Future Fluent: Teaching Students Essential AI Literacy Skills

AI surrounds students every day—from the social feeds and streaming platforms they use at home to the writing assistants and tutors they use at school. As educators, we have a responsibility to help them develop the knowledge and critical thinking skills to navigate an AI-powered world safely, ethically, and effectively. Join us for this session where we shared actionable strategies for building essential AI competencies across grade levels and explored key components of our newly launched student AI literacy courses. Topics included: Why AI Literacy Matters: Students use AI tools daily but lack the foundational understanding, critical thinking skills, and ethical frameworks to use them responsibly. As colleges and employers increasingly expect AI literacy, students need intentional instruction to build these skills. The SEE Framework: Grounded in human-centered use that supports rather than replaces student thinking, we explored how to teach students to use AI: Safely (protecting privacy, understanding risks), Ethically (maintaining integrity, navigating gray areas), and Effectively (mastering prompting, achieving meaningful results). Essential AI Competencies: Includes understanding how AI works, recognizing hallucinations and bias in AI outputs, crafting effective prompts, developing ethical decision-making skills, and critically evaluating outputs while maintaining authentic voices. Student AI Literacy Courses and Resources: Overview of our free 90-minute self-paced course and our more comprehensive course (with versions for high school and college students), including student workbooks with activities, prompt templates, and a framework for building a Personal GenAI Code.