How to Use AI to Learn (and Not Cheat)
By Gia Miller
Artwork by Tara Tassio
In first grade, you learned how to add and subtract. This laid the foundation for every math lesson to come. Because, for example, without knowing how to add 5 + 5 + 5, you would not understand that 3 x 5 equals 15. But what if, instead of learning your basic math facts, you had AI do that for you? The answer is obvious: by the time you were in second or third grade, you would probably fail math.
Now, what if, instead of having AI do your work for you, it helped you learn? It created videos to show you exactly how 5 + 5 + 5 apples equals 15 apples, and it produced flashcards to help you memorize basic addition and subtraction? Then, as you began to learn multiplication and division, AI helped you again, never giving you the answers but helping you learn what it means to multiply and divide. While elementary school math is definitely not the same as learning algebra or memorizing U.S. history facts, AI can help you learn these things and more.
To do this well, there’s one thing you should regularly do while using AI, according to Joan McGettigan, the director of educational technology at Windward School. “Stop for a moment and ask yourself, ‘Am I still doing the thinking? Does my judgment still matter here?’ It’s really important to think about this regularly. There are consequences if you constantly offload everything into AI. Because if you let AI do all the thinking, when push comes to shove, you won’t have the knowledge.”
Take a thoughtful approach
Like McGettigan, Jason Hult, the dean of teaching and learning at The Masters School, stresses the importance of not significantly relying on AI; it shouldn’t do the heavy lifting on any assignment. “We want our students to be ambidextrous in their ability to both think and create with or without AI tools,” he says.
“These tools are here, and they are amazing,” Hult continues. “I think it is a mistake to just totally abstain from using AI tools. Your time is limited, and you are going to be left with some tasks that are more worthwhile than others. Part of what I think is exciting about AI is that it will let you accelerate toward the challenges that are most rewarding and exciting for you.”
But using AI for homework, writing and studying does require some advanced planning. Hult recommends reading the course syllabus and individual assignment sheets first to see if your teacher provided clear guidance on when you can and cannot use AI. He also suggests talking to your teacher about how you plan to use AI for a specific assignment so they’re aware of your intent and can help guide you.
To prepare yourself for success, set up your AI of choice to provide you with the right type of information. “In my settings of any AI tool I use, I wrote a really lengthy disclaimer about how I do not want it to just give me information to make me happy,” McGettigan explains. “If it doesn’t know something, I want it to come back at me and tell me it doesn’t know it. The beginning of my disclaimer reads, ‘You are committed to truth and accuracy above everything else, including being helpful. A wrong answer given confidently is worse than no answer. Follow these seven rules in every response.’ Then I give it my rules, including using sources and statistics and addressing logic gaps.”
“Don’t be afraid to be firm about what you need,” she continues. “A lot of people will just ask a question, but AI is built on algorithms that may or may not be helpful to you.” So take some time to think about how you want AI to respond to you, knowing you can always add to your instructions at any time.
Develop a plan to complete assignments on time
You could be the smartest student in your class, but if you lack the executive functioning skills and cannot complete your homework or projects on time, your grades will suffer. This is an area where AI shines and cannot be misconstrued as cheating.
“If you don’t know how to handle a multi-pronged project by the time you are 13 years old, it’s going to sink you,” says McGettigan. “But AI can help.” Here’s an example prompt you can use for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or your large language model (LLM) of choice:
Make AI your new study partner
According to a 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, rereading or rewriting notes, highlighting textbooks and using mnemonic devices are not very effective ways to learn the material. The best way to study is often self-testing. Unless your school has a dedicated AI platform designed to help you study, our experts recommend you turn to Gemini Notebook, and we agree. It is designed to help you understand, organize and review what you’ve learned in school.
What makes Gemini Notebook unique is that instead of drawing from the entire internet, this tool will only use the information you provide, preventing it from giving you information you don’t need, as well as greatly minimizing hallucinations. With Gemini Notebook, you can do the following:
- Create endless individual notebooks
- Upload up to 600 external sources per notebook (copy/paste text, attach PDFs, upload audio recordings, etc.)
- Get quizzes and flashcards (along with immediate answers)
- Create extra practice problems
- Make study guides, outlines, reports and mind maps
- Transform your study materials into a podcast-style discussion between two AI hosts who will break down key concepts, create analogies and provide the main takeaways
- Create brief videos that summarize main topics and themes
- Synchronize your notebooks so you can study on your computer or phone
“You should figure out the way that’s most engaging for you,” McGettigan suggests. “Even if you have the best teacher in the world, they can’t always customize things for you, so why not have a bespoke curriculum?” She suggests asking AI to explain what you missed, then quiz you again.
Gemini Notebook also allows you to share your individual notebooks with others, so if you have a trusted study group, you could all work from one shared notebook, even when you’re not studying together.
Use AI to help you write, not write for you
Let’s be clear: Letting AI write your essays is cheating. When AI writes for you, you are no longer doing the learning, the thinking or the actual work. But AI can help you write. For example, Hult says he’s a slow typer, so he frequently uses an AI-powered voice-to-text so he can respond to emails faster. Or there are several AI tools available to help you minimize spelling and grammar mistakes, but McGettigan advises you use them with caution. “I frequently disagree with it,” she says about Grammarly.
“Academic integrity in the age of AI is really complicated, and our intuitions do not always align about what is cheating and what is not,” Hult warns. “I recommend students open a dialogue with their teacher about it. Students often get into trouble when they have not really thought about the act of writing as a multi-step process, and instead they just think about it in terms of the outcome. But when teachers talk about writing, it’s often every stop of the road from when you first start an assignment to when you hand it in. So have a conversation about the ways it might be helpful to use AI for an assignment and ask them when it might be problematic.”
McGettigan says that if you are honest about your writing strengths and weaknesses, you can use AI to help you improve. “You can have it give you feedback on your writing and help you fix areas your teacher has pointed out need improvement.” A prompt could look like the following:
Stay safe with AI
Many call AI “the wild west” for a reason: it’s so new that almost anything goes. There are very few laws restricting AI companies from providing false information or mining your data. So it’s up to you to keep yourself safe. That begins with the personal information you share about yourself and your family.“Just because it says it keeps your information private does not mean that it does,” McGettigan cautions. “Do not trust big tech because they’re also learning from you with your entries. So be really careful about what you put into an AI. For example, don’t put the poems you wrote into AI because it doesn’t necessarily stay yours.”
“And never use AI as a companion,” she continues. “It is not going to give you friendship advice. It’s not human. AI produces answers based on what word they think predictably would be next. It’s not actually connecting the dots on emotions. AI cannot give you psychiatric, friendship or dating advice, or emotional support.”
In addition to personal and emotional safety, your intellectual safety and integrity are also important. AI isn’t always right, and it’s very important to question what AI tells you. “We tell our middle school students that AI is this great big brain that has swallowed all the knowledge in the world, and sometimes that knowledge is inaccurate or misleading,” McGettigan says. “You need to question everything. Always ask yourself, ‘Do I think this is true? Is it biased?’ Then do the research to figure out if it’s true.”
She also warns that when compared to AI, even a basic Google search won’t help you anymore because in May 2025, Google announced that its traditional keyword search is transitioning into an AI-assisted search. “Before, the old Google search ranked results, allowing you to look at lots of different sites and piece together what is accurate,” McGettigan explains. “Now it will be more difficult.” We recommend you always ask AI to provide links to the sources it used so you can visit the websites to verify the information it provided.
So when it comes to using AI to help you learn, there’s a lot to consider, but don’t let that stop you from enhancing your learning. “It is really important that you take a minute after you use AI to reflect on the extent to which it helped you learn,” Hult emphasizes. “Did you create something that you’re proud of, and that feels like your own? That reflective step at the end is really important. And remember that right now, we’re all figuring this out together.”
This article was edited by Isabella Aranda Garcia and fact-checked by Julie Schwietert Collazo. The artist used pencil and paper; she used Procreate to edit her art.
This article was published in the September/October 2026 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.
Gia Miller is an award-winning journalist and the editor-in-chief/co-publisher of Connect to Northern Westchester. She has a magazine journalism degree (yes, that's a real thing) from the University of Georgia and has written for countless national publications, ranging from SELF to The Washington Post. Gia desperately wishes schools still taught grammar. Also, she wants everyone to know they can delete the word "that" from about 90% of their sentences, and there's no such thing as "first annual." When she's not running her media empire, Gia enjoys spending quality time with friends and family, laughing at her crazy dog and listening to a good podcast. She thanks multiple alarms, fermented grapes and her amazing husband for helping her get through each day. Her love languages are food and humor.
Tara Tassio
For as long as she can remember, Tara has always enjoyed creating art. This led her to study graphic design at SUNY Oneonta. She enjoys going to concerts, doodling in her sketchbook, and slinging lattes. Her favorite way to wind down is with a hot cup of chamomile tea.
