Hello Everyone,

To celebrate the two year anniversary of ChatGPT, we have to think about its impact on the real world.

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The population that truly made ChatGPT go viral was its adoption among young people and students. Each back-to-school season in the calendar year, ChatGPT explodes with a new wave of millions of global users. Why is that? Let’s do a deep dive into this.

As of June in 2024, the percentage of K-12 students and teachers who say they are using AI and approve of it has risen sharply over the past year, according to a new poll that was conducted by Impact Research for the Walton Family Foundation.

In mid 2024, less than 20% of students said they never use generative AI. That number is likely even lower now closer to the end of 2024. Young people usually are first adopters of new technologies that are going to be impactful. There is a general consensus that students perceive ChatGPT as a beneficial tool that enhances their learning experience.

In general ChatGPT and the top Gen AI tools are viewed as a resource that can improve writing and coding skills, increase engagement in subjects, and provide a better overall experience for assignments. This perception of relative advantage is crucial for motivating students to adopt the technology.

“The American public as a whole remains on the fence with artificial intelligence, according to many polls, but in education, adoption among teachers and students is rapidly rising.”

Over the past couple of years I’ve been exposed to a lot of work by people who actually work in education at the intersection of AI include folk like (Mike Kentz, AI EduPathways), (Marc Watkins, Rhetorica), (Jeremy Caplan of Wonder Tools), and (Jason Gulya, The AI Edventure) among dozens of others. The range of teachers, journalists and entrepreneurs in the space is starting to take shape into a cultural movement all its own.

In late August, 2024 ChatGPT hit 200 million weekly users, by the end of 2024 it could be at nearly 300 million. OpenAI’s CFO recently confirmed the $20 subscriptions make up nearly 75% of OpenAI’s exploding revenue. ChatGPT two years later, has proof of frontier model utility for millions of students and young professionals.

ChatGPT is considered to have a user-friendly UX (user experience interface) and this facilitates adoption of ChatGPT and it has been highlighted as a major reason for its rapid adoption. Students report that they find it easy to navigate and utilize, which lowers the barrier to entry for using such advanced technology. Students all over the world seem to agree.

According to advocates, Artificial intelligence and this new wave of Generative AI tools are increasingly recognized as a transformative force in education, with significant implications for teaching and learning practices. These include a wide range of tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, NotebookLM, Perplexity and more specific tools like we mentioned last time.

I’m a natural skeptic, but when I read the first-hand reports of how teachers experience their students interacting with ChatGPT and related technologies, I had to again get Nick’s take on this. Indeed Nick Potkalitsky, PhD has become an important advocate of a new Techno-Optimism around AI in the classroom I’m increasingly witnessing.

EdTech appears to be flourishing with Generative AI tools where AI technologies are being developed to tailor educational experiences to individual student needs, allowing for adaptive learning paths that can respond to a student’s strengths and weaknesses. This personalization can enhance engagement and improve learning outcomes. Students are also using Generative AI in distinctly new ways that might change their future of work and career development.

Nick is the founder of Pragmatic AI Solutions, and with Mike Kentz has recently published AI in Education: A Roadmap For Teacher-Led Transformation, you can buy it on Amazon here. To discover more Newsletters related to Education please go here. Nick also has a Newsletter on LinkedIn called The Pragmatic AI Educator.

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What follows is a guest post by (Nick Potkalitsky of the Newsletter Educating AI). Nick is an innovative educator developing AI-responsive instructional methods and approaches for today’s schools. I hope you enjoy the article.

Beyond Text Generation: How AI Ignites Student Discovery and Deep Thinking

Let me tell you about a quiet revolution unfolding in my senior English classroom.

Actually, there’s nothing quiet about it.

After two years of intensive experimentation with AI in education, I am witnessing something amazing unfolding before my eyes. While much of the world fixates on AI’s generative capabilities—its ability to create essays, stories, and code—my students have discovered something far more powerful: exploratory AI, a dynamic partner in investigation and critique that’s transforming how they think.

“AI writing is just bad,” one of my seniors recently declared in a reflective writing response with characteristic teenage directness. “It has no voice, no depth, plus it just can’t integrate quotes meaningfully—which is most of the work we do as students anyway.” This observation marks a crucial shift in how students perceive and use AI. They’ve moved beyond the initial fascination with AI-generated content to something far more sophisticated: using AI as an exploratory tool for investigation, interrogation, and intellectual discovery.

Every day brings new revelations like this.

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Figure 1. Leon Furze’s AI Adoption Framework: Though Furze’s model categorizes AI use in tiers, students actually develop generative thinking across all AI interactions, suggesting we need a fluid model focused on cognitive growth rather than usage levels.

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Consider this scene: A student sits hunched over their laptop, deep in conversation with an AI about climate data for their capstone project. But this isn’t your typical research session. “Show me this through a social justice lens,” they type. Then: “Now, through an economic perspective.” With each iteration of this exploratory dialogue, their understanding deepens, their questions sharpen, and their thinking evolves in ways that leave me speechless.

This isn’t the AI apocalypse that education doomsayers predicted. Not even close.

Instead of the much-feared “shutdown” of critical thinking, we’re witnessing something extraordinary: the emergence of what I call “generative thinking”—a dynamic process where students learn to expand, reshape, and evolve their ideas through meaningful exploration with AI tools. Here I consciously reposition the term “generative” as a process of human origination, although one ultimately spurred on by machine input.

At its core, this bi-directional dance between exploratory AI and generative thinking involves several key cognitive moves, and watching them unfold in real time is electrifying. Students learn to frame and reframe questions, approaching their subject matter from multiple angles simultaneously. They develop what some call “prompt literacy”—the ability to craft queries that open up possibilities rather than narrow them down. But more importantly, they learn to identify patterns and contradictions across AI responses, developing a meta-analytical skill that transcends any single interaction.

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Figure 2. AI-Enhanced Double-Loop Learning (Bendoly et. al.): This model demonstrates how continuous AI interaction creates a dynamic learning cycle: users explore ideas, gain insights, and develop new mental models, catalyzing both immediate understanding and broader thinking strategies.

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The transformation is particularly striking in our senior English course, where we’ve been exploring what it means to be human through works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831) and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019). When students engage with these texts in tandem with exploratory AI, they’re not just analyzing literature—they’re practicing a new form of intellectual dialogue that moves between human and machine perspectives, enriching both.

Consider one student’s journey through Frankenstein. Rather than simply asking an AI model to analyze the text, she began probing the AI’s own understanding of consciousness and creation. “How would you respond to the creature’s existential questions?” she asked. Then, fascinatingly: “How does your response differ from Shelley’s perspective?” The resulting dialogue wasn’t just about literary analysis—it became a real-time exploration of consciousness, creation, and responsibility that bridged two centuries of technological advancement.

“I’m not just learning about my research topic,” she told me later. “I’m learning how to think about thinking about it.”

This meta-cognitive leap is what excites me most. Students aren’t just using AI to gather information—they’re using it to understand their own intellectual processes. They’re learning to think while learning to understand their own thinking.

Yesterday, this approach took an unexpected turn. Walking down the main hallway in my school, I overheard a group of seniors in another classroom developing a training program for middle school students—not about AI writing, but about AI exploration. They had decided to use a project in speech class as an opportunity to teach younger students how to use AI as an investigative tool, how to probe its responses, how to develop deeper questions rather than quick answers. Spurred on by the investigative approach in my classroom, they had transformed from AI users into AI educators, creating a cascade of exploratory learning that I never anticipated.

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Figure 3. Potkalitsky. The Exploratory AI – Generative Thinking Cycle: As users engage with AI analysis tools, a continuous cycle emerges. The tools’ computational capabilities support increasingly sophisticated human cognitive processes, which in turn lead to more refined tool usage and deeper analysis. This interaction drives ongoing intellectual development.

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For educators watching from the sidelines, I understand your hesitation.

But this moment won’t wait.

This isn’t about teaching students to use AI as a shortcut—they’ve already figured out its limitations there. It’s about helping them harness exploratory AI as a tool for deeper investigation, critical analysis, and intellectual growth.

The revolution isn’t approaching.

It’s here.

And it’s generating possibilities we’re only beginning to comprehend.

The future unfolds daily in Room 142, where students aren’t just learning to use AI—they’re learning to think alongside it, to explore with it, to grow beyond it.

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If you are inspired after reading this article, I’m excited to share that my colleague Mike Kentz and I are releasing “AI in Education: A Roadmap for Teacher-Led Transformation” as an e-book on Amazon this October 30th. In it, we argue that teachers—not policymakers, administrators, or ed-tech companies—will lead education’s necessary transformation in the age of AI. But to do so effectively, they need a roadmap that addresses both practical challenges and deeper philosophical questions about human learning and agency.

The ideas I’ve shared about exploratory AI and generative thinking are just the beginning. In our book, we expand these concepts, showing how AI interaction affects student cognition and agency in both subtle and profound ways. Our goal is simple but ambitious: to empower educators to lead this transformation proactively, with both ethical awareness and practical tools.

The future of education shouldn’t be dictated by those furthest from the classroom. As my students demonstrate daily, the real revolution in AI education isn’t about generating content—it’s about exploring ideas, probing possibilities, and awakening new forms of human thinking. The journey from Room 142 is just beginning.

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Generative thinking isn’t just for students—teachers in classrooms everywhere are discovering their own capacity for transformative thinking as they explore AI alongside their learners. This journey is reshaping education from the inside out.

At Pragmatic AI Solutions, we’re building a community of classroom teachers, administrators, and researchers who are reimagining what’s possible in real educational settings. Our network offers:

Professional Development & Training

Classroom Implementation Resources

Expert Consultation

Conference Keynotes

Video Tutorials

Because the future of education is being written by those who teach.

Connect with us and join educators turning everyday AI challenges into opportunities for growth. Join our online community here.

Nick and Mike’s AI Education Book:

The book’s title is “AI in Education: A Roadmap For Teacher-Led Transformation”.

Drawing from over 20 years of combined experience, authors Mike Kentz and Nick Potkalitsky provide practical insights for integrating AI into schools while preserving core educational values.

“AI in Education” emphasizes a teacher-first approach, positioning educators as architects of learning who can leverage AI to enhance their expertise. It’s an essential resource for K-12 administrators, curriculum designers, teachers, and anyone interested in shaping the future of education in the AI age.

Appendix Further Reading

Here are some AI Newsletters at a glance that may intersect with education, students and the classroom in a way that adds value to today’s topic. With each Newsletter we list some of their best articles. Explore at your leisure for further insights.