Educator, author and trusted guide to families navigating AI
Dan Fitzpatrick writes about AI in education for Forbes and is the author of The Educators' AI Guide 2026, The AI Classroom and Infinite Education. He founded aieducator.tools after working as a teacher, school leader and education strategist.
He also hosts the AI for Educators Daily podcast and advises schools and education bodies in the UK and abroad.
Family Link will switch off a named AI app on your child's Android phone in about five minutes, and a second menu stops the next one installing at all. Google's Gemini switch sits apart from both, and is not offered for supervised accounts in the UK. None of it touches the account your child's school issued.
Gallup found that 2 percent of US teachers use AI daily to grade or give feedback and 7 percent weekly. The number that matters more is 58 percent: the share who have been given no guidance on it at all. What the evidence says, and what to ask your child's school.
You mostly cannot tell from the homework itself, and the tools sold to catch AI writing miss more than parents expect. What works instead is one question, asked at the kitchen table, that checks the learning rather than the text.
Blocking a named AI app on an iPhone takes about two minutes. The harder part is everything the block does not cover, because most of the AI your child meets was never installed by anybody.
Your child, or your child's school friend, wants to know whether their school can see what they type into ChatGPT. Usually not. A personal account on a personal phone is private to them. A ChatGPT account the school owns is not, and a school laptop reads what is typed on any site. The school email address is not what decides it.
My AI sits above your child's friends in Snapchat and nobody chose to install it. Here is what Snapchat's own help pages say it keeps, how to delete it, what two named assessments found, and the difference between hiding My AI and stopping it.
The European Commission has proposed switching AI chatbots off by default for children across the EU. It is a proposal, not a law, and it does not apply in the US or the UK. Here is what it would do, and the three settings you can check tonight.
Parents type this at 10pm and get either a shrug or a scare. Here is the honest answer: there is no diagnosis called AI addiction and no published hours-a-day limit, so the useful question is what the time replaced, not how much of it there was.
An AI detector cannot prove your child cheated, and your child's word alone will not settle it either. A former assistant headteacher on what to do first, what to send the school, and what to say at every age.
Reading is two jobs, and AI is good at one of them. Here is what the randomized trials actually found about AI reading tutors, why your child's school book is deliberately too simple, and the one check to run before you buy anything.
ChatGPT's parental controls never let you read your child's conversations, and OpenAI says so plainly. On a school device, software the school bought may read them. Here is what you can actually see, what the school can, and what to say to your child instead.
The AI age limits are all different, and not one of them is a lock. What ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Character.AI actually require, why the number is usually 13, and the two-minute check that tells you which version of the app your child is getting.
