AI-Lab for Educators

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming society, schools, and classrooms as we speak, and yet students, educators, and administrators are typically left to their own devices as they evaluate its benefits and costs. This course offers the opportunity to collectively investigate a timely vision for nuanced and responsive AI-literacies. We will focus on the practical integration of AI technologies into diverse educational ecologies. Participants will explore the use of AI generators—such as ChatGPT, RunwayAI, and Nano Banana—in a virtual classroom. Through hands-on experimentation, we will leverage collaboration to explore how generative AI can enhance and challenge existing pedagogies and literacies. How can students leverage AI without compromising their learning experience? What are their creative possibilities? How might AI change and impact academic research? These questions—and others generated by students—will drive the course's inquiries, experimentations, processes, and products, which we will pursue with both an open and critical mind.

Students will gain a solid understanding of how AI is impacting the classroom, i.e., teaching and learning, as well as research. They will engage in deep-level thinking and hands-on exploration of AI, its place and challenges in their professional experience (be it as students, teachers, administrators, or researchers). Through collaborative inquiry students will examine concepts such as AI-literacy, pedagogy, and co-creativity.