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Welcome to Mission decipher:
Secrets of the AI vault!
As an AI Intel Insider, your mission is to explore the secrets of the AI Vault. You’ll uncover what artificial intelligence is, how it’s transforming learning, and the powerful ways it can be used in the classroom. Along the way, you’ll explore opportunities for students to leverage AI as a tool for creativity, problem-solving, and research, while also addressing the challenges and responsibilities that come with it. Your mission: decode the possibilities, understand the risks, and unlock AI’s potential for education.
Listed below are some key Artificial Intelligence information all teachers should know. Once you’ve built your own confidence and expertise, you’ll find resources further down to use directly with your students. These include age-appropriate activities, ready-to-go slides, and take-home materials you can share with families to help extend AI education beyond the classroom.
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Mission support
What is artificial intelligence?
The world of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of systems that can mimic human intelligence. These systems can learn from data, understand context, reason about problems, make decisions, and sometimes act autonomously or creatively. AI encompasses a range of capabilities, including machine learning, natural language processing, image recognition, and generative AI, enabling machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as interpreting language, recognizing patterns, solving problems, and making predictions.
AI is already all around us, shaping how we work, live, and learn. In education, it is becoming increasingly important for teachers to understand AI, not only because it is transforming other industries, such as healthcare, finance, and marketing, but also because it can enhance teaching, learning, and classroom management.
Examples of AI you likely already know or use
- Voice Assistants like Siri or Alexa respond to your commands and improve as they learn your preferences.
- Streaming Recommendations on platforms like Netflix or Spotify use AI to predict what you might like based on past behaviour.
- Smart Learning Platforms like Khan Academy’s AI tutor or language apps like Duolingo use AI to personalize learning paths for students
Examples of how aI is used in other industries
- Finance: AI detects fraud by analyzing large datasets to find anomalies or suspicious patterns.
- Healthcare: AI-powered robotics assist in delicate surgeries, reducing blood loss and the risk of infection.
- Forensics: AI enhances blurry security footage and reconstructs faces for criminal investigations
Why AI Awareness is Crucial for the Classroom
AI isn’t just a future trend; it’s already part of your students’ lives and your teaching environment. Students may use AI tools, such as ChatGPT or image generators, for assignments, research, or creative projects, with or without your knowledge. Understanding how these tools work helps guide responsible and ethical use. At the same time, you might already be using AI in your practice without realizing it, through grading tools, adaptive learning platforms, plagiarism checkers, or even your school’s LMS. Developing a clear understanding of AI ensures you can navigate its opportunities and challenges, maintain academic integrity, and prepare students to engage with these technologies safely and effectively.
the Types of AI you Should Know
Analytical AI
Purpose: Examines existing data to extract insights, make predictions, or classify information.
Potential Uses in Education:
- Predicting which students may need additional support.
- Analyzing test results to identify common learning gaps.
- Automating administrative tasks like grading quizzes.
Generative AI
Purpose: Creates new data or content, often with a creative focus.
Potential Uses in Education:
- Assisting teachers in creating lesson plans, worksheets, or assessments.
- Helping students brainstorm ideas or practice writing.
- Creating simulations, visual aids, or even custom reading passages for differentiated instructions.
Did you know… about AI
In this insightful video, Claudiu Popa, founder of the KnowledgeFlow Cybersafety Foundation, delves into the intricacies of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective. Drawing upon his extensive experience in information security and privacy, Claudiu sheds light on how AI tools manage data, including user behaviour data and data uploaded by users, including files, images, and web pages. He emphasizes the importance of understanding these processes, especially in educational settings where teachers may not receive guidance on evaluating AI tools from a privacy perspective. This discussion is also particularly relevant for parents, as it highlights the need for awareness about AI’s role in classrooms and its implications for their children’s privacy.
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Student Use of AI: Opportunities and Challenges
Artificial intelligence has become a part of how students approach schoolwork due to its widespread popularity, accessibility, and capabilities. Many already use platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Grammarly, QuillBot, and Perplexity. Some are also exploring image generators like Canva AI and DALL-E, as well as math and coding helpers like Wolfram Alpha and GitHub Copilot. As teachers, you need to understand both the potential and the risks.
While remaining in compliance with your own school board policy, teachers should not heavily discourage or avoid using AI in the classroom, as it is already an integral part of how students learn and work outside of school. Completely banning it is unrealistic and may encourage students to use it without proper guidance. Instead, bringing AI into classroom discussions allows teachers to model responsible use, highlight its limitations, and demonstrate to students how to integrate AI tools with their own thinking. This approach prepares students for a future where AI will be part of nearly every field, rather than leaving them unprepared.
The student Opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence
Opportunities
- Personalized Support: Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot can provide instant answers to student questions, re-explain difficult concepts in simpler terms, and walk through problems step by step. This gives students additional practice and allows them to learn at their own pace outside of class.
- Accessibility: Tools like Grammarly and QuillBot can help English language learners improve sentence structure, vocabulary, and overall clarity. Text-to-speech and reading support features built into Microsoft Immersive Reader or Google Read&Write can make content more accessible to students who struggle with reading or have learning differences.
- Skill Development: Platforms like Perplexity can model how to research, summarize, and cite sources. Students can be guided to critique AI responses and develop stronger critical thinking skills.
- Efficiency: Some platforms can quickly generate presentation templates, and other math-based platforms can instantly solve equations with explanations. These tools save time on routine tasks, allowing students to devote more effort to analysis and critical thinking.
Challenges
- Academic Integrity: Students may attempt to submit essays or assignments written largely by AI tools, such as ChatGPT or Gemini. This makes it challenging to evaluate the student’s fundamental understanding.
- Accuracy Issues: AI often produces confident but false information. Tools may invent citations, misquote data, or give incorrect math solutions. Students must be taught to double-check AI outputs against trusted sources such as textbooks, scholarly articles, or verified databases, rather than assuming AI is always correct.
- Overreliance: When students rely too heavily on AI for writing, problem-solving, or editing, they risk skipping the practice that builds fundamental skills. For example, relying on QuillBot to rephrase entire essays or Grammarly to correct every mistake prevents them from developing their own voice, improving their grammar awareness, and utilizing problem-solving strategies. Teachers should emphasize balance, showing students when AI can assist and when they must do the work themselves.
Teacher use of Artificial Intelligence
Saving Time with AI
AI can help educators free up valuable time by automating routine or repetitive tasks. For example, tools can:
- Generate draft lesson plans, quizzes, or worksheets that teachers can then adapt for their own classrooms.
- Summarize large sets of information into digestible formats, such as condensing long readings into discussion starters.
- Provide quick templates for rubrics, parent emails, or classroom policies.
It’s important to note that this use is most effective when AI is given generic prompts (no student names or personal details). Teachers remain in control, editing and tailoring materials to fit their unique students.
Supporting Student Learning
AI tools can provide teachers with new ways to assess student progress by having the AI read student work, but they work best as helpers, not decision-makers.
- Teachers can use AI to analyze anonymous, generic samples of student work to spark ideas for feedback, next steps in instruction, or differentiated activities.
- For example, an AI might highlight common grammar issues, suggest additional practice problems, or offer ways to reframe a concept for struggling learners.
⚠️ Important reminders:
- Never enter personal or identifying student information into AI systems. Keep everything anonymous and general.
- AI is not a replacement for teacher feedback. It can point out patterns or provide draft ideas, but it’s the teacher’s professional expertise that ensures feedback is accurate, constructive, and caring.
Potential AI tools teachers can use
- Gibbly: AI for quick classroom materials and prompts.
- Steamly: Lesson planning support with draft outlines and resource ideas.
- Canva AI: Helps design visually engaging slides, worksheets, and classroom resources quickly. Teachers can start with a draft and customize to fit their needs.
- AI Fact-Checkers: Tools that attempt to detect AI-generated writing. These can raise awareness, but they are not fully reliable and should never be treated as proof. Teachers’ professional judgment is always more important.
These are all tools that teachers can use in their work; however, AI should never be a replacement for human judgment and analysis.
What teachers can do
- Set Clear Guidelines: Establish specific rules for how AI tools can and cannot be used in your classroom. For example, Grammarly can be used for proofreading grammar and style, but students should not submit essays generated entirely by ChatGPT or Gemini. Clarify these expectations early so students understand the difference between support and misuse.
- Teach Verification Skills: Emphasize that AI outputs are not always reliable. Show students how to cross-check answers against textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, academic databases, or other trusted sources. Building this habit helps prevent students from accepting incorrect or fabricated information.
- Design Process-Based Assignments: Create tasks that require students to show their thinking, not just a final product. This might include submitting outlines, rough drafts, annotated bibliographies, or brief reflections that explain how AI was utilized. These steps make it easier for students to rely on genuine learning and avoid relying solely on artificial intelligence.
- Stay Informed About Tools: Familiarize yourself with the platforms students are most likely to use, such as ChatGPT, QuillBot, Grammarly, and Canva AI, and understand how they can assist students in creating assignments. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses allows you to anticipate how students might apply them productively and how they might be tempted to misuse them. Always read the privacy policy for each AI platform you approve or use in your classroom (and in your personal life) and use school guidelines and policies to inform whether a tool is approved or not.
AI Misuse by Students: DeepFakes and DeepNudes
Since the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies, hundreds of accessible websites have been developed to create ‘deepfake’ and ‘deepnude’ content. Deepfakes are highly realistic and manipulated videos or audio recordings created using artificial intelligence. They often involve superimposing one person’s face onto another’s body or altering voices and actions to make it appear that someone is saying or doing something they never actually did. This technology can be used to mislead, impersonate, or spread false information. DeepNudes refers to the use of AI to create or manipulate images to generate nude or sexually explicit content of individuals without their consent. The technology alters uploaded photos to add realistic nudity, raising serious ethical and legal concerns around privacy, consent, and non-consensual image sharing.
In schools, this has become a serious concern, with incidents involving students taking images from peers’ social media profiles and using AI tools to generate fabricated content depicting actions that never occurred. In some cases, this has included digitally placing students’ faces onto explicit and pornographic material, causing significant harm to those targeted. For example, in Winnipeg, a high school discovered that students had used AI to create and share sexually explicit fake images of their classmates, sourced from social media. To highlight its severity, the incident prompted a police investigation and led the school division to implement new protocols for handling AI-generated content and protecting students.
Teens often underestimate the harm caused by DeepNudes, assuming they’re harmless because they’re fake. Creating and distributing AI-generated images like DeepNudes is unethical and can lead to serious legal consequences. These images can cause emotional distress, reputational damage, and could be used for sextortion. Students must understand that while AI makes it easy to create such content, the real-world repercussions are significant. We encourage discussions on responsible AI use and the importance of respecting privacy and dignity to prevent misuse.
Mission support
aI in the Classroom
Artificial intelligence presents educators with exciting new possibilities to enhance learning, but its adoption also raises significant ethical concerns. Teachers must address issues of bias, transparency, and equitable access while ensuring that any chosen AI tool protects student privacy and meets data protection requirements. Finding the right tool that meets all these criteria can be challenging, but should not be impossible.
AI Evaluation tool (eNGLISH ONLY)
The KnowledgeFlow AI Tool Evaluation Checklist for Canadian Teachers is a vital resource for educators and parents navigating the increasing presence of AI in classrooms. Focused on privacy and security, this checklist provides a practical and structured approach to evaluating AI tools before they’re integrated into educational settings.
This document focuses on the unique challenges of using AI in schools, including how these tools collect, store, and utilize sensitive information, such as student and teacher data. It guides educators in assessing key criteria, such as data security, regulatory compliance, and ethical design, ensuring that AI tools align with Canadian privacy laws, including PIPEDA and FIPPA. What makes this tool unique is its emphasis on real-world classroom scenarios. Whether it’s lesson planning, evaluating student homework, or creating engaging learning materials, the checklist provides clear, actionable insights tailored to each use case.
By using this checklist, teachers can fulfil their obligation to protect student data privacy, parents can better understand how AI is being used to support learning, and both groups can ensure that these powerful tools are used responsibly and securely.
Introduction to ChatGPT
Not sure where to start or what AI generators can do? This video offers tips and tricks to help you achieve the results you want by crafting more effective prompts. You’ll also learn general rules of thumb for using AI tools safely and effectively.
- Be cautious if you need to make an account to use an AI tool. Children under 13 should not make accounts and students 13-18 should require parental consent.
- Don’t share personal info with any AI chat bots.
- Unless your school has vetted a tool, keep private details out of your prompts, including any uploaded files.
- The more specific you are in the prompts, the higher quality output you will get.
Considerations for Using AI Tools in K-12 Classrooms by the Government of British Columbia
As of November 2024, British Columbia has taken a pioneering role in integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into education by issuing comprehensive guidance for educators. This framework emphasizes the ethical use of AI, data security, and the enhancement of student learning experiences. It provides practical resources, including curriculum connections and evaluation tools, to help teachers effectively integrate AI into their classrooms.
Provinces are at different stages in addressing AI in education. Ontario has enacted Bill 194, the Strengthening Cybersecurity and Building Trust in the Public Sector Act, 2024, which establishes a regulatory framework governing AI and cybersecurity across the entire public sector. The legislation applies to provincial and municipal institutions, school boards, hospitals, and other public entities. It mandates accountability, risk management, and transparency in AI deployment and grants the government authority to develop future regulations for AI use, rather than focusing solely on educational institutions. Meanwhile, Quebec has developed the Prêt pour l’IA report, which, while not exclusively education-focused, offers 12 recommendations for responsible AI development and use across sectors, including education and curriculum reform (CTF-FCE).
While many provinces are still exploring AI’s role in education, these developments underscore a growing national, even global, emphasis on the responsible integration of AI technologies. Educators are encouraged to stay informed about local policies and seek professional development opportunities to implement AI tools effectively and securely in their teaching practices.
Teaching Materials (Slide deck)
Here are three slide shows, filtered by grade range (Grades 9–12, 5–8, and 1–4), that you can add straight into Google Classroom. These slideshows make it easy for you to turn the information into teachable lessons with ready-to-go slides so that students can become the experts themselves. You can present them in class or share them with students and parents to explore on their own.
English Versions
French Versions
Classroom Activities
Here are lesson activities you can use directly in the classroom or upload to Google Classroom. There is a teacher version and a student version that can be directly handed out. The activities are curriculum-aligned and designed to deepen students’ understanding of cybersafety concepts. They are organized by grade range (Grades 7–12 and Grades 1–6) and conveniently included in a single document for easy access.
English Version
French Version
continuing Education: Artificial INtelligence
Back to School with Microsoft Copilot Educator PD, Educator Workshop
Power up the school year with a toolkit of creative, time-saving ideas powered by Microsoft Copilot. In this pre-recorded workshop, you’ll explore practical ways of using AI, like creating: an interactive summary of course curriculum documents in seconds, an assistant to unpack standards and plan targeted and impactful lessons, engaging digital escape rooms, automated meeting summaries, and fun class visuals. Along the way, you’ll learn how to craft effective prompts using Microsoft’s “Goal – Context – Source – Expectations” framework, pick up tips for thinking critically while working with AI, and see how the Microsoft AI for Educators course can help you keep building your skills. Leave with a collection of back-to-school ideas you can use immediately, plus strategies for integrating AI into your teaching practice all year long. By registering, you’ll receive the full-length recording and a Recording Recap broken into bite-sized segments so you can quickly find and revisit the content most relevant to you.
Generative AI for Educators Course
This course introduces educators to generative AI, a type of AI that creates new content such as text, images, or other media, and demonstrates how it can support teaching practice. Participants explore tools like Gemini and ChatGPT, learning to write effective prompts, evaluate AI outputs, and apply AI to plan lessons, create instructional materials, personalize instruction, and handle administrative tasks. By the end of the course, educators will be able to identify practical uses of generative AI, craft prompts, and develop classroom resources that enhance teaching and learning.
Cisco Networking academy
Introduction to modern AI
If you’re new to AI and curious to see what it can do, Introduction to Modern AI is the perfect place to start. This beginner-friendly course introduces key AI concepts and provides hands-on practice with AI-powered applications. You’ll begin with a broad overview of AI, then experiment with computer vision using a photo app and try out machine translation with an online tool. From there, you’ll dive into the exciting world of chatbots, where you’ll learn tips for crafting better prompts and gain practical experience with 10+ popular AI tools, including ChatGPT, Meta AI, Gemini, Google Translate, Claude, Hugging Chat, NotebookLM, and more. Start your journey today and discover how AI can simplify everyday tasks, spark creativity, and boost your productivity.
The Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) is a neutral, not-for-profit national centre of expertise with the mission of strengthening Canada’s digital advantage in the global economy. For over 30 years, and with a team over 100 experts, they have delivered forward-looking research, practical policy advice, and capacity-building solutions for individuals and businesses. ICTC’s goal is to ensure that technology is utilized to drive economic growth and innovation and that Canada’s workforce remains competitive on a global scale.
ICTC’s National CyberDay is funded by the Government of Canada’s CanCode Initiative.
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