AI Literacy in Schools

Building AI Literacy in Classrooms: What Every Teacher Needs to Know

Hot Take: you don’t need to be a tech expert to teach AI literacy

Ai is already prevalent in our lives and the lives of our students – targeted ads, TikTok algorithms, YouTube recommended videos, and ChatGPT homework help. You definitely don’t need to code or understand algorithms to guide meaningful AI discussions in the classroom. If you teach digital citizenship, media literacy, or critical thinking you are already halfway there to having meaningful lessons about AI literacy. 

What is AI Literacy?

AI Literacy is the ability to understand, evaluate, and use AI tools responsibly and effectively. It involves both technical awareness and ethical thinking, similar to media literacy but focusing on the tools that generate the information, not just deliver it.

Key components of AI Literacy:

  1. Know what AI is and how it works
    • Having a basic understanding of what generative AI is and how it works – knowing that these tools are LLMs and don’t “know” the answer to your questions, they create a response based on a prediction generation.
  2. Use AI critically and ethically
    • Understanding when and how using AI tools is and isn’t appropriate
    • Ensuring that AI tools are being cited when used, outputs are being fact-checked, and that responses are being judged for validity.
  3. Recognize bias and misinformation
    • Understanding that AI reflects the data that it is trained on – including any bias that is present. Therefore, responses will reflect this bias.
    • Students (and teachers!) should question who made the tool they are using, and what voices it might be excluding.
  4. Understand the social impacts of AI
    • Students should also understand the impacts AI has on jobs, identity, equity and privacy.
    • Conversations should be happening about who benefits from AI and who might be left out, and how being left out can impact someone.

Why AI Literacy is ESSENTIAL

Digital citizenship

Teaching students AI literacy teaches them about responsible and informed technology use. It also helps them to build trust online through good judgement and transparency.

Career and future-readiness

Whether we are ready for it or not, AI will be part of most professions in the near future. Students need to know how to use it well and how to critique it. We also want to empower students to become positive digital creators, not just digital consumers. 

Extension of media and information literacy

AI literacy builds upon skills students are already developing in our classrooms every day. Using AI as another type of source for students to practice evaluating the sources, and recognizing fake news. It encourages students to move beyond is it true? to how was this made and by whom?

Quick examples in action

Writing with AI: Students generate ideas with ChatGPT, and develop a response. They then critique and revise the content. Following this student’s reflection on what was helpful? What was inaccurate? What would you change?

Exploring bias or misinformation: Use AI to analyze the same topic from different perspectives. Comparing AI-generated responses about historical or social issues from these different perspectives. Students should ask themselves what’s missing? Whose voice isn’t represented? 

Common concerns and how to address them

“Students will cheat”

Solutions: 

  1. Focus on how students are using AI – not just whether they used it or not. 
  2. Teach students to be transparent – if you used it, show me how it helped you think better
  3. Design tasks that require original thought, reflection and critical analysis, rather than answers or responses that can be search up.

“It’s too technical for younger learners”

Solutions:

  1. Start simple: What is this tool doing? How do we know it’s accurate?
  2. Use age-appropriate analogies – for our youngest students you could equate AI to a helpful parrot – it repeats back to us what it has seen
  3. Focus on the thinking skills not tech skills

Some next steps

Embed AI Literacy into all teaching subjects. In science students could explore how AI is used in health or climate prediction, in Social Studies it can be used to discuss equity and access, for English class AI can be used for generating ideas and students can then critique and revise the work. 

Let students use real-world tools like ChatGPT or Copilot with teacher support. With your guidance and support it is healthy for students to explore these tools. Follow this exploration with an AI Literacy journal entry where students can reflect on what they asked the AI, what they learned, and what they should verify next time.

AI literacy is foundational—like reading and writing in a digital age

AI literacy is not an “extra”, like other literacy skills it is a core part of preparing our students for life today in this digital age. If you are nervous, start small, even the little things help, remember to have students think critically, and invite them into the conversations about the topic. 
By working with students we can teach them to use AI wisely, ethically, and creatively!