AI Isn’t Neutral — And Neither Are We: Spotting Bias and Evaluating AI in K–12 Education

As AI-powered tools become more common in high school classrooms, educators must not only navigate how to use them, but also how to critically question what they produce. In this session, we’ll explore how generative AI reflects and reinforces societal biases around race, gender, and identity, and why this matters in education. Participants will examine how tools like ChatGPT and Gemini respond to identity-based prompts, revealing issues of bias, stereotype, and erasure. We’ll then introduce a flexible, classroom-ready framework for evaluating AI tools through an ethical and pedagogical lens. This session blends digital citizenship, media literacy, and critical thinking to help students and educators become just not AI users, but thoughtful, ethical AI thinkers. Participants will leave with: - A flexible framework to evaluate AI tools in your classroom. - Examples of how bias appears in AI-generated content. - Strategies to support digital citizenship and media literacy. - Discussion prompts and activities to use with students.