By DFI Staff

DFI collaborated with Professor Irina Lyublinskaya on this video about how educators can teach AI literacy, with or without AI tools in the classroom. This is a key premise of her recent book, Teaching AI Literacy Across the Curriculum: A K-12 Handbook, co-authored with Dr. Xiaoxue Du. Working with a script created by Professor Lyublinskaya, DFI Studio and Media Producer Billy Collins animated the video, and Media Support Associate Abu Abdelbagi contributed character design and illustrations.

Find more resources for educators on our AI in Education page.

Transcript

As a teacher, the recent explosion of artificial intelligence tools can feel overwhelming and inescapable. But even if you don't plan on using AI tools or assignments in your class, you and your students can still benefit from AI literacy.

Being AI literate isn't the same as using or assigning AI tools in your class. It means developing a deeper understanding of the AI tools that seem to be everywhere in the lives of teachers and students. And it means preparing yourself and your students to navigate a world that is increasingly full of AI tools and media.

You can make a connection to something you're already doing in your classroom
without asking students to even use a computer. For example, think about this lesson from the fourth grade English Language Arts. In this lesson, students play a game to identify the meaning of words using context clues. Students will use cards showing words with multiple meanings like fan, scale, and trunk, along with cards of corresponding images. Students draw sentence cards with a fill in the blank problem. They choose the right word to fill in the blank, and then they choose the image that corresponds to the right meaning of that word.

What does any of this have to do with AI you might ask? The core of the activity involves understanding word meanings within context. AI models also need to analyze context to accurately interpret language and make sense of ambiguous words. Students are essentially data labeling when they match a word to its correct picture card based on context. This highlights how AI systems use labeled data and receive feedback to learn and make predictions.

Whether or not you use AI in your class, you and your students are navigating a world where generative AI tools are at their fingertips and now you know a little more about how those tools work. You can build on ideas like this to engage in more complex contexts, like bias in AI training data, or AI’s creative limitations.

And you can engage with all of this by using activities that look a lot like what students were already doing in your class, whether you decide to use AI tools or not. This activity, as well as many others for all grade levels, can be found in our book for K-12 educators, Teaching AI Literacy Across the Curriculum.

The views expressed in this video are solely those of the speaker to whom they are attributed. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the faculty, administration, staff or Trustees either of Teachers College or of Columbia University.