Category: AI

computer on a table displaying the title AI & Education Now
AI

📬 Big News: My Blog is Moving exclusively to a Free Newsletter!

Julie Darling

Dear readers,

After years of sharing ideas and inspiration here on my blog, I’m making an exciting change. Going forward, all new content will be shared exclusively through my free newsletter, AI & Education Now: Navigating the New Frontier of Learning — and I’d love for you to come along.

Why the move? Because we’re at a turning point. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we teach, learn, and think about the future of education. This moment calls for more than the occasional blog post. It calls for community. For real conversations. For fresh insights that arrive right where you are — your inbox.

🧭 What You’ll Get in the Newsletter
Every other month, I’ll send out a thoughtful issue featuring:

  • ✨ Fresh ideas and insights on AI in education
  • 🛠️ Practical tools, strategies, and examples you can actually use
  • 🔭 A clear-eyed look at where education is headed — and how we can navigate it together

This newsletter is for educators, technologists, parents, and lifelong learners who care about how AI is shaping the next generation of classrooms — and want to be part of shaping it well.

👋 New Here? A Quick Introduction
I’m Julie Darling — educator, author, and passionate advocate for thoughtful, inclusive use of technology in learning spaces. I’ve spent over 20 years at the intersection of teaching and tech, and I’ve shared that work on stages at ISTE and the World Education Summit, in outlets like NPR and EdTech Magazine, and through my books: Little Computer Scientists, Little Hackers, and Supporting the Development of Computer Science Concepts in Early Childhood.

🤝 Let’s Stay Connected
If you’ve appreciated my blog over the years, this newsletter is where you’ll want to be. It’s still free — just a new (and better!) format. But you will need to subscribe to keep receiving my content.

👉 Subscribe to AI & Education Now

This new space is built on curiosity and conversation. Have questions about AI? Excited about new tools? Feeling overwhelmed? Hit reply. Let’s figure it out together.

Thanks for being part of this journey and for caring about the future of education.

Warmly,
Julie Darling
Author, Educator, Speaker
AI & Education Now: Navigating the New Frontier of Learning

AI, Resources, News and Updates

AI & Education Now

Julie Darling

Job-Stealing Agentic AI, Meta AI Glasses and Why I’m Boycotting Duolingo

Image above generated using Adobe Firefly.

Since my last newsletter a lot has happened. AI companies are in a dead-heat to create viable agentic AI, and it’s raising concerns about reductions in the workforce, especially for entry-level positions for recent college graduates. AI video creation took a huge leap forward with the recent release of Veo 3, which is exciting…and also terrifying. On a personal note, when considering my prescription glasses options, it occurred to me that I might be able to use my vision insurance to purchase Meta AI glasses. Turns out I could and I did! They just arrived today. I’ll get to testing them and let you know in my next newsletter (in August) how they worked out.

Wayfarer was the only style available, which is actually great since I tend to overthink it when I have too many choices. Next year I’m hoping to get prescription Android AI/XR glasses (not yet released). I’m intrigued by the additional extended reality. 

In other news, you may have noticed that the name of this newsletter changed to “AI & Education Now” to reflect what I’ve been writing about lately. Thank you to all of you who have stuck around as my newsletters have changed and evolved over the past two years. I hope it’s helpful and you love the direction it’s going. I’m always open to feedback. Drop me a line if you have ideas, suggestions or thoughts about the next one! But for now, let’s get into it.

Job Stealing Agentic AI

Gemini (Google’s LLM) and Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) have been using Pokémon games to test how well their agents are doing. Anthropic’s newly released model – Claude 4 Opus (a paid version) – seems to have taken some substantial leaps this past week. Specifics were covered in this Wired article. 

This is one of the biggest takeaways:

“It was able to work agentically on Pokémon for 24 hours,” says Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger in an interview with WIRED. Previously, the longest the model could play was just 45 minutes, a company spokesperson added.

Although on the surface this may seem charming, whimsical even, the ramifications are much more nefarious. In the first segment of the most recent edition of Hard Fork titled “The AI Jobpocalypse”, hosts Kevin Roose (tech columnist for the New York Times) and Casey Newton (Platformer) discuss the potential impacts of these improvements in agentic AI on entry-level white collar jobs. Spoiler alert – a significant number of them are likely going away. 

Why I’m Boycotting Duolingo

The CEO of Duolingo recently announced that he believes that AI is a better teacher than humans, but that schools won’t go away because you still need childcare. When I heard this, I was aghast. Not only is this shockingly disrespectful to educators, it’s just entirely misguided. Perhaps this is why Duolingo isn’t a very effective tool for learning languages, the leadership doesn’t appear to understand anything about the research behind teaching and learning.…I could go on. Instead, I’d rather add some levity through a bit from one of my favorite comedians, Josh Johnson, although lengthy this is absolutely worth a watch – “A.I. Teachers and Duolingo’s New Plan — What Could Go Wrong?”. It’s also a love letter to teachers. 

Besides, I can now use my Meta AI glasses to translate conversations in real time. Although I’d love to be bilingual, the AI, ironically, appears to be rendering a need for services like Duolingo obsolete. Besides that, my local community college offers excellent language learning classes…with a real, live teacher. Based upon my learning preferences, and the language learning research, I know definitively that a real teacher will get me significantly closer to fluent.