There are so many delightful educators sharing their stories.
In This Issue
10 Minute Teacher. Friday's new episode on engagement for short attention spans, plus nine more, from student belonging to student data privacy.
Meta-analysis gone wild. Why we can't trust AI meta-analyses yet, and a video every researcher should watch.
A deep dive into the state of agents in education. Why so much of what we've learned about AI is becoming dated, what agents and skills are, which new agents teachers can actually use, and why protecting student data matters more than ever.
New on Cool Cat Teacher Talk. Should schools ban AI or teach it? Plus what's coming up, including a new series, Stop Pretending, Start Learning.
Subscribe and listen in the small moments. Links to get every new show on your phone.
AI News for You. Gemini Notebook summaries in Google Classroom, the Character.AI bankruptcy, and new research on whether AI holds up when you push back.
Try this. A Canva AI prompt for lesson slides and a way to get cited answers from ChatGPT.
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10 Minute Teacher
So, I edit down interviews to grab the most exciting helpful ideas for you. I hope you find some ideas to help you.
π Friday: Classroom Engagement Strategies for Short Attention Spans Β· Dr. Michael McDowell Β· It will be at coolcatteacher.com/e1015 on Friday.
Meta Analysis gone wild. Wow, I watched Justin Reich of MIT moderate a panel on AI meta-analyses with Patrick O'Neill of Ivy Tech Community College, Elizabeth Tipton of Northwestern, and Susanna Loeb of Stanford. Patrick audited 14 highly cited meta-analyses that claim AI boosts learning and found serious problems in all of them. When he redid the analysis with strict rules, the average effect was close to zero. Susanna's team found only about 20 studies with strong causal evidence out of roughly 880.
This is really important, and if you're a researcher who reads this newsletter, please take the time to watch this video. Before you quote AI research, look at this video first. (I pasted it up above for you.)
Even top journals get it wrong. A 2025 meta-analysis claiming ChatGPT boosts student learning, published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (a Nature Portfolio journal), was retracted in June 2026 after it had been cited more than 500 times. See the retracted paper and the National Education Policy Center's take.
We can't trust AI meta-analyses yet. The studies they combine are often small, measure different things, or don't measure learning at all.
The alarming part. Many journal calls for papers ask for positive AI results, so the negative findings seem to get ignored.
Next up is a deep dive into the state of agents in education, and after that, the AI news you need to know this week.
An Update on Agents in Education
You've probably heard the word "agentic" AI. Well what is an agent? I kinda imagine Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black zapping buggy looking humans. We're not talking Agent K and Agent J. But agentic AI does and will impact teaching, so I want to explain what it is and mention where agentic AI is on your favorite platforms AND how we can start using AI today so we'll be ready.
What is an AI agent? So, much of what we've been learning about AI and how to use might actually be becoming dated. Think of agents as little "informational bots" that do a task, whether it is monitoring a mailbox or doing tasks that are repetitive for you. While not all of these agentic tools are available on all of the platforms, we need to know that these tools exist and that this is where AI is heading.
What we can learn to do now? This is why, when you create a prompt, you need to learn to make a skill. At the end of the prompt, ask the AI tool to create procedures and recommendations so it can repeat the task. That is how we need to move. Gone are the days when we copy and paste prompts in. We should be able to say "create the newsletter," and it should have enough information saved from what we did last time to know what we mean. That is skills. (Gemini is replacing Gems with skills, and Gems will stop working in schools no sooner than June 1, 2027. ChatGPT is turning custom GPTs into plugins, where your instructions become a skill.)
Whatwill agents mean for our work? With agents, you tell the AI agent when you want it to pull together information and what data sources you want it to pull from, and it creates the draft for you that you can then edit. AI is becoming more useful.
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Here's what that could look like in a school (when they are available - we're not there yet but these are ideas of what agents could do for us when we're ready):
Email. An agent watches your inbox, flags the parent email that needs an answer today, and drafts a reply for you to edit. Nothing gets sent until you approve it.
Data. You tell it which gradebook export or spreadsheet to pull from every Friday, and it drafts a summary of who is missing work so you know which students to check on. (See my note on PII below.)
Newsletters and reports. It pulls from your calendar, your class page, and last week's notes and drafts the parent newsletter or the monthly report to your principal.
Meetings. A note-taking agent turns a PLC or department meeting into a list of action items and who owns each one.
Forms and permission slips. It monitors a shared form, keeps a running list of who has turned in the field trip permission slip, and drafts the reminder to the families who haven't.
Classroom insights. This is already starting. Google's new Gemini Notebook summaries in Classroom read students' chats with a notebook you assign and summarize their common questions and where they may need support.
Every one of these touches student or family information. That's why the PII conversation below matters so much.
Can't I just take a break? This isn't the first change in education. It's just the fastest. When I think about what my students thank me for the most, one of those things is how I taught them about technologies before they became widely available. GPS. Streaming. Web 2.0. Twitter. And yes, artificial intelligence before ChatGPT came out in November 2022.
Dave Hinrichs from Johnston County Public Schools in North Carolina told me he put a sign on his desk 12 years ago that says "Teach like Google exists." He says it's time to change it to "Teach like AI exists." We can't travel back in time, but we can look at the times in which we travel. So learning and growing has to become part of our habits. Dave and Christie Cloud talk about all of this on my newest Cool Cat Teacher Talk show, We Can't Mess This One Up: AI, Schools, and What Comes Next.
My heart for all of us. And I don't want us to pretend. Our problem may not be AI. It might just be pretending that learning is happening when it isn't. Kids ace a test, and on Monday morning they barely remember what it was about. We have to stop blaming and start naming the issues we need to work through. That's the new series I'm starting on Cool Cat Teacher Talk, about the data of where we are today and how we need to stop pretending.
Here's who can use the new agents right now.
Claude Duet (Anthropic, October 21). A proactive agent that sends you a morning brief, checks your apps every few hours, and asks before it sends a message or deletes a file. It's a research preview with a waitlist, for paid Claude Pro and Max subscribers in the U.S. It isn't on Team or Enterprise plans yet, and Anthropic doesn't say whether the free Claude for Teachers accounts get it. Read Anthropic's announcement. I've signed up for this and am holding my breath.
OpenAI Dots (September 29). Always-on agents you can message from Slack or Teams, for ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium users. Not in the free ChatGPT for Teachers plan (yet). Read TechCrunch.β
ChatGPT workspace agents. OpenAI lists the Teachers and Edu plans among those that get these shared, scheduled agents in research preview. If you have ChatGPT for Teachers, this is the agent I think you're most likely to see. Read OpenAI's announcement.β
Meta Muse (September 8). A personal agent that books, shops, and fills out forms, in its own app or WhatsApp. U.S. only, ages 18 and up, with no education version. Read PBS NewsHour. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Muse, but that is just my opinion.
Microsoft Study and Learn Agent. This one is built for school. It's free with Microsoft 365 Education for students 13 and up once your IT team turns on Copilot Chat. Microsoft's Teach tool for building unit plans is still in preview. Read Microsoft's update. I would test this first.
Takeaway: most of these agents live on personal paid plans, not your school account. Before you connect one to your school email or files, check your district's policy, and keep student information out of it. Stay tuned for more on this. And remember, start by learning to create repeated skills.
Coming up on Cool Cat Teacher Talk. The Missing Math, on the math kids need for money, risk, and real life, and a new series, Stop Pretending, Start Learning.
Gemini 4 Argon is out. This is another model for paid personal plans. As with any new model test it but they're saying it does some great things. Read Google's announcement.
Gemini Notebook in Google Classroom now summarizes student chats for you. Starting October 19, teachers who assign a Gemini Notebook through Classroom get insight summaries of the common questions, strengths, and areas where students may need support, and they can open each student's chat to check them. It's rolling out to Education Fundamentals, Standard, and Plus. Students see a notice that their teacher can read their conversations. Google also added a student hub in the Gemini app, with study notebooks, flashcards, and practice quizzes in one place. Read about insight summaries and the student hub. Takeaway: the notice is on the screen, but tell students yourself before you assign it that you can read their chats. (Honestly, they should KNOW you could read chats but this is a good teachable lesson. Just know if they know you can read the chats, that you should because they'll often try to see if. you're paying attention!)
AI note-taking wearables are getting cheaper. Nowadays pens, pendants, glasses, and of course, phones, all of those things can record. I like Plaud and use it with Claude but now, Amazon has a Bee Frontier. I also saw an ad for Pocket with a kid using an AI notetaker claiming he was doing "more work" than kids taking notes as he smugly said that he could review the notes from the whole class in five minutes. I so disagree with the ad but we're now going to see this and you should consider this because some IEP's will allow for this as well. So, take time to talk about AI notetakers, for sure! (And look at the ad below and see what you think - you might not think he comes across as smug at all but you can imagine parents sending these to school with kids!)
Character.AI filed for bankruptcy. It is rare that I'm rooting AGAINST a company but this is one company I've disagreed with in how they marketed. This tool has been dangerous and has faced lawsuits and a Texas investigation over teen safety. Eventually, they banned minors (but as with anything that tries to ban - such things are difficult to enforce.) Disney agreed to pay $20 million for some of its assets, and the app could shut down if no buyer keeps it running. The company filed for Chapter 11, and the sale is expected to close in late November or early December. And users can export and delete their data in the app. If my child ever used this tool, I'd go delete the chats for sure. Read TechCrunch and Character.AI's update.
Is the AI helping? Most schools can't tell yet. NPR reported this week that schools trying AI often have no way to measure whether it helps. Wichita Public Schools keeps its experiments small until educators can measure their value. Listen to the NPR story.
Research worth knowing
AI agrees with you even when it knows better. Dr. Philippa Hardman (LinkedIn) is one of my go-to researchers on AI. I read almost everything she writes on LinkedIn, and here's what came in this week. She tested AI models on real instructional design work. The two strongest did expert- or experienced-level work on 9 of 10 tasks. But when she pushed back on 24 recommendations about what to build, only 2 held. She calls it "caveat compliance." The model writes down why your idea is wrong, then does it anyway. Read Dr. Hardman's tests. Takeaway: when AI agrees with your plan, push back once and see if its advice holds.
"Teachers Using AI Say It Frees Up Time for What Matters Most" A Walton Family Foundation-Gallup survey, done with The Mattering Institute, asked 1,952 K-12 educators this summer. 59% used AI tools last school year, and 64% of those said it freed up time for the parts of the job that matter most to them. What made educators feel they matter most? Helping a student through something difficult (85%). Read Gallup's findings.
About half of U.S. adults never use AI chatbots, but about three in ten teens use them every day. In Pew's February survey of 5,119 adults, 51% said they never use chatbots. Among non-users, 83% said lack of interest was a reason, 79% named worries about their personal information, and 76% don't trust the answers. Read Pew on adults. Pew's teen survey found a majority of teens use chatbots, about three in ten every day, and 54% have used them for schoolwork. If we want to help kids, we might should be creating chatbots but really, creating Gemini notebooks and having students chat with the content really makes sense to me after reading this content. Read Pew on teens.
Try this
Lesson slides with Canva AI. Phillip Alcock's beginner's guide includes a prompt that builds six editable slides: an opening question, explain, model, investigate a mistake, practise, and an exit question, with student text under 35 words a slide. Get Phillip's prompt.
Search the live web with ChatGPT. Click the Search globe in the prompt bar so it turns blue, and every sentence in the answer gets a small source badge you can click. Without it, ChatGPT answers from its training data. Read the step-by-step guide. Takeaway: click the badge. A citation only helps if you open it.
Thank you
Hey, it is almost November (well not quite but just in a few days) and the holidays are approaching! Time is flying by. I hope you'll take a moment today to take a deep breath, close your eyes and hear the hubbub of school and think about the work you're doing that matters. Thing about the kids that you're reaching and who need you so much. You are so important. You might not feel appreciated but sometimes when you don't, it is vital to appreciate yourself and what work you're doing.
I appreciate you.
I appreciate you taking time to reach this newsletter. I work hard to curate resources to share with you so you can master change and know that we will get through this together. Part of my mission is doing all of this work every day so you can do your job in the classroom better and figure out ideas of what can help you save time. I just had a call with a school where I'm going to help them on teacher efficiency. This is something we can all do. We can learn and grow together as we figure things out.
This has been a jam packed newsletter with lots of news, but I thought it was important to spend a moment to talk about the agents that are coming down the pipe that are actually becoming usable for us and will make so many of us more efficient and better able to keep on top of things that are more mundane but yet important.
thank you for including me in your life. I appreciate the opportunity.
See you later, educator. Until next time!
Vicki Davis
Cool Cat Teacher
By November, Cool Cat Teacher Talk will air on 26 FM radio stations and 16 television markets across three countries. Watch or listen anytime on the Cool Cat Teacher Talk page, on YouTube, or in your favorite podcast app. Thank you for supporting my shows.
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