MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER

NOTEWORTHY NEWS

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to dive deeper:

• People are starting to treat ChatGPT like their new bestie - here’s why that’s a huge red flag.

• Should schools ‘redshirt’ Kindergarten start times?

• ‘Kid Rotting’ - the new trend parents are trying this summer. Will it impact your next school year?

TECH TOOL

Summer Brain Drain (and Screens) Driving You Nuts?

Summer rolls around, and kids seem magnetically glued to screens - and let’s be honest, so do many teachers. 

While screens can be helpful, all that scrolling and streaming leaves brains overloaded and vocabularies stale. Parents (and teachers) are desperate for a way to engage kids’ minds without another video or app full of flashing colors.

Who would have thought that technology itself could deliver a screen-free fix?

The Solution: Pinna

Pinna is an audio-first platform designed specifically for kids.

Think of it as Spotify meets Audible - but for child-safe, educational content. Its massive library includes immersive audiobooks, kid-friendly podcasts, interactive audio games, and original series aimed at kids from ages 3 to 12.

Vocabulary-building happens naturally as children listen to stories with rich language, explore new topics, and follow along with character-driven narratives, all without a single screen. 

Parents can use Pinna at home for travel, rainy days, or quiet time, while teachers can leverage it in the classroom for listening centers or literacy rotations without worrying about excessive screen exposure.

And because Pinna is fully curated and ad-free, you won’t have to worry about kids stumbling onto inappropriate content (phew!).

In Your Classroom:

Whether you’re road-tripping with your family or relaxing between curriculum brainstorming sessions, Pinna can turn downtime into an enriching experience. 

Play an audio game, listen to an adventure podcast, or let your kids discover a series you wish had existed when you were their age.

And come back-to-school season, you’ll have a powerful, screen-free literacy resource already in your toolkit.

Strategies

• Road trip sanity saver: Queue up a kid-friendly podcast to make summer travel smoother, and sneak in vocabulary exposure on the go.

• Screen-light classroom warm-ups: When school restarts, use Pinna’s podcasts to introduce themes, spark discussion, or kick off a writing activity.

• Build listening stamina: Set up a listening center with Pinna for kids who need to strengthen focus and comprehension without a screen’s distractions.

Pricing starts with a free trial, and then goes up to a max of $8.00 USD/month. However, there are freebies and educator-only pricing models as well.

Pinna proves you don’t have to ban technology to get kids off screens - you just have to use tech differently. 

BRAINY BITS

Can AI ever match a toddler’s babble?

This week, we explore a 2025 study that explains why children still outpace even the smartest AI chatbots at language learning - and what that means for teaching in an AI-driven world.

The Study: Constructing Language vs. Passive Processing

Researchers synthesized evidence from developmental psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics to build a new Constructing Language framework . 

Rather than passively ingesting text like ChatGPT, children learn by actively engaging all their senses - seeing, hearing, touching - and by social interaction: they point, crawl, babble, and adapt in real time to caregivers’ responses. 

The framework collates findings from head-mounted eye tracking, motion sensors, and AI‐powered speech recognition to show that language acquisition is an embodied, exploratory, and social process.

The Results:

Here’s what they found when comparing AI-learning models to nature’s version of language learning:

• Embodied Learning: Children use coordinated sensory input - the sight of a ball or the sound of “ball” - to bind words to real objects. ChatGPT, by contrast, only processes symbolic text.
  

• Active Exploration: Young learners shape their own lessons: by pointing at objects or babbling in context, they create opportunities for corrective feedback. AI models simply consume pre-written text without curiosity or initiative.
  

• Social Interaction: Language grows in back-and-forth exchanges. Children adjust their speech based on caregivers’ reactions. Chatbots generate next‐word predictions but can’t perceive listener confusion or reward genuine shared understanding.

Together, these lines of evidence explain why, despite trillions of parameters, AI learning remains fundamentally different (and slower) than a child’s (yay humans!). 

However, this also means that if humans relied on text alone, they’d need 92,000 years to match ChatGPT’s training corpus - but thankfully children achieve fluency in just a few years.

In Your Classroom:

AI tools can assist writing and translation, but this framework reminds us that true language mastery is embodied and social. 

To leverage children’s natural learning edge, blend technology with hands-on, interactive experiences:

Strategies

• Sensory Word Walls: Pair new vocabulary with real objects so students link words to multisensory cues.

• Guided Exploration: Use manipulatives (blocks, puppets) during story time and prompt students (“What happens if the bear turns left?”) to spark curiosity-driven dialogue.

• Reflective Playback: Record classroom dialogues (if allowed), then play back snippets so children hear how their own words map to actions - reinforcing self-driven learning loops.

By honoring children’s embodied, exploratory, and social strengths - and not relying solely on AI or text - we can design richer language lessons that keep human learners - and the next generation - one step ahead of those pesky machines.

REFERENCES

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

Pinna (2025).Kids podcasts, music, and audio games all in one place!  Retrieved from https://pinna.fm/

Brainy Bits:

Caroline F. Rowland, Gert Westermann, Anna L. Theakston, Julian M. Pine, Padraic Monaghan, Elena V.M. Lieven. (2025). Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences,ISSN 1364-6613 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.05.015.