Applying AI in the Classroom - A Lesson Plan
Written in collaboration with Lucas Gullino
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Although there is an ongoing trend for incorporating AI tools in the classroom, it might not seem easy to do so at a first glance: there is an ever-increasing amount of AI tools to choose from and very limited time to explore them. Nevertheless, there are some frameworks that can help us analyze and select what tools we can use with our learners while keeping in mind both the benefits those tools provide and the challenges they may pose. Therefore, in this post we will explain how a traditional lesson plan can be modified with the implementation of AI tools using the SAMR-AI model and Bloom's Digital Taxonomy.
The Relevance of Frameworks
SAMR-AI and Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy (BDT) are different not only in origin, but also general application: Bloom’s Taxonomy is a popular start for lesson planning, whereas SAMR-AI appears better suited to improving a pre-existing plan. Nonetheless, the increasing need to implement AI in lesson planning is pushing teachers to understand how different frameworks with this shared goal may interact.
It is important to point out that there is no single, universally accepted BDT. For instance, Heick (2025) proposes a series of verbs to simply incorporate to the now traditional Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. Some of these are well-established Internet practices (e.g., bookmark, subscribe, screenshot), while others are preeminently AI-based: prompt, fact-check and curate (Heick, 2025). However, other authors such as Jain and Samuel (2025) suggest a deeper reframing of Bloom’s dimensions (or “columns,” as they are usually presented) such as altering the very categories (e.g., renaming the highest-order category “creating” to “co-curating”).
Differences notwithstanding, BDT hopes to give students control over AI in order to reach new heights in terms of procedure and creation. Likewise, SAMR-AI’s highest goal is to allow students to create “a final product that is something more (creative) than what they started with or could have ever imagined” (Gillespie, 2022). Based on this, we can then, as a tentative procedure, modify a lesson following SAMR-AI’s guidelines while relying on Bloom’s categories to correlate changes. That is, where an original lesson plan has objectives in specific categories as per Bloom’s, a corresponding modification will quickly follow based on SAMR-AI. For instance, “googling” in BDT may quickly be correlated with querying ChatGPT in SAMR-AI’s substitution; “compiling information” in Bloom’s with asking an AI to summarize several documents in SAMR-AI’s augmentation; and so on.
Lesson Plans
By way of illustration, we propose a lesson plan which resorts to tools used in “traditional classroom settings,” that is, classroom settings where AI-driven tools are not used (Bekiaridis, 2024) like the use of the board, summarizing information manually and role-playing an interview. In this original lesson plan, the aim of the lesson is to learn about foreign countries by preparing and role-playing an interview with a famous person: the students start with an activation task, and then they watch a short video about an informal interview with a famous singer. Afterwards, in groups, they choose another famous person from a different country and do some research on that person. Finally, each group simulates an interview with the rest of the classroom in which one of the group members roleplays the chosen famous person.
As was explained before, this lesson plan lacks AI tools, or the tools of education that, according to Wedlock & Growe (2017), twenty-first century educators should use to structure learning and teaching in a way that matches the interests of the digital generations. Therefore, in the modified lesson plan, learners have to find reliable sources of biographical information of the chosen famous person and then feed the information to LightPDF’s Chatdoc to summarize that person’s life. In this way, AI is used by learners “acting as a human substitute or assistant with limited reasoning capabilities and functional change” (EdTechFocus, n.d.) and, therefore, technology can augment a traditional classroom activity, enhancing the delivery of the content (Choudhury, 2023). In turn, Jain and Samuel (2025) call this “ventriloquising,” a proposed additional lowest-order category in BDT reminiscent of SAMR-AI’s substitution level.
Source: LightPDF
Source: Hello History
After the group summarizes the biography with LightPDF’s Chatdoc, and learns about the chosen famous person, each group creates questions they would like to ask that person: for example, they may wonder why they did or wanted something. Finally, each group can use the app Hello History to ask an AI model pretending to be that famous person those questions, which transforms the traditional role-playing activity into a completely new task that redefines education since the app allows for the creation of a task previously inconceivable (Choudhury, 2023).
While the modifications to the lesson plan end here, we could continue by asking students to make an attractive presentation with other AI apps, illustrating which insights they have gained from performing the interviews. This would be as simple as creating a poster and embellishing it with generated images from OpenAI’s DALL-E depicting the famous person’s life. Regardless it is paramount not to overuse AI and, instead, to stay focused on the students' learning goals (Gillespie, 2022).
Punctually, the central aspect of this modified lesson is digital literacy. UNICEF (2021) recognizes the utmost importance of digital literacy for children and teenagers in the context of rising misinformation and fake news. Thus, it is urgent to equip them with the necessary skills to find valuable and trustworthy information, and to identify false and even malicious content.
In our modified plan, the first task helps students focus on the source of information, rather than the specific information able to be easily processed by the technology, while in the second task, the students may find discrepancies between their research with reliable sources and the information provided by the interview app, highlighting the need for exercising extreme caution when interacting with language models.
In conclusion, the modified lesson plan exemplifies the benefits that AI tools like LightPDF’s Chatdoc and Hello History can offer, since these tools not only adapt the learning objects to a generational paradigm shift in which learners are defined by phenomena such as globalization and rapid technological advancement (Wedlock & Growe, 2017), but also enhance and transform traditional classroom activities augmenting human abilities and reshaping education (Choudhury, 2023), as well as help students explore the relevance of digital literacy.
REFERENCES
Bekiaridis, G. (2024). Supplement to the DigCompEDU Framework. AI Pioneers. https://aipioneers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/WP3_Supplement_to_the_DigCompEDU_English.pdf
Choudhury, S. (2023). SAMR and AI: Don’t Get Stuck on Substitution. Flint. https://www.flintk12.com/blog/samr-and-ai-dont-get-stuck-on-substitution
EdTechFocus (n.d.). SAMR-AI. https://edtechfocus.com/samr-ai.html
Gillespie, R. (2022). SAMR: The Power of a Useful Technology Integration Model. Technology and the Curriculum: Summer 2022. https://pressbooks.pub/techcurr20221/chapter/samr/
Heick, T. (2025, September 28). Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy (2025): Levels, Digital Verbs, and AI-Aware Classroom Examples. TeachThought. https://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking-posts/blooms-digital-taxonomy/#digital-verbs
Jain, J. A., & Samuel, M. (2025). Bloom meets Gen AI: Reconceptualising Bloom's Taxonomy in the Era of co-piloted Learning. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202501.0271.v1
UNICEF. (2021). Digital misinformation / disinformation and children. UNICEF Office of Global Insight and Policy. https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/media/856/file/UNICEF-Global-Insight-Digital-Mis-Disinformation-and-Children-2021.pdf
Wedlock, B. C. & Growe, R. (2017). The Digital Driven Student: How to Apply Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy to the Digital Generations. Journal of Education and Social Policy. https://jespnet.com/journals/Vol_4_No_1_March_2017/4.pdf
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