Artificial intelligence isn’t a new term that the K-5 students in Selver Perez’s computer-applications classes are learning about for the first time.
Her students have been interested in learning about self-driving cars, robot vacuums, and voice-activated assistants, so her lessons have mentioned AI in one way or another in the past, said Perez, who teaches in New Jersey’s Passaic school district.
But the rising use of ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other generative AI tools in recent years has led the district to be more intentional about teaching about how AI works and its benefits and drawbacks, said Joanna Antoniou, Passaic’s supervisor of educational technology.
Along with lessons on coding, digital citizenship, and keyboarding, all K-8 students in the district get lessons about what AI is, how it’s trained, the ethical questions around it, and how to use it responsibly, Antoniou said. The district introduces more in-depth lessons on AI in 4th grade and builds upon those lessons in later grades, but there is still teaching and learning at the lower grades that expose younger students to the concept of AI.
The 12,000-student district is among the school systems that have started to implement AI literacy lessons within their curricula in the past few years.
The push for implementing AI literacy in K-12 education came quickly after the 2022 public release of ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that can answer seemingly any prompt. Since then, many technologists have been predicting that AI will be shaping the future of all sectors of society, including K-12 education. That’s why today’s students need to have AI literacy so they’re prepared for a world where the fast-evolving technology will be used regularly in everyday life and in careers, they say.
“This [technology] is the one that we need to be focusing on,” said Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE + ASCD, a nonprofit organization that provides resources and professional development on educational technology and curriculum to improve teaching and learning. “It’s where the need is and where the expectations are from future employers.”
Even President Donald Trump has made AI literacy a focus area: In April, he signed an executive order that called for infusing AI throughout K-12 education, which includes establishing a task force on educating young people about the technology, prioritizing AI education and training in grant funding, and partnering with organizations to teach AI literacy.
The U.S. Department of Education, in its proposal to include AI in its grant-funding priorities, defined AI literacy as “the technical knowledge, durable skills, and future ready attitudes required to thrive in a world influenced by AI. It enables learners to engage, create with, manage, and design AI, while critically evaluating its benefits, risks, and implications.” Other education organizations have used similar definitions for AI literacy.
Teaching AI literacy through existing technology classes
The Passaic district requires students in kindergarten through 8th grade to take a computer-applications class each year, which was the “perfect” learning environment to implement age-appropriate AI literacy lessons, said Antoniou.
The computer-applications teachers started incorporating lessons about AI into their curricula during the 2023-24 school year, Antoniou said. The goal is to provide students with “age-appropriate” lessons about AI, how to use it responsibly, and to teach them to “think critically” about it, Antoniou said.
“It does touch base on at least giving [students] a foundational understanding of what it is [they’re] interacting with, which I think is incredibly important to know—that it’s not magic. It’s coming from somewhere,” Antoniou said. “That’s incredibly important for our students to be exposed to.”
Perez, who meets with students once a week, started her AI lessons with 4th and 5th grade students in the first year. Using lessons from Learning.com and Code.org, she introduced them to what AI is and its history. She modeled how chatbots work by asking Google Gemini to write a story about whatever the students suggested. The class also had discussions about whether it would be right for Selver to sell a story she created with a chatbot.
With her K-3 students, there’s less emphasis on AI compared with other tech topics or skills because “it’s still a little abstract for them,” Perez said.
But sometimes, conversations about AI come up naturally with the younger students. For instance, a 2nd grade student saw Perez had ChatGPT bookmarked on her browser. Perez asked if the student knew what ChatGPT was, and that started a conversation about AI.
The student had heard about ChatGPT from an online video and from his parents. He told Perez he knew that AI can sometimes give wrong answers. Perez then opened ChatGPT and Gemini, and together she and the student asked the tools a few questions.
“I used this opportunity to explain [AI] hallucinations and prompt engineering, how the way we ask questions can affect the answers we get from AI chatbots,” Perez said.
For high school students in the district, there is currently no explicit AI literacy instruction, Antoniou said. However, Passaic Academy for Science and Engineering students can enroll in an AI course that began in the 2024-25 school year that covers basic AI algorithms, incorporates them into projects, and discusses the social and ethical aspects of the technology, Antoniou said.
There are also other opportunities for students “to be exposed to AI literacy throughout their regular school day at the high school level,” she said.
One of those ways is through the AI acceptable-use rubric that the district board approved this school year, Antoniou said. She envisions teachers using that as a conversation starter with their students about what AI is, how to use it responsibly, and what the expectations are for assignments. This includes AI literacy, she said, because “in order to understand the various levels of the rubric, the teachers need to review concepts with them, like prompting and ethics,” she said.
Teachers “should help students understand that they can use this amazing tool in different ways and model for them how they can use a generative AI model,” she said.
Using school librarians to deliver AI lessons
In Maryland’s Washington County school district, it’s students in grades 6-12 who are learning what AI is and how it works, through the lens of digital citizenship, said Ann Laber Anders, the district supervisor of technology and library media programs. The program started in the 2024-25 school year.
“What we’re trying to do is get students to understand how to use AI as a tool, to support critical thinking, brainstorming, and researching in a positive way through the lens of academic integrity,” Anders said.
Library media specialists in the district’s secondary schools developed eight lessons adapted from Common Sense Media’s ready-made AI literacy curriculum, Anders said. The lessons covered: what AI is, how it’s trained, what chatbots are, what AI bias is, how AI bias impacts lives, what AI algorithms are, and what facial-recognition software is. Depending on the school, librarians would either collaborate with English or social studies classes to teach the lessons or have those classes come to the library to receive lessons.
To build on that AI literacy over time, the librarians also created five “extension lessons” for this school year’s 7th through 12th graders, said Christine Hurley, the library media specialist for Boonsboro Middle School and the lead secondary librarian for the district. The new lessons cover different topics, such as deepfake videos and AI ethics, and they dive deeper into topics covered in the foundational lessons.
“The idea is that over time, we’re going to continue to build lessons out,” Hurley said. “But because it’s all changing so fast and it’s all so new, we wanted everybody to have the same start and then we’re going to age it up as it goes.”
The district is starting to build out an AI literacy curriculum for elementary students, too, Anders said. For instance, 4th graders have a discussion about AI after reading Alice and Sparkle, a book created by technology developer Ammaar Reshi using generative AI programs. But the work on the elementary AI literacy curriculum is “ongoing” due to the rapid pace of AI technological advances, she said.
The goal, eventually, is for AI literacy to be “infused across all classes,” she said. “We don’t want it to be compartmentalized. But starting off, we needed to have a place for that curriculum to land, so we put it into library media.”
What’s missing in schools’ current AI literacy efforts
Skeptics of the benefits of AI on teaching and learning are concerned about AI’s potential negative effects on people’s cognitive skills. They worry that schools’ lessons on AI literacy won’t focus enough on the technology’s harms.
“It might be worthwhile to spend some time explaining the massive ethical question marks that surround how these tools are trained, the data that they’re trained on, the environmental concerns, the ways in which they encode biases,” said Benjamin Riley, the founder and CEO of think tank Cognitive Resonance, which published a paper in 2024 about the educational hazards of generative AI. AI literacy efforts, however, just give a perfunctory nod to the downsides of AI, he said.
Mostly, Riley added, these efforts fall into a “pro-hype” slant.
“Very little [time] is actually spent on saying, ‘And therefore, you shouldn’t use it,’” Riley said. “If you are truly ‘AI literate,’ you would understand that using AI as a student is likely offloading the cognitive effort that is the entire purpose for why your school or your class exists.”
Others, however, argue that schools aren’t doing enough to ensure students know how to use the technology to enhance their learning and develop the skills they will need to succeed in careers that will require facility with AI tools.
“What we really need to do is stop spending so much time teaching AI literacy and we need to start teaching how students should be using AI for learning,” said Culatta of ISTE + ASCD.
“It’s good to know how [large language models] work and the data is structured,” Culatta said. “But what I really want them to know is, how are they having practice using these tools to help them be better learners?”
Schools should be teaching AI literacy in the context of a subject, he said.
“Talking about how a tool is programmed and how it spits out information is far less meaningful and useful than putting it in the context of learning and helping kids know how that works when you’re trying to get ready for a history test, or build a project for science, or write an opinion paper in English.”
Even so, Culatta acknowledged that it’s easier for districts right now to incorporate AI literacy into existing technology classes or through school librarians than it is to incorporate teaching about AI use in the context of a subject.
“In one case, I have to train one teacher. Box checked,” he said. “In the case of what I’m talking about, I gotta train all my teachers and I know that’s tough.”
