handful of kids, or an entire classroom.
  • Math for kids: Teaching real-world applications of math is a vital part of math education, that’s why we love math books for kids. Let them tell the math story, show the applications, and make the math come alive!

Math Journals

Why is it Effective?

Research (Benson-O’Connor, McDaniel, and Carr, 2019; Dacey, 2018; Kostos and Shin, 2010) shows that math journals:

  •  Could help students process their learning, make sense of their learning, and solidify their understanding.
  •  Can promote confidence. Each entry helps organize and clarify thinking processes for deciphering mathematical situations.
  • Students begin to make connections across mathematical ideas.
  • Assessment tool! Provides a window into students’ thinking, understandings, and misconceptions.
  • Nonverbal and nontechnical expression with drawings or diagrams provides additional access to understanding content
  • Journals foster growth in mathematical understanding and computation and allow students to make a deeper connection to math’s real-life applications in their own lives. Real-life connections provide a deeper understanding of the purpose of math concepts and skills.
  • In their study of math journal usage with second-grade students, they determined the use of math journals increased mathematical thinking, increased student use of mathematical vocabulary, and improved assessment of students’ understanding of the concept.

How can teachers use math journals?

  • Writing to make sense of a task.
  • Informative writing to describe or explain.
  • Argumentative writing to justify or critique.
  • Creative writing to express fluency, flexibility, or to elaborate one’s thinking.
  • Writing to reflect on your thinking (metacognition).
  • Sharing solutions with other students by talking about or sharing journal entries can be less intimidating than impromptu explanations in front of the whole class.
  • Discussions, either in pairs or in small groups, can introduce new ideas and encourage students to evaluate strategies—their own and those of others.
  • Sharing requires students to use mathematical language correctly and precisely to communicate mathematical ideas effectively. This can help with accessibility by making strategies explicit.
If you want to know more:

Types of prompts to guide students’ math journals

  • Reflective: Encourage students to think critically and reflect on what they are learning. An opportunity for students to synthesize their learning.
  • Problem-Solving: Students are working through a mathematical problem and writing about the processes or strategies used.
  • Topic Development: A record of how students’ learning has progressed on a given topic.

Math Task Cards

This blog brings many examples of math cards and how to use them in the classroom:

12 Ways to Use Math Task Cards in the Classroom

Number Talks

Why is it Effective?

  • Research shows that when students rely on rote algorithms, they don’t really understand what they are doing or why.
  • Develop students’ number sense- the ability to understand numbers and quantities, use numbers flexibly, and perform calculations mentally.
  • Allows students another way to express mathematical understanding and problem-solving strategies.
  • Builds confidence, number fluency, and helps learners recognize patterns between numbers, and understand the properties of numbers & operations.

What is a number talk?

  • Daily, short, structured way for students to talk about math with their peers (10ish minutes).
  • Teachers pose a problem and, using only mental math, students attempt to provide solutions. Students share strategies and listen and ask clarifying questions of one another.
  • Students aren’t just looking for the answer, they are looking for multiple solutions (or multiple ways to arrive at the solution)!
  • De-emphasis on speed and right answers and an added emphasis on process and communication.

Math Talk Prompts

This blog brings many examples of math talk prompts and describes the five steps to conduct a great conversation to use them in the classroom:

Word Problems

Why is it Effective?

  • Word problems are a big part of the curriculum and thus students’ learning journey with math.
  • Word problems are notoriously difficult, especially when challenging language obscures the intent of the question.

See how this teacher uses word problems in her classroom:

Guest post by Peer Tutor Tamara Jabboour and Ariane Faria dos Santos, October 2023.

 

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Filed under Blog Posts, Curriculum, Language & Lit Learning, Math, Resources, STEAM, Teaching Strategies, The Arts

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by | April 23, 2020 · 6:16 pm

Digital Read Aloud

With school closings and the shift to online learning, we want to ensure all teacher candidates have the necessary understanding of how to make your own read aloud material that complies with copyright as well as provide you with links to access to some carefully curated, free and available online resources. That that end, this post includes:

  1. Information about copyright including temporary changes to support COVID remote learning K-12
  2. Links to open online books including ebooks and video read alouds
  3. Tutorial or how to info to support making your own video or screen casted read-alouds

Read Aloud Canadian Books Guidelines

In response the Association of Canadian Publishers has formed the Read Aloud Canadian Books Program with Access Copyright “The Program will allow, on a temporary basis, a waiver of license fees related to the reading of all or part of select in-print books from participating publishers and authors, and the posting of the video recording online”, they ask that you follow the Read Aloud Canadian books guidelines of use when doing so. Please note that it is important for you to review up to date information to support your understanding. The following is an excerpt only:

      1. At the beginning of the reading, please credit the author, illustrator and publisher. State that you are presenting your reading “with permission from Access Copyright on behalf of the Publisher”. Separate permission from the Publisher is not required.
      2. Post your reading through your school’s password-protected platform or within closed group or password-protected platform. If this is not possible, uploading to YouTube is permitted if videos are marked “Unlisted.”
      3. Delete your reading or, if your platform does not permit deletion, disable access to the reading by no later than June 30, 2020. We will assess the need to extend this license on that date.
      4. The reading may not be retained as an archive or saved beyond June 30, 2020.
      5. By posting a reading, you agree to abide by the above terms.

It is crucial you understand that this temporary waiver of license fees for reading aloud in-print books, and the posting of the video recording online, only applies to a list of participating publishers and authors. You can look here for the current list of participating Read Aloud Canadian Books Program publishers and authors, and the in-print titles that are available for use.

In case you can’t find the book you were hoping to do “online story-time” of, you can email the Access Copyright’s permissions team at permissions@accesscopyright.ca, and they´ll look into obtaining permission from the copyright holder. Be sure to provide the title, publisher and ISBN of the work, when sending the email, and allow two to four business days for them to process your request.

A selection of available resources

The following resources may support ‘virtual read aloud or read along’:

For those  teaching English Language Learners, we invite you take a look at both our Digital Dual Language Books post, and Audible´s free children’s digital stories collection.

Youtube can also be a good option for read alouds presented by celebrities and authors. Check out the following playlists/channels:

For those teaching middle school students  I suggest you take a look at Bringing the Joy of Read-Alouds to Middle School Students  for some useful advice on the benefits of using read-alongs with older students (including strategies to support this activity).

For middle to secondary to adult learners, what about ‘A Sonnet a Day’ read by Sir Patrick Stewart?

Parents and teachers might choose to set up a youtube kids account or teachers uploading their own videos may wish to use ‘<a href="https://www.teachertube.com/"

Given the times we are facing, teachers across the globe have been coming up with creative and innovative solutions to keep students learning. I heard of a group of early childhood teacher´s in Mexico who transformed virtual story time by having a “surprise guest” come and read for their students: the teacher’s used the “Famous Voice Changer” app pretending Elmo, Darth Vader, Kermit the frog, and Iron man came to read for their students.

If you are thinking of creating your own online read aloud click here to look at the Scarfe Sandbox Digital Storytelling resource post to learn about a few different tools and resources. You might also consider using Camtasia, a proprietary software to which you have free access as a UBC student. Camtasia supports video editing and screen casting (perfect for read alongs, read alouds and explainer videos)
Once you have found the book and the technology you will be using for your read aloud, if you are still unsure of how to start your own recording, I suggest you take a look at the Strategies for Reading Aloud to Young Children. Never hesitate to check-in by emailing scarfe.sandbox@ubc.ca

I wish you all the best! And encourage you to tag Access Copyright (@AccessCopyright) and the Association of Canadian Publishers (@CdnPublishers) in any Instagram, Twitter or Facebook posts affiliated with your readings so they can see your efforts in action.

I remind you to delete your reading or, if your platform does not permit deletion, disable access to the reading by no later than June 30, 2020.

Below is an embedded read aloud you might enjoy! Selected by us for you (from FableVision’s Youtube Channel… (NB: to embed a video in your wordpress blog post, simply paste the URL to the video and WordPress will display the player. In some cases, you may need to copy the ’embed code’ from the video source).

 

 

 
(Guest post by Belen Guillermin, Project Assistant, Spring 2020)

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by | May 1, 2019 · 6:20 pm

VR Tours & Literacy

NOTE: As of June 2021, Google Tour Creator is being discontinued (and this post and accompanying video resources will be archived/removed)

Have you considered how 360° video, images, Augmented and Virtual Reality might help spark your students’ creativity and, perhaps, engage them in the ‘place’ or setting of a novel? In the past, such technologies were out of reach for the average individual or school… today, smartphones, ipads and laptop computers afford the capacity to create!

In May 2019, I had the pleasure of collaborating, co-planning, and co-teaching with a Grade 5/6 classroom teacher in Surrey to re-imagine how information learned from novel studies could be shared using Virtual Reality. We had a common goal to push the students’ (and our!) boundaries by rethinking the traditional book report and decided to use Google Tour Creator and Google Expeditions. (For some short ‘how to videos’ and links to VR content, visit this post)

To help guide the students we selected some BIG QUESTIONS for them to consider throughout this project:

  1. How do the author’s choose settings and how does this affect the plot of a story?
  2. How can we SELECT SETTINGS and EXPLAIN how they are significant to the novel we are reading?

Here’s how we wanted students to demonstrate their learning:

    • Use Google Tour Creator to find real-world settings that are close to our imagined settings.
    • Explain the significance of the settings by describing the location we selected and why it matters to the story we/they read.
    • Add additional detail to a setting by overlaying points of interest, relevant images, appropriate sound effects or audio, and include a narration of the scene for individuals who are unable to see it (creating accessibility).

Want to try this?

To help our students get started and to help scaffold their learning process we made video tutorials, provided links to additional resources, and a launch button to always bring them back to their tours.

First, we created a website to host everything students would need for this project. It contains tutorial videos and links to creative common images, sound effects, and music to help set the scenes and make them more immersive. You are welcome to use it! NOTE: due to Tour Creator requiring google login, we set up google accounts for each group of students to use so that they were not providing their own personal information. Further, we shared with students the importance of protecting their data and privacy through ‘just in time’ lessons and information. Fore more on protecting student data privacy, visit this blog post. You may require parent consents and/or specific school admin or district permission depending on your school district’s protocols and privacy policies.

We also have shared our resources from this project so that other educators may use this process with their own students. Below are links to each resource with a brief explanation of how and why it was created.

  • Scenes from a Novel AR-VR Unit Overview
    • This overview was co-created and includes inquiry questions to guide the teachers which differ slightly from the inquiry questions for the students.
  • VR Planning Page
    • This was the planning page used by students to capture what they imagined the scenes would look like. We wanted to help students narrow their focus by selecting valuable scenes and sketching them before heading into the vast virtual world.
  • Core Competencies Predictions
    • Students used this page to predict what core competency they would use the most through this project. They then used the sheet to self-reflect at the end of the project and write comments about whether they agreed or disagreed with their prediction.
  • Single-Point-Rubric-VR Tour
    • These were co-created with the class. The teachers introduced ideas and explained the process of using the rubric so that the class could decide on what merited a “passable” project. We also discussed what moved the project into the “extending” territory.
    • We had rich discussions about considering everyone in the class and that the goal was to create an immersive project so we had to decide on objectives that were within reach of every student. Many things were decided democratically where students voted on topics. For example, we decided on what the appropriate amount of scenes should be in a tour by displaying the number on our fingers.
    • Students then used the rubric to self-assess their project a week before submission. They marked down areas that needed improvement and areas where they went beyond expectations, then used this sheet to keep track of what they needed to work on. In the end, they submitted their project with their rubric.

 

We presented our learning journey and that of our students’ at the Surrey Teacher Association Professional Development Day in May 2019. You can view the slides below. We also presented at UBC’s Investigating Our Practices Conference, and the BCTESOL Conference.

*parent permission and informed consent provided

*student permission granted

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