Technology Essentials in Education Episode 30:
Demystifying Machine Learning for Young Learners

Welcome to today's episode of Technology Essentials in Education. I'm chatting with Debbie Tannenbaum today about what AI integration really looks like on the ground in an elementary school environment. Debbie has worked with younger learners for quite some time, and when I was thinking about topics to bring to you all for the podcast, the combination of AI and early learning, Debbie's a perfect person to help us jump into that conversation. She's an ISTE-certified educator who's really been spending time with universal Design for Learning, or UDL, and so we talk about a lot of things, everything from building custom gems to use with students, to think about AI-powered tools. I should say those custom gems really for educators to use to develop things for their students, so a wide range in today's conversation. Let's get into it.

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Welcome to the podcast, Debbie. I am so excited to chat with you today, but before we get into our conversation, we'd love for listeners to understand a bit about your role in education. What does your day-to-day look like?

Well, every day in my job is a little bit different right now, or actually, it's always different. Right now, we're in testing season. If you've ever been involved in testing season, you know it's not your normal every day, but in general, before testing season, I am really lucky. I get the opportunity to work with teachers and students, and this year, my role has really been focused on being more of a universal design for learning coach. I go in and I coach teachers on how to integrate universal design for learning using tech tools, and then I'm also doing that same work side by side with them, with their students, so their students are learning alongside their teachers. It's been really interesting work, especially in the age of Gemini, where I can create gems to help me really customize learning based on different classrooms' needs. I've really been enjoying it, and this year, I've gotten the opportunity to do some really cool work with our enhanced autism teachers at our school, showing them how they can leverage universal design for learning and AI tools to better meet the needs of their kids. It's been a very interesting year where I've gotten a chance to try lots of new things.

Yeah, and just the ability to have lots of conversations with your colleagues, like hear about what's happening in their classrooms, particularly with the group that we're kind of zooming in on today, talking about AI in an elementary education environment. So many different directions, so many things I'm sure you're hearing. As we get into that piece, I first wanted to ask you a bit about being an ISTE certified educator. How has that shaped the way you approach your work with teachers and students?

It totally changed everything for me. Before becoming an ISTE certified educator, I kind of didn't have a system as far as how I determined how these things all work together. Sometimes you learn all these different things as you're going through your education journey, and the ISTE certification really helped me put them all together. It helped me see things like how universal design for learning really connected to intentional technology use. It also helped me really think about the role of rubrics in how I give my students guidelines on showing my expectations. It just made me really think about the why. I've always been one of those people, and I know you're the same, where pedagogy always comes first, but it really helped me look at it under a different lens. Now whenever I'm doing anything with technology, I'm always looking at that and saying, okay, how is this technology helping our students to learn better? How is it helping them to apply the learning to synthesize the learning?

Yeah, and having a framework for that through the program, having the vocabulary to bring that to all the educators that you work with in your school community and beyond, because I know that you present and write and share on topics related to what we're talking about today. I'm sure that really helps facilitate those conversations and help come back to what's really important with making sure that learning is front and center, and the technology piece is a layer that is doing something that has some sort of intentional use when it's picking and choosing. There's plenty of things that are bright and shiny and exciting that might pull us towards a booth on a conference floor or something.

But AI can fall in that category and outside of that category towards a more intentional use. It's a really hot topic in education right now, and a lot of the conversation that I know when I'm working with schools and districts tends to center on middle school, high school, higher ed, what it means for teachers, of course, but also for student use too. So how are you seeing AI show up in elementary classrooms or your conversations at least with elementary educators?

Well, right now, most of our tools are not approved to use with our elementary students, and so at least in the elementary classroom, I work a lot with my fourth graders. We'll do things like use tools like Adobe Express, which is a fantastic tool, where we'll really start talking about how the AI works and things like that. This year, Code.org did a fabulous job of sharing some really great activities during the hour of AI versus the hour of code, where my students started to get the idea of how AI works. I don't necessarily feel like in the elementary school having students necessarily using what I would consider more generative AI is always what I have my students do, but with things like image generation, those are some really great opportunities, especially with our upper elementary learners, to have them understand how natural language affects a product. We started off with some activities where we just learned how machine learning worked, and then once we understood that, we started to look at different types of things inside of Adobe. Now we're doing some stuff with Canva, just seeing how these different tools work, seeing the benefits but also seeing how much critical thinking we need to really put behind them, and seeing when they aren't always perfect, sometimes they can still be a little biased. That's really helped my upper elementary learners.

When we really think about it, so many of the tools we use on a daily basis have AI built in. I think a lot of times people are like, well, kids aren't using it. They're using it. They might just not understand how it works. Tools we use on an everyday basis like Lexia and ST Math and things like that all have AI built in. A lot of what I've been doing, especially with my younger grades, is exposing them to things I use AI with and really doing that modeling piece. I don't know if you've played with vibe coding yet, but vibe coding has become my new obsession. I do a lot of vibe coding activities for my students, and then I'm talking to them about how I've used the AI with my natural language to create things, and that there might be bugs, and they're going to be my testers. They're going to help me determine if there's things that I'm missing in those things. I think that's really important for us to model for our students because they keep talking about how we're going to do AI literacy lessons, but it's getting better. Places like Day of AI have elementary lessons now, but on the whole, we're waiting too late to go to middle school and high school.

Yeah, and just the strategies you shared there of thinking aloud, of modeling, having that transparency in terms of your choices and thought process is something that we know connects to great teaching regardless of what the topic is. I was just chatting with someone yesterday who's an iSchool educator. We were talking about the comparison to an elementary read aloud. You would pause and say, I wonder what this character is thinking, or I noticed this, it made me think. You're modeling these ELA strategies in the same way you can when you're embedding some AI literacy. Debbie, I appreciate what you mentioned about the AI and so many tools students have been using beyond the past three or four years of the GPT of it all. We're just so much more likely to point at something and say that's AI than we would have been in the past where plenty of adaptive learning software like the one you mentioned that are prominent in elementary environments do have AI working behind the scenes. The generative AI examples for image generation like in Adobe or Canva or tools kids already use is a great point too because it's not just a chatbot meaning that kids are using AI. It's part of some of the tools.

That kind of gets me to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is about misconceptions. What are some of the biggest misconceptions you hear from educators or families about using AI with younger learners?

A lot of it I hear is obviously the common idea of cheating, which I would hope in 2026 we're past those ideas, but you still hear them. A lot of times I feel like parents are afraid it's going to take away their or even some educators take away that critical thinking piece. I spend a lot of time both with the teachers I work with and the students I work with really talking about the fact that when we're using any sort of AI, we start with the human and we end with the human. I think that's really important because I say to my students, think about the Adobe Express activity where they had to create a creative portrait of themselves. So many of them are like, well, that doesn't look like me. Like, well, let's talk about why. Let's talk about the language that we need to use to get what we want. Those are the conversations that are super important no matter what we're doing. Making sure our kids really understand that this is based on data sets, that this is not magic, that this doesn't happen out of nowhere, but it's based off of data. The data you put in is going to determine what comes out. Prompt engineering has kind of evolved past where it was before, where you had to be so specific because now the AI can even help you with that. But really having conversations, especially with my kids in the upper elementary about that, but also with my students even in first grade, I've used the Gemini storybooks a lot with them. I bring that in because it's been a great way to scaffold learning. We're a science of reading school, and a lot of the materials we use don't give our kids access to start. Using supplemental materials like that to do that is really important.

I would say, it says I wrote this. Let's talk about that for a minute. I provided language that helped write this, but I didn't write this. Just like if somebody's mowing the lawn, if they're using a riding mower versus using a push mower, there's a different amount of effort in there. I think giving kids really concrete examples of how it relates to everyday life really helps them. It's still accomplishing the task, but the amount I'm putting in there, and when you're doing that riding mower, you're directing it in a different way than you're directing that push mower. Those ideas really help our kids, and I want them to understand. I say to them, this is how I made this. This is something that adults can do, and I'm hoping at some point we'll have some guided ways of doing that. I know some people I know are starting to use different ways of collecting data from their kids so that they can do things on their behalf. I haven't had a chance to really explore that yet, but I want my students to understand that, but I also want my teachers to understand.

You asked about teacher reactions. I did all this work this year with EAC and AI, and a lot of my teachers were scared. They didn't realize how they could use these things to really meet the needs of their students, and it can be teacher-facing resources sometimes. Sometimes it's student-facing resources, but being an educator has never been harder. So whatever we can do to do our jobs better, then we can save that real high energy for those interactions and that personal touch with our students. It's really essential because I don't want to lose any more educators because they're tired.

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Just that reallocation of our time, our energy, sometimes I call it our brain capital. We only have so much of this, and if we're putting it all towards a task that we could outsource, or if there's different ways to allocate our time, it's worth taking a look at that. The lawnmower example you gave is a great one too for students to visualize the different ways we interact with machines. Sometimes they're right in front of us, pushing or riding them, or sometimes they're working behind the scenes. That storybook gem from Gemini is one of my favorites to show educators because it can create some great high interest text, some nice visuals, but it also is great for sparking conversations about how did it know to do this? What assumptions did this school make? Why did it choose this type of person for the images when I didn't specify? Why was this the default? I think it's a really great one for having those conversations with students and teachers.

When you're coaching elementary teachers who are curious about AI but understandably feel a little hesitant, where do you usually start those conversations or start that work with them?

This year, one of the things I've done, like I mentioned earlier, is that I started creating gems for each of my classroom teachers that I share with them. A gem, in case you're not familiar, is really a specified Gemini prompt where you put the information in ahead of time. Sharing it with them, some of my teachers will actually engage in it and others don't, but then showing them how I'm using those things and modeling those lessons for them is really essential. We're 25% multilingual learners and 25% students with disabilities at my school. Something as simple as sentence stem generation or including some of those multilingual strategies like GLAD strategies, showing them how they can leverage something like that is powerful. There's only so much intellectual brain capital you have. Sometimes it's hard to remember all of that. I've been talking to my teachers about how they can use something like Gemini or a gem to do a universal design for learning audit to look at a lesson they've already done. A lot of times we're like, we've made this lesson, it's ready. Well, is it really meeting the needs of our kids? Sometimes something as simple as that can be really powerful. Some of my teachers aren't ready to start from scratch and use and really leverage it where it could be used, but they just want to use it to check their lessons and see where their lessons are at, see how they can make their lessons just that little bit more customized to their learners' needs. That's been a great way of doing that. I think it just depends. All of my teachers are at different places. For some, they're ready to jump in. I have one teacher who's vibe coding with me and she's all in. Then I have other teachers who are just like, I just need to watch what you're doing and see how you're doing it. I'm not quite ready to dip my toe in yet.

Right, and there's those different entry points for people. The audit example you gave is a great one because there may be someone who says, this isn't for me or I don't need to create anything new or I don't know where to start. But if they have great things, maybe it's the audit, maybe it's reflection, maybe it's something where they're taking what they've created and now adding this extra layer, this other experience for students, maybe shifting it so that it's more connected to the World Cup or whatever. I think that's a great entry point for someone who is not quite sure what this means for them and isn't making a connection to their day to day. It can really help get those wheels spinning.

You mentioned vibe coding and gem creation. What are some of your favorite AI powered tools or use cases that work well for elementary educators and their planning and their prep?

I'm going to be perfectly honest. I am not an AI tool person. I'm having a lot of fun with SWOT in my outside of school life, but I'm definitely a Gemini girl. The vibe coding has become a huge thing for me lately. I really like how it can create an experience where students are being critical thinkers and they're creating as part of an interactive activity. That's been really valuable. So many of the things that we have for our students are teacher talk. This enables it to be more student-directed and student-facing, where our students are getting to engage more. I find that our students spend a lot of time listening, and we need to get our students engaged more. Sometimes it even means creating something more like what I would consider a FET-type thing, where they're using it as a manipulative but they're still doing paper to record the results. That's been really valuable, especially as far as math goes. I still use a lot of other math tools, but being able to create my own math tool that meets the needs of where my students are at and offers them challenge and critical thinking has been really powerful. With our enhanced autism classes, we've been able to create tools to help teachers not only help their students develop literacy skills but also to monitor IEP goals, which has been super powerful. Giving our teachers a prompt to start with, a prompt builder, and then saying to them, let's create this for our students based on your sensory and motor needs has been super powerful and something that I think I'm just at the tip of the iceberg playing with. Like you mentioned before, the storybook to me is one of the easiest entry points of everything. We've been using it for social stories. I think about something like a social story, our elementary educators, how many times as an elementary educator do you need a social story and you're like, I don't even know where to start.

Yeah, right. I feel like I can just, I've been out of the classroom for a little bit now, but as a fifth grade teacher for almost seven years, just being in the room with all the books, looking for the perfect text, the perfect leveled resource or something that was going to be just right for one of my students who was excited about oceans but maybe a little bit hesitant to jump into a new text. Just that idea of going to a space where you can create or find some stories is huge. At all levels, but particularly right in elementary where you might need to find more text for students over the course of a unit. We even have, as far as social stories go, in our enhanced population, we have kids who elope. We have kids that are biting. We can create a story and then even add a kid's picture in so that they can see themselves in that story. It's really powerful. For many of my educators, they're willing to try that before they're willing to try anything else. I kind of view it like when I first started doing tech coaching, if I show teachers how to use Pear Deck or Flashcard Factory, it was an easy entry. I feel like the storybook is that first easy step because all they have to do is say, this is what I want the story to be about. It really helps those kids. It's an easy entry point and a great discussion point.

I think it really is a good way to check a few boxes and give that scaffolded support to really create something that they can bring right away to their classrooms.

Debbie, this was such a wonderful conversation full of practical tips and strategies for listeners. I know you are active on social and share in lots of spaces. Where can people connect with you? Where can they learn more about your work?

Sure. I have a website, TannenbaumTech.com, but I try to keep it as easy as possible. It's Tannenbaum Tech everywhere. In 2026, I'm spending most of my time on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I still have an X account, but I don't spend as much time there as I used to. Those are great places to find out more. I'm going to be pretty busy this summer. I'm really excited about getting to go to lots of different conferences and share the things that I'm really excited about.

Anyone who's listening who is curious about what's going on in elementary education with a tech connection should follow you and get plenty of ideas that they can bring into the upcoming school year. Thank you so much, Debbie, for your time today.

Thank you so much for having me. It's always fun to get a chance to chat with you. Chatting with Debbie today was a lot of fun. So many great strategies and examples that she shared. Let's finish up with a few takeaways from the conversation.

First, model AI use for students by thinking aloud about your choices and showing how AI generated content was created. Use Gemini's storybook feature to create supplemental text, social stories, and scaffolded reading materials. Try vibe coding to create interactive student-facing activities that promote critical thinking over consumption. Build custom Gemini gems for classroom teachers to help them customize learning experiences for their students.

Thanks again for joining this episode and tuning in to all of Debbie's great strategies and stories that she shared. A big thank you to Jotform, the presenter of today's episode. To learn more about Jotform and how educational institutions can get a 30 percent discount on Jotform Enterprise, head to Jotform.com slash enterprise slash education.