AI and education: Helping journalists improve news coverage

Generative AI is reshaping the way children and adults learn, make decisions and engage with the world, including their peers and families. 

The Journalist’s Resource and the Harvard Graduate School of Education have organized this free, one-hour webinar to help journalists better understand and cover the topic.

Journalists will gain:

• A stronger knowledge of what the research says about AI and education to date and where the largest gaps in research exist.
• Questions and story ideas to help them delve deeper into the issue, hold government agencies accountable and provide their audiences with greater insights on the impact of AI.
• Tips for tracking how tech companies are selling their AI products to K-12 schools, colleges and universities.

Policymakers, educators and nonprofit leaders are also encouraged to attend. The panelists are:

Tessa Forshaw, a cognitive scientist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who is the faculty chair of the Workplace and Workforce Learning Concentration and co-director of the Compass Collaborative and Workforce Learning and Artificial Intelligence Initiative. She has written extensively about AI and workforce training and is coauthor of the 2025 book, “Innovation-ish: How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World.”

Sharad Goel, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who leads the Computational Policy Lab at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Goel, who studies higher education and other policy topics through a computer science lens, worked with a research team to build an AI tutor and then conduct a randomized trial to gauge its impact among 6,000 students at 59 U.S. colleges and universities. The resulting paper will be released next year.

Nneka McGee, AI for Education’s director of partner strategy and the project lead and lead author of recent Stanford Accelerator for Learning reports on responsible AI in assessment and AI and learning differences. McGee, a former school district chief academic officer, serves on the advisory board of the digital news site EdSurge. She coauthored the forthcoming book “Educating Digital Citizens in an AI World.”

Natasha Singer, a journalist who has covered technology in schools, and tech industry influence in schools, for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online privacy law. In 2019, she was part of a team of Times reporters that won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer finalist in national reporting for their coverage of online tracking and privacy. She also is author of a new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.”