Tag: AI

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.

Resources, News and Updates

Harnessing AI Tools for Educators: Insights from MACUL 2025

Julie Darling

Michigan in early spring is magic….and rife with contrast. Frozen next to flowing water, sprouting plants next to dormant, wild temperature swings. It always feels like the beginning of something exciting – potential, possibility. I’ve started going on long outdoor walks, again. Walking has always been my best thinking time. I’ve solved plot issues, and outlined novels over the span of a walk. Lately, I find myself thinking about AI. I was fortunate to attend the MACUL conference this year where the majority of the sessions were focused on AI.

There were two points in particular, made by Dr. Sabba Quidwai at the keynote, that I can’t stop thinking about. The first, although many schools are writing policies that disallow AI, many businesses won’t hire workers unless they’re well-versed in the use of AI. This disconnect poses a significant problem that we need to figure out soon, in both K-12 and Higher Ed. The second, employees, now and going forward, will need to know how to supervise AI agents, or possibly a combined team of AI agents and human employees.

I get that this may feel overwhelming and scary, so I wanted to offer my advice – just pick one AI tool, experiment with that tool every day for a week, 5-10 minutes a day should suffice. Then, next week, pick a different one…and keep going. Maybe start with one of the resources in the last section?

Upcoming Event

On Saturday, April 12th at 11 a.m., I’ll give a STEM Storytime at the Ypsilanti District Library. Come make a Caesar Shift cipher decoder to take home, stick around to use LEGO spike and Ozobots for coding activities. Hope to see you there!

MACUL Conference Tools & Resources

Although certainly not an exhaustive list, these are some of the new to me, or most discussed tools and resources from the 2025 Annual MACUL conference.

Just about every session at MACUL at least mentioned Google’s NotebookLM, a truly powerful Google Workplace Labs project.  NotebookLM allows you to upload content such as documents, YouTube videos and web pages. You can then use NotebookLM to generate a summary, timeline, FAQs, or study guide. You can even have it develop the uploaded content into a podcast.

PadletTA is Padlet’s new AI-powered teaching assistant designed to help with lesson planning, developing quizzes, presentations, text leveling, rubrics and more. You can use links, text, YouTube videos or documents saved in your Google Drive to start.

Gamma is an AI tool that allows you to create presentations, documents and websites without requiring design or coding skills. You can generate the content from a prompt or import a file/URL to kick it off.

LTX Studio creates AI powered storyboards which include character images, short clips of movement within the storyboard, and even a movie poster.

Google Read Along listens to kids read aloud and helps them when they get stuck.

Vurbo.ai turns voice conversations into multilingual translations in real time, currently able to translate 90+ languages.

I’d love to hear about your favorites tools, prompts you’re using that are working well, ways in which you’re teaching AI to others, or anything else you’d like to share! Tell me in the comments below?

Julie Darling and Rebecca Lowe standing in front of the sign describing their AI Summit talk.
Resources, News and Updates

February News

Julie Darling
Julie Darling and Rebecca Lowe standing in front of the sign describing their AI Summit talk.

The 2nd Annual Michigan Virtual AI Summit was a whirlwind! If you’re interested, you can find many of the presenter slides posted. To find these, follow the link, scroll down, and click the + next to the meeting room assignment.

It was lovely presenting with Chad Williams and Rebecca Lowe (pictured right) about policy, practice and the power of the school librarian…and how that all relates to A.I. I briefly met keynote speaker Ethan Mollick. His book Co-Intelligence is fascinating and should be the next A.I. book you read.

I’m currently at work on a secret project (send me all your productivity and motivational tips!) and so the newsletter and events will slow down a bit. You’ll likely hear from me every other month for 2025 – unless there’s something urgent that I simply can’t wait to share.

Save the Date!

On Saturday, April 12th I’ll give a live STEM storytime at the Ypsilanti District Library.

MEDIA

I had a feature article in the December edition of Computers in Libraries magazine. Tips for Helping Little Computer Scientists and Little Hackers appeared in the print edition.

What I’m Reading Right Now

The American Library Association Youth Media Awards were just announced!

I’m particularly excited about the Newbery award winner The First State of Being which was also a National Book Award finalist. Caldecott honor and Coretta Scott King award winning My Daddy is a Cowboy is also delightful. Kwame Crashes the Underworld, a John Steptoe winner and Coretta Scott King honor is a really fun read and finally the Caldecott award winner Chooch Helped has really gorgeous illustrations. So many wonderful books on this list!

I’ve also been reading Unmasking A.I. and Infinite Education, two very different, but both timely and relevant books on A.I.

Author Julie Darling reading at Schuler Books
Uncategorized

December News

Julie Darling

The STEM storytime at Schuler Books was really fun!

I read Little Hackers and Little Computer Scientists, we sang some songs from the guidebook and participants made Tasha’s decoders to use to send secret messages.

Author Julie Darling reading at Schuler Books

In January, I’ll take a break from writing this newsletter. I hope you all find some rest and rejuvenation after the hustle and bustle of the winter holiday season. I’m certainly looking forward to resting, recharging, and recalibrating. Do you make resolutions? Mine will be to establish a reasonable, regular schedule for working on my novels.

Forthcoming Events

On Tuesday, December 17th, I’ll speak on a panel at the Michigan Virtual 2nd Annual AI Summit.

If you’re there too, I’d love to connect!

I’m also reading Little Hackers for Iowa’s Computer Science Education Week on Thursday, December 12th. Anyone can register to attend here, you don’t have to be an Iowa resident. Consider checking out the additional events they have going on that week. They’re pulling out all the stops for this week-long computer science in education celebration.

Media

Ed Tech magazine published an article about the books and my inspiration. You can read Q&A: Embrace Age-Appropriate Computer Science Concepts for Elementary Students here.

I was also featured in Ann Arbor Family magazine. You can read Author Julie Darling Teaches Computer Science by the Book here.

What I’ve Been Reading

I’ve been diving into all things A.I. in preparation for my presentation and for some secret activities that I’ll tell you more about later on. There has been a lot of content dropped by several organizations, recently. 

UNESCO has been weighing in, with frameworks designed for students and teachers. The U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology has listening sessions,toolkits and more. I’m re-reading Co-Intelligence in anticipation of Dr. Mollick’s keynote at the forthcoming A.I. summit and of course pouring over our district content too. It’s a lot. I feel equally excited and terrified by how quickly everything is moving. I’m curious about your thoughts, share them in the comments?

A picture of the sunrise on a river and me sitting in the distance on a stand up paddle board.
Giveaways, Resources, News and Updates

September News | Book Launch!

Julie Darling

Photo Credit: Anna Cools

Pictured above is me, attempting to soak up the last dregs of Summer. It’s been in the 90s here in Michigan, which makes it impossible to believe that Fall is almost upon us. Despite clinging to these final hot and sunny days, I couldn’t be more excited for it to be September. This is the month the books will release!!! I can’t wait to finally hold them in my hands. I can’t wait for you all to have access to them. They’re available for pre-order on Amazon now. You can also pre-order them here on the Routledge website starting on September 9th.

I’ve also received word from my publisher that I have fifteen sets to give away across book launch events. Like and reshare any of my book launch social media posts throughout September, including this blog post, to be entered into the drawing.

Lastly, a request. The #1 way authors get discovered is through Amazon reviews. Once you see the books, if you have a moment to give an honest review on Amazon, I’d be eternally grateful.

AI Tool I’ve been experimenting with.

Over the summer I gave three presentations about AI in Education. The first was as a spotlight speaker at the Longwood University Summer Literacy Institute, the second was on a panel for the Michigan Education Association, this talk will be turned into a course soon, accessible to MEA members and the final presentation was to the librarians at Ann Arbor Public Schools.

After each of these talks, participants messaged me about the songs they’d created using the music creation AI tool, Suno. If you’d like to listen to the songs I shared at the presentations, you can listen here. Suno is fabulous for creating catchy music with lyrics that reflect your prompt. My favorite is ‘Library Beats’.

I’d love to hear your Suno creations too! If you want to, you can share with me over social media or send the link to my email: AuthorJulieDarling@gmail.com

Resources, News and Updates

Read | Write | Tech Blog – April 2024

Julie Darling

This April is Poetry, a Solar Eclipse and A.I. (oh my)!

Cover from the book A Few Beautiful Minutes: Experiencing a Solar Eclipse
Image of phases of total eclipse
Path of total eclipse across North America

One week from today, on Monday April 8th there will be a total solar eclipse in North America! Check out this NASA site for a 3D visualization of the path of totality. To add a bit of whimsy, also consider this eclipse playlist (scroll down and preview before sharing with kids) compiled by NASA interns for the 2017 eclipse.

A Few Beautiful Minutes by Kate Allen Fox (with gorgeous illustrations from Khoa Le) is a great read to use to explain how solar eclipses work and build anticipation for this event.

MACUL name and logo

The MACUL Conference was fantastic as usual. A few of my new favorite A.I. resources were GoblinTools, a site that helps you break down tasks into manageable steps, just describe your task in the “add new item” box and click the magic wand on the right-hand side and Pi AI, an A.I. personal assistant (who doesn’t need one of those?!) I’m also intrigued by EduaideAI, a robust lesson planning (and more) tool.

April is National Poetry Month and it’s my birthday too!

Speaking of A.I., Verse by Verse is an intriguing tool that helps you compose poetry inspired by classic American poets. Click on “let’s write a poem”, choose up to three famous poets, choose your preferred poem structure. I wrote one just now about the solar eclipse, here’s how it turned out:

If you’re someone who buys me birthday gifts, in lieu of a gift this year consider leaving a review of my first book (assuming you read or skimmed it).