Over the past month, I’ve spoken at a variety of state conferences. Walk by any session, and I mean ANY session, with “AI” in the title, and you’ll see that it’s PACKED! From superintendents and principals to technology directors and classroom teachers, educators are seeking to understand, while asking so many good questions…
- Should we provide access or lock and block?
- What boundaries should we set for student and staff use?
- What policies should we put in place?
- How can AI help me be more efficient in my work?
- What does cheating look like in the age of AI?
- How can we help students understand the implications of these tools?

….and on, and on, and on. These are all great questions and I’m sure you’re hearing them too. Regardless of where you fall on the “AI-belief continuum,” we can all agree that the use of Artificial Intelligence will only continue to grow. It’s also hard for anyone to argue that AI won’t continue to become a daily part of the world of work for many, if not an important part of most jobs, in the years to come.

Combined with the fact that educators are always looking for new and different ways to remain relevant as the world changes, it’s important to point to high-quality resources that educators can leverage to teach newer topics such as AI. With that, I want to share an incredible resource and point you to four free (no catch!) AI lessons your teams can use with students. Here’s how you can quickly access them:

1. Visit The Achievery, an incredible free teaching tool funded by digital equity grants. (Feel free to share the embedded FutureReady.link/achievery link to access the platform.)

2. From there, take one minute to sign up for a free account. (There’s no catch here and I wouldn’t share it if it wasn’t awesome. Promise!)

3. Once signed in, you’ll have free access to over 500 highly engaging lessons for K-12 that use short, high-interest movie (think the Lego Movie!) and video clips to help teach particular topics (like AI), and then have ASCD-written lesson plans that teachers can utilize; completely at no cost. Really, there’s no catch here!

Once signed in, you can easily search for AI-related, kid-friendly videos and lesson plans, four of which I’ve included below.

Images above courtesy of The Achievery.

Similar to how I’m guessing many of you are feeling, I’m continuing to research and test new AI tools to see how they can benefit my work. I’m proceeding with caution, yet see such incredible opportunities to help shift many teacher-centric practices into those that are more learner-centered by design.

(As a side note, I created the lead blog post image in under a minute using Image Creator from Microsoft, a new generative AI tool. Check it out!)

All for the kids we serve,