The AI Who Taught Me

Luke Shepard
  • 5.0 (4)
  • EDUCATION
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Can a robot really teach? The AI Who Taught Me is a weekly podcast that explores how artificial intelligence is changing classrooms—sometimes for better, sometimes not. Hosted by Luke Shepard and his AI co-host Emerald, each episode investigates the real-world impact of AI on how we learn.

Episodes

  1. MAR 7

    #11: Eduaide's New Integrated AI Workspace

    Many of the best education tools are built by teachers. Thomas Thompson was teaching middle school social studies when he and a colleague started building Eduaide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three years later, their small team (including a co-founder who still teaches full-time) has built a tool used by over 800,000 educators. Most education AI tools today are just a directory of prompts, which have created tab-overload. Teachers generate content in a chat, copy it to Google Docs, edit it, go back to the AI, generate more, copy again. The copy-paste loop. Eduaide has built a document workspace that unifies all the context about a given lesson. The AI reads your document, understands context, and lets you revise in place. It's the same shift we're seeing in developer tools, from ChatGPT to Claude Code to OpenClaw, applied to education. I talked with Thomas about his approach to product development, how they use evaluations to ensure that the tools do what they should, and how to apply pedagogy with myriad choices in AI tools. He gives us a sneak peek into where the future of AI education tools is going. For more, check out Eduaide Videos of the Document Editor Also, subscribe to my newsletter baseclasses.com!

    29 min

  2. FEB 4

    #10: Lit with Lyns: A Veteran Teacher’s Journey into the AI Frontier

    This first teacher interview, we chat with the creator of "Lit with Lins" about her evolution from teacher to curriculum developer to AI advocate. She shared her use of Magic School, Spark Space, and We Will Write, as well as some pitfalls such as her experience with AI tools that are blocked in her school. Check out Lyndsey's site and her teacher resources: https://litwithlyns.com/ Reference to the CDT study and intro to my new substack - subscribe here! https://baseclasses.com/p/welcome-to-base-classes

    23 min

  3. 11/21/2025

    #9: The Story of Amira, Ello and the AI Reading Tutors that Actually Listen To You

    Calling all teachers! I would love to interview you about your experience using AI in the classroom - please visit https://www.theaiwhotaughtme.com/stories to sign up! -- Have you ever sat with a child who is learning to read? It's fun to listen to them sound out the words and offer gentle pointers to help them along their way. But up until recently, most edtech software couldn't do that: they just guide kids without being able to tell what they are actually saying out loud. But that is changing. In this episode, we cover the ground-breaking science behind Amira Learning. It started out of CMU's Project LISTEN and they have earned an impressive body of research (including a recent study in Louisiana) showing large learning gains in students who use an AI tutor that can listen and offer specific corrections. Future work out of Digital Promise will continue to study these effects. But the latest LLMs have impressive speech capabilities out of the box, and it has enabled a new generation of reading apps that can listen to kids. Ello has surged in usage among home schoolers, while Project Read, Buddy Books and eSpark Reading Lab all offer great programs to enable phonics instruction that actually listens to kids. In the future, perhaps we'll even have built in support within the major models, or the ability to bring-your-own-book and have an AI tutor read with you. In any case, this is one of the most interesting and widespread uses of serious AI in schools today

    20 min

  4. 09/24/2025

    #8: Learning Modes from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

    We dive into the recently announced learning modes from the big three LLM vendors:  ChatGPT released Study Mode, but seems to have killed it since Gemini now has Guided Learning as well as a paper showing its effectiveness compared to others Claude has two learning styles - Explanatory and Learning - which offer two ways to learn about a topic. But the interface is quite confusing. We also discuss the implications of a recent report on how people are using ChatGPT, including that more than 10% of conversations are classified as Tutoring or Teaching modes. Nearly half of ChatGPT usage comes from 18-25 year olds, which helps show why the university market is so important in this space. And check out this TikTok from Jerard.b showing how ChatGPT is a little ... too ... helpful.

    20 min

  5. 07/28/2025

    #7: Alpha School Claims 2X Learning- Is It Real?

    We look into the results from Alpha School, a private school in Texas that claims to use AI to help students gain 2x in only 2 hours a day. When I dug in, I saw that their main "whitepaper" is reporting results based on using the wrong column from the NWEA MAP data! They haven't had any independent verification of their claims, which calls into question their validity. I'm still quite intrigued by the school and I look forward to more robust reporting on their results from external researchers in the future. Watch the accompanying YouTube video to see the charts and sources in more detail! https://youtu.be/UPFCkbc3O3A   Sources: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school https://austinscholar.substack.com/p/austin-scholar-173-the-science-behind https://2hourlearning.com/results/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhov2Av7-5c

    23 min

  6. 07/09/2025

    #6: Inside an AI Writing Tutor: A Conversation with Sage Founder David Vinca

    Writing feedback is a particularly focused use of AI in education. All the major AI education tools help improve writing, including MagicSchool, Brisk, Eduaide and more. But even with the immense power, there's a tension: how do you help students learn to be better writers without just doing it for them? In this episode, we talk with David Vinca, the founder of the Sage AI Writing Tutor, which has gotten a lot of traction and positive feedback from teachers this year.  David and Luke discuss what makes a great writing tutor, why current LLMs don't always provide the best feedback, and what significant changes are coming for AI tools in schools in the upcoming school year.   You can learn more and try the Sage product at hellosage.io.

    20 min

  7. 06/28/2025

    #5: Beyond the MIT ChatGPT Study: What The Research Tells Us About How To Use AI To Teach Writing

    There has been a lot of drama and misinterpretation about a recent study preprint put out by MIT - Your Brain on ChatGPT. In this episode, we will look at that study in more detail, as well as a few others that have received less attention but I think do a better job of telling us how to use AI to teach writing. We begin this episode by looking at a recent MIT pre-print, Your Brain on ChatGPT - preprint paper and the study site with FAQ and figures. TIME Magazine covered this here, and then interviewed the study's main author, Dr. Nataliya Kosmyna - interview here. Fox News exaggerated the claims in their coverage of the story. It has been covered also by CNN and many other publications worldwide. But the study doesn't actually make the claims that this breathless coverage suggests! Instead, we list three other studies that are more helpful at discerning how to use AI to teach writing: Beware of Metacognitive Laziness.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09315 In this experiment, some students used ChatGPT to write essays, while others did not. Those who used ChatGPT's help had better essays, but didn't have a significantly different level of learning or retention. Modifying AI, Enhancing Essays. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07200 A retrospective look at the CoAuthor dataset - a set of transcripts of students who used GPT-3 to help with their essays. This paper showed that students who engaged with feedback, rather than just accepting it blindly, had the most improvement. Harnessing AI in Secondary Education to Enhance Writing Competence. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12117v1 Not an experiment, but an overview and summary of other research. "Research on feedback on writing shows that it is particularly valuable for students to receive help while they are engaged in the writing task. If students find themselves stuck or wonder how they have performed so far, feedback can be a great help. ... Unlike the human teacher, generative AI can provide instant feedback on a student’s writing (Jeon, 2023). This might include highlighting strengths, suggesting improvements, and pointing out areas where the student's voice shines through." -- These three papers are available in the Stanford GenAI for Education Hub, which is an invaluable resource for finding quality research on AI in education.

    19 min

  8. 06/16/2025

    #4: Saving Teachers Time with MagicSchool and Brisk

    Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, several AI education companies have sprung up to help teachers use these new tools in their classrooms. MagicSchool, founded by Adeel Khan, has been used by over 5 million teachers around the world. Meanwhile, Brisk Teaching has been growing fast and has over a million teachers using their extension as well. These new platforms are the way that many teachers encounter and use AI in their classrooms. In this episode, we'll describe how they work, tell their story of how they began, and evaluate the evidence (or lack of evidence) on student learning.   Sources mentioned:     Tiers of Evidence ESSA tiers of evidence (MagicSchool and Brisk both have earned the LOWEST tier, Tier 4, requiring just that there is a rationale behind their product but no evidence yet). Common Sense privacy reviews for MagicSchool and Brisk are both 93%.   MagicSchool sources   Case studies from Aurora Public Schools(and the Aurora edtech page) and Innova. MagicSchool study from University of Jhang. Youtube short advertising rubric generator and Adeel Khan interview    Brisk sources Arman Jaffer interview on the Linkup Podcast and Brisk case studies.

    28 min

  9. 05/29/2025

    #3: LLMs Make Biased Teachers

    Using LLMs can seem like a safe bet - but they have biases built in at every stage of the process. In this episode, we'll talk about how bias sneaks in and look at some studies that detail how LLMs are trained and how to watch out for and correct bias in an educational context. Notes: Follow up on the Tutor CoPilot study from the first week: https://lukeshepard.com/blog/preregistration-of-outcomes Reserach about LLMs in classrooms: LLMs Are Biased Teachers Meta's study on A Systematic Study of Bias Amplification OpenAI discusses their own dataset: OpenAI: Is ChatGPT Biased? I was influenced by Dr. Timnit Gebru- on AI Bias and the recently published The AI Con Book, which goes into more detail about how bias works in LLMs and the risks across industries.

    27 min

  10. 05/14/2025

    #2: Are College Students Learning Less Because of ChatGPT?

    There has been a lot of discussion about a recent article in NY Magazine, titled Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. It contains many anecdotes about the nearly omnipresent use of ChatGPT and other AI tools on college campuses. Even two years ago, a survey found that nearly all students had used ChatGPT in some form, and the use has just expanded. "Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays." One of the students hit the nail on the head: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them." One teacher interviewed claims that "Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. ... It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.” In this episode, we'll examine whether this is true: is the use of AI in schools really short-circuiting the learning process? We look at two repositories of incredible research that help us answer that question. First, we look at the meta-analysis published on May 6 in Nature: The effect of ChatGPT on students' learning performance, learning perception, and higher order thinking. The authors looked at 51 experimental studies from around the world, and they found "that ChatGPT has a large positive impact on improving learning performance and a moderately positive impact on enhancing learning perception and fostering higher-order thinking."   * In Taiwan, researchers saw strong learning when they used ChatGPT embedded in a game to help seventh graders learn science concepts. * In Dubai, a set of eleventh graders were studying electromagnetism in their physics class. Those who used ChatGPT saw larger learning gains. * In Australia researchers found that AI helped boost scores on student writing - but only when students actually made edits and engaged with the suggestions. When they just copy/pasted the text, their learning was much worse.   We also discuss the Stanford GenAI repository which serves as a great resource for finding up to date studies that analyze what's happening with AI in education.   See more on my blog: https://lukeshepard.com/blog/chatgpt-in-schools

    17 min

  11. 05/02/2025

    #1: Do Chatbots Help Students Learn?

    In this kickoff episode, host Luke Shepard and his AI co-host Emerald dive into how AI is entering classrooms. We will be looking at how AI is used in classrooms, starting with some recent research out of Harvard, Standford and Penn.   Studies We look at four studies published in the last year: Pew Research study on use of chatbots in school. About a quarter of US teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork A pre-print of the pilot in the Harvard Physics class in which students used a chatbot to help with studying. AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning From University of Pennsylvania, How kids who used ChatGPT did better on practice but worse on the eventual tests. Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests Stanford saw gains from a study of 1,800 students across multiple school districts in the use of a new AI tutor assistant. How AI can improve tutor effectiveness and the paper PDF   Further Listening:  Listen to this recent interview between Jane Rosenzweig and Michael Horn about how AI is affecting writing.   Sal Khan's TED talk: How AI Could Save and Not Destroy Education

    18 min
  • 11 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Can a robot really teach? The AI Who Taught Me is a weekly podcast that explores how artificial intelligence is changing classrooms—sometimes for better, sometimes not. Hosted by Luke Shepard and his AI co-host Emerald, each episode investigates the real-world impact of AI on how we learn.

Information

  • Creator
    Luke Shepard
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    11
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The AI Who Taught Me

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