AI Tools Produce Content But Students Learn Less
88 posts across 29 communities in the last 30 days; 24% from r/Teachers.
“Academics wouldnt be using it as some sort of sick marketing campaign though. [re: OpenAI's unreleased model solved most of the math problems from a single prompt. It did not even exist before the end of August. Each problem used ~3 hours of thinking.]”
“I am just sick of AI use by other adults in my building. Our awesome PTA creates posters all AI looking images and fonts. AI hasn't adapted enough to be different looking enough. A teacher in my plc is using AI to create test questions that are worded so strangely and I'm so…”
“It's a mixture of both, really. On one hand we got Google Classroom and other study platforms pushing every AI Tutor they can towards us students. On the other hand, teachers(Some might be good, but it's a growing problem) frequently hand us assignments created with Claude and…”
Educators are struggling to integrate new technologies, particularly AI-powered tools, into their classrooms. The focus is often on flashy features and demos, while the tedious, time-consuming, and essential daily tasks (like progress reports and ensuring accuracy) are neglected, leading to burnout and a lack of trust in new solutions.
SOURCES (60)
“One of the biggest patterns we've noticed working with early childhood & primary students (ages 4–11) is that while kids can swipe tablets effortlessly, most have zero mental model of how their devices actually work—or how to control them intentionally. Before diving into abstract coding…”
“Hey guys. Have you noticed that evrything in society is moving, AI, maths, Ideas...except for the school system. Almost nothing groundbreaking in terms of helping learners study faster yet effective has come up in a while. We have opus 5.5 yet school systems have barely changes. What if instead of investing our precious time, energy, effort and tokens in saturated apps, why don't we, for once turn our attention to apps that utilize the newer technologies cheaply available to us to solve prob”
“You should use AI and youtube to learn AI. However I recently decided to start teaching people how to use these tools as there is a lot of nuance and understanding how to use the tools can be a learning curve. Since I have never educated anyone before I need some practice so id be happy to teach for free so I can further develop my curriculum. You'd just have to bear with me while I learn how to teach! [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle on this AI t”
“100% correct!! Unfortunately with tech is it's a never ending learning process too. Your best bet would be to use AI as your learning tool this way you get the experience and knowledge at the same time. [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle on this AI thing. What specific AI skills/classes would help me?]”
“Eeew. You're not teaching anymore, you're just training the AI models with your feedback. [re: 90% of my district's assessment items for ELA are AI-generated]”
“I work for a very large district. "We have to do the best with what we have" is how my literacy coach explains it. In past districts, we had access to Pearson item banks. They weren't perfect and this was pre-AI so maybe they've changed, but I'm gobsmacked that my district has no ELA item bank. It's all just AI. Allegedly there is a protocol they run the generated items through, but I've run into several items egregious enough over the last two assessments to reach”
“That would be like taking a World War 2 history class in 1942. [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle on this AI thing. What specific AI skills/classes would help me?]”
“I think AI is more effective as a tutor than as a teacher. The student sets the curriculum and does the work up front (e.g. writing up LaTeX notes) then the AI checks it and answers questions with the notes as context. I've had some success with this approach for theoretical physics, but it is clunky and maybe there's a better solution.”
Hey everyone! I’ve been working on a project that organizes AI tutoring prompts into a structured learning path. I think AI has a lot of potential for education, and I wanted to…
“Hold on a second, let me ask AI for help in discussing why creativity can be difficult for students. [re: It's really bumming out how little imagination students have (high school)]”
“Hey everyone, This conversation around AI in education is incredibly complex, highly debated, and deeply personal for every educator and leader reading it. There are so many conflicting opinions, from "total ban" to "full integration." Rather than trying to solve everything, I want to synthesize the professional consensus on where we are going. I've categorized my thoughts into three areas: Purpose, Policy, and Pedagogy. I welcome thoughtful, nuanced responses, especially”
“AI slop will be indistinguishable soon. This argument is temporary. I'd even argue AI already does a good job regarding education for most subjects, and I've been entertained/interested in some AI projects. Also, even if it doesn't do all the work, many YouTubers already use it for parts of their workflow. [re: I genuinely don’t know why people are so vehemently against AI, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask (Read body text)]”
“The AI Hub provides 91 curated lesson plans teaching middle and high school students about AI - how it works, what the risks and benefits of AI are, and how it is impacting society.These activities come from six different nonprofit organizations that are building educational resources for classrooms. Our nonprofit worked with 16 different teachers to comb through more than 200 different resources, with the teachers vetting these resources to find the best resources for their classrooms. The end”
“A lot of people say that AI makes people dumb or whatever, and while it might be true, AI is a tool. You have to use it properly. In my case, I currently use ChatGPT to make lecture notes, plan my study routine, help me make flashcards, generate lesson summaries for me to print before I start class, and I'm currently in the top class when I had previously struggled with motivation. Yes, obviously if you make him write EVERYTHING for you, of course you won't learn. However, if you use him”
“My kids' high school is developing an "AI Literacy Program" for all students by grade level. Since I work in tech, I was asked to participate. I attended one session and then decided it was a waste of time. Their objective seems to be to write a massive document that no one will ever actually read let alone implement. The primary focus was on prompt engineering. I told them it's 2026 and every kid in the school can write prompts just as effectively if not more so than the folks in the room.”
“I’ve been using ChatGPT more and more for lesson planning and honestly… I’m still not sure how much time it actually saves me lol. Some stuff is great and takes like 5 minutes. Other times I end up rewriting half of it and think I probably could’ve just done it myself. There are also so many AI tools now that I’ve basically given up trying to keep track of all of them. What do you guys actually use regularly that genuinely saves you time? submitted by /u/crypto_gardener [link]”
“It’s amazing how much it has to say. Almost like an excited and very very smart kid who hasn’t learned to judge social cues. [re: AI has made me lose my attention span.]”
“Academics wouldnt be using it as some sort of sick marketing campaign though. [re: OpenAI's unreleased model solved most of the math problems from a single prompt. It did not even exist before the end of August. Each problem used ~3 hours of thinking.]”
“I’m seeing a lot of business tech grad programs,like MSBT start teaching stuff like AI, blockchain, and AR so people know how to actually use the skills for real companies. Which made me wonder if anyone working in business or tech right now has seen these things actually being used in daily work or if it’s just hyped up? submitted by /u/Sea_Review1518 [link] [comments]”
“Original study Link here Another study Link here and excerpt below: AI helped participants better discern what’s real – and resulted in a 21% higher chance they would make the right call. But their unassisted performance, when reviewing new images without AI’s help, grew 15.3% worse in the experiment’s fourth week. “These results indicate that while AI may help immediately, it may ultimately degrade long-term misinformation detection abilities,” the study noted. submitted by /u/simpl”
“Ai shared your thoughts [re: Veteran teachers, please understand survivorship bias before telling newer teachers how to survive this profession.(Warning: Long rant)]”
“There’s plenty of excitement around AI, but I’m curious what’s working in day-to-day district operations for schools and superintendents. Have you found a use that takes meaningful work off your team’s plate? Or does checking the output end up taking just as long? Are you loving or hating what’s out there today? Seems hit or miss depending on who you ask..! submitted by /u/Dear-Journalist8826 [link] [comments]”
“I was recently trying to work out what advice I should be giving my 15 year old son, I asked various AI for their recommendations given "possible" AI time frame and it seemed pretty much study whatever you want but always add " and business". Investing in things that AI will just make better. However, in the case of AI improves robotics to the point it's better than humans... who knows. But all that may not pan out as reality. For me, AI is still making a lot of the same mistakes it was mak”
“I’m currently a long-term sub for a continuation high school. Before I took over, students were doing all their learning on Chromebooks, so naturally every single one of them was failing. When I took over, I decided to make their work exclusively on paper. My principal supported me on this. Anyway, teacher left behind nothing. Literally nothing. Just textbooks. Unfortunately many of my students have not been to school in years, and as a result they have deficits in reading and comprehension. The”
“Do you have a classroom that is able to look at their phone or laptop screens? That might be a better way of proving if they are using AI or not. [re: Virtual Teacher Struggling w/ Rampant AI Use]”
“bruh is this ai... [re: AI math tutor that teaches on a whiteboard, and you can interrupt it if you're confused]”
“Hey all. I'm a teacher currently using custom GPT's to help students with certain excercises and projects. It seems to be the only way to create a specific set of instructions to easily share with hundreds of students at once, so it's sad to see them go. Does anybody know of an alternative currently available that can be easily shared? Plugins are not the answer sadly. submitted by /u/ParticularHot366 [link] [comments]”
“It is 2030, you’re walking down the hallway at school and some students have knocked over their TeacherBot 5000 and are stripping the copper wire out of it. The TeacherBot babbles something about “constructive alternatives“ and “taking a break,” but the kids keep going. You look farther down the hallway and see another group of students jamming pencils and other random objects into a TeacherBots cooling vent and the Bot can’t reach the port or remove the items. What would you do? submitted”
“Hi. I teach for a public virtual school. My biggest battle involves students using AI for everything. I ask them questions about their opinion, things they literally can’t get wrong, and they still turn to AI. I know many of you who teach in-person are returning to pen and paper, which I would totally do too in a brick and mortar environment, but obviously not feasible in this scenario. I considered having students suspected of using AI meeting with me 1:1 and explaining their work. However, I l”
“The whiteboard drawing part is what caught my eye, most math tools just spit out an answer or a wall of text. Being able to circle a step and ask about that specifically feels like it could actually replace the awkwardness of stopping a real tutor mid sentence. Signed up, gonna throw some calc problems at it and see if it trips over stuff like implicit differentiation where the handwaving gets real heavy”
“I’m 23, dropped out, still building software for schools in Nepal. Early on I thought teachers wanted “AI that answers anything.” What I kept seeing in real classes: book on the desk, board empty, teacher rewriting the diagram while the period burns. I stopped pitching features and started from that gap — one page on screen, teach on it, don’t redraw the book. Some teachers get it in 30 seconds. Some don’t care. Principals ask about pilots and cost. Students only care if the stuck page gets clea”
“I get why it saves time, but watching the slow creep of AI-generated mediocrity in classrooms is like watching a paint-dry contest where everyone forgot the paint was ever good to begin with.”
“I've been playing around with some of Google's newer AI features like Gems, NotebookLM, Workspace Flows and some of the more agent-like stuff, and I'm curious what teachers are actually doing with them. Obviously I'm already using Gemini and NotebookLM for the usual things, but I'm struggling to come up with genuinely useful ideas for the more agentic/automation side of things in teaching. Things that actually improve how I work, rather than just doing the same things a littl”
“I am just sick of AI use by other adults in my building. Our awesome PTA creates posters all AI looking images and fonts. AI hasn't adapted enough to be different looking enough. A teacher in my plc is using AI to create test questions that are worded so strangely and I'm so bored after reading 20 of them. This plc member is so smart, but it saves time, which is great. I hate how AI produced slides and posters look. We don't want the students to use AI, yet we are showing them info a”
“I did an activity with my final students the other day as this is their last class before graduating, and I wanted to inject some 'workplace reality' into our last couple of sessions. In my industry, job interviews include practical assessments like case scenarios, role plays, simulations etc. Soooo, I gave my class a case scenario and gave them 20 minutes to read it and then put them into pairs in break out rooms and gave them the list of mock interview questions they would ask each oth”
“It's a mixture of both, really. On one hand we got Google Classroom and other study platforms pushing every AI Tutor they can towards us students. On the other hand, teachers(Some might be good, but it's a growing problem) frequently hand us assignments created with Claude and ChatGPT. The school then forbids us to use AI, but there's no way to police this anymore, and we gets points taken off if we don't sounds like GPT's perfect answer. I think the worst offenders, IMHO, are the publishers who”
“But why would there be any difference between a teacher giving you the shortcut or AI giving you the shortcut?AI can give you 1000s of exercises and explain in great detail exactly how to solve them, and what you're doing wrong, as well as where you suck, explore other ways of solving and where you should improve. Learning to integrate or solve differential equations with Gemini is 10x better than even the good teachers I've had. It beats bad teachers because it's just simply better than them, a”
“I’m also for banning it in the sphere of education. First off for much of education the student is not on a quest to discover novel things. But rather to learn known concepts. Meaning the answer is not the point. The exploration of the student is the point. Having shortcut machines to the answer are detrimental.Secondly it’s unclear whether shortcuts to many “answers” are wholly beneficial in many cases outside the academic sphere. Hence scandals when for example video educators use AI in their”
“> replace AI with calculatorsSeriously? Idk about you but we weren't allowed to use calculators until long after we had already learned how to do whatever the calculator did by hand, except in cases where that was never the point of the lesson to begin with (like calculating cosines). And even then, sparingly. The reason they eventually let people use it was that it had nothing to do with the lesson being taught, and it was a waste of time at that point to make us do arithmetic by hand. Not beca”
“Assuming I have been on hibernation since 2018-19 time frame, which materials - books, MOOC courses and YT channels would be recommended for me to get started with understanding all the current progress on AI/ML. I am looking for a resource like TeachYourselfCS[1] that can give me structure and roadmap to navigate all the progress/knowledge on the domain.[1] - https://teachyourselfcs.com/”
You should not be indifferent, especially as an educator. AI is NOT it.
“AI is an amazing and incredible tutor. But kids aren’t taught how to use it as such. Kids can be good problem solvers and figure out just enough AI to get to the end result of what’s being asked of them. Teachers don’t have flexibility to go off script from what district/state allows to incorporate AI as a tool in class. Too many parents don’t like their kids having homework intruding on personal time. So they don’t get the kid involved learning outside the classroom. But many of the parents the”
“I used to be a teacher, I feel like i could walk into any class and wing a subject pretty darn good. With ai and all the tools available I feel I could have a whole years curriculum ready in a weekend.”
Use pre-made human graphics or just figure something else out.
“Looking for some ideas from people who know a lot more about this than I do. We've got funding for a small AI lab in a public further education college in Ireland (roughly community college in the US). The hardware is reasonably decent. The goal is to give students useful skills beyond just using ChatGPT. If you had the lab, what would you teach them? submitted by /u/menage_a_un [link] [comments]”
“Early-stage and researching before I build anything. No product to promote, no link here. Looking for blunt feedback from people who've shipped or bought edtech. Which kids' AI literacy tools have you seen actually get used (Code.org, Experience AI, Teachable Machine, etc.), and what made them stick or fade? Do story-driven adventure games work in schools, or do they mostly succeed at home? Poptropica is the model I keep thinking about, with islands, quests and customizable characters, b”
“If you think that’s a lagging indicator, the many reports from teachers and from self reports from students and even adults trying to learn also point in the same direction. See what’s happening with exams and homework exercises.Education itself has lost access to the tools that were making it cheaper and easier to teach.Learning something is a side effect of overcoming friction. AI removes friction.”
“I teach private and corporate students in and around Seoul, mostly working professionals. The part of the job I hated wasn't the teaching. It was everything else: lesson creation, making/checking HW, writing feedback that won't be read. This year I built a system with AI to handle most of it. This is what it looks like and I'm wondering how AI has changed their setup: During class I jot rough notes in Notion. Errors I heard, what we covered, what's next. Messy is fine. Overnight,”