“We didn’t ban calculators. We taught math differently. We didn’t ban the internet. We taught research differently. So why are we trying to ban AI instead of doing the same?” We’ve been here before. I was a young teacher when the internet showed up in classrooms in the 90s. Educators panicked. Teachers worried it would make students lazy, that it would only be used for cheating, and that memorizing facts and dates would go out the window. They were right. Sort of. The internet did change things. But it didn’t destroy learning. It made us rethink what was worth teaching and how we wanted to spend instructional time. It pushed us away from memorizing trivia and toward analyzing, questioning, creating, and connecting. The same thing happened with calculators decades before. There was real fear that students would lose the ability to compute. But what actually happened was that students stopped getting stuck in multi-digit calculations and started spending more time doing real math. They m...
“We didn’t ban calculators. We taught math differently. We didn’t ban the internet. We taught research differently. So why are we trying to ban AI instead of doing the same?”
We’ve been here before.
I was a young teacher when the internet showed up in classrooms in the 90s. Educators panicked. Teachers worried it would make students lazy, that it would only be used for cheating, and that memorizing facts and dates would go out the window. They were right. Sort of. The internet did change things. But it didn’t destroy learning. It made us rethink what was worth teaching and how we wanted to spend instructional time. It pushed us away from memorizing trivia and toward analyzing, questioning, creating, and connecting.
The same thing happened with calculators decades before. There was real fear that students would lose the ability to compute. But what actually happened was that students stopped getting stuck in multi-digit calculations and started spending more time doing real math. They modeled. They reasoned. They understood. They used the tool so they could focus on the thinking. Calculators opened the door for students to focus on deeper math concepts.
Now it’s happening again. This time with AI. Once again, I see a lot of educators panicking.
There’s a lot of rumbling right now about how students will cheat, how they won’t learn to write, and how they’ll let AI do the work. But if we stop and look at the bigger picture, it becomes clearer that AI is not the end of education as we know it; it’s a profound shift. I believe it will become a disruptive innovation in education, just like the internet and calculator before it and will fundamentally change the way classrooms operate.
AI is already showing up in nearly every career field. Professionals are using it to write reports, analyze data, generate code, brainstorm solutions, and communicate more clearly. It is already a part of how adults function in the workplace. We should be making sure students know how to use it well and not keep it out of reach.
If we are using AI in our careers, and our students will be using AI in theirs, then it needs to be part of what we teach. We are not doing kids a favor by pretending it doesn’t exist. We’re actually setting them up to be left behind.
So instead of asking how we can stop students from using AI, let’s ask how we can teach them to use it better.
How Students Can Use AI Without Losing the Thinking
Here are some real examples of how students can use AI to support learning:
1. Writing with Purpose
Instead of banning students from using AI to help with writing, flip the process. Let them use it at home to generate a first draft based on their ideas, outline, or prompt. Let them learn how AI prompt iterations work and how they can improve AI output with quality input. Then in class, they can work on refining it. They can evaluate the writing, make decisions about what to keep or toss, improve the structure, clarify meaning, and build their own voice. We’re not removing writing from the classrooms; we’re shifting it to focus on the parts that, I believe, matter the most.
2. Better Questions, Deeper Thinking
Students can ask AI to generate a list of questions about a topic, then analyze those questions. Are they deep or shallow? Do they show bias? Are they open-ended? Which ones are worth exploring? This leads to great conversations about how to ask better questions and how to dig deeper into a topic. It builds inquiry and metacognition.
3. Clarifying Hard Ideas
If a student is stuck on a tough concept or reading passage, they can use AI to rephrase it at a level they can understand. This isn’t about dumbing down the content.; it’s about building access. Once they have a simplified version, they can compare it to the original to see what changed. They can annotate the two texts, identify what was clarified, and look at how meaning, tone, or nuance may have shifted. This process strengthens reading comprehension and helps students become more aware of how language works across levels of complexity. It also teaches them how to adapt difficult content without losing the core ideas.
4. Practicing Revision and Evaluation
Students can submit an original piece of writing into an AI tool and rather than ask for AI to provide a new draft, students can ask for suggestions. Then they can review the feedback, decide which changes are helpful, and ignore the rest. Students won’t just be editing. They will be evaluating. They will learn to spot lower-quality feedback, recognize good advice, and build the skill of revision instead of waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.
5. Exploring Different Perspectives
Students can prompt AI to simulate multiple points of view on an issue. For example, in a social studies class, they might ask for different perspectives on a historical event from the point of view of a leader, a protester, an outsider, or a citizen. I have had students compare historical events and actions of leaders from different time periods that may be difficult to complete without AI, because the time period contexts and situations are, on face, so very different to allow for an easy comparison. Students can then compare AI responses and talk about what each version highlights or leaves out.
6. Creating Personalized Study Tools
AI can help students make flashcards, concept maps, or summaries that are tailored to how they learn best. They can ask AI to quiz them, explain a term using a real-life example, or break a big idea into steps. They can participate in live conversations with AI and have AI quiz them on topics they are learning, while also providing students quality feedback in real-time. I believe immediate feedback is the most underrated quality of AI; in our video game and social media world students have grown accustomed to repeated and immediate feedback and AI is probably the closest thing we have to match that rapid pace of learning. Personalized tools give students control over their learning and let them reinforce concepts on their own terms.
The Bottom Line
AI is not the enemy. Poor use of AI is. But the only way students will learn how to use it well is by actually using it, with guidance, with reflection, and with purpose. We need to change our current and intense focus around AI and student cheating and shift conversations toward how AI is more about supporting relevance and affording students additional opportunities to think more deeply.
If we expect students to graduate into a world where AI is a daily tool in nearly every field, then they need to be developing those skills now. The ability to write, research, evaluate, analyze, and create with AI as a partner is not optional, but necessary.
Instead of asking “How do we stop students from using AI?” maybe we should be asking, “How do we teach them to use it better?”
Because like it or not, AI is not going anywhere. So let’s stop talking about whether students will use AI. Let’s spend more time on the question of how we will teach them how to use it more effectively.