Launching the expanded AI Classroom Toolkit with Cyberlite during Global Media and Information Literacy Week 

AI is opening new pathways to information, giving people faster access to answers, ideas, and knowledge. At the same time, it’s making it harder to know whether the content we see is authentic. 

Companies that build AI have a responsibility to make it reliable and trustworthy, and that responsibility doesn’t shift to the people who use it. But AI is already shaping how people search, learn, and encounter information. Helping people navigate that reality means building media and AI literacy (MAIL): the judgment to decide whether and how to use AI and what information to trust. These skills are as foundational as AI safety, and educators are asking for help teaching them. 

That’s why, during Global Media and Information Literacy Week, we’re launching the expanded AI Classroom Toolkit: Unlocking Generative AI Safely and Responsibly, created with the online safety organization Cyberlite. It’s part of Microsoft’s broader commitment to make sure AI strengthens human thinking rather than replaces it. It also reflects Microsoft’s focus on education and empowerment, a core pillar of our Safe Participation Framework. 

What’s new in the AI Classroom Toolkit

The expanded toolkit adds a deeper focus on critical thinking, verification, and media and AI literacy, helping students judge AI outputs and make informed decisions about what to trust online. Together with the original modules, it’s now a single, classroom-ready resource that covers the core of AI safety and literacy. Realistic, scenario-based lessons and activities help students practice these skills in situations they may encounter online: 

• The Climate Campaign: Gina enters an online challenge to make a campaign for a cause she cares about and finds that some winning entries use AI to show events that never happened. Students sort a feed of real and AI-made posts and practice lateral reading. The lesson: whether a post was made with AI doesn’t decide whether it’s trustworthy. What it claims, and who is behind it, does. 

• The Helpful Bot: Alex creates an AI help bot inside his online game, then catches it inventing details and collecting players’ personal information. Students learn why AI can get things wrong, how to trace claims to reliable sources, and why they’re responsible for AI-generated content they act on or share. 

• What Kind of AI User Are You?: An interactive quiz, hosted by Cyberlite, helps students identify their AI habits, strengths, and potential blind spots, and gives them an AI Type to reflect on and discuss. 

“When we created the first Classroom Toolkit: Unlocking Generative AI Safely and Responsibly with Microsoft in 2023, most of the conversation was about using AI safely. Today, the questions young people ask about AI have grown sharper and more personal, like what to believe online or how far to trust a chatbot’s answer,” said Michelle Yao, cofounder of Cyberlite. 

The toolkit also reflects what young people in our co-design sessions with Cyberlite told us: they want to learn by doing, through games, real-life scenarios, and peer discussion. Teachers don’t need to be AI experts, and students don’t need an AI tool in hand to start. 

That approach builds on the reach and results of the original toolkit. Since 2023, the first version has reached educators in 10 countries and 11 languages, including through government and partner learning platforms. In South Korea, 93% of participating educators reported improved knowledge and understanding of ethical issues, privacy, and bias related to AI. 

“Our hope is that every student leaves a little surer of their own judgment, and that everyone feels more confident deciding how AI fits into their lives,” said Yao. 

Literacy works alongside product design and policy

Education is one part of the equation. Our commitment to media and AI literacy also shows up in how we design products and the policies we support.  

Last month, we set out five principles for AI in education, including “AI designed to support students’ learning, not replace their thinking.” We also committed to enforceable privacy, safety, and transparency protections for qualifying educational AI products in US school districts. These protections help schools and families understand how these tools work and the controls available to them. 

Media and AI literacy is now a global priority

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has released a framework for a MAIL assessment beginning in 2029. As part of its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it will examine how students reflect on, analyze, and evaluate information, including AI-generated information. This week in New Delhi, UNESCO is also launching an AI extension of its “Think Critically, Click Wisely” global curriculum, which Microsoft advised on. 

This growing global focus makes the need for support urgent—educators want help, and many aren’t getting it. In Microsoft’s 2026 AI in Education report, 53% of educators and 77% of students say they haven’t had AI training.  

Closing this skills gap matters beyond the classroom. Healthy societies depend on a shared basis of facts, informed public debate, and confident civic participation. As authenticity gets harder to judge, there’s a risk that people start doubting everything, creating what the Digital Inquiry Group calls a “dangerous declaration of permanent uncertainty.” MAIL offers a way through. It builds the confidence to decide what to trust. 

Media and AI literacy for every age

Across Microsoft, we’re helping people build these skills wherever they learn and find information: 

• In classrooms: Students debate whether to accept, question, or rework an AI tool’s answers in an AI and Critical Thinking lesson from The Economist Educational Foundation, supported by Microsoft. Available alongside other media literacy lessons in Microsoft Learning Zone, the lesson has reached students in 116 countries. 

• Through play: Millions of players have checked sources, spotted bias, and cracked cases of AI misuse in Minecraft Education’s The Investigators and Reed Smart: AI Detective. 

• For content creators: UNESCO, with Microsoft’s support, is developing resources to help creator associations train their members in MAIL and is testing them with creators in Nairobi this week.  

• For voters: Check. Recheck. Vote. helps people apply AI literacy to election information. 

• In our products: Search Progress, built with input from the Digital Inquiry Group, turns research assignments into source-checking practice in Microsoft Teams for Education. 

What’s next 

Through Microsoft Elevate for Educators and local partners, we’ll bring the AI Classroom Toolkit to new audiences, with more languages and localized content rolling out through 2027. We’ll keep evolving it as technology and educators’ needs change. 

Explore the toolkit and supporting resources for educators today.  

AI will keep changing how people find information and the content they encounter. Our goal is to help people meet that change with confident, informed judgment about the AI they use and the information they trust so they can fully take part in civic and democratic life. 

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When intimate images are shared without consent—whether real or AI-generated—the harm is immediate, deeply personal, and often long-lasting. It can affect someone’s sense of safety, dignity, and control, both online and offline. Protecting people from harms like non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) has long been a priority for Microsoft. And as technology advances, our response continues to evolve to tackle very real challenges like the proliferation of highly realistic synthetic imagery. With the US Take It Down Act coming into force this month, establishing new federal protections against the spread of NCII, it’s important to share how we’re evolving our approach: making it easier to report harm, taking new steps to detect known NCII, and enabling more effective enforcement across our services.

Expanding protections across Microsoft services

Our goal is to make it simpler for individuals, or their representatives, to report violative content to Microsoft. We have strengthened our global reporting processes for NCII with a more intuitive form, with clear options to describe harm, including both real and AI‑generated images. These changes are designed to ease the burden for people in a distressing moment and enable faster, more effective action by our teams. Microsoft’s NCII policy is applied consistently across real and synthetic content, recognizing that the harm to individuals is the same, regardless of how an image was created. To report content on Microsoft services, hit “Report A Concern” or in the product where you encounter the content.  

We also want to proactively detect and prevent the spread of known NCII by working with StopNCII.org, a reporting platform that enables individuals to create a digital “fingerprint,” or hash, of their images. Two years ago, we provided StopNCII.org with a new version of PhotoDNA that enables victims to create a hash without an image ever leaving their device. This can then be used by StopNCII.org partners to detect and remove matching NCII content across platforms, allowing industry to work together to prevent re-sharing and protect individuals’ privacy. We have been piloting the use of these hashes in Bing since September 2024. 

We have now expanded our use of validated StopNCII.org hashes across Microsoft consumer services, including Teams Free, OneDrive, and Xbox. We will implement these changes carefully to advance effectiveness and accuracy—accelerating removals, automating where appropriate, maintaining human review for reported cases, and providing clear, accessible paths for users to appeal decisions.

Enhancing our collective response to this harm

No single company can address NCII alone. It requires coordination across industry, governments, and civil society. Microsoft will continue working with partners to improve shared tools and approaches that help prevent this content from spreading. We will also continue to advocate for clear, effective policies that protect victims, support innovation, and strengthen accountability across the ecosystem.

We will also continue to advocate for policies that support efforts to advance laws that prevent and deter image-based abuse. Microsoft advocated in support of the US Take It Down Act and welcomes the European Union’s work to strengthen protections against “nudification” apps, alongside global efforts to criminalize this misuse of technology. We are closely tracking Ofcom’s recent announcement that new measures will be required under the UK Online Safety Act to address illegal NCII harms. We believe our proactive work in this area will help us maintain trust with survivors, users, and regulators, among others.

Speed, clarity, and trust matter for people affected by intimate image abuse. When someone reaches out for help, we will strive to respond quickly, respectfully, and effectively. Our goal, though, is to invest in technologies and partnerships that reduce the likelihood of harm. We have joined forces with Childnet, a UK NGO that aims to safeguard children online, and created educational materials to prevent the misuse of AI to create intimate imagery among teens. These materials have now been released in the UK, as well as localized with partners in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan.

I am proud to learn from our digital safety team, which is carefully charting our path, and from the many industry and community leaders contributing to this work. This is an evolving challenge. We are committed to the journey, grounded by the voices of experts and survivors.

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