AI, CS, & Digital Literacy

Most schools across our region rely on Google Classroom and Google tools, so the updates Google announced today at BETT 2026 are likely to touch a significant number of our classrooms. At a high level, Google is weaving Gemini (their AI assistant) more thoughtfully into Classroom, assignments, feedback, and student learning tools. The goal is to provide practical support, improve accessibility, and offer better insight into learning — while also navigating important ethical considerations around student AI use.

Before diving in, one important assumption:

👉 For our youngest learners (especially K–2), this is not about giving students direct access to AI tools or independent use of Google Classroom.

Instead, these updates are best viewed as teacher-facing supports that may — or may not — fit existing classroom practices. With that, here are some highlights of the new tools and functionality we'll be seeing:

K–5 (Especially K–2): AI as a Teacher Tool

Even without student…

After sharing Alex Kotran’s thoughtful letter to teens about AI and jobs, it felt only right to shine a spotlight on our younger learners, too. 🎉

Enter Amanda Bickstaff from AI for Education, who recently sat down with none other than Ruff Ruffman for a fun, kid-friendly conversation about AI literacy. 🐾🤖

If you’re a K–5 educator, this one’s a total win: approachable, engaging, and perfectly pitched for curious elementary minds. You and your students are going to love it!

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