Tech bans, and calls for more of them, are in the air. The Los Angeles Unified School District just banned screens. Australia banned social media for everybody under 16 years of age. Other districts and states are following, or weighing whether to do so or not.

That was the theme of our latest AIR|GPT meetup. Personally speaking, I find any kind of one-size fits all, top-down policy as being dumb. They are short-sighted, refusing to contend with human variation and the complex nature of schooling and learning. Further, the media in question don’t disappear at the school gate. Kids will meet them outside the classroom (at home, on the bus, in their pockets) whether or not we let them in during the school day. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make the problem smaller. It just makes the school’s role in helping kids think well about these tools smaller.

The conversation, as always, was richer than my one-line take. Liz Kolb, Helen Crompton, Caroline Fell Kurban, and Ruben Puentedura each brought their own angle, and the conversation, as always, was nuanced (which is something else missing from these one-size-fits-all policies). And, as always, Errol St. Clair Smith’s smooth handling kept the whole thing from drifting into polite agreement.

Check out our latest episode: Expanding Screen Bans in Education: Simple Solution, Complex Problem, A Smarter Path Forward

Below is the list of all episodes of AIR | GPT

• The Creators of SAMR, TPACK, Triple E, SETI, and GenAI-U Launch New Podcast With a Review of NoteBook LM
• Para-social Relationships: The Pros and Cons of Falling in Love With Generative AI
• 2024 Mic Drop on the AIR GPT Podcast
• AI Schools Are Catching On: What They Get Wrong, What They Get Right, What They Are Teaching Us About Teaching
• Some Think More Deeply With Gen AI, Some Less: Here’s What’s Behind The Emerging Critical Thinking Divide
• The Science and Art of Teaching Creativity in the Age of Gen AI: What Every Educator Needs to Understand
• The Blindspots in AI Guardrails, Guidelines, and Good Intentions: What We Need, What We Don’t, and Why
• All Gen AI Studies Are Not Created Equal: What These Two Highly Cited Studies Overlooked, Why It Matters
• Grok This: When AI Goes Off the Rails, What Educators Need To Know About the Root Causes
• Three Years of Gen AI: The Lessons We’ve Learned, What We Plan to Do Differently As We Head Back to School
• Pedagogical Debt: What We Owe Our Students in an AI World
• Cheating? Forget About It! Asking the Right Questions About Agentic AI and Education
• What If the Most Disruptive Thing About AI Is How Confident We Are About It?
• Expanding Screen Bans in Education: Simple Solution, Complex Problem, A Smarter Path Forward