AI, CS, & Digital Literacy

AI isn’t coming — it’s here, and it’s reshaping how we work, learn, and build careers. Two recent pieces — Alex Kotran’s “A Letter to Teens About AI and Jobs” and Mark Perna’s “The Top 5 AI Skills to Build Your Personal Competitive Advantage” — offer a powerful, practical roadmap for helping high school students navigate this future.

🧠 1. This Isn’t a Distant Future — It’s Now

Alex Kotran emphasizes that AI is already disrupting the job market and will only increase in impact as teens enter the workforce. Rather than sugarcoating it, he points out that we don’t know exactly what jobs will look like, but we do know that the old playbook of “study this major → secure a safe job” doesn’t apply anymore — and that uncertainty is a signal, not a barrier. alexkotran.substack.com

➡️ Message to students: It’s less about picking the “right job” and more about building the…

The Power of Teacher–Student Relationships

Every few weeks, a new headline pops up predicting the “end of teaching as we know it.” AI lesson planning! AI grading! AI tutoring! Surely the robots are coming for our jobs… right? Not so fast.

A brand-new review of over 70 years of research—covering 2.6 million students—just landed, and it has something important to say about what really drives student success. And spoiler alert: it isn’t shiny tools or cutting-edge algorithms. It’s something far simpler, far more human, and far more powerful:

🥰Teacher–Student Relationships (TSR).

Across decades of studies, age groups, and school settings, positive teacher–student relationships consistently predicted improvements in eight major areas of student success:

1. Better classroom behavior

I love when I find something in the AI-in-education space that makes me stop mid-scroll, refill my coffee, and think "This, I gotta share!". Utah just did that.

They’ve released two beautifully clear, surprisingly grounded documents:

• Portrait of an AI-Infused Learner

• Portrait of an AI-Infused Educator
  

And honestly? They’re good. Not flashy. Not fear-based. Not 90 pages of “don’t do this.” Just thoughtful, practical vision for how students and educators can navigate an AI-infused world with curiosity, ethics, and confidence.

Here are the big themes that stood out — and why I think they’re worth paying attention to.

🍌 With the release of hyper-realistic AI media tools like Nano Banana Pro (released today) and OpenAI’s recently released SORA video app, the line between authentic and AI-generated content is getting thinner by the minute. Images and videos that once required teams of experts can now be created in seconds — by anyone, including students.

The challenge for educators isn’t teaching students how to use these ever-evolving tools — it’s helping them navigate a world where the media they consume is being shaped, altered, or fully generated by AI, whether they realize it or not.

👉 This is where aiEDU’s newest resource — AI Snapshots: Evaluating AI Outputs — comes in. These “plug and play” slides are designed for quick, meaningful discussions about the media students encounter every day. And most importantly: no AI or computer-science experience is required. These snapshots aren’t technical lessons — they’re conversation starters about the ethical and societal implications…