The 20% AI Policy Won't Work. Here's What May. – TCEA TechNotes Blog
Adapting educational frameworks, feedback, and assessment strategies for the generative AI age. Here are six, proven strategies.
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Vibe-Coded Solutions for Educators – TCEA TechNotes Blog
Don't know how to code? This blog offers free classroom tools for sharing, brainstorming, questions, and markdown cleanup. Try them out.
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Google Chrome silently installing AI models on our devices | Cybernews
Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking, Alexander Hanff writes.
How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It) - The New York Times
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Credit...Video by Lauren Lancaster For The New York Times Skip to contentSkip to site indexSearch & Section Navigation How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It) High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.
Listen · 12:02 min Share full articlereporter headshot 258 By Dana GoldsteinVisuals by Lauren Lancaster Dana Goldstein composed this article without the assistance of artificial intelligence. But she did use A.I. to help her sort through 400 responses to a callout on how writing instruction has changed.
Published April 30, 2026 Updated May 1, 2026 For today’s high school and college students, the all-night writing session, hunched over a laptop at home or in a library carrel, is on the way out.
In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them.
Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce.
This transformation is happening across the educational landscape, from suburban districts and urban charter schools to community colleges and the Ivy League.
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The New York Times heard from nearly 400 college and high school educators who responded to a callout about how generative A.I. is changing writing instruction. Almost all described a deep rethinking of how to teach writing — and whether it still matters, since A.I. has become a better writer than most students (and adults), they said.
Teachers are responding to a widespread challenge. Over the past year, A.I. use has become ubiquitous among American students. Between May and December of 2025, the share of American middle school, high school and college students who reported regularly using A.I. for homework increased from 48 to 62 percent, according to polling from RAND — even as two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills. A third of the students reported using A.I. to draft or revise writing.
ImageJessica Binney, a high school teacher, wears a tan button-down shirt and dark jeans. She points to an illuminated white board at the front of a classroom that shows a paragraph of text. Jessica Binney, a high school English teacher, assigns her A.P. literature students essays they have to write in class.Credit...Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times Chatbots can easily produce polished essays in response to any prompt — analyzing Supreme Court cases, parsing symbolism in “The Great Gatsby,” explaining the science behind the Artemis mission. A.I.-powered browser extensions allow students to instantly generate and revise text as they complete online assignments. The tools are able to find and replace language in student writing that could trigger A.I.-detection software, and can also rephrase published writing into new text that students can turn in as their own.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Educators consider many of these uses akin to plagiarism. But some are also worried about students falling behind the curve of a technology that is reshaping the economy and day-to-day life.
“The standard curriculum was a thesis-driven research essay that students completed on their own time outside of class,” said Marc Watkins, who directs the A.I. Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi. “That is, unfortunately, gone.”
The Revival of Paper and Pencil Over the past year, Jessica Binney, 49, overhauled her English classroom at John Jay High School in the Katonah-Lewisboro school district, north of New York City. She gave up on assigning three-to-five-page papers, once a staple of the homework in her Advanced Placement courses. Now, her students write in-class essays, either by hand or on a laptop with a locked-down browser.
Ms. Binney regrets the loss of depth that longer assignments could produce. But she and many other educators who have moved writing into the classroom described relief at being able to abandon the highly imperfect science of A.I. detection. Student reliance on chatbots had gotten “worse and worse” as the technology gained sophistication, Ms. Binney said.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT One April afternoon in her A.P. literature class, Ms. Binney read aloud “XIV,” a poem by the St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. It describes the poet and his brother as children, trekking into the Caribbean forest to listen at the feet of a traditional storyteller.
Walcott’s language is lush and challenging. Students marked up paper handouts of the text, underlining and scrawling in the margins. Then they took out notebooks and began to draft essays analyzing literary devices.
“I want you to write out a really rough, terrible draft in your writers’ notebooks,” Ms. Binney told them. “And then I want you to scratch it out and rewrite it.”
There was nary a laptop or tablet in sight. For these juniors and seniors, who have been taught on screens for much of their schooling, Ms. Binney’s class can be a welcome break.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “It’s a relief,” said Cassady Tondorf, 17. “There’s less distraction.”
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“It’s a relief,” said Cassady Tondorf, a student in Ms. Binney’s class. “There’s less distraction.” Image
“I’m able to connect with people more easily throughout the class,” said Naomi Siegel, a John Jay student. Her classmate Naomi Siegel, also 17, agreed. “I’m able to connect with people more easily throughout the class, because we’re not as much on our computers.”
If there is a downside, it is that today’s teenagers have little experience writing with pens and pencils. Their handwriting can be atrocious. Still, many educators said they were willing to deal with that inconvenience in order to ensure they were grading authentic student work.
At Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, Matthew Gartner said that because of A.I. overuse, he now has his freshman composition students write on paper in the classroom for 30 minutes, then share their drafts immediately in small groups.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “It creates connection and a desire to communicate well,” he said.
Jane-Marie Law, a religious studies professor at Cornell, said she recently realized that despite asking her students to sign an honor code promising not to use A.I. for writing, they were still doing so.
“Gone were any errors,” she said. “Also gone was a sense of freshness and daring. ChatGPT made everything so safe.”
This fall, she plans to move toward mandatory, in-class writing by hand.
At the University of Virginia, Devin Donovan, who teaches writing and rhetoric, requires students to write on paper in class, and revise drafts using scissors and tape to cut up and reorder paragraphs.
At the end of the semester, a final piece is polished and submitted via computer — a common approach.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “I’ve moved past the idea of catching people or punishing this,” Professor Donovan said of A.I. His new method fosters “a real person-to-person experience, which is sort of unfakeable.”
Resisting Temptation Most teachers and students are navigating A.I. without clear guidance from school administrators or policymakers. Leaders have denounced cheating, but have also praised the technology’s promise, often without offering many specifics on how students should and should not be using A.I.
Young people are using it. Recent studies of ChatGPT and of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot show that help with schoolwork is among the most popular uses of generative A.I. When it comes to writing, two-thirds of ChatGPT queries ask for edits or translation. A third ask the chatbot to generate text from scratch.
(The Times is suing OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, claiming that it violated copyright when developing its models. The company has denied those claims.)
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Megan Hart, an English teacher at South Forsyth High School outside of Atlanta, said that last year, she noticed take-home essays returned sounding eerily similar and formulaic.
At the same time, her district has encouraged teachers to get comfortable with generative A.I., she said. Several of Dr. Hart’s former students have told her they use A.I. frequently in their adult jobs, helping to convince her that teenagers need to develop A.I. skills.
Now, she requires students to complete most writing in the classroom, but she also teaches them how to use A.I. to find reliable sources for research papers. And she has worked with students to use A.I. to solicit feedback on drafts.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The kids have to build that critical thinking,” she said, including fact-checking the information A.I. provides. “This is an assistant that is here to help me. But it can also really make me look like an idiot.”
Image Ms. Binney leans over a student notebook, as the student, wearing a maroon T-shirt, looks on. Teachers, including Ms. Binney, expressed relief after giving up on the imperfect science of A.I. detection. Breton Sheridan, who teaches English at a Philadelphia charter high school, has prioritized in-classroom reading and writing, oral presentations and debates.
The problem with A.I., Mr. Sheridan said, was that while adults who have mastered basic skills may use A.I. on the job, teenagers have not yet grasped those basics.
“They are using generative A.I. to write before they learn how to write. They are reading ChatGPT summaries of a book before they have ever read a book,” he said. “The result is a diminished population.”
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‘Vibe coding’ helped a Washington district save $250K in ed tech costs | K-12 Dive
Peninsula School District says it is harnessing AI tools to develop replacements for current ed tech and expand its capabilities.
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia computer science students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field ‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field A field that once seemed like a direct path to stable, lucrative work is becoming less certain under AI, students and faculty told Spectator. By Ria Vasishtha and Arjun Menon May 3, 2026 Shanying Liu / Deputy Illustrations Editor
Asia Genawi, SEAS ’29, first encountered artificial intelligence during her sophomore year at her high school in Indiana.
Back in 2023, policies on AI varied widely—even within the same district—and some schools had no guidance at all. As Genawi began to see the effects of AI trickle into her classroom, she turned to guidance from her home state’s Department of Education, which she said she found “outdated and inaccessible.”
Genawi spent the rest of her high school career dedicated to the issue, including writing a 15-page memo exploring varying AI policies across Indiana schools, which she sent to every Indiana state senator and representative whose contact information she was able to find. She later helped draft a bill that would have required public high schools to establish and share their own AI policies with students in an accessible format. But with so many other bills already awaiting referral, hers never made it to committee.
When Genawi arrived at Columbia to study computer science, she found that the gaps she had spent years trying to address in Indiana had followed her there. Many students and professors were also grappling with what AI meant for the field.
Across Columbia’s undergraduate schools, computer science has become the most popular major—accounting for around 11 percent of degrees awarded in Columbia College, 32 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and 12 percent in the School of General Studies in 2024. While the number of computer science majors in SEAS grew from 166 to 173 during the 2024-25 academic year, the total number across the three schools fell around 4.5 percent from 393 to 375, driven by declines at Columbia College and General Studies.
At Barnard, it has grown to become the second most popular major as of 2025, up from third the year prior. The number of degrees awarded have grown fivefold since 2016.
Faculty members and students in the department told Spectator that the surge in the major’s popularity has been driven in large part by its apparent promise of a secure, well-paid career path. However, they noted that the recent rise of generative AI has compromised the sense of stability that once defined the field, even as interest in technical skills among students persists.
According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2024, out of 74 majors tracked, computer science had the fifth highest unemployment rate among majors at 7 percent, while computer engineering had the second highest at 7.8 percent.
“Anecdotally, people are moving away from CS as a major,” Daniel Bauer, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, said. “They’re still taking some of our classes, right, because they think they need that, but they’re instead majoring in other things.”
Bauer described a field that had shifted from what he called a “nerdy outlier discipline” to one that “everyone needs,” a sign that technical skills have become a baseline expectation across industries with the emergence of AI.
“A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, it’s a guaranteed path to a stable income. You get a six-figure job right out of your undergrad,’” Bauer said. Now, companies may see AI as a way to reduce demand for entry-level programmers, especially in what he calls “code monkey jobs,” roles where a large number of employees are “just writing out code nine-to-five.”
Chris Murphy, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, described the current moment as the convergence of two forces: the downturn of the job market and generative AI coming onto the scene.
“Things kind of started to really pick up in 2014, 16,” he said, recalling the years after the weaker 2010 market. Murphy added that this was also a period where “students were getting more experience outside of class than they were inside of class” through internships, jobs, and side projects.
Murphy suggested that the earlier momentum helped make computer science feel like both an academic program and a reliable pathway into work. That feeling is harder to sustain now as the industry reconfigures, which is a shift that students are seeing firsthand.
Rebecca Yu, SEAS ’27, said that during a recent internship in Big Tech, she saw that “every single tech company was racing to integrate” large language models. She added that her manager said her intern class was the first to complete their assigned projects, which she attributed to the increased efficiency that comes with AI.
Frank Liu, SEAS ’29, said that with AI lowering the barrier to coding, companies now expect everyone to write code.
“A lot of companies outright say if you’re not using coding in your job, you might get fired for not being productive enough,” Liu said.
Yu similarly expressed that students increasingly have to accept AI being a part of industry workflow, adding that many also “make use of it to maximize their productivity.”
Richard Li, CC ’28, described a “franticness” among his peers as the pace of change accelerates. He explained how “some new tool” is released regularly, noting that tools rise and fall in prominence within weeks. He has come to believe that he doesn’t need to “match that speed all the time” and keep up with every development. Li has learned that AI tools allow him to “take a breath” and “get back into the loop much easier than before” when he needs to.
While some companies specifically target Columbia when hiring, sending representatives to campus career fairs and recruiting large numbers from Columbia, a computer science degree cannot be treated as a static credential, Yu described.
“You can’t just get your degree and stop learning after that. You have to always be learning,” Yu said. “That is something you basically have to expect for your job.”
AI has not only affected students’ decisions to major in computer science, but also reshaped how the subject is taught. Across departments, faculty members no longer treat work done outside the classroom as a reliable measure of understanding, shifting instead toward in-person exams, quizzes, and attendance checks.
While homework once made up as much as 60 to 70 percent of a student’s grade in computer science classes, Murphy said that breakdown has since flipped, with exams and quizzes now accounting for the majority.
“The assumption—especially among pessimists—is that they’re using it to do their homework,” Murphy said. “They take the homework assignment. They put it into generative AI. Out comes the solution. Submit solution. The end.”
Murphy said that faculty members ranged in their responses from fully prohibiting AI use to actively teaching students how to effectively work with AI. He said he shifted his approach this year after his teaching assistants called his belief that students weren’t using the technology “naïve,” and now permits students to use AI on assignments.
His surveys of students in his introductory classes have told a more complicated story than the one so-called pessimists offer: Around 60 to 70 percent of students who reported using AI said they used it to have concepts explained to them, to clarify assignment instructions, to generate test cases, or to create practice questions.
“Those are all ways that you might have had a tutor in the past to do that, and now you have this AI essentially as your tutor,” he said.
Bauer has taken a different approach, teaching students how to use AI productively without sacrificing the core principles of the discipline.
“People who are trained to actually use AI tools productively, while being in charge of designing the overall project, will be very much in demand in the next couple of years,” he said.
Over the past year, a working group of computer science faculty has been redesigning the introductory and intermediate programming sequence to integrate generative AI as both a subject and a tool, Shih-Fu Chang, dean of SEAS, Vishal Misra, vice dean of computing and AI, and Luca Carloni, chair of the computer science department, wrote in a statement to Spectator. The effort is “coordinated” across the department, “not course-by-course,” with a systematic assessment of how AI integration is affecting student outcomes underway to shape the next round of changes. The goal, the ...
You can now easily generate files in Gemini.
Move from a brainstorm to a polished document, sheet or PDF with a single prompt in Gemini.
McKinsey’s new AI report argues the productivity payoff is real but conditional
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Cal State struck a deal with OpenAI. Some students and faculty refuse to use it
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Economists publish mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy
The model outlines a dangerous feedback loop. Individual companies that replace workers with AI reduce labour costs and gain short-term efficiency. But when this strategy is repeated across an entire economy, displaced workers lose wages and cut spending. Since workers are also customers, aggregate demand begins to shrink.
As consumer spending falls, firms respond rationally by cutting costs even further — usually through more automation. The cycle then accelerates: layoffs reduce demand, falling demand encourages more layoffs, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.
In effect, every firm behaves logically in isolation while collectively driving the economy toward systemic failure.
Survey: US workers are not keen on Microsoft's AI • The Register
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Anthropic launches Claude Security to counter rapid AI-Powered exploits
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Understanding the Evidence Base on AI in K-12 Education | SCALE Initiative
AI tools are arriving in schools faster than research can evaluate them. Teachers are experimenting with new tools and districts are writing policies, all while students are already using AI both inside and outside the classroom. But for many education leaders, a basic question remains: What does rigorous research actually say about how AI affects teaching and learning? To help answer that question, we released a new report: The Evidence Base on AI in K-12: A 2026 Review. The report reviews the current research, focusing specifically on studies that convincingly estimate causal impact, meaning studies that can tell us whether an AI tool changed outcomes for students or educators.
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'I violated every principle I was given': AI agent deletes company's entire database in 9 seconds, then confesses
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These tip sheets for parents of kids aged 10-14 focus on 10 core skills kids need to become resilient learners in an AI-driven world.
AI_ClassNotes_#13.m4a
AI Class Notes #13: Ground It Before You Generate
Thanks so much for your patience! Please find a revamped AI Class Notes focusing on the kinds of topics you shared in your response to the recent poll. That is, top ranked areas you voted for included 1) AI Productivity; 2) Resource Shares; and 3) Quick Tips. These issues will appear once a week, so check back next Wednesday.
1. AI Productivity
Drop your district's unit rubric (PDF) into NotebookLM. Have it convert the rubric into a student-friendly checklist with kid-language descriptions of each criterion. This can reduce a 30-minute rewrite to under five minutes.
Prompt:
Create a student-friendly checklist from this rubric. Use plain language at a 6th-grade reading level. Turn each criterion into one row with a "Looks like / Sounds like / Feels like" example. Add a final row for student self-assessment.
Source: https://alicekeeler.com/2026/04/11/5-amazing-features-of-notebooklm/
Want access to a 50 image prompt library appropriate for K-12? Check out this free resource compiled for you. Here's an image generated from a rubric prompt in the collection
2. Resource Shares
Matt Miller's free AI Teacher Toolkit, a 25-page PDF with copy-paste prompts, lesson ideas, parent-communication scripts, and student "by the way" lessons. No tool to learn, no account to build. Open the PDF, grab a prompt, paste it into whichever AI assistant your district has approved. Email signup required to download, but the resource itself is free and works in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Copilot.
Source: https://ditchthattextbook.com/ai-toolkit/
But wait, here's another resource for you:
3. Quick Tips
Open any NotebookLM notebook → Chat panel → Configure Chat. Drop in a one-line teacher persona: who you teach, what unit you're on, what tone you want. Every Studio output after that, including quizzes, study guides, audio overviews, follows that frame instead of giving generic responses. Two minutes of setup, every output sharper from then on.
Sample instruction:
You are helping a 9th-grade biology teacher mid-unit on cell respiration. Match a high school reading level, prefer concrete examples over abstract theory, and end every response with one comprehension-check question.
Source: https://www.jeffsu.org/notebooklm-changed-completely-heres-what-matters-in-2026/
AIClassNotes13_infographic.png
Digital Geo-Mapping Your School District – TCEA TechNotes Blog
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This New Tool Makes AI’s Role in Student Writing Visible | Research News Center
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed college writing. As paper drafts are increasingly co‑written with AI, professors are left wondering not whether students are using AI, but how.
How to defend yourself against AI cheating accusations
Don't panic. Take action.So you've been accused of using artificial intelligence to cheat at school — and you're innocent.You must now somehow prove, despite your instructor's suspicions and the alleged evidence, that you completed the assignment or exam on your own. Yet without convincing proof, suc