Overview
Developing real-world publications such as magazines, newspapers, or podcasts offers students powerful opportunities to practice creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking for a real-world audience. These projects engage learners in robust problem-solving: working together to identify an audience, manage complex workflows, and produce a professional-quality product that others will read, hear, or use. Generative AI can amplify these experiences by serving as a collaborative tool that supports, but never replaces, student voice and ownership.
At Ulster BOCES in New York, students in the New Visions Health program produced a first-ever student magazine called Vitae, focused on health, wellness, and recovery for a teen audience. To meet the challenge of creating a polished publication under tight timelines, students strategically integrated AI into their workflow through:
Planning and audience awareness: Students used AI to brainstorm article topics, titles, and layouts tailored to resonate with their peers. AI generated a wide range of ideas, and students used their own knowledge of the audience to select the most compelling concepts to develop further.
Drafting and revising: Students collaborated with ChatGPT as a feedback partner, using it to refine clarity, flow, and tone, while making deliberate choices to keep their authentic voices at the center.
Editing and production support: When articles exceeded space limits, AI helped students condense content without losing meaning. It also generated captions, sidebars, and pull quotes that enhanced the magazine’s design and readability.
By weaving AI into each stage of the process, students were able to produce a polished deliverable for an authentic audience. Just as importantly, they practiced transferable skills including creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking, that will serve them well beyond this single project.
Apply This Strategy in Your Context
Here are ways educators can prompt students to integrate AI into projects that result in real-world publications:
Set the stage for authentic work- Develop a project that results in the production of an authentic publication such as a website, social media campaign, or podcast. The student-created output should be familiar enough to students but still ambitious and challenging enough in its scope.
- Position AI as a partner: Keep the cognitive lift on the students by collaboratively identifying concrete ways to use AI.
Use AI for brainstorming and planning: Generate ideas for topics, headlines, formats, or audience engagement strategies to spark student creativity.
Embed AI in Writing and Revision: Position AI as a drafting partner while teaching students to critically evaluate and refine suggestions.
Leverage AI for Production Support: Apply AI to tasks like summarizing long sections, creating captions, or suggesting design elements, so students can focus on meaning and storytelling.
- Build in reflection and ownership: Guide students to consider how AI shaped their process and product, and articulate their role in ensuring authenticity. Here are some suggested reflection prompts:
How did AI influence your ideas or writing?
Which parts of the work do you feel best represent your own voice?
When did you accept or reject AI suggestions, and why?
How did using AI change the way you worked with your peers?
What steps did you take to ensure the final product feels authentic and meaningful?
Thoughtful integration of AI into project-based learning empowers students to produce high-quality deliverables for authentic audiences, while developing durable skills in communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.
This AI-enabled strategy was developed by a member of the School Teams AI Collaborative—a partnership between Leading Educators and The Learning Accelerator (TLA). The Collaborative was developed to bring together innovative educators from schools across the country to share ideas and discover effective ways to use AI in the classroom.
