In August, the “Shuyuzhe Reading Teacher Workshop · Guangzhou Session”, supported by the GF Fund Charity Foundation and organized by Mantianxing Charity, successfully concluded. Over the course of three and a half days of learning and practice, 77 frontline key reading teachers from various counties and districts took part in an immersive “AI + education” experience, opening up new possibilities for the future of rural education.

Guided by the vision of “making AI a true partner in teaching and learning”, the GF Fund Charity Foundation hopes to encourage frontline key teachers to start from real classroom scenarios, bring their concrete teaching challenges into the workshop, and develop practical, implementable lesson plans, thereby redefining “AI + teaching” in their own way.

Reading is not only a way to acquire knowledge, but also a foundation for cultivating critical thinking, emotional connection, and aesthetic sensibility. In the age of AI, how to enable AI to support reading education in a way that is both gentle and empowering became the central theme of this workshop.
To help teachers move beyond their existing perceptions of AI, better understand it, and learn to collaborate with it, the workshop adopted a project-based learning approach. Participants were divided into three grade-level groups—upper, middle, and lower grades—and were tasked with using AI tools to design high-quality lesson plans that match students’ learning needs and reflect educational value, with the aim of transferring these capabilities into their everyday course design.
Eager to experiment, the teachers used Mita to search for inspiration, Deepseek to write stories, Doubao to design posters, and Jimeng to generate creative visuals, experiencing first-hand the distinctive capabilities of different AI platforms. After multiple rounds of revision and refinement, they ultimately produced picture-book teaching plans that were both educationally meaningful and practically implementable.
At the end of the program, teachers summed up their experience with three key words: “sense of authenticity, sense of achievement, and sense of growth”. These words also reflect the original aspiration behind the GF Fund Charity Foundation’s long-term commitment to reading education. Over the years, the foundation has consistently focused on the fundamentals of reading education and on supporting teachers’ growth and empowerment. It not only recognizes the crucial role teachers play in children’s development, but also firmly believes that accompanying and supporting teachers is, in essence, planting seeds of hope for the futures of many more children.
The GF Fund Charity Foundation noted that AI cannot replace teachers, but it can become a powerful assistant to them. The value of this workshop lies not only in giving rural teachers hands-on access to AI tools, but also in helping them build the resilience and mental frameworks needed to face the AI era, and in enabling them to pass these capabilities and ways of thinking on to more children. Looking ahead, the foundation will continue to focus on rural education and fulfill its social responsibilities within its means, offering diversified forms of support to accompany the growth of rural teachers and enabling more rural children, through quality reading, to see a broader world and discover their own boundless potential.