When thinking about what my students thank me for the most, one of those things is how I taught them about technologies before they became widely available. It has been important to me as I saw things emerging, that we wrestled with the ethical issues while they were in middle and high school. That way, when they saw the technology, they wouldn’t blindly accept the marketing hype but would wisely and well discern their approach to the technology. GPS. Streaming. Web 2.0. Twitter. And yes, the students I taught about artificial intelligence before ChatGPT came out in November 2022. They thank me because they were able to approach AI with wisdom.
We can’t travel back in time but we can look at the times in which we travel. And teachers are awesome. They want to do what is right by students. I live in awe and respect of teachers doing this every day. Love of students and respect for teachers is why I love bringing experts like today’s guests, Christie Cloud and Dave Hinrichs. They live and work in North Carolina, a state that is choosing to teach AI instead of banning it. They use AI every single day as power users, but also teaching teachers. Together they wrote a chapter in The Educators’ AI Guide 2027.
As we recorded this episode, some decisions have been made at major school districts in the US that are very concerning. New York City, the largest school system in America, banned student AI tools from pre-K through eighth grade, while at the same time the United Arab Emirates made AI a school subject starting in kindergarten. On the other side of the world, Beijing schools now require AI lessons in every primary and secondary school. India is starting AI literacy in third grade. States like Alabama are weaving AI into digital literacy standards that begin in kindergarten. The approaches are so different, but our kids are using AI and we cannot let them just “figure it out” on their own. We have to get into this world with them.
Yet, using Chat is really yesterday’s approach to AI. Today’s AI is going agentic. But what does that mean?
So, in this episode, we cover agentic AI in plain English, what tokens are and why AI costs money, why you don’t always need the most powerful model, how to fact-check what AI tells you, why they avoid AI detectors, and the hardest question I asked them: what do we tell a student who could make an A with AI but should earn a B and actually learn it? Our kids need us to do the right thing now. But we are literally figuring it out together! So, here’s another conversation bringing the experts to you.
Here’s where the facts in this episode come from, with the time stamp so you can hear each one. Checked October 22, 2026. AI policies change fast, so check the source before you rely on a date.
Christie is in her 25th year in education. Her answer is: the whole purpose of school is to prepare kids for the world they’ll live in as adults, and there are very few jobs left that don’t include AI in some form. You can’t even run a Google search without it. Banning it is short-sighted. Kids need fluency and safety, and they need their hands on it to learn both.
Dave writes and updates the AI guidelines for his district, so he sees both ends: data privacy worries on one side, and teachers worried about cognitive offloading on the other. His answer brings to us the nuance that all of us feel, and students need to understand. Then Dave said this: “We messed up cell phones. We said, it’s not our thing. That’s a home thing, but they’ve impacted us. We’ve messed up social media… this technology is the most transformative since the internet itself and we can’t mess it up.”
Our kids need us to bring our A game to this AI – I would say game, but AI isn’t a game. It is really serious even if we can start off by learning it by “playing with it.” We still need to know how it works.
The whole “Prompt Engineering” stuff never got me excited. AI is a word calculator. Ask it to interview you. AI can write the prompts for you! Sure, our words help and we can share prompts but it seemed to me that in education we got off task when we went too deeply into prompt engineering instead of learning how to engineer the conversation. The interview mode of conversing with AI takes so much pressure off you when you use it, for example.
As Christie put it, “It’s not beyond you. No matter what stage of acceptance and integration with AI you are, like you can do this.” A natural, conversational tone gets better results.
Dave’s method is to tell the AI to ask you questions one at a time. You can steer it when it’s wrong, and you don’t get a wall of text. I like to ask AI to create a plan and not to start the plan until I approve it. This saves tokens and prevents wasted time.
Dave and Christie use AI in very advanced ways. They’ve built what Dave calls a “multiplayer AI system,” with shared context for their conference sessions and projects, and they build tools in Codex. “Instead of a brain and a mouth, now it has hands.”
Yet, we need to learn how to select models. Christie was talking about this when she said, “You don’t always need a Ferrari.” Most days, she uses AI to solve everyday problems for her teachers. When teachers asked how to fit Constitution Day into their standards, she used ChatGPT to build an interactive escape room with a teacher’s guide and intro slides. That used to take her hours in Google Forms. Now it takes a few clicks and a proofread. Christie is an expert on building escape rooms, and that expertise shines as she can create more of these digital escape rooms, better, because she knows how to create escape rooms and because she knows how to use AI and save time so she can make more of them!
So, “AI agents” is a commonly used term, and I thought it would be helpful to discuss what they are. Christie’s definition: an agentic workflow is when you direct the AI toward a goal you’ve set, give it context and guardrails, and let it do the work on your behalf.
Dave compared it to student agency. We give students some control over their learning, but not “whatever you want.” We still give them context and guardrails. An AI agent works the same way.
Christie uses agents to gather tech news for her weekly tech tips email and to summarize and prioritize her email when she’s been away. Dave wrote a product requirements document for his team’s planning needs, told Codex to build it, went to lunch, and came back to a working dashboard. I use Claude Cowork the same way. I hand it a task, walk away, and it texts me when it needs my approval. It can draft email, but it can’t send it.
Everybody wants AI to be free, but it isn’t. Dave explains tokens (the way AI companies determine how much AI costs). He says they are little chunks of text that add up, and that’s how the cost is measured. Most beginners will never notice this. But if you start writing code or doing AI-intensive tasks, you may run up against limits.
Christie has fantastic advice: use more than one AI tool (she uses ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini – all of which have free versions for educators. I wrote about how teachers can get Claude and ChatGPT free.) Then, when you hit your limit (or get close), ask for a handoff document and move the work to another model. (A handoff document will put everything for where the task is into one document and you can copy and paste it into the next AI tool.) And part of AI literacy now is picking the right model for the job. I don’t need the most powerful model to find a refill for my pen.
In my own fact-checking of Google’s AI summaries, I find errors in about one out of five. And I have seen some teachers who spent years saying “you can’t cite Wikipedia” now citing Google search AI summaries. We all need to be discussing this right now as a new literacy of the AI era.
Christie, who has a strong history background, asks AI for sources, including primary sources, and checks the links herself. Sometimes the link doesn’t even work. That’s a teachable moment about research. (Some people call this hallucinating; a more accurate word is “confabulation.” See my AI definitions document for more on this.)
Dave has a great metaphor. He says, if your accountant made a mistake on your taxes and said, “It wasn’t me, it was the calculator,” you wouldn’t accept that. “You shared it, your name’s on it, it’s yours.” He also calls Gemini “a really enthusiastic Labrador who really wants to please you.” He says you need to tell AI tools, especially Gemini, not to go until you say to start a task.
Christie’s first rule for teachers: be careful what you give it. No address lists. No IEPs (Individualized Education Programs). If you have to wonder whether something should go in, leave it out. Her second rule: don’t be scared of it. Teachers are excellent talkers and natural learners. Play with it before you try to build a unit plan with it.
Dave’s district is moving carefully toward student use: shareable Gemini notebooks where teachers provide the sources, shareable Gems, creation tools like Canva and Adobe Express, and a state CTE (Career and Technical Education) course where students build with PlayLab (a nonprofit platform where educators build their own AI tools and students use them).
Dave is thankful his district’s guidance says to avoid AI detectors, which can over-identify neurodivergent students and English learners. He’d rather change the conversation. He’s had a “teach like Google exists” sign on his desk for twelve years, and he says that now it’s time to teach like AI exists. Make AI use explicit in each assignment, on a scale from zero AI to full AI, and focus on whether students can defend and explain both the process and the product. It shouldn’t be a game of gotcha.
Christie brought up the calculator. Students need basic math skills before a calculator does the work for them, and basic writing and research skills before AI does. But calculators aren’t going anywhere, and neither is AI. “We’ve been here before, friends.”
So, we have to talk integrity. Some students and new graduates say they feel “AI guilt” about how much AI did for them in school, and some are applying for jobs they don’t know how to do. One New York financier told the Financial Times (as Moneywise reported) that his summer interns’ ideas were “alarmingly shallow.” And it isn’t only graduates. HR Executive calls what workers are feeling “the great AI regret.” Depending on which report you read, most students are already using AI (54% of U.S. K-12 students in 2025; 95% of UK undergraduates), while only about a third of districts say they teach students how to use it (RAND: 35%). A whole generation is figuring it out alone.
So what do we tell a student who could make an A with AI but might make a B doing it on their own? This is what we’re facing now.
This is the convo we all need to be having and I suggest you listen to what they say.
As discussed in the show by Dave, OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs. Existing custom GPTs stop working on December 11, 2026, and OpenAI plans to end creation of new ones on October 26, 2026. They’re being replaced by something OpenAI calls plugins, which bundle your instructions, your reference files, and the apps you connect.
It doesn’t happen automatically. If you made a GPT (I built one for my AP Computer Science Principles class), go to My GPTs and click “Migrate to plugin.” Your instructions and knowledge files come over. Custom actions, old conversations, and sharing settings don’t. And if your students use a GPT you shared with them, they’ll lose it on December 11 unless you migrate it and share the new plugin. Here’s OpenAI’s migration FAQ.
If you’re a parent reading this, three things carry over to your kitchen table.
Whether your school looks more like New York City or more like North Carolina this year, the question underneath is the same one Christie and Dave kept coming back to. Are our students still doing the thinking? Kids might not have access to AI at school but many have it at home or at their public library. We have to understand that AI exists and is being used.
AI will keep changing. Good teaching, the human part, is still ours.
This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Acronyms are spelled out in parentheses on first use. Minor errors or artifacts may remain.
Vicki Davis (00:00): Welcome back educator. This is Vicki Davis and this is Cool Cat Teacher Talk. We can’t mess this one up. AI, schools, and what comes next.
Announcer (00:12): Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators. Tips and inspiration to elevate your teaching.
Vicki Davis (00:25): We’re always trying to help kids thrive. Whatever we do today, our kids in 10 years or 20 years need to thank us. And one of the things that my students have always thanked me for was introducing them to technology before it became widely available, whether it was a GPS (Global Positioning System) or streaming even Web 2.0 and Twitter. And those that I taught about AI before ChatGPT launched on November 30th, 2022, those kids have come back and thanked me.
Vicki Davis (01:02): In September 2026, the largest school system in America made a decision that has everybody talking. New York City banned student AI (artificial intelligence) tools from pre-K all the way through eighth grade. No chatbots, no AI tutors. They even switched off all of the AI features inside 38 programs their schools were already using.
Vicki Davis (01:28): High schoolers can still use AI in some pilot programs, and every high school student will take AI literacy lessons in New York City. Some parents and advocates cheered. Others, including a former deputy mayor, said a blanket ban with no exceptions is the wrong call. Meanwhile, other places are going the exact opposite direction. The United Arab Emirates made AI a school subject in every public school, starting in kindergarten. In China, every primary and secondary school in Beijing now teaches at least eight hours of AI a year, starting at age six. India is adding AI and computational thinking beginning in third grade in the 2026-27 school year. And here in the United States, Alabama is weaving AI into digital literacy standards that start in kindergarten.
Vicki Davis (02:24): I’ve always taught artificial intelligence for elementary and up. And my older students have developed lessons for the younger students as we talk about how AI works. Because remember this, ask your kids how your smartphone works when you talk to it, or the smart speakers, and you’re going to find that they already have a model for how these tools work.
Vicki Davis (02:50): If we don’t talk about it, they’re gonna make it up in their own mind. And my concern is that they’re gonna think that AI is more accurate than it really is when it needs our supervision. So today’s show is so important. So today we’re talking with two educators who work with AI every single day to respond to schools that are banning it. Christie Cloud is an instructional technology facilitator in North Carolina.
Vicki Davis (03:16): And a founding member of the EduGuardians. Dave Hinrichs is a director of digital platforms and pedagogy from Johnston County Public Schools. And together they wrote a chapter in the The Educators’ AI Guide 2027. And their argument is that the thing we’ve all been teaching teachers to do with AI is out of date.
Vicki Davis (03:38): And by the way, they work in a state that chose to teach AI with its students rather than ban it. North Carolina’s official AI guidance for schools says, and I quote, “Attempting to enforce broad bans on AI is a futile effort that widens the digital divide between students with independent access to AI on personal devices and students dependent on school or community resources.”
Vicki Davis (04:04): They go on to say, “It is imperative that all schools and districts ensure all staff and students are AI literate.” Now, this is not talking about AI tutors, it’s a whole different conversation. We’re talking basic AI literacy. Do students understand how it works, how to supervise it, And I want you to stick around for Dave’s warning about the two technologies he says schools already got wrong.
Vicki Davis (04:29): And you’ll hear Christie explain why when it comes to AI, you don’t always need a Ferrari.
Vicki Davis (04:34): Let’s talk to Christie and Dave.
Announcer (04:37): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (04:41): Today we’re talking with two people who think the thing we’ve all been teaching teachers to do with AI is already out of date. Christie Cloud is a founding member of the EduGuardians, a community of educators that has grown to more than 240 members.
Vicki Davis (04:57): Dave Hinrichs is director of digital platforms and pedagogy for Johnston County Public Schools in North Carolina, where he has spent 30 years in one system watching all that technology come and go, as many of us have. Together they founded CraveEdventures and they’ve just contributed a chapter to The Educators’ AI Guide 2027. So Christie and Dave, welcome to the show. I want you to respond to the schools that are banning AI in the classroom.
Christie Cloud (05:31): I’m here for it. So my name is Christie Cloud and I am an instructional technology facilitator in Harnett County, North Carolina. This is my twenty-fifth year in education. And for the schools who are currently banning AI, I Understand that AI can be problematic when we put our students in front of it. And I understand that we need the utmost care when dealing with our students. But the entire purpose of education is to prepare students for the world that they will one day inhabit as adults. And there are very few jobs now that are not including.
Christie Cloud (06:17): AI in some form or fashion. You can’t do a Google search without AI being included in that. So while I understand the motivations for our students, I believe that it’s rather short sighted because in order to prepare them for what comes next in their next chapters, we really need to be teaching fluency and safety, and they need to have their hands on it.
Christie Cloud (06:43): And use it in order to understand all of those factors.
Vicki Davis (06:48): Okay, Dave?
Dave Hinrichs (06:50): I’m Dave Hinrichs. I’m the Director of Digital Platforms and Pedagogy for Johnston County Public Schools. I did ask for Pedagogy to be added to my title To answer the question about schools banning AI, I think like most things, it’s a nuance. When you take an extreme on either, you don’t get to what really needs to be there. And as someone from a district level, writes and updates the guidelines. Yes, there’s gonna be concerns about PII (personally identifiable information) and data privacy and safety on one end and from a classroom level, there’s gonna be the worry about cognitive offload, but it can’t be a outright ban and of course we can’t have wild, wild west. So there needs to be really clear instructions. And I wish I knew who I heard this originally from.
Dave Hinrichs (07:37): But it resonated with me and I say it a lot. We messed up.
Dave Hinrichs (07:41): Cell phones. We said, it’s not our thing. That’s a home thing, but they’ve impacted us. We’ve messed up social media. So it’s not our problem. Home, but it’s impacted. It’s all become integrated, connected to people’s lives. This technology is the most transformative since the internet itself and we can’t mess it up. So we really, and it’s moving so fast. And that’s, you know, that’s how we started the chapter. We blinked and AI changed and it’ll change again.
Dave Hinrichs (08:08): While people are still learning to prompt, we’re over here with agentic systems. We have to be able to stay on top of it, and make sure the students are still learning.
Vicki Davis (08:18): All of us, we’re talking about AI as if it started November thirtieth, twenty twenty two. We all know that it’s far before that and and all of us who’ve been in it a while have been talking about AI for a very long time. But but we’re specifically talking about LLMs (large language models) for just a minute. You know, when when we started and everybody was all so, gung ho on teaching prompt engineering, you know, for me I’ve never been gung ho. It’s like it writes prompts for you. So you you it’s a word calculator? Like it can help us. And of course, the interview method of having it interview you is one of the best methods.
Vicki Davis (08:53): Let’s get to the argument of your chapter of like, hey, the stuff we’ve been teaching about AI is not really what we need to be teaching about AI.
Christie Cloud (09:01): I think Vicki you summed up some of the points that that we are making so pointedly is that so often it’s, click here to get 50 prompts for teachers or download this guide for and it becomes a conversation the more you use your LLM of choice. It learns significant, you know, factors about The way you speak and what you need, it becomes more of a conversation. And we believe that a natural tone in conversation with your LLM of choice is going to lead to better results. And also it’s gonna be a lot less scary for teachers who are beginning the process. When when you tell someone, you need to use these verbs or you need to structure.
Christie Cloud (09:50): With a role and suddenly you start losing people and they sort of get like a a glassy gaze and they’re like, I I don’t I just don’t know what to do. This is beyond me. And and that’s kind of what we want to really work to eliminate. It’s not beyond you. No matter what stage of acceptance and integration with AI you are, like you can do this. It’s really just learning to chat with it.
Dave Hinrichs (10:17): When we set out to write the chapter, one of the things, it sort of stemmed from lots of conversations. One of the things that Christie is really big on is talking directly to teachers. It’s important to her. We’ve been at conferences standing in lines and she’ll pull up teachers’ eyes say, what do you want to see? What’s important?
Dave Hinrichs (10:35): Been trying to interview as many people as we will just for the sake of that, learning and building. And one of the things we noticed is there was just a wide level of understanding of AI. In front of a group, I’ll do fist to five, your understanding. And so many times people will say one and then you start teaching and they’ll be like, you’re really good. You’re way more than a one. We didn’t have common language.
Dave Hinrichs (10:59): And then somewhere like five and I start showing things and they’ve never seen it. Go back to what Christie was kind of saying, the conversation, the word prompt engineering was scary. Wasn’t really engineering, it was just talking, like you said, calculated for language. Often say you don’t need these big frameworks or to have it intimidate you. Don’t know how to prompt it and give me these prompts. Just ask you two or three questions and say.
Dave Hinrichs (11:20): What don’t you understand? And this is my unlock. Ask me one at a time so you can steer it’s incorrect and also don’t get a wall of text. But just helping people understand that there’s different ways and levels of using it. And what’s not better than the other? There is more than prompt, get back, prompt, get back. We wanted to help guide people understanding to more complex uses. I tried not to say advance.
Dave Hinrichs (11:45): Because sometimes you just want a question answered and sometimes you’re orchestrating a system, but more complex. And when I set out to learn it originally there wasn’t a clear pathway. There was a YouTube video here and an article here and none of it was coherent. And so we tried to lay out, hey, find where you are and here’s how you can move along.
Vicki Davis (12:04): And so let’s go to like this moment. How are more advanced people perhaps using AI. Dave,
Dave Hinrichs (12:12): Sure. So.
Dave Hinrichs (12:14): Personally, Our model of choice is GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the model family behind ChatGPT). And has shared context for all manner of things. But sometimes we want to get her AI’s opinion on my AIs and back and forth.
Dave Hinrichs (12:28): For example, we have a number of conference sessions that we’ll submit. And we have those stored in there as Canon. And then if we want to adapt them, we’ll say, I need you to print this out for, let’s say, FETC (Future of Education Technology Conference) and NCTIES (North Carolina Technology in Education Society). Well, they’re totally different formats. And it has those formats saved so it can spit them out. And then we’ll build them together, iterate between different AI tools.
Dave Hinrichs (12:51): So what we decided to do was try to build the multiplayer AI system where we have our personal context separate, and our shared one where it can interact with all of our open loops, our projects, things we’re trying to create, social media strategy, conference, proposal sessions, and we can both work out of that together to iterate.
Dave Hinrichs (13:14): And so it’s a really exciting unlock that we’ve had to play with. And we do that through Codex rather than going to just ChatGPT. The Codex desktop app will let us manipulate the files. It’s why I moved away from a custom GPT long ago and lo and behold, now they’re about to deprecate them because as I was iterating, I get a new idea and get excited about it. And then it would be gone unless I went in and updated all the documentation. So it was just, I didn’t want to use it anymore as a source of frustration.
Dave Hinrichs (13:41): So I started working in Codex, not just to code, but to just build. Because I like to say, it’s AI. Instead of a brain and a mouth, now it has hands. And it can do the things for me that we come up with. And so we just made that our default. And it helps us build. And so that’s what I’m really excited about, that and idea of building anything you want. We call that designing the impossible. We have an origin story about that. We had a tour for a conference session that was the metaphor of the whole session. And then night before, We were locked out of this little 3D tour. So Christie heroically built another one. It wasn’t quite as good.
Dave Hinrichs (14:24): But it was still amazing because that’s all she does is amazing. It makes this in tour. She’s like, I’m to have to use this and really serve the function. The next morning, I woke up and said, I wonder if we can build this. And so right after the conference got home, we started building it. Now we had our own 3D tour maker. And then I was like, I think we can build just about anything, which is what we asked now. Can we build this? And then should we build this? Because sometimes we don’t need to. There’s something better. So that just.
Dave Hinrichs (14:52): Solving whatever problem on the fly and the multiplayer AI. And you said what you’re excited about. I’m very excited about both. That’s my geek out moment.
Christie Cloud (15:02): One of the most important things to remember when using AI is that you don’t always need a Ferrari. I am very excited about using agentic workflows and to combine our context, but on a day-to-day level, that’s not what I use AI the most for. And in our framework, We try to put forth that message that you know you don’t always need to use the top model to get the output that you need. And you don’t always need to be in an orchestrate mode in order to get what you need. I use AI a lot in my role as an ITF (instructional technology facilitator) to try to help my teachers solve problems that they’re dealing with in the classroom on a day-to-day basis. We have Constitution Day coming up, and the teachers were like, What?
Christie Cloud (15:53): You know, this isn’t really in in our standards, so how can we integrate this? And I was like, you know what? Let’s let’s see what we can do. So we took some really good items that we had that that really explained and and gave some context to AI and I used ChatGPT Work. I wasn’t even in Codex and made a really great escape room that the students could do interactively in class. I built it with, a teacher’s guide and it had intro slides to introduce the activity. And that’s another thing that I love about iterating with AI is once you have the one thing that you need, sort of the core that you’re building your lesson around. We all know from our experience in the classroom It’s just part of it. You still have other things that you need. And by working with AI, you can create those other things at a speed that it was previously just impossible to imagine. So now it’s like, you want a one pager to go with that? Yes. Let’s make sure that we feed it some really good context. Let’s make sure that we check its output for accuracy. But it’s gonna do a lot of the hard work that we spent so much time putting in. And then we’re there, because the humans always in the loop. So we’re there at the beginning to make sure it gets the best information that it needs. And we’re there at the end to double check it and make sure it’s giving us exactly what we need to meet our classroom goals. And that’s what excites me the most about it is that all of those things that were so time consuming for teachers I can do this in a few clicks. And then my expertise that I’ve spent years honing and a great education, getting to this place can be used for what I really want it to be used for, not time consuming putting together piece, but the overarching, like curating piece. This is what I need in my classroom.
Vicki Davis (17:51): Christie and Dave, I had a a parent call me yesterday and she’s been asked to do a one day etiquette lesson that has to integrate with certain standards. And she had taken notes and sent it to a teacher that I had trained. So the teacher took the photos of the six pages and aligned it with a curriculum, pulled it together into this nice little one pager outline. And my friend who was the parent, her mind was just blown.
Vicki Davis (18:12): She’s like, okay, this is all of my stuff, but it’s formatted so beautifully and helped me understand. And I was like, okay, AI, what you do now is you do idea creation and it does word calculation. You say, okay, this is my idea. Here’s my standards, right? We pull in those standards. So beautiful at standards integration. And I love that both of you keep using the word build.
Vicki Davis (18:39): I’m building, I’m creating, I’m curating. Like the idea when you are well using AI, the thinking is all still with the humans, It’s so still with the humans. So let’s talk about how do you explain agentic AI? Because you remember, you know, prompt engineering, that word scared everybody off. Well, now AI agents like they think terminator, pow pow, right.
Vicki Davis (19:05): How do you simply explain AI agents to teachers who are like, okay, so I don’t even understand how to use a regular AI. Now you’re talking agents?
Christie Cloud (19:14): Agentic workflow is when you are directing the AI and the AI is doing the work for you. It’s often very interconnected and it is moving toward a goal that you have set for it.
Christie Cloud (19:26): But it’s no longer just, a prompt and an output, even with iteration. I believe Dave likes to say that, you’re gonna give it arms, it’s gonna do some work. You give it the context, you give it the goals that you wanna set forth and you set it loose, and those agents are going to work on your behalf, again, saving you some time, saving you some frustration.
Dave Hinrichs (19:48): One of the things that if I were to say it right now, someone’s to explain it, I would try it this way. And I’d we often talk about student agency, right? And we get what students to be able to have some modicum of control over their learning. But we don’t say, whatever you want. We still give it the context guardrails or to harken to an agentic goal, the slash goal, right? Well, agent, agency, right? Now the AI, rather than just having a conversation, now has some agency to go achieve that goal as well. But yet you’re still giving it the context or guardrails.
Vicki Davis (20:24): So we can give it tasks. You’ve talked about one task earlier, which is okay, here’s my presentation I want to do, adapt it for ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) and FETC and NCTIES. That’s a task, that you give your agentic AI tools. For me, when it’s an agent, it’s pretty much something like, Hey, I’m I’m gonna give this to you and walk away for an hour. Claude Cowork, which is what I use, will text me on my phone and say, I do need approval for this or that it can read my email, it can draft email, it can’t send email. I am always checking that because you’re always having to monitor it. Give us some other tasks that you have your agentic AI do.
Christie Cloud (21:01): Of the things that I have instituted because I like to do weekly tech tips. I have it collect and then provide to me when I ask for it some updates, usually some Google things that are happening out there. And then it pretty much summarizes that for me, gives me some links that I can check out and helps me curate my email to send out for that. It’s been super helpful. So that again, I’m saving a lot of that time that I would be checking all of these different websites to get that. Email is also one that I have very much enjoyed using Agentic Workflow for because I can get a summary, while I’ve been gone, what’s coming, what needs my attention the most. And that’s been really helpful because I think the one thing we could all agree on as teachers is there’s never enough time. So once your AI has some context about what you do and and what’s going on, it can sort of prioritize those tasks for you. And the more it does it and the more you iterate with it, the better it gets at it. And it can give me at this point a pretty good estimation of here’s what you need to tackle first. Let’s get on this girl.
Christie Cloud (22:12): And I think email and your calendar is some of the best places to start with agentic workflow because it’s so helpful and one of those things that you can see immediate use from and immediate like, wow, This is a way it can help my daily life.
Vicki Davis (22:30): Yes, I triage my email all the time with my Claude Cowork been out of town. And it’s like, okay, one of the most important things. So, Dave, how about you?
Dave Hinrichs (22:38): Building, building, building. And just to throw one back to Christie, for ISTE she built a custom ISTE app to connect every EduGuardians session to know where to be, how to let other people join EduGuardians. ISTE has their app, but the EduGuardians had where all the members presenting. But building, for example, We have a lot of tasks in our team, in the office, trying to get them all prepped and all of that. And I said, we need this organized. So I sat down, wrote out a PRD, product requirement document, right? And my team’s like, hey, we need to grab lunch real quick and get back. Said, wait, hold on, I need to set up Codex. And I made a, everything we needed for planning for the next month. And I told it to cook, you know, go. And I would check on it and grabbed our food, came back and had built us a whole dashboard. So something like that. Whenever we need something, sometimes it’s for efficiency purposes, or sometimes it’s for brand new opportunities that were never before possible. Be a dashboard or a new tool that we might use for students or like something that’s immediate need, like you were saying with constitution day and there wasn’t anything rather than hunting down for a pre-made somebody posted it. It’s just like a custom one to our standards in our context.
Dave Hinrichs (24:00): It’s everything is just available to you when you learned the skills and that’s really the thing is it seems so out there but when you realize it’s Just an extra couple steps and when you don’t know it Ask it. I thought take a screenshot. It’ll say click here and I’ll say I don’t see it where and I see click right there It’s really that easy
Vicki Davis (24:21): And so as we talk about this, it may be slightly nerdy, but that’s okay. So my quote tokens, I use Claude Cowork, renew every Wednesday at three. So we know that doing things with AI requires what we call tokens. I tell my teachers it’s like exchange rate, sometimes a dollar’s worth this in one place and a Dollars worth that in one place. It’s kind of how tokens are. I will, like you said, Dave, orchestrate my life around, okay, I gotta be out of the office for the next four hours. What can I give my AI to do so that when I come back, I’m ready to work because it’s done the work it needs to do. I’m constantly delegating just like you are. But If you become a heavy power user like us three seem to be, can cost money. Obviously your district is paying for some things, but how do you explain tokens to teachers? Because it’s real easy to accidentally launch a task that the AI can’t do without paying a bunch more money, right?
Dave Hinrichs (25:26): Okay, when I was talking about the sort of token shortage that we’re kind of headed toward one time, was telling Christie, we kind of need to prepare for this. She’s like, what do you mean? So she asked GPT. She’s like, my gosh, it says, in reality, it’s, you being subsidized and you would really have spent probably X number of, don’t worry, we’re going to build systems where we can switch AIs.
Dave Hinrichs (25:51): Which I haven’t fully built, but I will say I probably spend more than I should. We have our education versions of GPT and Gemini and now Claude that we can bounce between. But for our personal work, we both have Gemini and the basic GPT. And I’m very thankful for OpenAI who seems to gift us bankable resets in Codex all the time. When we have a couple backed up, that’s when I sometimes will go into a big task, knowing that if it says, you’re out of tokens, I can just go reset and keep going, because it is quite frustrating. But when I explain it to people, it’s just very similar. It’s not each character is a token, little chunks of it are tokens and it adds up. And that’s how they measure the cost.
Dave Hinrichs (26:39): Everybody wants AI to be free, but it’s not. There’s a cost behind the scenes. So the more you feed into it and the more it gives you back. And so that’s why you kind of want to be intentional about it on something big. For many beginning users, they’ll never even notice it. But when you move into sort of the power user or say, hey, build this, I’m going to go to lunch and it runs for an hour. You’re going to come back. Sometimes I have come back to you’ve hit your five-hour limit.
Christie Cloud (27:06): Well, I think one of the great things about education at this moment is that there are so many opportunities offered to teachers through Claude, GPT, and Gemini as well. A lot of my teachers have asked me, you you sent out Claude recently. Like, do do we need that? Because you know, you sent out chat, we all gotten that last year. And I’m like, Well You might never need it, but it can be really useful if you do hit your tokens. And that’s one thing I like to point out. Like every once in a while, GPT is is my favorite. It’s the one I started with. It’s kind of the one that I’ve progressed with. But I use Claude if if I’m looking for something, in the moment, I often use Gemini. And I think that by using each of them a little bit, They all get a little bit of the context. And it’s really easy if you do hit your token limit that you can very quickly move that down to a light model and ask for a handoff document and boom, move that right over to another LLM and and keep rolling because, we got stuff to do.
Vicki Davis (28:11): We do. And not every model is the same. You don’t have to always use the most high powered model. Yesterday I was just looking for a refill for my pen. And I’m like, hey, I don’t like this type of ink. I want that type of ink. I just selected a lower model, because why should I, use a higher one? So part of, AI literacy now is like, picking the model And stewarding that resource of saying, hey, I might need something higher powered for this when I’m building something. So let’s talk about fact checking. Christie in the pre-show, you were talking about that, hey, I like to use Claude for fact checking. So, the last time I was playing with the Gemini, the summary at the top of Google.
Vicki Davis (28:53): About every time I do my fact check on that, it’s about a 20% error rate. I don’t like to call it hallucinatory rate because that’s kind of like letting it off. I just hallucinated, you know, like, I it’s like a human saying, I was on drugs, just like ignore what I did. Well, you’re still responsible for what you did, So that but that error rate is about 20%. One of the literacy issues that I see is that.
Vicki Davis (29:16): A lot of people take the Google search as every line is correct and they don’t fact check and they don’t go look at the links. And these teachers who spent years saying you can’t cite Wikipedia are now citing Google search. Like it’s accurate. So how do you help teachers understand fact checking, this basic literacy of what Google search has turned into and how we can help our students ensure that things are accurate?
Christie Cloud (29:43): Okay, so I can’t wait to hear Dave answer this because he has such a good metaphor for Gemini and it’s gonna be fantastic. So everybody hold on for that. But I agree with you. I often get things from Gemini that I’m like, hmm, I’m not so sure about that.
Christie Cloud (30:02): And I’ve also gotten that in ChatGPT. And I’ll be like, wait, are we sure about this? Let’s open something up. And I have a very, very strong history background. So I think this might have come pretty naturally to me. I was like, okay, we need sources and I’m gonna want something primary too. Like we’re not just going to go with what you say. I’m gonna need you to tell me where you got it, where it came from.
Christie Cloud (30:25): Can you give me some links? I want to check those out myself. And I think it’s a great way to start teaching that to students. And of course, teachers can use that as well. It’s not going to be a hundred percent accurate a hundred percent of the time. And this is one way we keep humans in the loop. You get the information.
Christie Cloud (30:49): But do you have an outside source that can verify this for you? It’s gonna save you some time. It’s gonna give you some great ideas. You can even ask it for some great places to look. But I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s ever gotten a link and clicked on it and it’s like an invalid link. Like, what?
Christie Cloud (31:06): You know, what you you didn’t even give me the link that works. So it becomes a way to teach our students the process of research as well.
Christie Cloud (31:16): Because then we can back that up with other things. We got this idea here. It looks great, but let’s make sure that we can verify that. So I think it offers us an opportunity, sort of like the silver lining on the cloud, it’s not great that these things happen, but it’s a great use case to teach our students some really important skills that are going to help them in so many ways as they move.
Christie Cloud (31:43): Through a very, media heavy world. These are important skills, even if we’re not talking AI.
Vicki Davis (31:51): It cites Reddit like a primary source. Okay, go ahead, Dave. We’re not even gonna talk Reddit
Dave Hinrichs (31:57): Wow. It’s funny because it just happened to me. But I’ll get to my Gemini example. But first, the original question was how would you explain it to others? And one of the things was brought up earlier was it’s a calculator for language, which I say all the time. And it’s predictive. I’ll say Mary had a little and they’ll go “lamb” and that’s what it’s doing just on a much more sophisticated level. And I said, if you took your taxes to an accountant and they made a mistake and you’re like, I’m in trouble, you made a mistake. Or it wasn’t me, it was the calculator. You wouldn’t be okay with that. Now it’s just the same with the language. It’s like, okay, you’re gonna iterate if you use it, but in the end, you are responsible for that output once you hit share. And that is the most important thing. Nobody gets to say, well, it wasn’t me it was AI. Well, you shared it, your name’s on it, it’s yours. Just like if you turn in some document with a calculator, your name’s on it, it’s yours. It’s a tool.
Dave Hinrichs (32:47): And so to that end, yes, fact check, ask for a source to check it yourself is the beginning. But the more you start to work with them and the different models having different personalities or the way they answer, you work with it, you start to pick up on it. That’s a much more nuanced and more advanced skill. The beginning is you’re responsible for the output. Check it, and your name’s on it. Just simple as that. Same with the calculator and math. But I say the more you start to work with it, you pick up on when it’s pattern matching and making things up. Like it’ll start talking about somebody I brought up. I’m like, you don’t even know who that is. You’re right. I was pattern matching. And sometimes I’ll even put it when I’m talking to it. Don’t pattern match. Look it up. And sometimes that you’re wrong. Your own company’s documentation says you can do this. You’re right. I assumed too much from my memory, but it’s just from working so much with it. You pick up on it when it’s pattern matching.
Dave Hinrichs (33:39): And the different personalities have different ways that it sort of expresses itself in talking to you. Gemini, I find, is a really enthusiastic Labrador who really wants to please you. And if you don’t tell it, don’t go until I tell you to go ask me questions. As soon as you start saying, hey, I want to build this, it’s like, great idea, here we go. And five pages later, your token’s like, whoa, I was just starting the conversation. So that’s why I always say give it.
Dave Hinrichs (34:03): Some context and tell it to ask you questions one at a time, because it’ll make assumptions if it dumps out five pages and three paragraphs in, that’s a wrong assumption, which colored the rest of it. And you’re like, I didn’t even read. As soon as I find the mistake, I stopped reading. This part’s wrong. So I like to teach it to work with me step by step back and forth. So I’m in charge of the word calculation, so to speak.
Vicki Davis (34:31): When I work with my AI tools, I kind of set the parameters for how I’m going to work this session. Okay, this is a turbo session. Don’t ask me questions, just do it. Or this session is when I want it granular. I want you to ask me, each step of the way. But one of the challenges I’ve found it particularly in the Google summary at the top, is that in its desire to be simple.
Vicki Davis (34:52): It will mix apples and oranges together. I did a simple search on what’s the current hallucination rate in artificial intelligence. And it was mixing all kinds of research reports that were measuring different things. So in some ways, it becomes even more important for us to teach students to be researchers and how you look at data and can you combine this type of data with another type of data?
Vicki Davis (35:20): So that they are wise and literate about how to analyze those primary sources. So what are some of the things that both of you are telling your teachers, okay, in the age of AI, you and your students need to know how to do blank.
Christie Cloud (35:35): So the first thing that I tell my teachers is that you need to be careful what you give it. I think we all remember the horror stories when it first came out of people putting, complete address lists and IEPs (Individualized Education Programs) and and things like that in there. And I don’t ever want that to be on my watch. I’m like you be very careful. And we’re very careful even in a district in as a school, like okay, this is in a controlled environment, but it is best practice for you to still remember, don’t add these things. That’s the first thing that I always start with. I don’t ever want to hear, I thought it would be okay. Like If it makes you wonder, should I put this in here? I like to err on the side of caution there. Let’s not. If you have to wonder about it, let’s go ahead and leave it off. The second thing I really want is for them not to be scared of it. Like, okay, you haven’t used it before, but you can develop these skills. And it really is just a back and forth conversation. And teachers are excellent talkers. I mean, we talk For hours at a time with our students about so many things. And we’re naturally learners. This is just another part of that. So it’s new, but it’s not out of any of our wheelhouses. So I like to, put a little, be careful what you do with it, but please play around with it. I think just like our students.
Christie Cloud (37:04): Anytime that you have a new tool or a new toy, like play with it, see what it can do, do some fun things with it. Your first thing doesn’t have to be to build your unit plan. Like just give it a few things, see how it does, see if you notice any of the errors that, it’ll give you an idea how this is going and it’ll teach you some of the things to look for as you move forward. And then I’m just like.
Christie Cloud (37:27): Don’t be afraid to try things because you’re never gonna know if it can do it if you don’t ask. So just ask it. This is what I imagine. Maybe this is an example I have that I spent so much of my time doing. Like escape rooms are a big unlock for me for the classroom because I have spent literally hours putting them together in Google Forms so that they worked correctly. And now Here’s the context. Here’s what I want it to do. And it just gives me something that that just needs a little proofreading in such a short amount of time. So that’s my other thing. Don’t be scared of it. Make sure you’re being careful with it and see all of the things that it can do. What are you using the most of your time for in your classroom creating? Let’s see if we can hand some of that off to AI to make your job a little bit easier.
Christie Cloud (38:21): Ask it questions when you have no idea what’s going on, or it’s using words that you know Dave uses and you’re like, this isn’t in my vocabulary. Ask it. What does that mean? I don’t understand. Explain it to me like I’m five. And you’re gonna learn and you’re gonna get better. And your outputs are also gonna get better.
Vicki Davis (38:42): That’s great. Dave?
Dave Hinrichs (38:43): I like to kind of approach this from a district level perspective as someone who is help writing the guidelines and getting PD (professional development) out there. And I will say.
Dave Hinrichs (38:55): Shout out to NCDPI (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction), they have provided stellar guidance for our state that’s really balanced and saying we need to move forward with this, but didn’t just say you’re on your own. And I really appreciate them for that. And we’ve matched our guidance to theirs for the most part, whenever possible. But I’m often in a position where I am providing PD to others who will provide PD, sometimes direct and sometimes not.
Dave Hinrichs (39:19): What I’ve found is that there is a range in every single room. Sometimes I’m asked to come in and say, provide PD to this group about this, but I still say, what is your level? I think we’re moving forward. We’re going to definitely need to provide the same thing we ask of our teachers and students, very differentiated experiences to help them move along because every single room is so diverse. Have people who are out there.
Dave Hinrichs (39:46): Pushing it and other people who are still kind of, I don’t know about this. So getting to that point of, where are you at and helping you move? But we have this year started moving toward some direct student use, which we’ve really known that’s had to come, but we tried to do it measured. I wish we could have got there sooner, but we now made teacher shareable.
Dave Hinrichs (40:09): Google Gemini notebooks to them. Teachers are more comfortable with that because they’re providing the sources and a lot of very excited about that. We’ve now allowed Gems to be shareable with teachers, have a little bit of control over the output and how that’s going to work. The creation tools like Canva and Adobe Express, they’ve had that ability, which I never want to take a creation tool out of a student’s hands and want more. So I’m happy about that. And then, you know, just As a state, have an AI class that students can take now through the CTE (Career and Technical Education) department. And we’ve partnered with somebody called PlayLab who is providing student AI to build with that. So we are beginning to move that. Think the big goal is going to be always time, as always for any teachers, and time in front of them in a differentiated capacity, which is another challenge. But I think the biggest goal is finding where they are, moving them to what they can do so that they are comfortable using it with students, either as a tool or teaching students to use it, because we are going to need, for so many reasons, to be able to teach them to use it responsibly, ethically, as a partner and not something to cognitively offload or just think of Completing the task because that isn’t it it’s the process of learning and iterating with it, which is a very important skill
Vicki Davis (41:32): So you brought up the word cognitive offloading. Now we know that there are those who want to approach this like every other thing we’ve seen. Okay, just detect the AI. And we’ve seen, the short story that won awards that everybody said, we’ve run this AI detector and it was, AI detected. And then the author said, no, no, no, and it wasn’t. And this word AI slop, I mean, there are parents all over social media. I don’t want the school to use an AI slop. Which that word is just thrown around. But detection and the AI slop or anti-AI slop, there’s some people who are under no circumstances am I gonna ever even touch AI, which ha, they’ve been using spell check, I promise you.
Vicki Davis (42:13): So these particular topics, which are hot buttons right now, when teachers come and talk to you about AI detection or when parents push back about AI slop, how do you handle the that pushback?
Dave Hinrichs (42:26): I’m very thankful that our guidance is avoid AI detectors. And I will give similar examples and how it over-identifies neurodivergent students or ESL (English as a Second Language) students. Let’s, another topic, but let’s not even put that in. And try to change the conversation from rather than continuing to act like this world isn’t changing. It was the same thing with Google. You know, I put the teach like Google exists sign on my desk 12 years ago. It’s still there. I can take the camera to it. But I think it’s now time to change it to teach like AI exists Now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to be very intentional about making sure the students are doing the thinking that they can defend and explain.
Dave Hinrichs (43:17): The process as well as the product, but it doesn’t need to be a game of gotcha. It never did. That’s not what anybody went into teaching for was to play the game of gotcha. It’s let’s set up. Maybe the backtrack. I don’t like to have the conversation of trying to hide the fact that you used AI.
Dave Hinrichs (43:40): Let’s make it out in the open a conversation. Here’s our chart. You know, a lot of people have those. Have those as well. Zero AI, full AI and everywhere in between. Make that explicit in your assignment, in your activities, in your learning objectives. And even model when you’ve used it, we’ve tried to do the MPD. Hey, this was used for the images. It’s not a, don’t want anybody to know like, well, actually this day and age is kind of silly not to have it as a partner.
Dave Hinrichs (44:07): And there’s a lot talk about the AI proofing assessment. And there’s some value to that. It’s almost as if AI becomes part of the assignment or even the assignment along with it. It’s no longer a gotcha. It’s just this is now a tool. And I think a lot of tools sort of absorbed in very slowly with that fear.
Vicki Davis (44:25): Where are you with this whole AI detection, AI slop conversation, Christie?
Christie Cloud (44:30): So this is where I really like to bring in the calculator. There are definitely moments where the students don’t need AI, that it should be their original thoughts. And that’s where the zero to infinity comes in, really, useful in are we gonna use AI? Is it gonna be not in this assignment? But When calculators were were first out, people had all sorts of complaints about those. Are the kids really learning? It is true, students need basic math skills before we put a calculator in their hand where it does it for them. Students need basic grammar skills, they need basic research skills before we put AI in front of them. But just like calculators aren’t going anywhere.
Christie Cloud (45:16): AI isn’t going to go anywhere. This is part of our new Teaching reality whether it’s one we agree with or not. So it does need to become okay, they need some basic skills, but they also need to have exposure to this. And I think the calculator is is such a great, callback to this. Like we’ve been here before, friends. We have done this before. And if you look back at so many articles, people were losing their minds over that too. So one day it’s gonna be something new. There’s always gonna be these things that have people, just calling to the mountains and this is happening and it’s the end of the world. And it, you know, very rarely is. So let’s take a breath. Let’s see when we can teach those core skills, when we can introduce this, and when we can make it useful.
Vicki Davis (46:09): Some things that I find refreshing and just wonderful about this conversation is that so much of what we’ve talked about is very, very human. You know, Christie, how you and Dave are working together, each appreciating each each person’s strengths and the stories you tell. And explaining AI is so much about telling a story, of okay, this is this is how this works. And and it’s still about learning Now I’m gonna share one of my big worries just of where I am is is looking at it as a teacher and talking to students who have graduated from high school in the last few years. So there’s this new word, AI regret. And it’s coming from, okay, Reddit, Dave. Okay, Dave laughs at my Reddit jokes because we know that AI and Google search is really emphasizing Reddit right now for some reason.
Vicki Davis (46:56): But there are people graduating from college right now who were in college when ChatGPT came out and basically are admitting every single thing that I’ve done in college. I let AI do for me. I’m now applying for jobs that I don’t know how to do. I was talking on a trip I went on recently with someone in the medical profession who said, Yeah, our problem is is that the board testing is going down.
Vicki Davis (47:21): Because they’ve used AI so much that people who are trying to get into the medical profession, they didn’t really learn it. My thought is there’s this five to eight year period, maybe, maybe 10, where we’re trying to work out artificial intelligence and how it works and how it impacts learning. We know that depending on which report you see, that 80 to 90 percent of students are using AI.
Vicki Davis (47:44): We know that typically about thirty percent of schools admit to teaching AI. So what this speaks to is we have a massive generation of kids figuring it out by themselves. Hopefully not kids in your schools, right? Because you’ve really made it part of what they’re doing, but a massive number that are trying to figure it out.
Vicki Davis (48:04): A massive number of universities that are trying to figure it out. The pedagogical approach has to change. The testing approach has to change. How we do the the products, all this has to change. But in the meantime, you have all these kids in the education system right now and their learning can’t wait. And somebody asked me, Well, who are gonna be the superstars of tomorrow? And I said, Well, probably your B students, the ones that are actually doing the work, because AI can make higher grades than the average.
Vicki Davis (48:31): High school junior and senior, I believe. So I want you both just to kind of do your own take. What do we tell parents now? What do we tell students now so that they can steward their own education with integrity, even if those kids who are using AI heavily may actually make higher grades than them. Because that’s where we’re sitting right now. And it’s a hard sell to a kid to say, I’d rather you make a B and actually know it than to make an A and get into the college of your dreams. I wish they didn’t have to make that choice, but it is a hard place right now. It’s kind of this big picture of integrity in the AI age, actually learning up here with our brain, which admittedly may not be able to test as highly as an AI tool.
Christie Cloud (49:21): I think integrity is gonna be one of one of the key words there. Schools everywhere are very testing centered now. And that is something that does bleed down to our students. If this is what we value, they have learned that’s what we value, then that’s what they are going to want to achieve. And it’s got to be those hard conversations. They’ve got to happen at home. They’ve got to happen in the classroom. And the thing that I think teachers are so good at that we tell our students, like you are more than a test. It is a snapshot of you at one moment in time. And it may not be the best snapshot of you, but it is your snapshot. And that I think goes back to your agency and your ownership of your learning. And yes, shortcuts are easier, but here’s what happens when you take those shortcuts. It’s like you’ve got to know the rules before you break them, right? So it’s important for you to know how to do these things before you go off and try to use AI to do it for you. You’re it’s it’s never gonna be a hundred percent. So I think it it involves a lot of tough questions and a lot of tough answers at home and at school. But it’s A process, and that’s exactly what learning is. And I mean, no one wants to use their students as the test subjects, but it’s not just our students that are test subjects right now. I think we all kind of are because we are in this early stage. How are we going to adapt? How are we going to change? What role are we going to allow it to have? And Some of those decisions we don’t even get to make. Some of them are made by the company you work for. Some of them are made by the district you teach for. And those guidelines are put in place and we adhere to those, but it’s still a test phase for all of us. And having grace, I think, is another thing because we’re not always gonna get it right every time. So understanding that there’s gonna be some problems, there’s gonna be some bumps in the road, and allowing each other the the grace to to try again and and get this right.
Vicki Davis (51:41): Dave?
Dave Hinrichs (51:41): We have a situation as a byproduct of the high stakes testing that gets put out there with report cards that emphasizes the final answer. And oftentimes in racing to make sure we’ve covered standards to get on that test, we’ve created a situation where it’s the final answer. And AI has flipped Bloom’s (Bloom’s Taxonomy) on its head.
Dave Hinrichs (52:04): And you can get the final answer. Not as surely on that test, although I do believe someday if we do this right, we will have an AI active, AI inactive part of the test showing that we’ve taught to interact with it just like we have calculator active, calculator inactive. Just that alone has created that all that matters is completion.
Dave Hinrichs (52:27): And the right answer I’m a John Hattie fanboy and we know self-reported grades and the developing of metacognition, that’s where it’s at. That’s where the learning’s at. We’ve come across students who you can say are reflective and metacognitive and others where things just sort of happen to them. And developing that metacognition and creating, rose-colored glasses maybe, but just a world in which the way we learn becomes what’s your source on that just because we have to be that way. It doesn’t become rude. It becomes expected. And we talk about process and like, how might we do that? Well, AI itself, I mean, just the fact that we have that to be able to give the feedback and that alone could maybe help and keep the teacher able to have those conversations of the metacognition. That systemic approach, it’s a different how’s it gonna happen or will it? But I think teachers are amazing and they’ll adapt and they’ll see the right thing. And they will eventually get to that point of this is something I can use to help because I’m never gonna bet against the teacher sees the right thing. They always figure that kind of thing out and they’re gonna.
Vicki Davis (53:36): So we’ve been having a conversation with Christie Cloud, founding member of EduGuardians, and Dave Hinrichs and they have a chapter in The Educators’ AI Guide 2027. We’ve had a far-reaching conversation bringing you to the current frontier of where we are moving past prompt engineering, talking about agentic AI.
Vicki Davis (53:58): And wrestling with the questions of what does education look like and what should it look like in the AI age? There aren’t easy answers, but we should all be having these conversations. So thank you, Christie and Dave, for having that conversation with me today.
Christie Cloud (54:13): Thank you so much for having us.
Dave Hinrichs (54:15): Thank you for having us.
Announcer (54:16): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (54:19): So, what do we take away from this interview with Christie and Dave? First, I hate to say this, but stop worrying about prompt engineering. Talk to AI instead. Have it interview you. Dave’s unlock is simple. Tell the AI to ask you questions one at a time so you can steer it and you don’t get a wall of text. Second, you don’t always need a Ferrari. Christie’s point is that part of AI literacy now is being able to pick the right model for the job.
Vicki Davis (54:48): And saving the powerful ones for when you’re really building something.
Vicki Davis (54:51): Third, you put your name on this. As Dave put it, you wouldn’t accept if your accountant said, your taxes are wrong because the calculator made a mistake. Okay. That accountant is using the calculator. Likewise, if you share it, if you create it, you own it, so check it.
Vicki Davis (55:12): And one quick heads up, because Dave mentioned it in this conversation. If you build a custom GPT for your classroom, and I did it for my AP (Advanced Placement) Computer Science Principles class, OpenAI is retiring them after October 26, 2026. And existing custom GPTs will stop working on December 11th. OpenAI is replacing them with something it calls plugins.
Vicki Davis (55:39): A plugin bundles three things, your instructions, your reference files, and the apps you connect. But this doesn’t happen automatically. If you made a GPT, go to My GPTs and click migrate to Plugin. Your instructions and knowledge files come over. Custom actions, your old conversations, and your sharing settings do not. And here’s one that will catch teachers. If your students use a GPT you shared with them, They will lose access on December 11th unless you migrate it and share the new plugin with them. If you use someone else’s GPT, check with whoever made it. And lots of people do use custom GPTs. Now, I use Claude more than I use ChatGPT now. And Claude uses connectors and skills, and they are somewhat similar. In fact, Claude calls its bundles of skills and connectors plugins also.
Vicki Davis (56:34): So the whole industry is sort of moving in the same direction that Dave described. From a chatbot to an assistant with instructions, files, and tools that it can actually use.
Vicki Davis (56:45): So you’re not constantly having to start over from the very beginning when you’re asking it to do something. I will link to OpenAI’s migration page in the show notes. So here’s your challenge. The next time you open any AI tool, before you ask for anything, type ask me questions one at a time until you understand what I need. Then create a plan and do not start the plan until I approve it first.
Vicki Davis (57:14): Whether your school looks more like New York City this year or more like North Carolina, the question underneath is the same one Christie and Dave kept coming back to: Are our students still doing the thinking? AI will keep changing. And good teaching, the human part, is still ours.
Vicki Davis (57:30): You’ll find links to Christie and Dave, The Educators’ AI Guide 2027, and everything else we mentioned at coolcatteacher.com/nextai. I’m Vicki Davis and you’ve been listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. See you later, Educator.
Announcer (57:52): Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Follow the Cool Cat Teacher everywhere you connect.
Dave Hinrichs and Christie Cloud are the co-founders of CraveEdventures, a professional learning initiative dedicated to creating joyful, practical PD experiences that help educators reimagine what’s possible in their classrooms.
Dave is the Director of Digital Platforms & Pedagogy for Johnston County Public Schools, bringing leadership experience in digital learning and personalized instruction. Christie is an Instructional Technology Facilitator at Boone Trail Elementary in Harnett County and an adjunct professor at Thomas University. She is also a founding member of EduGuardians.
With over four decades of combined experience in education, Dave and Christie have presented at ISTE, FETC, TCEA, GaETC, and NCTIES. Christie has also co-hosted Curicon 2023 and Week of AI 2024. Their sessions are known for blending research, humor, hands-on exploration, and actionable strategies that educators can implement immediately.
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