Wednesday 12 November 2025
I was fortunate to attend the July meet-up for Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) in Sydney, along with David Parr (Head of eLearning).
The focus for this three-day event was Artificial Intelligence, a hot topic in education. We enjoyed the chance to meet and reconnect with our fellow Australasian ADEs, learning from passionate and talented educators as well as industry experts. David and I set ourselves the goal of developing a framework for integrating AI tools into our Level 2 Art History and Classical Studies classes, so that we can support our students to use them in a way that enhances, rather than outsources, their learning.
Over the past two terms I have trialled a range of tools and strategies with my Level 2 Classical Studies students to support them as they prepare for their external exam later this month. This has been a real challenge, as the technology is so new and constantly evolving, and I am not always familiar with it myself! However, it has been exciting to learn along the students and gain a better understanding of how they are currently using AI tools, and where I can support them to do this better.
The most positive feedback from my class was about Google’s NotebookLM - a tool which I also introduced to my other senior classes. It allows students to upload their class notes and other selected sources as the information the AI draws from, meaning that all the content it creates is relevant and reliable. NotebookLM can quickly create engaging material based on the students’ resources, including podcasts, videos, mind-maps and flashcards. This has been a real game-changer for revision, with many students using it in their other subjects and some even recommending it to friends!
Students love that it can help them with the ‘hardest part’ of studying - getting started, by creating podcasts which they can use to passively review material while they are exercising or travelling to school. It also gives them new ideas from existing content and provides rhetorical questions or interesting insights which they can use to enhance their understanding.
One of my A2 students even uploaded her 40 pages of class notes and asked the AI to identify all the important quotations. It produced these in a table, which she was easily able to turn into her own flashcards for revision. I have really enjoyed learning tips like these from my students and look forward to sharing them with next year’s classes as we leverage AI to continue to help them achieve their academic goals.
Lauren Lethbridge - HOD Classics