Technolandy

SOL Summer of Learning 2026: AI’ing Different(iated)

I’ve just spent three days asking:

How does your brain read?

How does your brain math?

How does your brain write?

All of these are getting tightly entwined with discussions around AI – especially the knee jerk reaction to ‘ban’ it – what if we also banned teaching reading since kids can use that skill to get all sorts of ideas… or have them wait until some later birthdate when they may be better ready to take up such an important skill…  sigh (is there a sarcasm font alignment yet?)

What if the problem isn’t that students use AI — but HOW they use it?

Sigh.

New York City has announced that students through Grade 8 won’t be using generative AI at school this year. https://abcnews.com/Technology/new-york-city-public-schools-banning-ai-middle/story?id=136134872&cid=social_twitter_abcn

West coast too: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/us/lausd-schools-ban-ai-artificial-intelligence.html

And yet GPT-6 has also launched with is yet another evolutionary step that kinda made the work we did during pro-d on AI a tad out of date…https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/9/4/openai-unveils-gpt-6-astra-amid-rising-scrutiny-and-safety

Now, as much as an #edtech fan and advocate that I am… I have always practiced a healthy balance – lots of work and energy in environment sustainability and aspects like deep play in my kids and students learning journeys… but I also don’t see tech as ‘cheating’ any more than my eyeglasses/contacts are cheating because they help bring equity into my experience. 

I have also long time wondered (since about grade 4… maybe grade 3) about the relevance of school when so often the environment seems isolated from the real world with levels of hypocrisy – 

And I keep wondering why our response to disruptive technologies in education is so often to make school more insulated from the world outside it.

Calculators?

Internet?

Wikipedia?

Phones?

Social media? – the fastest growing media of all time, likely because it replicates the original format of storytelling and information sharing – oral/aural strategies… books and print were only created because you couldn’t have everybody appear live-in-person to share around the world… now we can… 

Now AI?

What’s next?

Slide rules?

Quill and ink?

Scrolls instead of books? (This is a great video though… https://youtu.be/pQHX-SjgQvQ?si=6GbuYwcfJDQnmFCN

🙄

I’m not going  to argue “give every Grade 2 student unrestricted ChatGPT.”  I’m way too big of a fan of learning through play (especially deep play). But we can’t ignore AI – its already influencing their world… at least the world outside of school… 

Of course there are things we ought not let AI do. Even/especially if it does that better…

But this week Cari Wilson from West Vancouver Schools shared a much more interesting question:

What could we teach students to ask AI to do?

Don’t give me the answer. Help me figure it out.

Act as a Socratic tutor.

Point out the two biggest ways I could improve my writing.

Find holes in my argument.

Ask me five questions about my project.

That’s not outsourcing thinking.

That’s asking AI to provoke thinking.

It’s doing what AI has proven to be very very good at: collaborating

 Socratic tutoring approaches deliberately make AI ask questions, identify gaps and guide rather than simply supply an answer. Recent reporting on schools introducing AI literacy similarly describes educators deliberately exposing students to hallucinations and bias so they learn not to trust AI uncritically. 

Personal experience in a school that focuses on descriptive feedback has also seen differentiation by students… if it is task completion to jump through a hoop… AI is greatly used to get the ‘mark’; if the assignment is connected to their learning, and is relevant and meaningful, the students want the descriptive feedback on their learning, not AIs… it has even taken some work to coach how AI is not cheating when done as collaboration – looking for sentence fragments; spelling/grammar; logic etc. 

Because here’s my bigger Different(iated) ideation

I’ve just spent three days asking:

How does your brain read?

How does your brain math?

How does your brain write?

And if those three explorations tell us anything, it’s that brains don’t all access learning in the same way.

So why would we assume every learner should use—or not use—the same tools?

For one learner AI might provide language.

For another, organization.

For another, feedback.

For another, a patient Socratic tutor.

For another, a way to turn the brilliant thing they can say into something they can finally get onto a page.

And sometimes?

The right use of AI is no AI at all.

That’s differentiation too.

I think the biggest fear is that AI is eliminating a gap that used to exist: only some could afford tutors to help/do their childs school work… now everyone has access to the same support. 

I don’t want schools to teach students to use AI.

And I certainly don’t want schools to teach students to avoid AI.

I want schools to be the place where students learn:

When does AI help my brain think?

When does AI do my thinking for me?

And how do I know the difference?

Because outside of school, nobody is going to ban it for them.

That’s AI’ing Different(iated)!

If young people are going to live in an AI-saturated world, perhaps school should be where they learn how not to be used by it. And not assume they’ll ‘just know how to do it’ when they reach some artificially decided birthdate… 

And on a day following a global outage… and the introduction of a “6th iteration” – I wonder if Astra can interact with the digital world on ‘your’ behalf.

If that trajectory holds, “AI literacy” isn’t primarily going to mean prompt engineering. It becomes something much closer to:

agency + judgment + verification + delegation + creativity + ethics. <— which fits better with our (BC) competencies than curriculum… 

What should I delegate?

What should I retain?

How do I know whether the result is good?

When should I intervene?

What am I responsible for when my agent did the work?

And — probably most importantly for my Different(iated) thread — what becomes newly possible for someone whose brain was poorly served by the old interface?

Or more of a query for the upcoming year… How does your unique brain interact with a computer — and why did we ever assume keyboard + mouse + menus was the universally correct answer for everyone, anyways?