Learning in Hand Issue 41

Issue 41 • August 20, 2025

It’s tough to keep up with AI. New tools seem to pop up daily, and even the “old” ones keep rolling out fresh features. On top of that, educators are sharing smart ways to put AI to work in classrooms.

The Back to School AI Summit is designed to help make sense of it all. This online event features daily keynotes and dozens of short, 20-minute sessions covering tools, bias, ethics, pedagogy, social-emotional learning, and more.

I’ll be presenting From Prompt to Pictures: Creative Illustration with AI on Wednesday, September 10th, at 10:40 AM Central.

I’m not sure if sessions will be recorded, but I do know that registration is free. You might as well sign up now and explore ideas and resources that could come in handy this school year.

Complete Curriculum Creator 📝

Thanks to TeachAid for sponsoring this newsletter!

Most AI tools for teachers will give you a single lesson or worksheet. TeachAid stands out by building a complete unit, aligned to your state or national curriculum.

You enter your grade, your standards, and your topic. TeachAid confirms the unit description with you, then builds the whole thing in minutes.

Your unit can include:

🗓️ Daily lessons
📊 Slides
🧩 Interactive activities
🪜 Scaffolds
✅ Check-ins
🪞 Reflections
📝 Assessments
🤖 An AI tutor for every student

If you just need one lesson or a single activity, TeachAid can do that too.

Planning and Delivery

TeachAid doesn’t just outline the unit for you. It generates everything you need to teach the unit, including presentations, practice activities, diagnostic, and assessments.

The presentations TeachAid creates for you have an interactive mode that you can project to your students’ screens. They join with a code and can respond right in the presentation.

Want extra support for small groups or independent work? Switch on Tutor Chat and your students can get AI-powered, real-time help that matches your lesson.

You can even tell TeachAid the pedagogical approaches you want to use, and it will weave them right into your unit.

I prompted TeachAid to generate a unit about Artificial Intelligence as part of a 6th grade ELA class. I simply entered, “A week long unit about AI for students. Include an awareness of what AI is, critiques it's output, and explore ways students can use it for learning.” TeachAid generated a unit plan, closely tying the content to 6th grade ELA standards. Then within the unit, I could proceed to generate lessons, activities, and resources, each tied to the ELA standards.

Free to Use

There is something so very satisfying about watching a complete unit come together in minutes. See for yourself: You can always use TeachAid for free.

Differentiation and Scaffolds

Scaffolds, IEP supports, translation, and enrichment are built in. Every unit can be adapted for diverse learners, with Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports automatically embedded. Content can be generated in over 100 languages and aligned to your community and classroom context.

Complete, Customizable Units

With TeachAid, every piece of your unit is connected. Lessons lead naturally into assessments. Scaffolds and IEP supports are tied to the actual tasks students are working on. Enrichment activities build on what has already been taught. Even the AI tutor is synced to your unit so it can give help that is relevant to your content. It is not just a set of resources. It is a complete, all-in-one teaching experience.

Curious what your next unit could look like?

Sign up for free to see how it works with your curriculum and teaching style. Check out TeachAid’s Resources page for webinars, training videos, and professional development materials.

Slide Selection Shape-Up 📏

You might have noticed that selecting an object in Google Slides looks a little different. Instead of six blue squares, you’ll now see four corner circles, four side handles, and a rotation handle with an arrow.

Along with the new look comes a welcome upgrade. When multiple elements are selected, dragging a corner circle automatically keeps proportions, so nothing gets stretched or squished. Before, you had to hold Shift to do that. If you actually want to stretch or squish a selection, just drag one of the pill-shaped side handles.

Even better, resizing a group now scales text, borders, and shadows along with the objects. No more resizing only to spend extra time fixing mismatched borders and font sizes.

Before and After proportional scaling in Google Slides

Guided Growth with Gemini 🏊

Google is rolling out a new mode for its Gemini AI chatbot called Guided Learning. Think of it as turning Gemini into a step-by-step tutor. Instead of giving answers right away, Gemini asks questions, drops hints, and moves at the learner’s pace. The goal is to build understanding and keep students engaged in the process rather than rushing to the answer.

Last week I presented Deep Dive into Prompting Gemini with teachers in the Council Bluffs Community School District. I went all in a diving theme, and my Swim Lessons handout page focused on Guided Learning mode. It is one way Gemini can act less like a shortcut and more like a supportive coach.

Waiting Wisdom ⏳

Wait time can feel awkward, but it makes a difference. Mary Budd Rowe’s research showed that when teachers paused for just a few extra seconds after asking a question, student answers grew longer and richer, with more reasoning and inference (Kent State University, Wikipedia). Other studies confirm that even a 3–5 second pause helps more students join in.

Think-Pair-Share pushes participation even further. A 2021 study found that adding a pairing step before sharing increased hand-raising and overall engagement compared to whole-class questioning (ScienceDirect).

Recently I was in a session with Dr. Carol Lippert, who described Think-Pair-Share as covert and overt. I instantly liked the word covert. “Think covertly” feels more engaging than “think silently” or “think by yourself.”

Students can picture themselves on a secret mission, holding onto their ideas until it is time to reveal them. First comes the covert thinking. Then comes the overt sharing.

Image generated with Gemini, August 2025

Norms for a New Year 💻

Book Creator’s Back to School Resources Hub now has Digital Norms notebooks, with versions for both elementary and secondary students.

Inside each digital book are ready-to-use pages for a class pledge, responsible AI use, handling toxic comments, collaborating well with others, and more.

Teachers with a free Book Creator account can host one library with up to 40 books and unlimited students. A premium upgrade is $13 per month (or $130 per year) and unlocks unlimited libraries and up to 1,000 books.

Lingo to Learn 💬

CNET recently published a ChatGPT Glossary with 55 AI terms. Of course, these apply to more than just ChatGPT.

While I don’t think that everyone should know all of these terms, here are some I want to highlight:

Deepfake: An AI-generated video, image, or audio clip designed to look or sound real.
Hallucination: When AI confidently produces an answer that’s false or made up.
Inference: How AI takes what it learned in training and uses it to create new responses.
Slop: Low-quality content mass-produced by AI to grab clicks or ad revenue.
Stochastic Parrot: A nickname for AI that highlights how it strings words together based on patterns in its training data. The AI can sound convincing, but it’s really repeating patterns rather than truly understanding.
Temperature: A setting that controls how predictable or creative an AI’s responses are.
Token: A small chunk of text (about four characters in English) that AI processes to form its output.

Tech Tools Takeoff 🛫

I tuned into FETC’s Back to School Ed Tech Tools webinar, and it was packed with ideas I know teachers will appreciate. Four presenters shared fast, fresh tools and strategies to kick off the school year with the right mix of technology, AI, and creativity.

Here are some of takeaways:

Snorkl lets students record voice reflections while the AI gives instant feedback, which helps teachers peek into their thinking.
MegaMinds is a Roblox-like world where students can learn, create, and even talk with AI avatars as they move through challenges.
SchoolAI Spaces 2.0 allows teachers to build guided chat experiences step by step while tracking student progress.
Synthesia creates video “digital twins” that can deliver messages in more than 100 languages.
NotebookLM was a crowd favorite. Upload a handbook, set of readings, or even a test, and it can generate study guides, voice notes, and summaries.
Perplexity is a strong research partner that cites sources and shows exactly how answers are found.
Bolt.new builds working websites or games in seconds. Teachers type an idea, and it writes and publishes the code.
Text Blaze is a Chrome extension that auto-types saved rubrics, comments, or replies with a shortcut.
Google Earth Projects let students turn book reports or history assignments into interactive, place-based tours.

A few quotes that stood out:

“Voice reflections are X-ray vision for teachers. You see inside a student’s thinking.”
– Lindy Hockenbary
“Never trust, always verify. AI generates inaccuracies, and our reputations as educators depend on checking facts.”
– Nneka Hogan
“AI should free us to do what matters most: building relationships and guiding authentic learning.”
– Donnie Piercy

Each presenter came back to the same idea. Technology should save teachers time and help them focus on what really matters: students, relationships, and authentic learning.

You can register for free and watch the recording of the webinar.