AI in the
Classroom Toolkit
Twenty-seven sections and a hundred tips — saving time, tools, prompting, teaching with AI, AI literacy, academic integrity, policy, privacy, and equity. Practical, sourced, and hype-free. Built by K12 Academics, free and with no login.
Welcome
Welcome to the K12academics AI in the Classroom Toolkit — the practical companion to our State of AI in Education Report. Where the report maps what's happening with AI in schools, this toolkit is about what to do: how to use AI to save time, teach with it, teach about it, handle integrity, protect privacy, and set sane policy — without the hype.
How to use this toolkit
- Browse by section in the sidebar, or search it
- Jump to AI Tools, Academic Integrity, or Policy
- Use the Checklists and 100 Tips
- Checklists are interactive — click a box to check it off
Who it's for
- Teachers exploring or already using AI
- Instructional coaches and department leads
- School and district leaders writing policy
- Anyone who wants a calm, practical starting point
The stance this takes
- AI is a tool — powerful, flawed, and here to stay
- You stay in charge; AI drafts, you decide
- Teach students to use it well, not just avoid it
- Protect privacy and equity from day one
K12academics has connected families and educators with the right resources since 2004. This toolkit is a free resource — no login required. It's a practical starting point, not legal advice or a product endorsement: tools are named neutrally, and for policy and privacy decisions, confirm with the official sources linked in each section and your own district.
The State of AI in Education
A quick data grounding before the how-to — the fuller picture is in our State of AI in Education Report. The short version: adoption has raced ahead, and guidance and training are catching up.
Two gaps define this moment. First, a training gap: about 68% of teachers report receiving no AI training, even as most are experimenting (RAND). Second, a governance gap: adoption is outpacing policy, and only around 18% of principals say their district has provided AI guidance — with lower rates in high-poverty schools (RAND). Meanwhile 98% of teachers support teaching students to use AI ethically (Pew). This toolkit exists to help close those gaps in your own room.
This toolkit is the action companion; the State of AI in Education Report has the full data on adoption, tools, the market, literacy, integrity, governance, ethics, and the road ahead — including our AI in Education Readiness Index for benchmarking a school or district.
Getting Started with AI
You don't need to overhaul anything. The best on-ramp is to pick one real task you already do, try AI on it this week, and build from there.
Start with one painful task
Choose something time-consuming and low-risk — a first-draft lesson plan, a rubric, a parent email, or a set of discussion questions. Let AI do the first draft; you refine. Momentum comes from one small win, not a grand plan.
Pick a tool built for teachers
Start with an education-specific tool (like MagicSchool AI, Brisk Teaching, or Diffit) or a general assistant your district has approved. Education tools come with structure and privacy protections that general chatbots don't.
Treat every output as a draft
AI is a fast, tireless assistant that is sometimes confidently wrong. Read, fact-check, and adapt everything before it reaches students. You are the expert; AI is the intern.
Protect student privacy from day one
Never paste students' names or personal information into a general AI tool your district hasn't cleared. Use approved, education-specific tools for anything involving student data (see §15).
Open one AI tool and generate a first draft of something you're already making this week — then time how long the edit takes versus building from scratch. That single comparison is what turns skeptics into regular users. Small, real, repeatable.
How AI Saves You Time
Time is the headline benefit, and it's real: teachers who use AI weekly save about six hours a week — roughly six weeks over a school year (Gallup/Walton, 2025). Here's where those hours actually come from.
Planning & materials
- First-draft lesson and unit plans
- Worksheets, warm-ups, and exit tickets
- Rubrics and answer keys
- Discussion questions and writing prompts
- Leveled versions of a reading passage
Feedback & assessment
- Draft feedback on writing (you review it)
- Quiz and question generation
- Rubric-aligned comment banks
- Diagnostic and formative check ideas
- Simplify or reframe a tricky concept
Communication & admin
- Parent emails and newsletters
- Translating messages for families
- Meeting notes and summaries
- Recommendation-letter drafts
- IEP-goal and report-comment drafts (you finalize)
Only about a third of teachers use AI often enough to get these gains, and grading is the least common (and riskiest) use. The goal isn't to hand your class to a machine — it's to reclaim the hours spent on first drafts and boilerplate so you can spend them on students.
AI Tools by Use Case
The landscape moves fast, but a small, reliable stack covers most needs. These are widely used options to research — named neutrally, not endorsed. Fit, and your district's approval, matter more than any list.
All-purpose teacher tools
- MagicSchool AI — 80+ teacher tools in one place
- Brisk Teaching — AI inside Google Docs/Slides/Classroom
- Eduaide.ai — plans, rubrics, differentiated materials
- Generous free tiers; built for schools
Differentiation & content
- Diffit — leveled texts from any article, PDF, or video
- Curipod — interactive AI lessons and slides
- Canva for Education — design with built-in AI
- Quizizz — AI-assisted quizzes and practice
Student tutoring & practice
- Khanmigo — AI tutor + teacher planning (free for teachers)
- SchoolAI — teacher-controlled student AI spaces
- Khan Academy — free lessons and practice
- Tools with teacher visibility and guardrails
General assistants
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot
- NotebookLM — summarize & query your own documents
- Powerful and flexible, but general-purpose
- Use only district-approved ones for student data
Match the tool to your biggest pain point, start with a free tier, and check two things before student data touches it: that it's approved by your district, and that it publishes FERPA/COPPA compliance and states it doesn't train on your data. Education-specific tools (MagicSchool, Brisk, Diffit) typically do; general chatbots often don't. See §15.
Prompting: Getting Good Output
The difference between disappointing and genuinely useful AI output is mostly the prompt. You don't need tricks — you need to be specific, the way you'd brief a capable new aide.
A simple recipe
- Role — 'You are a 7th-grade science teacher…'
- Task — exactly what you want made
- Context — grade, standard, students, constraints
- Format — length, structure, reading level
- Examples — paste one you like, if you have it
Make it better
- Ask for options, then refine the best one
- Tell it what to fix — iterate, don't restart
- Give it your rubric or standards to align to
- Ask it to explain or show its reasoning
- Request a specific reading level or tone
Instead of 'make a lesson on fractions,' try: 'You're a 4th-grade math teacher. Create a 45-minute lesson on comparing fractions for students reading below grade level, aligned to [standard], with a warm-up, guided practice, and an exit ticket.' The more you brief it, the less you edit.
AI for Lesson Planning & Materials
Planning is where most teachers see the fastest payoff. AI won't replace your judgment about what your students need — but it will take the first draft off your plate.
Draft, then teach your expertise into it
Generate a plan or unit skeleton, then reshape it around your students, your pacing, and what you know works. The AI gives you 70% of a starting point; your professional judgment supplies the part that matters.
Generate the supporting cast
Rubrics, answer keys, warm-ups, exit tickets, discussion questions, choice boards, and graphic organizers are fast to produce and easy to check — exactly the boilerplate that eats planning time.
Align to standards and check facts
Paste in your standard and ask the AI to align to it — then verify. AI can misstate facts, invent citations, or drift off-standard, so a quick expert read is non-negotiable before it reaches students.
Build a personal prompt library
Save the prompts that work. A reusable set of 'make a rubric,' 'level this text,' and 'draft a lesson' prompts turns AI from a novelty into a dependable part of your workflow (see §22).
Differentiation, Accessibility & Multilingual Learners
This is arguably AI's best classroom use: making the same content reachable for every learner in minutes instead of hours — the kind of differentiation teachers rarely have time to do by hand.
Reach every reader
- Instantly level a text up or down (Diffit)
- Generate scaffolds, sentence stems, and word banks
- Create tiered versions of the same task
- Summarize or simplify dense material
- Add comprehension questions at each level
Support access & inclusion
- Translate materials and family messages
- Draft and refine IEP goals and accommodations (you finalize)
- Rework content for different learning needs
- Generate audio scripts and alt formats
- Multiple ways to show learning
For multilingual learners
- Two-way translation for families and students
- Bilingual glossaries and vocabulary support
- Content in a student's home language to build understanding
- Adjust complexity while keeping the concept
- A support, not a replacement for the teacher
AI-drafted IEP goals, accommodations, and translations are starting points that you review and own — accuracy and appropriateness are your call. And never enter a student's personal information into a tool your district hasn't approved (see §15).
AI for Feedback (Not Grading)
AI can transform feedback — the part of assessment that helps students most — while grading stays firmly in your hands. Keep the line clear.
Great for feedback, first-pass only
AI can draft specific, rubric-aligned feedback on writing far faster than you can — surfacing patterns and suggestions. Treat it as a first pass you review, edit, and make your own before it reaches a student.
You assign the grade
Let AI speed up marking (e.g., rubric-based tools), but the score is a draft and the grade is yours. Grading is the least common and riskiest AI use for good reason — accuracy, fairness, and accountability rest with you.
Never paste private student data
Feedback tools that are education-specific and district-approved are built for this; general chatbots are not. Don't put identifiable student work or names into an unapproved tool (see §15).
Turn feedback into learning
Use AI to generate models, exemplars, and revision suggestions students can act on — and to help students self-assess against a rubric before they submit. The goal is growth, not just a number.
Teaching With AI in the Classroom
Beyond your own prep, AI can be a thinking partner for students — when it's structured, supervised, and used to deepen thinking rather than skip it.
Good student-facing uses
- Socratic tutoring that asks, not tells (e.g., Khanmigo)
- Brainstorming, then critiquing the ideas
- Debate partner or devil's advocate
- Feedback on a draft before peer review
- Explaining a concept a different way
Design the task well
- Be explicit about when AI is and isn't allowed
- Make thinking visible: process, drafts, reflection
- Have students critique or fact-check AI output
- Use teacher-controlled tools with visibility
- Model good use out loud yourself
When to keep AI out
- When the struggle is the point (early skill-building)
- Foundational reading, math facts, handwriting
- Assessments of independent understanding
- Any use that skips the learning, not the busywork
- Age and tool rules still apply (usually 13+)
Have students generate an AI answer, then grade the AI against your rubric and fix its mistakes. It flips AI from a shortcut into a critical-thinking exercise — students learn the content, practice evaluation, and see the tool's limits firsthand.
Teaching AI Literacy
Whatever your subject, students need to understand the tool that's reshaping their world. AI literacy isn't a computer-science topic — it's a life skill, and 98% of teachers support teaching it (Pew).
What students should understand
- How AI works: it predicts likely text, it doesn't 'know'
- It can be confidently wrong ('hallucinate')
- It reflects biases in its training data
- Always verify facts against real sources
- Their data and privacy are at stake
The judgment part
- When AI is appropriate — and when it isn't
- How to prompt, then evaluate and revise output
- Giving credit and disclosing AI use honestly
- Thinking for themselves first, using AI second
- Ethics: fairness, honesty, and impact
Ready-made curricula
- Common Sense Media — AI literacy lessons
- AI for Education — free frameworks & PD
- Code.org and aiEDU — AI curriculum
- ISTE and Digital Promise — standards & guidance
- Weave it into existing subjects, not a separate unit
Academic Integrity in the AI Era
This is where schools most often go wrong. The instinct is to buy a detector and police cheating. The evidence is clear that this approach fails — and harms students. There's a better path.
Why detection is a dead end
- AI detectors are unreliable — accuracy varies wildly
- They wrongly flagged ~61% of non-native English writers' essays (Stanford)
- Vanderbilt and others disabled Turnitin's detector over false positives
- They're easy to evade, and some vendors sell 'humanizers'
- No student should be penalized on a detector alone
What works instead
- Redesign assessment: in-class, oral, drafts, process, personal
- Value thinking you can see happen, not just the product
- Set crystal-clear expectations for each assignment
- Teach integrity and require honest AI-use disclosure
- Talk with students, don't just surveil them
Vague rules cause most 'cheating.' Tell students exactly when AI is allowed, encouraged, or prohibited for each task — a simple green/yellow/red scale works well — and ask them to note how they used it. Clarity prevents far more misuse than any detector catches, and it's fair to everyone, including multilingual students a detector would wrongly accuse.
Classroom Norms & AI Use Policies
Adoption has outpaced policy — most schools using AI still lack a formal one. You don't have to wait for the district; you can set clear norms in your own classroom today, and help shape the bigger policy.
Set classroom norms now
Even without a district policy, publish simple expectations: which tools are okay, when AI is allowed, how to disclose its use, and what privacy rules apply. A short, clear norm beats silence — and prevents most confusion.
Use a proven framework for policy
Schools don't need to start from scratch. The TeachAI AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit offers free principles, real examples, and sample policy language for staff, students, and families — the standard starting point.
Align with your state
Around 34 states plus DC and PR have issued K-12 AI guidance, and a few (Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma, Virginia) now require district policies — yet only about 16% of district policies reference state guidance. Check yours, and connect the two.
Make it a living document
AI changes monthly. Build in a review cycle, gather feedback from teachers, students, and families, and update as tools and needs evolve — a policy frozen in place is quickly obsolete.
Responsible & Ethical Use
Using AI well means using it honestly, safely, and with eyes open to its flaws. A handful of principles keep you and your students on solid ground.
Know the limitations
- Hallucination — it invents facts and citations; verify
- Bias — it can reflect and amplify stereotypes
- Currency — it may be out of date
- Overconfidence — wrong answers sound authoritative
Use it with integrity
- Be transparent when you and students use AI
- Keep a human in the loop on anything that matters
- Don't outsource judgment about students to a model
- Give credit and model honest disclosure
Mind the rules
- Most general tools require users to be 13+ (often older)
- Follow your district's approved-tool list
- Watch for bias in anything student-facing
- Protect student data at every step (see §15)
The biggest risk isn't that AI refuses to answer — it's that it answers wrong in fluent, convincing prose. Fact-check anything you'll rely on, teach students to do the same, and never let an AI output be the final word on a grade, a fact, or a decision about a child.
Student Data Privacy & AI
Privacy is the line you don't cross. Student data is protected by law, and most general AI tools were not built with those protections in mind. A few rules keep you safe.
The core rules
- Never enter student names or personal info into an unapproved tool
- Federal laws (FERPA, COPPA) protect student data
- Use your district's approved-tool list
- When unsure, de-identify or don't enter it
Vet a tool before student data touches it
- Does it publish FERPA/COPPA compliance in plain language?
- Does it state it won't train on your data?
- Does it give teachers control over student interactions?
- Is it on your district's approved list?
Safer by design
- Education-specific tools (MagicSchool, Brisk, Diffit) build this in
- General chatbots often don't — treat them as public
- Prefer tools with a signed data-privacy pledge
- Loop in your tech/privacy lead when adopting anything new
If you wouldn't post it publicly, don't paste it into a general AI tool. For anything involving identifiable student information, use only tools your district has approved and that publish their privacy compliance — and when in doubt, ask before you enter it.
Equity & the New AI Divide
AI could widen educational gaps or help close them — and which way it goes depends on choices schools make now. The early data shows a real and growing divide.
Where the gaps are
- Access — to devices, tools, and reliable internet
- Guidance — 25% of affluent vs 13% of high-poverty schools report AI guidance (RAND)
- Training — most teachers get none; some far less
- Confidence — uneven comfort among staff and students
Close them on purpose
- Choose tools with strong free tiers
- Build AI literacy for all students, not just some
- Prioritize PD in under-resourced schools
- Make guidance and expectations explicit for everyone
- Watch for bias that harms specific groups (see §12)
Left alone, AI tends to benefit students who already have the most access, the clearest guidance, and the most support at home. Closing the new AI divide means deliberately extending access, literacy, and training to the students and schools most at risk of being left behind.
Communicating With Families About AI
Families have questions and concerns about AI in the classroom, and transparency builds the trust that makes everything else easier. Most parents actually want guidance — 81% say it would help (CDT).
Be transparent
- Explain how and why you use AI in your classroom
- Share your rules for student AI use
- Reassure them about privacy and data protections
- Invite questions; you don't need every answer
Help families at home
- Point them to AI literacy resources (Common Sense Media)
- Encourage honest conversations about AI use
- Frame AI as a tool to use well, not just fear
- Acknowledge concerns without dismissing them
Put a short, plain-language note about AI in your back-to-school communication: what tools you use, how student data is protected, and your expectations for students. Getting ahead of the conversation turns a source of worry into a sign that you're thoughtful and in control.
For School & District Leaders
Leadership sets whether AI adoption is chaotic or coherent. The governance gap — adoption racing ahead of policy and training — is a leadership problem to solve, deliberately.
Close the governance gap
- Adopt clear guidance before mandating (or banning) tools
- Use the TeachAI toolkit for principles & sample language
- Align your policy with your state's guidance
- Maintain an approved-tool list vetted for privacy
Invest in people, not just tools
- Fund real, ongoing PD — most teachers get none
- Build teacher and leader AI literacy first
- Create space to experiment safely
- Support under-resourced schools first (equity)
Vet and govern
- Require FERPA/COPPA compliance from vendors
- Establish privacy, bias, and evaluation review
- Set a feedback-and-improvement cycle
- Benchmark readiness (see our Readiness Index)
Our State of AI in Education Report includes an AI in Education Readiness Index across five pillars — teaching integration, AI literacy, governance, privacy & security, and infrastructure & access. It's a useful frame for an honest audit of where your school or district actually stands. Read it at research.k12academics.com.
Professional Learning & Staying Current
AI moves faster than any curriculum. Staying useful means building your own learning habit and leaning on the communities doing this well.
Build your own skill
- Try one new AI task a month; keep what works
- Learn prompting by doing, not by reading about it
- Follow a few trusted educators and orgs
- Share what you learn with your team
Where to learn
- AI for Education — free frameworks and PD
- ISTE and Digital Promise — standards and courses
- Common Sense Media — literacy and reviews
- TeachAI — guidance and examples
- Your district's PD and PLCs
The bigger effort
- Major PD initiatives are scaling up nationally
- The AFT's National Academy for AI Instruction
- (with Microsoft, OpenAI & Anthropic) — a $23M effort
- Watch for free training in your state/union
- Ask your district what AI PD it offers
The Road Ahead (2027–2030)
AI in education is early. A few directions are worth watching so you can prepare rather than react — the fuller analysis is in the State of AI in Education Report.
From chatbots to agents
AI is moving from answering prompts to completing multi-step tasks — planning a unit, assembling materials, and adapting them with less step-by-step direction. The teacher's role shifts further toward direction, judgment, and quality control.
Toward AI-native tools
Expect AI woven directly into the platforms you already use — your LMS, gradebook, and content tools — rather than as separate apps. Fluency with the principles in this toolkit will matter more than mastery of any one product.
Assessment gets rethought
As AI makes take-home text easy to generate, schools will keep shifting toward authentic, process-based, and in-person assessment. The integrity approach in §12 is where this is heading, not a temporary fix.
Literacy becomes essential
AI literacy is fast becoming a core competency for students and staff alike — and federal and state guidance increasingly prioritizes it. The schools that build it now will be ready; the rest will be catching up.
Toolkit Checklists
Six checklists for putting this toolkit to work. Click any box to check it off; your progress stays for this session. Tap a checklist to open it.
Getting Started with AI
Vetting an AI Tool
Planning an AI-Literacy Lesson
Redesigning an Assessment for Integrity
Setting Classroom AI Norms
For Leaders: AI Readiness
Downloads & Templates
Templates referenced throughout this toolkit, ready to adapt to your classroom or school.
Use & get started
- Teacher prompt library (starter set)
- 'One task this week' tracker
- Tool-vetting checklist
- Reusable prompt recipe card
Integrity & assessment
- Green/yellow/red AI-use scale
- Assignment AI-use statement templates
- Assessment-redesign planner
- Student AI-disclosure form
Literacy & classroom
- AI-literacy lesson outline
- 'Critique the AI' activity template
- Classroom AI norms poster
- Student-facing AI use agreement
Policy & families
- Classroom AI policy template
- Family AI communication letter
- Approved-tool tracker
- Leader policy-alignment worksheet
Editable versions of these templates are available on request — see §26, Stay Connected.
Communities & Resources
You don't have to keep up with AI alone. These organizations do the heavy lifting on guidance, curriculum, and professional learning — most of it free.
Guidance & policy
- TeachAI — AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit
- U.S. Department of Education — Office of Ed Tech AI guidance
- CoSN — responsible-use policy resources
- UNESCO — generative AI in education guidance
Literacy & curriculum
- Common Sense Media — AI literacy & reviews
- AI for Education — frameworks & free PD
- Code.org — AI curriculum & resources
- aiEDU — AI education for all students
Standards & professional learning
- ISTE — standards, courses & community
- Digital Promise — research & guidance
- Your state's education agency AI guidance
- The AFT National Academy for AI Instruction
Go deeper
- K12academics — State of AI in Education Report
- The full State of Education report series
- Your district's approved-tool list & PD
- Trusted educators in your subject area
QR Resource Hub
Scan any code below with your phone camera — perfect for a printed copy of this toolkit.
State of AI in Education Report
Read the full companion report and data.
Visit K12academics.com
Browse every directory and resource in one place.
Join the Newsletter
Sign up for education news and resources.
This Week in Education
Our weekly roundup for families & educators.
Community Catalogs
Flip through our seasonal program & member catalog.
Follow on Social
All our channels in one place.
Contact Us
Questions, template requests, or ideas for the next edition.
Find Schools & Programs
Search directories across six categories.
K12academics Resource Center
Beyond this toolkit, here's what K12academics offers — much of it free.
Research & reading
- The State of AI in Education Report (companion)
- The full State of Education report series
- 'This Week in Education' weekly newsletter
- Free toolkits like this one
Find what you're looking for
- K-12 Schools directory
- Colleges & Universities
- Education Vendors (incl. EdTech)
- Summer Programs & Performers
For schools & programs
- Community Catalogs (digital flip-catalogs)
- Branded media kits & interactive suites
- Partner & advertising opportunities
- See what members say
Stay Connected
Ways to stay in touch with K12academics — and to help shape the next edition of this toolkit.
Subscribe
- Join our newsletter
- Get 'This Week in Education'
- Education news and resources, regularly
Contribute
- Nominate a tool or resource for a future edition
- Request the editable templates from §22
- Tell us what educators still need
- Contact us
Follow
- All our social channels
- Daily resource shares & community highlights
- Partner or advertise with us
Sources & Further Reading
The figures in this toolkit come from current, primary research, and the guidance points to authoritative organizations. Start with our companion report, then go to the sources themselves.
The companion report & data
- K12academics — State of AI in Education Report
- Gallup / Walton Family Foundation — teacher AI use & time saved
- RAND — American Educator & School Leader panels (adoption, guidance)
- Pew Research Center — teacher & teen AI attitudes
Guidance & policy (authoritative)
Literacy & classroom
Academic integrity
- Stanford HAI / Liang et al. (2023) — detector bias vs. non-native writers
- Weber-Wulff et al. (2023) — detector accuracy (33–81%)
- Vanderbilt, Penn & others — disabling AI detectors
- Shift to authentic, process-based assessment
Figures reflect the most recent data available as of the 2026–2027 school year. AI, tools, and policy change extremely fast — confirm current specifics with the sources above, our companion report, and your own district before you rely on them.
100 Tips for AI in the Classroom
Everything above, distilled into 100 quick, practical reminders you can scan any day. Twenty categories, five tips each.
Getting Started
- Start with one time-consuming, low-risk task.
- Pick a teacher-built or district-approved tool.
- Let AI draft; you refine and decide.
- Time your edits vs. building from scratch.
- Momentum comes from one small win.
Saving Time
- Teachers who use AI weekly save ~6 hours a week.
- Target first drafts and boilerplate, not students.
- Only about a third use it often enough to benefit.
- Reclaim planning hours for actual teaching.
- Grading is the least common — and riskiest — use.
Choosing Tools
- Match the tool to your biggest pain point.
- Start with a free tier.
- Education tools add structure and privacy.
- Check district approval before student data.
- A small, reliable stack beats chasing every app.
Prompting
- Be specific — brief it like a capable new aide.
- Give role, task, context, format, and an example.
- Ask for options, then refine the best.
- Iterate and correct; don't restart.
- Give it your rubric or standard to align to.
Lesson Planning
- Generate a skeleton, then teach your expertise in.
- Rubrics and warm-ups are fast to make and check.
- Align to your standard — then verify.
- Save prompts that work into a library.
- The AI gives 70%; your judgment supplies the rest.
Differentiation
- Level any text up or down in minutes.
- Generate scaffolds, stems, and word banks.
- Translate materials for multilingual families.
- Draft IEP goals — you review and finalize.
- This is arguably AI's best classroom use.
Feedback & Grading
- AI drafts feedback; you review and own it.
- You assign the grade, always.
- Never paste private student work into an unapproved tool.
- Turn feedback into models and revision suggestions.
- Let students self-assess against a rubric first.
Teaching With AI
- Use AI as a tutor that asks, not tells.
- Make student thinking visible: process and drafts.
- Have students critique and fact-check AI.
- Keep AI out when the struggle is the point.
- Model good use out loud yourself.
AI Literacy
- Teach that AI predicts text — it doesn't 'know.'
- It can be confidently wrong; always verify.
- It reflects biases in its training data.
- Cover honest disclosure and giving credit.
- Weave literacy into existing subjects.
Academic Integrity
- AI detectors are unreliable — don't trust them.
- They wrongly flag non-native English writers.
- Never penalize a student on a detector alone.
- Redesign assessment; value visible thinking.
- Set clear AI rules for every assignment.
Classroom Norms & Policy
- Set norms now, even without a district policy.
- Use a green/yellow/red AI-use scale.
- Adopt the TeachAI toolkit as a starting point.
- Align with your state's AI guidance.
- Make policy a living, reviewed document.
Responsible Use
- Fact-check anything you'll rely on.
- Keep a human in the loop on what matters.
- Watch for bias in student-facing tools.
- Be transparent about your own AI use.
- Confidently wrong is the trap — stay skeptical.
Privacy
- If you wouldn't post it publicly, don't paste it.
- FERPA and COPPA protect student data.
- Use only district-approved tools for student info.
- Prefer tools that don't train on your data.
- When unsure, de-identify or don't enter it.
Equity
- AI can widen or close gaps — choices decide.
- Guidance is scarcer in high-poverty schools.
- Choose tools with strong free tiers.
- Build AI literacy for all students.
- Prioritize PD where it's needed most.
Talking to Families
- Be transparent about how you use AI.
- Most parents want guidance, not silence.
- Reassure them about privacy and data.
- Point them to AI-literacy resources.
- Get ahead of the conversation in the fall.
For Leaders
- Adopt guidance before mandating or banning.
- Close the governance gap deliberately.
- Fund ongoing PD — most teachers get none.
- Vet vendors for FERPA/COPPA compliance.
- Benchmark readiness honestly.
Bias & Accuracy
- AI hallucinates facts and citations — verify.
- Wrong answers sound authoritative.
- It may be out of date.
- It can amplify stereotypes.
- Never let AI be the final word on a child.
Student Wellbeing & AI
- Guard against over-reliance that skips learning.
- Keep foundational skills human and unaided.
- Watch for AI replacing peer and teacher connection.
- Balance screens with in-person time.
- Teach judgment, not dependence.
Staying Current
- Try one new AI task a month.
- Learn prompting by doing.
- Follow trusted educators and orgs.
- Share what you learn with your team.
- Ask your district what AI PD it offers.
Mindset
- AI is a tool — powerful, flawed, here to stay.
- You're the expert; AI is the intern.
- Teach students to use it well, not just avoid it.
- Start small and build.
- The goal is more time for what only you can do.