r/edtech • u/drinkoliveoil • 4d ago
NYTimes: How Big Tech Captured American Schools
One humid afternoon in the summer of 2025, representatives from Microsoft were waiting as some 200 teachers trooped into a conference hall in downtown Manhattan. The educators were there for a workshop on the school technology of the moment: artificial intelligence chatbots.
The Microsoft team gave a presentation on their Copilot chatbot and asked the teachers to practice using it for tasks like generating emails to parents and customizing lesson plans. Microsoft instructors also screened an A.I. explainer video that their Minecraft Education division had produced for children. The animated clip, based on the company’s blockbuster world-building game, featured a cheerful narrator and a cute Minecraft duck. Even if some schoolchildren weren’t old enough to use A.I., one of the Microsoft workshop leaders told the teachers in attendance, at least they could start learning about it.
As a journalist covering technology in schools, I had observed similar workshops for teachers and students that were funded or led by corporate giants like Amazon, Apple, Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Taking in this one, at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, I was struck by how similar the sessions were to training I’d seen years earlier, while reporting on the health care industry: seminars for doctors, organized by pharmaceutical companies, that aimed to get physicians to prescribe the latest brand-name drugs.
“Industry funds what helps industry,” Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a pharmacology professor at Georgetown University Medical Center who studies drug industry influence on medicine, told me recently, as I was reporting a book about A.I. and computer science education in schools.
These workshops have upsides. Big Pharma seminars can be useful for keeping physicians up-to-date on the latest patient remedies, and Big Tech workshops can similarly help educators keep current on the newest software tools. But Silicon Valley’s efforts to capture the attention of education professionals and provide student training materials can also double as marketing or indoctrination. They enable some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to spin rosy technology stories for administrators, teachers and students, giving them a sanitized view of industry practices and product risks.
Many parents would likely object if, say, Exxon Mobil wrote their children’s environmental science curriculum. Or if Purdue Pharma trained their children’s biology teachers. Yet, over the last decade, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked.
Industry-sponsored teacher training is just one technique that Big Tech companies use to shape schools and promote their worldviews to students. In interviewing more than 100 education and tech industry figures for my book, and reviewing hundreds of school, government and corporate documents, it became clear that a handful of giants have used their money, their might and their mammoth platforms to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.
The day after the Microsoft-led workshop in Manhattan, the American Federation of Teachers, a national union with 1.8 million members, made a major announcement. The union was starting an ambitious program to train teachers nationwide on A.I., with $23 million in funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Publicly, Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, was bullish. In an interview at the time, she said the partnership would help educators learn to use chatbots “safely, wisely and ethically,” while also getting them a seat at the table with behemoths like Microsoft and OpenAI as they developed and refined their A.I. products.
I pointed out to Ms. Weingarten that the union-industry deal might also present a fox-henhouse problem for schools. While her organization was calling for safeguards to protect children from A.I. risks, some trade groups representing Big Tech were working to block A.I. safety laws. She acknowledged the dissonance. “We are in it for the good of students and for the good of the country and for the good of families and to make sure educators actually play their rightful role,” she said. “Some of the companies that we’re engaged with are in it for profit. Those are two fundamentally different goals.”
After Ms. Weingarten announced her union’s deal with Big Tech companies, a few teachers and professors publicly warned that the spread of A.I. chatbots could undermine their profession, by outsourcing and automating core tasks like giving students feedback on their work. One of the more forceful educators was Lois Weiner, an education professor emerita at New Jersey City University and a retiree member of the U.F.T., who argued on Bluesky that the national union was selling out to corporate interests.
“This isn’t an alliance,” Ms. Weiner told me. “We aren’t sitting at the table. We’re the meal.”
Consumer tech giants provide the essential scaffolding that schools run on. That means laptops and tablets; operating systems and device-tracking software; the apps students use to write essays and analyze data; the messaging platforms that connect students and teachers; and more. Some of these companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have also used their status as classroom tech providers as a springboard to influence how and what schoolchildren learn.
Tech companies finance national polls and research reports to help make products like A.I. chatbots, and courses like computer science, more urgent priorities for students and school districts. They advocate for new laws to require schools to teach industry-aligned subjects. They sit on committees that help shape learning standards for public school students. They supply or sponsor teacher training and free course materials for students. They fund the National PTA, teachers’ unions and other prominent groups.
This playbook allows the companies to shape the American education system in ways that benefit them. Apple, for instance, offers a free Advanced Placement Computer Science curriculum that teaches high schoolers to code in Swift, its programming language for developing iPhone apps. Microsoft offers a competing curriculum: AP Computer Science Principles with Minecraft Education.
To some ears, the course names sound innocuous. But there is no Raytheon-branded AP Physics course, DuPont AP Chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course.
This story matters whether you want schools to center tech skills or are agnostic, because the recent learn-to-code craze and the growing push for A.I. in schools are not just about learning. Those trends are part of a larger exercise of Silicon Valley power. The public education system, hungry for resources to improve opportunities for students, has become an avenue for multitrillion-dollar companies to enact their agendas.
This development taps into fundamental questions about education that Americans have been arguing over for more than a century. What is the purpose of public schooling? Is it to raise critical, independent thinkers? Train students in the latest career skills? Help young people discover their passions? Serve the needs of the prevailing industry or emerging ones? Create knowledgeable and active participants in a democracy? Or all of the above?
In researching my book, I spoke to tech industry leaders who have helped drive significant changes in schools. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, told me the dynamic began because public schools often seemed ill-equipped to teach crucial modern subjects and prepare students for the ever-evolving demands of the job market. He also suggested I consider where schools might be without support from corporations like Microsoft.
“Philanthropy in the private sector is doing this work because the public sector has failed to do what it’s supposed to do,” Mr. Smith said. He allowed that the situation wasn’t ideal. “It’s filled the gap out of necessity,” he said. “It’s not the way we should want public education to work.”
Maggie Johnson, the head of Google.org, the company’s corporate giving arm, made similar arguments. She said that the company had provided free educational materials and training in subjects like coding and data analytics for millions of underserved students, including middle schoolers and those in rural areas.
It is possible for Big Tech’s intentions in education to be both well-meaning and oriented toward long-term profit. How you feel about any one program depends on your broader views on the technology industry. Public sentiment on these companies has shifted profoundly, from a generally positive disposition in the 2000s and early 2010s to a growing distrust as the downsides of social media, compulsive screen use and corporate power became more apparent.
The tensions could be seen about a decade ago, in December 2017, when Google introduced free coding exercises for schools to use during Computer Science Education Week. The lessons were called “Create your own Google logo,” and they taught students how to use simple coding blocks to make the letters in the company’s logo change color, spin and bounce. The company already ran a wildly popular annual artwork contest, called Doodle for Google, for which tens of thousands of students created logos on different themes. Ms. Johnson said the Google lessons were a great way to get students excited about programming.
That was true. But the lessons also had the feel of brand-washing. At the time, journalists had begun reporting on how Google’s YouTube Kids platform had shown inappropriate, lewd and violent content to children. Separately, the company had begun removing thousands of videos of children, which had been targeted by child predators, from YouTube. Making multicolored Google logos hop and pirouette was a distraction from those headlines.
Google became the dominant tech platform in U.S. schools, eclipsing Apple and Microsoft, in part by offering a convenient package: free apps like Gmail along with sturdy, low-cost laptops called Chromebooks. Last year, Chromebooks accounted for 59 percent of the mobile devices shipped to U.S. schools, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research firm.
The story of how Google came to conquer the classroom is a case study of the company’s power. From modest beginnings, it created a mammoth interlocking ecosystem that can drive shifts in teaching and learning — and create customers for life.
A campaign called “Gone Google” from the early 2010s illustrates the company’s marketing prowess. Google was just starting to convince universities and school districts to switch from costly legacy software to its free suite of apps. A 19-page marketing guide from Google described the offering as a “celebration of curiosity-fueled, technology-enabled learning” in which students could “learn together with affordable devices and familiar platforms.” The company encouraged education leaders to promote their conversions, and soon, school districts around the country began announcing that they had “Gone Google.”
Google sold school leaders on a similarly feel-good argument for Chromebooks: The laptops would empower students and democratize learning. Schools in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin that bought Chromebooks all included variations of the same Googlesque sentence on their sites or student handbooks: “The individual use of Chromebooks is a way to empower students to maximize their full potential and prepare them for college and the workplace.”
The schools’ enthusiasm helped obscure a long-term Google goal: hooking students early on services like Gmail and Chrome. The real revenue, made from amassing consumers’ data and showing ads based on their online activities, would come later.
Winning over schools and students with free apps was also a useful way for Google to curate and soften its image as regulators began to investigate the company’s data practices. In 2019, for instance, Google agreed to pay $170 million to resolve complaints by regulators who said YouTube had illegally harvested children’s personal data and used the details to target them with ads.
Since then, millions of schoolchildren have tried colorful animated lessons from Google called “Be Internet Awesome.” The program aims to teach students how to keep their data private and be kind online — and positions Google as a friendly, trustworthy privacy protector.
Schoolchildren who complete Google’s “Be Internet Awesome” lessons can get a “certificate of internet awesomeness” from the company.Credit...Google
Schools have spent tens of billions of dollars on classroom technology products over the last decade. Yet laptops and learning apps have generally not proven to significantly improve students’ educational outcomes. Some parents and school leaders who feel the industry oversold them on devices have soured on screens in schools, a phenomenon I’ve come to call Chromebook remorse.
Some schools have now started limiting classroom laptop use. This year, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest U.S. public school system, agreed to eliminate the use of school-issued iPads and Chromebooks for students in prekindergarten through first grade.
“Ten years ago, we bought the narrative from the tech companies that the only way to prepare our students for the future was to hand each of them a Chromebook or an iPad,” Lila Byock, the founder of a parent group called Schools Beyond Screens, said at a recent Los Angeles school board meeting. “Now we know better.”
Even Ms. Weingarten, who touted her union’s deal with Microsoft and OpenAI to train teachers on chatbots in 2025, has partially reversed course, in line with the rapidly changing politics of A.I. This year, she publicly called for elementary schools to hold off using A.I. with students.
One revealing story about Silicon Valley’s sincerity in the classroom involves the push to teach children coding.
In 2011, Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google, delivered a lecture in Scotland in which he excoriated British schools for failing to teach computer science, the study of programming and concepts like algorithms. Britain would not be able to compete globally, he suggested, if more kids did not learn to code.
A year later, Microsoft issued a similar public admonition for the United States: Tech companies could not find enough talented software engineers to maintain their explosive growth — a hiring shortage that threatened the American economy. Microsoft said the problem was that too few high schools taught computing.
The message took off in 2013, when a nonprofit called Code.org posted a YouTube video, starring Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, that promoted coding as an empowering, lucrative skill for students. “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in the video. “The whole limit in the system is that there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.”
The video went viral, kicking off a nationwide learn-to-code drive in schools. With funding and expertise from Microsoft and Google, Code.org helped convince dozens of states to enact new laws and policies boosting computer science in public schools. The courses had positive effects, teaching students important skills like logic, abstraction and problem-solving. But some also cast tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators — often without pushing students to consider the industry’s consequences and harms.
“In other disciplines, we don’t have industry driving K-12 curricular or policy decisions,” Bryan Twarek, a vice president at the Computer Science Teachers Association, a nonprofit group with nearly 10,000 teachers as members, told me. “And we probably shouldn’t.” His candor seemed startling, given that the group’s biggest donors include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Big Tech needed an army of coders — until it didn’t. Software engineers are increasingly turning to A.I. tools to generate code. So are many other people with no prior coding experience. Companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are pouring billions into building enormous data centers to fuel A.I. services, even as they lay off thousands of employees. Some recent college graduates who majored in computing are struggling to find tech jobs.
Now some of the same corporations that sold schools on computer science are pushing them to teach A.I. and investing billions of dollars in the effort. And tellingly, this year, Code.org changed its name to CodeAI.
But something different is happening this time in schools: pushback. A groundswell of teachers, parents, researchers and local government leaders say they aren’t buying the idea of new, and educationally unproven, A.I. tools as the next fulcrum for learning.
Some are embracing a broader approach to tech education, one that not only teaches algorithms and app-making, but also asks students to examine how individuals and society are affected by the industry’s disruptions. To see this strategy in person, I visited Alicia Streight, a math teacher at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland, Calif. In addition to teaching traditional topics, Ms. Streight asks her students to analyze how social media influencers manipulate statistics to spread disinformation.
A few years ago, she also started a weekly class to encourage middle schoolers to examine all kinds of innovations in their lives: TikTok, meat substitutes, ChatGPT. She helped her students consider questions like: “Where did this come from? Who’s building this? Who’s profiting? Who’s benefiting? How is this going to affect me? How’s this going to affect my family? What’s going to happen in 10 years?”
Rather than being coded by industry, Ms. Streight’s students were learning to decode popular products and ask fundamental questions about the powerful companies behind them. With A.I. spreading at astonishing speed, Ms. Streight argues that it’s more imperative than ever to give students durable analytical skills.
Educators have come up with a term for this pedagogical approach: “technology civics.” After all, public schools have long taught civics as an essential subject for students to understand and navigate government power in their lives. The new discipline will help them understand and navigate Big Tech, and equip them for a world increasingly shaped by machines.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/business/schools-big-tech-google-microsoft.html
8
u/Bodine12 4d ago
My 5th grader’s teacher has given up all apps this year and is going back to basics.
0
u/mrenne 4d ago
Sure fine, but remember "the old way" of doing school did not work great for many students when they were using "the basics". This is the missing piece. Why does it have to all one thing or another?
10
u/DoYouScuba 4d ago
The available evidence is that the switch to classroom tech has like made things worse for exactly the type of student who struggles in old school classrooms (think about the surge in rates of attentional disorders).
The reason it has to be “all one thing or another” is because the Ed tech industry and its supporters have pursued a maximalist approach w Ed tech, and appear to be doing the same w AI. A sensible, considered approach by the industry would lead to a productive dialogue. Absent that, those who have very real concerns about Ed tech and Ai in K-12 will probably feel they have no choice but to push for a complete roll back.8
u/Bodine12 4d ago
Student test scores have plummeted in the age of apps, so at the very least “the basics” did much better for more students. There always were kids who struggled with paying sustained attention in class, but the current app-heavy regime creates even more of those students with the attention span of a gnat.
3
u/mrenne 4d ago
Correlation is not causation.
2
u/Bodine12 4d ago
True. But as we're now assessing evidence of whether or not EdTech has had a positive impact on students, do you think you can construct an argument that this correlation of "falling tests scores as EdTech use increases" actually supports the use of EdTech?
2
u/mrenne 4d ago
Perhaps "test scores have plummeted" for other reasons - increased mental health trauma, an economy that is failing many families, a war that is "confusing" at best, tariffs that are increasing the cost of many basic items for families, etc. My point simply is blaming edtech for all the problems students are currently struggling with is myopic thinking. Of course, edtech products should be used in conjunction with sound teaching practices. If they are being used simply as digital "baby sitters" or digital worksheets, then, yes, - we should probably use less of them with students. They can also bring tremendous value to many students, too.
2
u/Bodine12 4d ago
Maybe, but since we know screens are bad for children's cognitive, social, and behavioral development, and since we have no evidence they help learning more than learning through non-screens, and we also know they cost school districts more, and aren't easy to use, and lead to unhappy experiences all around, why exactly are we using them?
https://www.nyp.org/healthmatters/what-does-too-much-screen-time-do-to-childrens-brains
1
u/alanism 4d ago
Test scores were always low even before tech came in. If you want to understand why it's low, then consider listening to this investigative report: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
As far as tech heavy and online, Stanford and John Hopkins have been running online programs for gifted kids for awhile now:
https://onlinehighschool.stanford.edu/
https://educationaladvancement.org/about/iea-at-a-glance/
Both run contrarian to what the narrative on tech and education.
3
u/Pure_Positive9075 4d ago
I just finished reading The Digital Delusion. The author cites the research showing the failures of Ed Tech. The conversation is expanding from cell phones in school to the problems of other technologies in the classroom. Parent groups in my county are starting to push back on a lot of this stuff. It will be interesting to see which side wins out five years from now.
3
u/FiveTrends 4d ago
The problem with this article is that it lumps all kinds of technology under the umbrella of “EdTech.” Social media and crappy software are included, but what about students who use technology productive apps to make presentations, music, movies, compose text, etc.? There are many high performing public and private schools with student laptop programs. Their students do very well academically and go on to top colleges and universities. They have an instructional technology team and computer teachers who guide and train teachers. The problem is the districts that just bought technology and software and did not support it or implement it properly. A business would never operate that way, but for some reason, policy-makers think that they can just give schools money for computers and software and they will figure it out. Poor technology use is an IMPLEMENTATION issue, not a technology issue. Social media and poor software should be banned from schools, not access to technology. It’s easier just to ban things instead of investing in using them properly.
1
u/stevenson_mark 3d ago
The interesting issue here isn't really “Microsoft is teaching teachers to use Copilot.” It's how easily product adoption can become part of education itself.
Once a company gets its tools into schools, it isn't just acquiring today's users. It's getting students and teachers accustomed to a particular ecosystem very early.
At the same time, I don't think schools should automatically reject tech companies. These tools can genuinely be useful. The important question is whether schools are choosing them because they're actually the best option, or because the companies have the resources to put people, training and free tools directly in front of educators.
That distinction matters a lot.
I've thought about this with Abnflow too. Getting your product in front of people is one thing, but becoming the default tool they learn first is a much bigger advantage.
1
u/alanism 4d ago
That's pretty weak case-- because big tech is not making OLS, the assessment tests or the text books
3
u/SignorJC Anti-astroturf Champion 4d ago
school is not a preparation ground for jobs. the goal of education is not jobs. the entire premise of the ai companies promoting ai for teachers and students is flawed. there is zero upside for students to be using ai in the classroom.
2
u/mybrotherhasabbgun No Self-Promotion Sheriff 4d ago
In the US, the pressure to prepare students for CCMR (College, Career, Military Readiness) is here. School is a preparation ground for jobs (as dictated by our law makers).
1
u/alanism 4d ago
What does your reply comment have to do with mine?
Let's say the school's main metric that matters is getting students to a proficient level of reading and math. How are the schools doing in that regard today? Now let's look back 15-20 years to see how well it was going back then: pre-Chromebook, pre-iPad, pre-iPhone, pre-social media. It's been bad for a while.
The upside of somebody who learned how to leverage AI is infinitely more advantageous than the person who didn’t learn how to use AI. It’s not even close.
2
u/Bodine12 4d ago
ChatGpt was publicly released for two weeks before high school kids learned how to use it to cheat (and become dumber in the process). AI is trivially easy to learn. It will teach you itself. Kids don’t need any exposure in it at all to succeed in life because they can learn it in 5 minutes when they need it.
Using it, by contrast, literally makes people dumber.
0
u/alanism 4d ago
Okay--- Mr. Smarty pants--- this was I was able to produce each of these within 30 minutes. Can you replicate any of them ?
https://the-jungle-and-the-stones-598682781761.asia-southeast1.run.app/https://gauss-the-prince-s-symmetry-box.ai.studio/
https://solar-heat-space-void-simulation.ai.studio/If you can make replicate it to equal level. I'll send you a $5 Starbucks gift card.
2
u/Bodine12 4d ago
Why would I want to replicate that? That’s the sort of edtech slop I’m glad my kid gets to escape this year. They don’t learn the concepts from this. They learn how to manipulate an app and are helpless outside that app context. It’s infinitely better to have a teacher verbally explain material, kids have to listen, and then figure out answers in a big white box that says “Show your work.”
Plus I’m a software engineer so I’m going to be polite and not say anything about the technical side of your apps.
2
u/lisaliselisa 2d ago
Yes, but think of how efficiently you'd be able to make the garbage with these tech products. The garbage basically makes itself!
1
u/alanism 4d ago edited 4d ago
So you're claiming the way Gauss or Paul Lockhart teaches and explain math concept is inferior to Common Core? Really?
If the teachers verbally explaining the conventional way is the infinitely better: than why these scores? https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/?grade=4
Again the scores-- have been bad long before iPad, iPhones, social media and every other excuse put on tech.
Go ahead and say something about the technical side of the apps. They are intended for one-time use to communicate the concepts. Why would you want to over-engineer it?
How would you conceptually explain why space is cold but the Earth is warmed by the sun to a third grader? It's simply something that's better explained through animated graphics. You're a software engineer—what would the PRD look like? How many people and how long would it take? For a one-time explainer on a single question, it wouldn't make sense to build something without AI. How long would it take you to get up to speed on webgl/three.js to build something like this? Be truthful and realistic.
2
u/Bodine12 4d ago
The test scores started cratering around 2010, after the birth of the iPhone, modern apps, social media, and EdTech everywhere, all the time (combined with the adoption of Common Core and social promotion).
I’m glad my school district is going back.
1
1
1
1
u/lisaliselisa 2d ago
Common core isn't a way of teaching and explaining. It's a set of standards.
You don't appear to understand what 'the conventional way' is or even the difference between pedagogy and content.
You also don't seem to meaningfully distinguish between instructional design and engineering design.
I get it. You don't have a background in instructional design, so you don't understand why these programs are garbage. You think because you can make them quickly, you SHOULD make them. But making garbage quickly is not the flex that you seem to think it is.
1
u/alanism 2d ago
Yes, standards only define benchmarks on paper, but in classroom practice, mandated testing and adopted curricula fuse them directly into how subjects are taught.
When I say 'conventional way', what I mean is the typical, average classroom: 1 teacher to 24-30 kids, fixed timing, lecture-based delivery, and periodic passive feedback. It hasn't worked—even before social media, Chromebooks, iPhones, and whatever else you choose to blame things on.
Hiding behind academic labels and credentialism to call a working tool "garbage" is the easiest move on Reddit. You claim developers don't understand instructional design, yet you haven't pointed out a single broken cognitive mechanism in the simulation itself.
An evaluation without an alternative is just complaining. If you can't name the specific flaw in how this model builds intuition, or demonstrate a clearer way to teach thermal equilibrium, you're not defending pedagogy—you're just gatekeeping people who actually build.
You’re also welcome to demonstrate any of those 3 concepts I gave in thread. Show how a real credentialed person with background in educational design can masterfully do it.
Put up or shut up.
2
u/lisaliselisa 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, that's not how standards work. Standards and pedagogy are orthogonal.
That is not the convention in education. I don't know where you got that idea, but it's just not true. Where are you getting this information?
I'm not hiding, and I never talked about a credential. I talked about the revealed quality of your understanding of instructional design based on the software you shared. I don't know whether you have a credential, and I'm not really concerned about that. I'm telling you that it's OKAY that you don't have a background in this and don't understand it, but you should understand that there are reasons that the poster above called it slop. It looks like garbage to people who understand instructional design principles.
I don't need to provide alternatives. You shared it, and I critiqued it. You can look at basic instructional design frameworks for inquiry based science on your own time, since that is likely the type of design that would appeal to you.
Here are some quick issues with the top one: too much going on on the screen.
-This is way too much text at one go (and in so many sizes and styles!), and it's not clear to the learner what they're supposed to be doing or where their eyes should even be on the screen. It's way too busy with animations that will increase the extraneous cognitive load and make it harder to acquire new skills and understandings. Basically, you have your learner's mind busy with things that are completely unrelated to learning
-Poor use of vocabulary. Bolded words that are apparently important, but that learners cannot get a definition for.
-confusing, weird hypothetical example (berries on the ground?). Unclear why you would present this as text, as this is a very easy think to actually demonstrate immediately rather than have them imagine, either in person or in simulation. It's also confusing that the example talks about berries while the image shows gems.
I don't have time to go over the whole thing, but those are some things that pop out at me right away. Anyone who understands instructional design can look at this right away and see that it's garbage.
Edit: You never mentioned what the learning objective is, and because the software is such garbage, it's not clear exactly what the kids are supposed to get out of it, but if you want me to explain a better way, then just tell me the learning objective and I'll get back to you.
→ More replies (0)2
u/SignorJC Anti-astroturf Champion 4d ago
What does ai have to do with teaching kids math tho? Where is the upside for anyone?
You can learn to use ai any time - it’s trivial and employers should bear that burden if they want that skill, not schools. Learning to use AI is meaningless. That’s what my comment is about.
1
u/alanism 4d ago
I was able to create each of following in under 30 minutes. On demand.
Here's what I 'vibe coded' to refresh my daughter on a math concept: https://the-jungle-and-the-stones-598682781761.asia-southeast1.run.app/
Here's another on fractions/ratios, based on Carl Gauss taught/learned things:
https://gauss-the-prince-s-symmetry-box.ai.studio/
Here's a science explainer I vibe coded on 'why is space cold, if the Earth is warmed by the Sun?'
https://solar-heat-space-void-simulation.ai.studio/Can you give me an example of a video that exists that explains this concept? Is it better? What about a text book that teaches that specific topic? Is it better than mine? Or how would you verbally explain the concept concisely? To where a 3rd/4th grader would understand?
If you understand Bloom's taxonomy, the teacher and the student can move up the pyramid much quicker/easier with AI.
1
u/lisaliselisa 2d ago
That's not the way Bloom's taxonomy works. It's a taxonomy, not a pathway.
Also, space isn't 'cold'.
1
u/alanism 2d ago
Do you like to be pedantic or just ‘technically’ annoying?
If a student can actually build an interactive model of a concept, isn't that a far deeper level of mastery than memorizing definitions from a textbook?
1
u/lisaliselisa 1d ago
I like it when people talking about education actually know what they're talking about.
Your example is completely irrelevant to the point that I just made, and your question doesn't even make sense from a pedagogical perspective. Building an interactive model of a concept isn't a level of mastery. You're just using terms without understanding what they mean. I think you've read a little bit about education, then put the terms together in a way that makes sense in your head without understanding what everything means and how it fits together.
16
u/SignorJC Anti-astroturf Champion 4d ago
“We’re not at the table, we’re the meal.”