Teachers know the truth about summer. It’s a time to decompress, attend to personal matters and in general store up energy reserves and regroup.
Beyond the Bell Co. has spent June and July on back-end work, and I want to catch you up on what's done, what's new, and where to find us starting next week.
The big one: we're on Instagram. Starting Monday, July 13, you'll find new content at [@beyondthebellcompany] four times a week. Three short videos and one carousel, every week, through the fall. AI literacy, classroom policy, and digital citizenship, made for the educators doing this work without a roadmap.
What came out this spring and summer, in case you missed it:
The essay on what schools can and cannot legally do about AI deepfakes is live. If your district hasn't had that conversation, it's overdue, and the piece gives you the legal footing to start it.
The AI in the Classroom Policy and Reflection Toolkit is live: policy posters, a student reflection form, a family letter, and drop-in syllabus language for managing AI use without banning it or pretending it doesn't exist. The two posters are free on their own.
And the free shelf keeps growing: AI Safety Checklist, the AI Reference Guide, and Real or Robot?, the no-cost first lesson of the Screen Smart unit.
What's coming. A free conversation-starter resource for parents lands in mid-August, built for back-to-school night. At the end of August, a longer essay on a double standard nobody in education wants to talk about. And in September, tools for figuring out what your students actually know about AI before you teach them anything.
Follow along on Instagram at beyondthebellcompany and Pinterest at Beyond the Bell Co, and forward this to the teacher on your campus who got voluntold to figure out the AI policy. They need it more than anyone.
See you next week.
Jamie