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, according to an Education Week article. With many predictions that AI will shape the future of all sectors of society, including K-12 education, 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, technologists say.
“This [technology] is the one that we need to be focusing on,” says 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.”
One method for teaching and learning AI literacy is through existing technology classes. One example: require students in kindergarten through 8th grade to take a computer-applications class each year. This is seen by some as an excellent learning environment to implement age-appropriate AI literacy lessons.
Computer-applications teachers in one district started incorporating lessons about AI into their curricula during the 2023-24 school year. 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.
Another example: One teacher meets with students once a week using AI lessons for 4th and 5th grade students. 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.
With her K-3 students, there’s less emphasis on AI compared with other tech topics or skills because AI is still a little abstract for them.
Another alternative is to use school librarians to deliver AI lessons.
In Maryland’s Washington County school district, students in grades 6-12 learn what AI is and how it works through the lens of digital citizenship, says 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 says.
Library media specialists in the district’s secondary schools developed eight lessons adapted from Common Sense Media’s ready-made AI literacy curriculum, Anders says. 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 either collaborate with English or social studies classes to teach the lessons or have those classes come to the library to receive lessons.
Librarians also created five “extension lessons” for Boonsboro Middle School’s (MD) 7th through 12th graders, says Christine Hurley, the library media specialist for the 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 says. “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 says. For example, 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 says.
The goal, eventually, is for AI literacy to be “infused across all classes,” she says. “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.”
Education Week
