Lego announced this month that they will be selling new “Computer Science & AI” kits to schools and other education organizations, geared toward K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 age ranges. These kits include building materials and lessons, supported by software that helps students better understand how machines can sense the world, predict language, and perform other AI tasks. With their great track record in the EdTech space, this seems like a very promising way to integrate AI literacy without necessarily putting students in front of a chatbot window.

In her “Zoom Ahead: AI for Tomorrow’s Leaders” address, First Lady Melania Trump urged US students not to “surrender your thinking to AI” despite the temptation to let the technology do work for them. Rather, she said, “curiosity is the driving force behind every great achievement” and advised students to use AI as a tool to enhance their own creativity. Her talk was sponsored by Zoom and included students, scientists, and technologists. I’m eager to see how this push from the White House is converted into meaningful directives and funding.

As I mentioned in last month’s newsletter, one of the big ChatGPT releases at the end of 2025 was a novel integration with Adobe products. Without a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, ChatGPT users are now able to edit photos and create graphics through the chatbot’s own interface. I got hands-on with this feature in early January and it was a disappointment. Initial edits to PDFs (using Adobe Acrobat) or photos (using Photoshop) were largely successful after the initial Adobe login process. But subsequent edits were much less useful. ChatGPT would either not make the change or would generate a broken link to the new file. For now, at least, this new set of features is a work in progress.

While AI image generation has been available for years (and has become somewhat awe-inspiring of late), the struggles of these tools to include text and show accurate information are well-documented. If you’ve ever tried to ask ChatGPT or Gemini to make a visual to use in class, you’ve certainly seen evidence of this limitation. Here’s an example from my book “Fifty AI Prompts for Teachers” that I generated back in mid-2024 using one of the foremost models at the time. Notice how the text labels include misspellings and gibberish, and do not accurately label the parts of the digestive system.

But advances from both OpenAI and Google have made image generation much more useful for creating information/educational diagrams. The state-of-the-art right now is Nano Banana Pro in Google Gemini. Here’s how I’m using it now.

What’s the Goal? Create infographics to use in lessons, slide decks, activities, and assessments that accurately include exactly the details and labels needed, rather than searching for available pre-made images online and settling for “close enough”.

How do I get started?

Since this is essentially a prompting challenge, it’s important to remember our prompting best practices. Don’t forget to tell the model what role you wish it to play and provide some context about the age/grade, subject area, and learning goals of the image you wish to create. Here’s the prompt I used to make an improved version of the diagram above:

And this is what it created:

The improvement is obvious and significant. But, of course, this kind of prompt is just the beginning. You can also provide it with an image like the one above and ask it to make changes, such as removing labels to make the image better for a student exercise. Try using the “+” button near your prompt to upload files, or asking for follow-up changes to a generated image. Since Nano Banana excels at editing parts of an image without starting over from scratch, it does a much better job of tweaking its output to get what you need.

When you play around with this new capability, please share what you’ve created and any prompts that worked really well for you.

For the next month, I’ll be preparing the 1-hour versions of the Learning Forge lessons for presentation at the Science for All Summit and the North Carolina Technology in Education Society Conference. If you’ll be attending either of these, I’d love to meet and chat about how you’re using AI in your classroom.

This spring will also bring more of Solution Tree’s “AI for Educators” workshops all over the country. I’ll be kicking it off in Stockton, California but other dates will be listed soon. Check out ST’s website to sign up or to schedule an event near you.

Next month I will be sharing resources from my Learning Forge presentations and some powerful uses of the new features in NotebookLM. Until then, keep looking for ways to be curious and try AI tools in new ways.

Paul (and the Codium Educational Consulting team)

P.S.

Don’t forget to email me with examples of how you’ve used the tools and strategies that I’ve shared.