Gen AI tools are changing rapidly. I can’t keep up. As one of my colleague put it, no one can. He cites Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland characters:

Welcome to the Red Queen Race in education.

This concept, borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s whimsical tale, has found new relevance in our AI-accelerated world. The original metaphor described how Alice and the Red Queen had to run as fast as they could just to stay in the same place—and this perfectly captures what’s happening across industries today – including education.

Before you even check your morning messages, headlines about new AI breakthroughs have already moved the goalposts. A late-night announcement about an educational AI tool becomes breakfast conversation, and by lunch, not knowing about it feels like falling behind. Just like Alice and the Red Queen, many teachers find themselves sprinting to keep up with technological advances while feeling they’re falling further behind, caught in a cycle where yesterday’s innovation becomes today’s baseline expectation.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to run this race.

Dr. Bruce Ellis goes on to point out:

“The problem isn’t with technology itself—it’s with the frantic pressure to adopt every new tool simply because it’s the newest thing on the block. Strategic integration based on actual classroom needs is very different from trend-chasing driven by fear of falling behind.

Frantic Pressure

You know, that frantic pressure to adopt comes at us from all the digital tools we are forced to use, from Microsoft 365 with Copilot to Gemini in Google Workspace for Education (and all the others). Is there a version of these tools without Gen AI built in, unasked for?

The host of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, Jonathan Green, makes some excellent points about not getting caught up in it as well. But those are for another day.

Consider SHINE’s five-step framework (get a copy via Canva), a free tool educators can use to make sense of the volume of tools being foisted upon them. It helps answer the question, “Should we bring an AI-powered tool into the classroom?”