In this ChatEDU Check-In: The IT department, where AI goes to die?, Matt explores the risks of treating generative AI as a standard enterprise software rollout. This episode examines how traditional corporate and school structures may inadvertently stifle the transformative potential of AI through excessive normalization and risk aversion.

Key Takeaways:

Treating AI as a standard software deployment flattens its unique capabilities and ignores how fundamentally different these systems are from previous office automation.

Focusing solely on simple automation and efficiency gains prevents genuine augmentation, causing schools to miss opportunities to redefine instructional environments or student partnerships.

Overly cautious oversight from risk averse departments leads to an information gap where innovative users hide their AI activity, preventing leadership from developing a realistic strategic vision.

Matt’s Two Cents: School leaders must resist the urge to de-weird AI by handing total control to risk-averse departments that prioritize elimination over experimentation. Real innovation is often bubbling up from lead teachers and principals rather than centralized IT, and it requires leaders to model risk taking to bring these high value use cases out of the shadows and into a mature organizational strategy.

Link:

The IT department: Where AI goes to die

https://tinyurl.com/ynj8fxn7

Sponsor

Eduaide: Where good ideas become great lessons. Eduaide is an AI-powered, research-based K-12 tool that creates high-quality resources, games, and graphic organizers built for better student outcomes. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠⁠.

In this ChatEDU Check-In: The IT department, where AI goes to die?, Matt explores the risks of treating generative AI as a standard enterprise software rollout. This episode examines how traditional corporate and school structures may inadvertently stifle the transformative potential of AI through excessive normalization and risk aversion.

Key Takeaways:

Treating AI as a standard software deployment flattens its unique capabilities and ignores how fundamentally different these systems are from previous office automation.

Focusing solely on simple automation and efficiency gains prevents genuine augmentation, causing schools to miss opportunities to redefine instructional environments or student partnerships.

Overly cautious oversight from risk averse departments leads to an information gap where innovative users hide their AI activity, preventing leadership from developing a realistic strategic vision.

Matt’s Two Cents: School leaders must resist the urge to de-weird AI by handing total control to risk-averse departments that prioritize elimination over experimentation. Real innovation is often bubbling up from lead teachers and principals rather than centralized IT, and it requires leaders to model risk taking to bring these high value use cases out of the shadows and into a mature organizational strategy.

Link:

The IT department: Where AI goes to die

⁠https://tinyurl.com/ynj8fxn7⁠

Sponsor

Eduaide: Where good ideas become great lessons. Eduaide is an AI-powered, research-based K-12 tool that creates high-quality resources, games, and graphic organizers built for better student outcomes. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠⁠⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠⁠⁠.

In this ChatEDU Check-In: The IT department, where AI goes to die?, Matt explores the risks of treating generative AI as a standard enterprise software rollout. This episode examines how traditional corporate and school structures may inadvertently stifle the transformative potential of AI through excessive normalization and risk aversion.

Key Takeaways:

Treating AI as a standard software deployment flattens its unique capabilities and ignores how fundamentally different these systems are from previous office automation.

Focusing solely on simple automation and efficiency gains prevents genuine augmentation, causing schools to miss opportunities to redefine instructional environments or student partnerships.

Overly cautious oversight from risk averse departments leads to an information gap where innovative users hide their AI activity, preventing leadership from developing a realistic strategic vision.

Matt’s Two Cents: School leaders must resist the urge to de-weird AI by handing total control to risk-averse departments that prioritize elimination over experimentation. Real innovation is often bubbling up from lead teachers and principals rather than centralized IT, and it requires leaders to model risk taking to bring these high value use cases out of the shadows and into a mature organizational strategy.

Link:

The IT department: Where AI goes to die

https://tinyurl.com/ynj8fxn7

Sponsor

Eduaide: Where good ideas become great lessons. Eduaide is an AI-powered, research-based K-12 tool that creates high-quality resources, games, and graphic organizers built for better student outcomes. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠⁠.

In this ChatEDU Check-In: Typewriters as an Anti-AI Tool, Liz explores how a Cornell University instructor is using 19th-century technology to ensure authentic student authorship. By removing screens and internet connectivity, the classroom shifts from digital convenience to a manual process where every character must be intentionally struck. This analog approach prevents the use of generative AI and online translation tools that often bypass the struggle of learning.

Key Takeaways:

Using manual typewriters creates a cognitive shift by forcing a slower pace of writing, requiring students to think deeply before committing ink to paper.

The absence of a delete key or digital cursor ends the habit of delegating problem-solving to search engines or AI models, returning the work to the student.

Replacing laptops with mechanical hardware changes the social dynamic, encouraging students to collaborate with peers and embrace the messy reality of the learning process.

Liz’s Two Cents: This episode highlights a fascinating, albeit extreme, strategic pivot toward "embodied" learning as a response to AI. While high-tech problems often seek high-tech solutions, the use of typewriters serves as a reminder that friction in the writing process is often where the actual learning happens. For district leaders, the takeaway isn't necessarily to buy vintage hardware, but to recognize that intentionally slowing down the creative process can be a powerful way to reclaim student agency and authentic assessment in a digital world.

Article:

https://www.ksat.com/tech/2026/03/31/a-college-instructor-turns-to-typewriters-to-curb-ai-written-work-and-teach-life-lessons/

Sponsored by:

Eduaide: Where good ideas become great lessons. Eduaide is an AI-powered, research-based K-12 tool that creates high-quality resources, games, and graphic organizers built for better student outcomes. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠.

In this ChatEDU Check-In: The AI Cheating Panic is Loud, Student Use is Quiet, Liz explores the reality of how students interact with AI compared to common cheating narratives. Research involving interviews with over 50 students reveals that most AI use is functional and supplemental rather than fraudulent. The episode highlights a significant gap between institutional fears and actual student habits.

Key Takeaways

Student AI use is often boring and organizational, focusing on unpacking assignment instructions and clarifying lecture points.

Students treat Chat GPT as a 24, 7 on-demand tutor that provides a patient, non-judgmental resource for office hours at any time.

A psychological disconnect exists where students view their own use as responsible while assuming their peers are using it to cheat.

Liz's Two Cents: This episode highlights a strategic need for district leaders to shift the conversation from policing fraud to supporting supplemental learning. If the loud narrative of cheating dominates, schools risk missing the opportunity to integrate AI as a legitimate tool for organization and study support. Leaders should address the perception gap among students to foster a culture where responsible use is the visible norm rather than a hidden practice.

Article

https://edunewsletter.openai.com/p/the-ai-cheating-panic-is-loud-the

Sponsored by:

Eduaide: Where good ideas become great lessons. Eduaide is an AI-powered, research-based K-12 tool that creates high-quality resources, games, and graphic organizers built for better student outcomes. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠.

In this ChatEDU Check-In: The New Social Lab Modeling Humanity with Millions of Bots, Matt explores how researchers are moving beyond individual chatbots to study the collective behavior of millions of autonomous agents in digital societies. These studies utilize environments like Minecraft to observe how AI agents interact, organize, and evolve without human guidance.

Key Takeaways:

AI research is shifting toward a new field of digital sociology where thousands of autonomous agents function as a persistent collective society rather than just one to one conversational tools.

Without human intervention, AI agents in simulations spontaneously developed complex social structures, including specialized labor, economic systems, and even political debates over tax reforms.

Researchers successfully modeled the spread of ideologies by introducing a parody religion to a small group of agents, demonstrating how AI societies can act as digital twins to track the movement of misinformation.

Matt’s Two Cents: These simulations raise a critical strategic question for educators: are these agents providing novel insights into human behavior, or are they simply mimicking human patterns as "stochastic parrots"? As we consider using AI personas for focus groups or sociological modeling, we must discern whether these digital twins offer authentic data or merely reflect the biases and behaviors already present in their training sets.

Articles:

The first ‘AI societies’ are taking shape: how human-like are they?

https://tinyurl.com/y2uesysk

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

https://tinyurl.com/z46e2rbk

Sponsored by:

Eduaide: Where good ideas become great lessons. Eduaide is an AI-powered, research-based K-12 tool that creates high-quality resources, games, and graphic organizers built for better student outcomes. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠.