Reflections on MIT’s Guidebook to AI in Schools (Part 1) If you were to ask me about Australian K-12 teachers' response to the arrival of AI in schools, based upon my experience I'd suggest a walk into a staffroom in 2026 would reveal a range of responses. In many schools, I suspect there'd be some evidence confidence, interest and enthusiasm from a relatively small group of teachers who we might describe as the 'early adopters' or 'first followers'.

If you’ve found yourself tinkering with ChatGPT to help write a cover letter or polish a paragraph, you’re not alone. But if you've worried that doing so might slowly rot your skills, you’re in good company too. That’s the worry that well-known researcher into 'GRIT' Angela Duckworth and her co-authors set out to test in a recent, tightly designed experimental study titled…

In the unfolding terrain of 21st-century education, history teachers are called to be more that simply narrators of the past. We are, increasingly, called to design of learning environments for engagement, agency, and meaning. In my own classroom, this shift has been most visible in my evolving use of a flipped learning model. When I began to discover the flip...

Earlier this year, a question was posed to me - one that lodged itself under my skin, not because it was profound, but because it disappointed me. “Should learning be easy or hard?” I've never been one for deceptively simplistic binaries. To me, this question revealed something important: a conceptual flattening of what learning feels like, requires, and becomes in a K–12 classroom.

I haven’t blogged this term - not out of a lack of ideas, but because Term 4 in Queensland operates on fast-forward. For my international readers, Term 4 represents the end of our school year. Term 4 for me felt like an eight-week sprint to the end of the school year. The first two weeks were dominated by a focus on Year 12s - especially as they prepared for their final external exams.

How do we meaningfully design assessment of and for learning when the presence of AI tools fundamentally changes the game? Earlier this term, I was invited to present to a group of school curriculum leaders who are preparing to reimagine assessment for the 2026 school year. The timing is both exciting and daunting. These leaders find themselves on the frontlines of a rapidly shifting educational landscape, grappling with the complex interplay of generative AI, cognitive development, academic integrity, digital equity, and evolving pedagogies.

We’re entering a moment in education where the learning process itself is up for renegotiation. With generative AI now accessible to every student with a keypad, the temptation is real: skip the hard part, avoid the struggle, bypass the friction. Tools like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are fluent, persuasive, and increasingly responsive — so, the question we now face isn’t…

A student's wisdom from within our class yarning circle “History isn’t just about what happened. It’s about what we do with it.” We talk a lot about AI in education right now - and yes, I use it in my planning, research, and even in drafting reflections like this one. But for all its convenience and power, it can’t do what happened in my classroom last week.

There’s something brittle about education's recurrent discourse around Explicit Instruction (EI) and Inquiry. For all the energy it generates, the debate feels stale - locked in false binaries and riddled with misrepresentations. Lately, I’ve been returning to the work of Sweller, Dreyfus, and especially John Dewey, trying to find a more honest, rigorous way forward. What I’ve found is that the loudest voices in this debate - particularly some advocates of what I’ll call “extremist EI” - aren’t really arguing against historical inquiry at all…

Offering interactive Vietnam War mind maps through study guides to personalised audio and video summaries, Google’s NotebookLM is reshaping how my History students study - even on the move. In this post, I reflect on what happened when I introduced it to Year 12 Modern History, and how one Year 9 student showed me how far in front of others she was by listening to AI-generated overviews of historical topics while jogging.

How are students really using AI in the classroom? This thoughtful and candid episode from the AI in Education podcast flips the script - handing the mic to the learners themselves. Featuring a group of articulate and reflective students from my classroom, the episode dives into the grey zones of AI use in schooling - from study aids to moral dilemmas.

If you grew up in Australia and studied history in the 1970s or 80s like I did, you likely encountered a story of nationhood that was neat, triumphant, and sanitised. It was a story of explorers, settlers, and infrastructure — a relentless march towards “progress”. For all its coherence, the cost of such a narrative was its silences: Indigenous resistance, the trauma of dispossession, and the violence of the Frontier Wars were largely absent.

I recently spent time with the Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, a document co-authored by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. At over a hundred paragraphs, it’s as theologically weighty as it is ethically urgent - wide-ranging, bold, and, in parts, surprisingly hopeful.

The recent MIT Media Lab study Your Brain on ChatGPT made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Accusatory articles and alarmist social media posts latched onto a simplistic narrative: that AI tools like ChatGPT are, in short, 'cognitively corrosive'. But the real story is far more interesting and far more relevant to those of us working in classrooms today. But let's start at the beginning.

At the 2025 EduTechAU conference in Sydney, I posed what might seem like a simple provocation: Can AI help our students learn and thrive? The answer I gave was emphatic: Yes. But - and this is a vital but - only if we as educators make thoughtful, urgent, and courageous decisions now. We are living in a moment as consequential as the cusp of the industrial revolution.

"It’s not about the technology. The human in the loop matters." - A summary of my presentation to the 2025 QHTA State Conference. This June, I had the privilege of delivering a presentation titled Reimagining History: Refreshing Pedagogy for an AI-Disrupted Classroom. Set against a backdrop of rapid technological change and ever-growing teacher workload, the presentation wasn’t just a demonstration of tools; it was a provocation and a call to reimagine the very core of our pedagogy.

I had the privilege of hearing Professor Rose Luckin speak live twice at EduTECH Australia 2025, and while her reputation as a global authority on AI in education certainly preceded her, it was the clarity, urgency, and humanity of her message that resonated most powerfully. Her keynote was not a sales pitch for the latest tools or a technical showcase. Instead, it was a deeply philosophical and strategically grounded call to action for educators, school leaders, and system architects to engage with AI from a place of wisdom, not novelty.

Conversations describing teacher use of AI are changing (again). Initial educator conceptualisation of AI as 'just another edtech tool' have quickly crumbled - but the metaphor of seeing AI as a tool remains. That said, the tool as metaphor is also now fragmenting as early adopters and some first followers grapple with the conceptual nature of AI bots and agents.

I sometimes think people say they are fine with disruption… until it actually disrupts them. We are not in an age of approaching disruption. We are living inside it. And yet, as educator and technologist Dr Nick Jackson warns, many are sleepwalking into an educational crisis. One where institutions claim to embrace innovation while shuffling forward with the same scripts, assessments, structures, and assumptions that predate the AI age.

A teacher-led framework for using generative AI to deepen thinking, foster discernment, and support student agency. Last week, I experienced one of those quiet, surreal moments of pause: the kind you get when a milestone you've been working toward for months suddenly clicks into place. My first major peer-reviewed article of my PhD candidature, Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education: Initial Principles Developed from Practitioner Reflexive Research…

This paper explores the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) with chat-like functionality (CLF) in education, focusing on the secondary history classroom in an Australian context. It pre...

Why explicit instruction and inquiry aren't mutually exclusive Last week, I travelled to Canberra for the HALT Summit - a professional learning experience that felt more like a reinvigorating recalibration than the 'stock standard' conference. Amid the powerful conversations about impact, innovation, brain science, leadership, and pedagogy, it was Nathaniel Swain’s keynote that had me thinking most deeply long after the applause of at the conclusion of the final had ended.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in education has been met with both excitement and concern. According to a 2023 survey by the Wor...

In recent months, I’ve been reflecting on how to purposefully integrate Object-Based Learning (OBL) into my history classes. It strikes me that any fundamental shift in how we think about designing history pedagogy for the AI era should allow for increasing opportunities to engage with the physical world around them. I believe we should imagine AI, not as a replacement for human-centred learning but, as a space-maker.

Victor Klemperer · Audiobook

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know I don’t believe doing things - including excursions or field trips - just for the sake of ticking a curriculum box or burning up a bus budget. Teachers need to act with purpose. They must know their why. To me our purpose is clear. We are about learning. Therefore, class activities must be about learning - not about filling in time, not just about 'engagement', and not 'just fun'.

In 2019, at the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, I was introduced to a mobile platform called GooseChase EDU. Marketed as an app for gamified learning, it promised student engagement through scavenger hunt-style missions. That kind of language can feel gimmicky, especially for a subject like History, where the goal is often deeper thinking and ethical reflection rather than fast-paced point-scoring.

In 2019, at the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, I was introduced to a mobile platform called GooseChase EDU. Marketed as an app for gamified learning, it promised student engagement through scavenger hunt-style missions. That kind of language can feel gimmicky, especially for a subject like History, where the goal is often deeper thinking and ethical reflection rather than fast-paced point-scoring.

In a world saturated with disruption, secondary History teachers stand on the threshold of profound change. The rapid evolution of AI offers breathtaking opportunities — but also daunting challenges. Amid the noise, a quieter revolution calls to us: the turn toward slow, connected, values-based teaching. Slow teaching in History isn't about doing more — it’s about being more. It calls us to be more present, more authentic, more attentive to student voice.

A quick, and slightly tongue in cheek, response to Dr Nick Jackson. Student Name: The System Class: Education Reform – OngoingDate: April 2025 General Comments: The system has a long and storied history. For over a century, it has played a central role in the delivery of mass education, contributing significantly to the spread of literacy, numeracy, and general knowledge.

This post was inspired by a powerful line from Divya Ganesan’s recent article in Education Week (“The One Thing This Student Will Never Ask AI to Do”). Her reflections capture something essential about what it means to think in the AI age - and what it means to teach. "I use AI to polish my grammar and formatting - ChatGPT catches my pesky capitalisation mistakes and cleans up awkward phrasing.

It will take a concerted effort by every sector of our society to respond to Trumpism’s threat.

“Zazu Nova, Where Are You?” In what I hoped to be an act of allyship, I tried to bring the activist Zazu Nova into my recent blog about how AI gendered action figures could be a ‘…

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here ar...

The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government...

There are a LOT of AI generated action figures – complete with packaging -being shared online at the moment. We’ve seen this kind of behaviour before from GenAI users but this time, the…

This Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 12 | April 6, 2025 As the first Australia teaching term for 2025 closes, for this post I’ve paused to reflect on what I’ve learned from living a full &…