AI, CS, & Digital Literacy

Welcome back, educators! 🎉

A new school year means new notebooks, new seating charts, new names and faces to remember… and approximately 47,000 new things competing for our students’ attention.

It also means it’s a good time to dust off one of our most important digital literacy skills: figuring out whether the information in front of us deserves our trust. And that’s where SIFT comes in.

What Is SIFT?

Developed by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, SIFT is a simple framework for evaluating information online. Rather than asking students to immediately read, analyze, and decide whether a source is “good” or “bad,” SIFT gives them four moves to help them investigate first.

🛑S — Stop

What if you could build the thing you wish existed?

Not someday. Not after finding someone who knows how to code. Now. That’s the idea behind vibe coding — and it’s something we think everyone in our districts should be playing with.

Start With a Problem, Not a Coding Project

Superintendent Wesley Benjamin of Kalama School District in Southwest Washington is a great example. Kalama serves about 1,200 students, and Wesley has been using vibe coding to tackle real problems across his district.

In this Google EDU On Air conversation, he walks through his process:

• Start with a “What if?” problem.

The countdown is on. The pencils are dull, the coffee mugs have been abandoned in questionable locations, and educators across our 5 county region are preparing to enter their well-earned summer era. 🪩

Before you fully transition into sunscreen, snacks, and pretending not to check your school email, I wanted to send you off with a few AI-in-education resources to toss into your summer beach bag. No pressure. No homework. Just a few things to explore when your teacher brain surfaces from the snorkel dive that is summer break.

Your “Wait, How Does This Actually Work?” Watch

Still wondering about the nuts and bolts of AI? Few people have explained it better — or with better drawings — than Henrik Kniberg. This video is a clear, visual, surprisingly fun introduction to how generative AI works and why it sometimes feels brilliant and sometimes confidently wrong. 🔗 Generative AI In a…

Thanks to one of the latest ChatEDU episodes, I recently came across a post by Carla Engelbrecht Fisher that felt really relevant as we look at infusing AI into existing engineering lessons for this year's for Oregon STEM Week:

14 Ways to Remind Yourself (and Your Kids) AI is a Machine, Not Your Friend

This article is full of simple, relatable ways to help students (and us!) understand what AI is (and isn’t).

At its core, the post reinforces a few key ideas that are essential for students: AI doesn’t think - it predicts. AI doesn’t understand - it patterns. And sometimes, it gets things wrong in ways that feel surprisingly human.

What I appreciate most is how actionable her approach is. Here are five of the 14 ways she suggests we can start talking about AI with kids:

1. AI is an it.