NOVEMBER EDTECH UPDATE

Seesaw AI is transforming classrooms with responsibly designed tools that save teachers 8+ hours a week, right inside Seesaw.

• No new logins
• No new systems
• Just seamless AI, where teachers already teach

Explore Seesaw AI now: https://bit.ly/43bCQgs

November Engagement Ideas:

• Join Seesaw for Exploring AI Together: A Seesaw Learning Series, where Seesaw partners with Tinkercast and Code.org to explore how AI is transforming teaching and learning. Discover practical ideas, free Seesaw lessons, and strategies to build AI literacy while inspiring creativity and confidence in your students.

• New! AI Literacy Lessons for Future-Ready Students, featuring our latest collection with Tinkercast, the #1 STEAM podcast for kids! These fun and engaging lessons help students think critically about AI and develop as responsible digital citizens. Dive in and start exploring today!

• Empower Student-Led Conferences with Seesaw: Showcase student growth and mastery with Seesaw Portfolios and Highlights! Give students the chance to lead the conversation—by reflecting on their learning, showing their progress, and celebrating what they've achieved, all in one spot. It's a great way to build voice, ownership, and real, meaningful conversations at every step.

This was a great blog and lesson from "The SIFT" - An educator's guide to news literacy about Ai slop. Complete with resources and discussion prompts.

It’s hard to avoid “AI slop” that’s rapidly permeating the internet.

• “AI slop” is low-quality synthetic content designed to grab attention and earn money online — and it often spreads misinformation.
• Fake videos: When scrolling Instagram reels, 15 out of 20 videos online are now AI slop, according to internet culture researcher Aidan Walker. The best-performing AI slop videos play on strong emotions, like fear, anger or sympathy.
• AI lacks oversight: Tech companies are largely failing to flag or label AI-generated posts on their platforms. The Washington Post confirmed this by uploading the same AI video to eight different platforms and only one — YouTube — disclosed to users that it was AI.

Discuss:

• AI slop can be hilarious or disturbing — but is it also harmful? Why or why not?
• What potential impacts could AI slop about current events or public figures have on real-world situations?
• If it were up to you, what kinds of guardrails would social media platforms and AI companies themselves put around the technology?

Idea: Use the “AI slop” slide in Week Seven of the Daily Do Now resource for a short video and additional classroom-ready discussion prompts.

News Literacy Project Resources:

• “What to know about OpenAI’s Sora” (NLP TikTok)
• “Introduction to Algorithms” (Checkology® virtual classroom)
• Infographic: “6 things to know about AI”

Related:

• Video: “Jake Tapper creates AI videos to highlight the risks” (CNN)
• Opinion: “Where does Wikipedia go in the age of AI?” (Financial Times)
• “Teenagers struggle to tell if videos are real or fake as AI floods social media” (ABC Australia)
• https://opentools.ai/news/ai-slop-how-generative-ai-is-feeding-us-junk-online

Subscribe to this newsletter

Mashable reviewed the learning modes of the major foundation models—Google's Gemini Guided Learning, Open AI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude—revealing differences in their approach, benefits, and drawbacks. The researchers found that the tools were were best suited for self-directed learners and had the following to say:

• Claude’s use of Socratic questioning was well positioned to help student’ develop their understanding, but the researcher found that the bot’s avoidance of giving answers led to long back and forths with little resolution.

• ChatGPT showed a tendency to give answers and rewrite student work rather help them improve their work on their own.

• Gemini excelled at math instruction with visual scaffolds. However, it frequently failed to address provided assignments and performed unpredictably across subjects.

Eric Curts has out done himself in his Oct 16th, 2025 Control Alt Achieve: transforming education with technology.

💎 Introducing EduGems - Resource Link

Recently Google made an update to Gemini Gems so that now you can share them with others. Inspired by this, Eric Curts put together his own collection of favorite Gems that he created or collected in categories including:

• 💡 Curriculum & Lesson Design
• 📖 Literacy & Language
• 🧒 Student Activities
• 💯 Assessment
• 🔑 Student Support
• 💼 Professional Tasks

You can find and use them at his new "EduGems" site at: edugems.ai

Note: If the main link does not work for you, you can just go to the Google Sites link for the site here - https://sites.google.com/view/edu-gems/home - It looks like Squarespace may have a DNS issue, so he is working with them to get that fixed.

At the moment the site is very basic, but he hope to add more features over time as the collection grows. And if you have Gems you would like to share with him, you can submit them through this Form to be considered for inclusion in the collection.

1. Kialo is an online structured debate platform with argument maps in the form of debate trees. It is a collaborative reasoning tool for thoughtful discussion, understanding different points of view, and collaborative decision-making, showing arguments for and against claims underneath user-submitted theses or questions

2. SuperStructures.io - Teaching Tools that boost student engagement, foster meaningful connections, and make learning seriously fun. Spark student curiosity, foster critical thinking, and conduct formative assessments.

3. Factile is a Jeopardy game maker that energizes everyone, not just a handful of students, with great new features that are designed with both student engagement and teacher goals in mind

4. Grouper - Create groups of any size with a single click. Randomize, customize, or group students by attributes. Use groupings right away or save for later.

5. Kira’s AI Tutor meets learners where they are, offering just-in-time support that keeps progress moving and builds confidence along the way.

6. Design your own unique font with GenType! This cool Ai tool from Google lets you turn any idea into an entire alphabet. Just drop a prompt, and watch as GenType works its magic!

🍎 The 4J Instructional Technology Website

🐼 The Canvas Community

🐠 Seesaw Trainings and Resources