#405 – An AI Literacy Framework

#405 — An AI Literacy Framework

AVID Open Access
9 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Paul Beckermann 0:01 Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckermann.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 0:05 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic of today’s episode is an AI literacy framework. Most people I talk to will readily admit that AI is both a powerful tool and a potentially disruptive technology. It’s reshaping our understanding of work, daily life, and learning. Similarly, most educators I talk to agree that someone needs to teach students how to use AI responsibly and effectively. The big questions are, who does this and how? Well, some guidance may be in the works. In May of 2025, a collaboration of prominent international organizations released a draft of a document called Empowering Learners for the Age of AI: An AI Literacy Framework for Primary and Secondary Education.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 (cont.) The authors include the European Commission, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, with support from code.org. While still in draft form, this document has the potential of guiding schools and educators in preparing students for an AI-infused world. In today’s episode, I’m going to share an overview of this document. If it sounds applicable to you and your work, you can follow up with a closer look yourself. In fact, the authors of this framework are looking for public feedback over the next few months. They intend to seek out feedback in multiple ways before revising and publishing a final draft sometime in 2026. If you are interested in providing feedback, you can do so by following the web link: teachai.org/AIliteracy/review. We’ll include this link in our show notes as well. The document begins with a definition of AI literacy that brings together elements of definitions from other well-respected worldwide organizations.

The definition reads, “AI literacy represents the technical knowledge, durable skills, and future-ready attitudes required to thrive in a world influenced by AI”. “It enables learners to engage, create, with, manage and design AI while critically evaluating its benefits, risks, and ethical implications”. They also add that teaching of AI literacy is a shared responsibility across the educational ecosystem, rather than the duty of any individual educator. It goes on to say that educators are encouraged to embed AI literacy when and where it aligns with their subject and context. These competencies are intended to be developed across a learner’s primary and secondary education experience. In other words, it’s not to be taught in a standalone class. It’s the responsibility of all K-12 educators to play a part in AI literacy training. All right, so let’s take a look at the framework.

The framework itself has been created by pulling together work from other international initiatives, including the European Commission’s digital competence framework for citizens, UNESCO’s AI competencies for students and AI competencies for teachers, the digital promise AI literacy framework and AI for K-12, five big ideas in AI. During the creation of the framework, three key themes emerged. Theme one was how AI and machine learning work. This supports the premise that understanding AI helps learners dispel misconceptions about the technology and enables a more informed evaluation of its implications. Theme two is human skills to emphasize for successful collaboration with AI tools. For this theme, the AI Lit framework emphasizes several skills and attitudes that support learners’ successful collaboration with AI.

These include durable skills such as metacognition, critical thinking, communication, questioning, perspective, taking, and computational thinking skills like abstraction, decomposition, and problem formulation. Theme number three is AI effect on individuals, society, and environment. For this theme, learners must think critically about how AI affects them and how it will continue to shape their futures. It points out that values, context, and accountability are inseparable from learning with and about AI. All right, upon these themes is built the framework itself. And the framework is broken down into four domains of AI literacy: engaging with AI, creating with AI, managing AI, and designing AI. So with engaging AI, they’re talking about using AI as a tool to access new content, information or recommendations and all the processes that go into that. Creating with AI is about collaborating with an AI system in a creative or problem-solving process.

Managing AI requires intentionally choosing how AI can support and enhance human work. And designing AI is about empowering learners to understand how AI works and connect it to its social and ethical impact by shaping how AI systems function through hands-on exploration in an education context. Embedded within that key framework structure are knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are important in mastering AI. As for knowledge, students will need an understanding of topics like the nature of AI, AI reflections of human choices and perspectives, how AI reshapes work in human roles, AI’s capabilities and limitations, and AI’s role in society. Skills that will be necessary include critical thinking, creativity, computational thinking, self and social awareness, collaboration, communication, problem-solving. We’ve heard these before. A lot of them are wrapped into the four C’s. These are critical, transferable life skills that students will need in an age of AI.

And finally, there are broad personal attributes that will be necessary, things like being responsible, being curious, innovative, adaptable, empathetic. These really, again, are transferable, future-ready, skills that our students will need, both for AI and for life in general. Each of these areas is developed further within the descriptions of each competency. There’s a general summary and a brief breakdown of what that competency means. In practice, all of this context leads up to the main section of the document: competencies. In fact, this makes up about half of the framework document itself. This section is structured around the four key areas of AI literacy: engaging with AI, creating with AI, designing with AI, and managing AI. As these competencies are broken down, the related knowledge, skills, and attitudes I mentioned are called out specifically, and scenarios are provided for both primary education as well as secondary classes.

These examples are intended to provide concrete ways that these competencies might be integrated into an actual K-12 school setting. While this is a high-level overview of the document, the true power of it is in digging into the specifics, and I encourage you to do just that. It might offer you some actionable insights for how AI education can be integrated into your school and your classroom. After reviewing the document, if you’re interested, you can also provide input and feedback using the online form. Again, that address is teachai.org/AIliteracy/review. Regardless of whether you dive in more deeply or not, be sure to be on the lookout for the final draft, which is scheduled for some time in 2026. To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, visit avidopenaccess.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out the article collection: AI in the K-12 classroom.

And of course, be sure to join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening. Take care and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.