Curiosity is high, policies are murky, and everyone wants practical answers. We dive straight into what AI fluency really means for teaching and learning: using AI effectively and responsibly without losing the human voice that makes education meaningful.

We dig into the shift from early fears of cheating to today’s tougher questions: who gets amplified, how consent is honored, and what privacy looks like todays classrooms. You’ll hear how a simple stoplight policy cuts through confusion across courses and lowers cognitive load for students who just want to do the right thing.

On the tools front, we spotlight Notebook LM as a grounded, source-citing environment built for higher education. Students can create mind maps, flashcards, and audio summaries from their own materials—ideal for diverse learning styles and neurodivergent needs—while tracing every claim back to a specific source or lecture moment. This isn’t “AI does it for you.” It’s “AI helps you do it better.”

We close by rejecting the dystopian loop of bots assigning, bots answering, and bots grading. Instead, we offer three concrete starting moves. Together with Dr. Sarah Egan Warren of NC State’s Institute for Advanced Analytics, we unpack how community, consent, and clarity turn AI from a buzzword into a reliable part of the classroom toolkit.