Top Ways AI Will Impact Teacher-Student Relationships

Alright. Hi, everyone. I'm Shay Bartlett. I'm your friendly neighborhood comms manager at Instructure, and we're here to talk about the top ways that AI will be influencing the relationships between teachers and educators in this coming year. I will pass it over to our wonderful moderator, Victor Rivero, who will introduce our wonderful panelist. You're on mute, Victor.

Okay. Alright. You can hear me just loud and clear now? Alright. Very good. Well, thank you very much, Shay.

I appreciate it. Yes. As you said, this is the top ways that AI will impact teacher and student relationships, and it's brought by brought to you by Instructure and myself, Victor Rivera. I'm the editor and chief of EdTech Digest. So we have a lot of wonderful, lovely people here today, and I wanted to introduce, and and many of you I recognize and I've worked with.

I wanted to introduce Melissa Lobel. She is the chief academic officer at Instructure, which is a multibillion dollar company, but it just feels so down to earth when you're talking with Melissa. So she's a seasoned education technology exec. She's customer experience and business leader, passionate about innovating digital alternatives to traditional teaching and learning practices and building even that scale, which she is doing. And she's also a board member for OneEdTech, very interesting company or a very interesting, association.

She's an early stage adviser, and she's an EdTech top one hundred from EdTech Digest top one hundred list and one of the most influential leaders in EdTech. Welcome, Melissa. Thank you for having me. Yep. And, I'm gonna I'm gonna go down the line, and we can kinda circle back.

But, I I wanted to I see Jeff Faust. Jeff is another person, familiar face. Jeff is the chief technology officer for Chesapeake Public Schools in Virginia, and he is responsible for technology strategy and vision supporting the CPS strategic plan in power twenty twenty five. And he served as a teacher. And and correct me if I'm wrong.

If if anything's out of line here, just you you you can interrupt, please. He served as a teacher, a software developer, product manager, school leader, and at the executive level. And he's also served as a, Future Focus Forum's advisory board member with EdTech Digest, Future Focus Forum. And he was a panelist there most recently right before ISTE twenty twenty four in Denver. And he's a very funny guy.

I can Well, Victor, thank you. And, you humble me yet again, and I appreciate the, the accolades. Okay. Well, very good. So Paul Paul's next.

He's an English teacher, Batesville Public Schools in Batesville, Indiana. Paul is thankful to work in a community that allows me to use my passion to impact my city. And he says, I'm fortunate to serve on the boards of the Batesville Area Arts Council, Safe Passage Incorporated, and is a dual credit instructor for Ivy Tech Community College. So humble. He's a great person.

And having been an English major in college myself, I love myself a great high school English teacher. And but as we're gonna find out, this is not your last, you know, your father's or your mother's or your It's not last generation's English class with, what we'll be looking for. We're we're gonna we're gonna lean more toward the future with Paul's help. So welcome, Paul. Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to represent the the Midwest on this panel. I love it. Alright. Good.

And and we also have, and we're very fortunate to have, a student representing all students everywhere. No pressure. And that is Lydia Palmer, and she's a student at Central High School. So, Lydia, I know very little about you and would like to learn more. What area of the country are you coming from? Yes.

So I'm from St. Joe, Missouri. So it's about an hour outside of Kansas City. So kind of the Midwest also. But, yeah.

And I go to Central High School. I'll be a senior this year. And, yeah, that's that's about it. Okay. Good.

Well, we're gonna hear more from you and your perspective on AI and education and learning. So we're looking forward to that. But I'm I'd like to start with some questions. And maybe we can even start with Melissa, but I wanna I wanna ask this question. This this question is for everybody, and we'll go round robin style.

And you can, you know, chime in if you'd like. And if you if you wanna kinda pass on that one and listen to the next question, that's okay too. Alright. So, what excites you most about the potential of AI in the classroom, and where are your hesitations? Oh, that's a good one. From an excites for for context, I'm a lifelong teacher, so I'm gonna be a little nerdy about education in this conversation about the teaching piece of it.

And I think that's in particular what excites me most about AI, is the opportunity for and I think people will be surprised that I say this, creativity to flourish for teachers. It just opens up, I think, so many more opportunities to think differently about how you engage your students, where you engage your students, the kind of personalized environments that you can create. And even more than that, it it enables people I think about my own teaching. I started in the high school classroom, and and I'm terrible at at graphics and not the best at, maybe making the most interactive content, but I'm excited about using that in a real meaningful learning context. And AI just helps people like me be able to do that and and, again, create really engaging, really impactful.

So it it unleashes the inner creator in you. I think what worries me, maybe not worries me, but, you know, I think we need to lift up AI literacy, and make sure that everyone understands. There's a lot of fear out there and that everyone understands teachers, educators, students have good, well versed understanding of AI, what it can and cannot do, and how to be good users of it or stewards of it. And I think we do need to be out there building literacy campaigns around AI. Wow.

Excellent. So we'll go we'll go, dig on the line here. How about Paul? Yeah. I'd like to echo a lot of what Melissa said. And it's funny to phrase this conversation around excitement because a year ago, that is not the word that I would have chosen for me and most of the my fellow teachers to use to describe AI.

A year ago, so much has changed, and I think we'll probably touch on that, at some point during this discussion. But it really has developed into a sense of excitement. And at Batesville, we're really big on taking the mule out of teaching. So finding ways that we can alleviate some of the tasks that often take time. So like Melissa was saying, if you have an area that you don't necessarily prefer, like, making things look pretty, we can now alleviate that through the use of AI.

I think through, from a teacher's perspective with students, it's really been exciting to me to see how I can use AI to meet students where they're at. I've I've found it to be a great tool for equity, in terms of learning gaps that might need to be filled or just the the reality in education is that you you have a class and you have multiple different levels of learners, and that's always been a challenge in education. So with AI, I found it to be easier to really work with students who might have certain needs. I think that my biggest hesitation is similar to Melissa's as well that we've opened up this gate, and it is exciting and it is creative, but there's there's not a whole lot of direction for where we can take this or where we should take this. So teachers feel a lot of hesitancy and concern because they don't feel informed enough to use it themselves, let alone to encourage their students to use it.

Alright. And now we'll go to Jeff. Well, I think, many great points to be made. I the thing that excites me the most is, you know, I can remember early in my career, attending a workshop with Carol Ann Tomlinson, and anybody in education probably knows that name. And if not, when you hear the word differentiation, that's the Carol Ann Tomlinson is the mother of all differentiation and really brought that term to the forefront in classrooms across America.

And if I'm talking to a room of teachers and I say, you know, who who here knows what differentiation is? Everybody knows. New here, you know, has worked to differentiate your curriculum. Absolutely. Everyone's hand goes up. And who's been successful in differentiating your entire curriculum for all your learners? And no one's hand goes up.

And and that's the reality because the challenge of truly personalized teaching and learning, there's there's just a capacity issue that is very real. One teacher in the room, twenty, thirty, forty students or more in the room, individualizing that for that one teacher is just an an insurmountable amount of work. So we've been talking about this for a long time, and and I see for the first time with AI, with a true assistant, a true content generator that prevents me from having to search for hours and hours and hours for that just right graphic, that just right, you know, piece of of content. I can see the the empowerment for our teachers who have been trying to differentiate going on three decades now, really getting down to brass tacks and be like, no. I'm really, we don't call it differentiation anymore.

Now we call it personalized learning, which is great, but truly student centered personalized learning. I think I think this is the entry point at which we can make that an attainable thing for all teachers and all students. My concerns, you know, to echo some of the other ones, there's no there's no playbook right now. There's not, there's probably not a college course anywhere in America, and maybe I'm wrong on that, for our preservice teachers on effective use of AI in your classroom. And so for me, in education as a a we're a very purposeful, profession in a very purposeful industry.

We do stuff that we know works. We don't do stuff that we're not sure doesn't, you know, will work effectively because the risk of harming students is too too great of a risk for most of most of us or any of us to want to take on. So that to me is the the greatest challenge is that even though Towson and and large vendors like, you know, like Instructure have put together wonderful resources. There's not a universal rule yet or universal best practice or universal what to do, what not to do with AI. And I think that's the thing that has us, you know, probably most off balance right now as a as a professional and as an entity.

Mhmm. Well put, Jeff. Lydia, what do you think of all of this? Yeah. So a little bit different for me, obviously, because I don't really use it in a teaching kind of way. But I think that one of the super cool things that I think about AI is that it's kind of an unlimited resource and obviously not completely unlimited, but, I just think it it really is a cool resource.

Not something that I've kinda learned even through just doing some research for this webinar is that AI really is something that can be used for good and, yeah, which I think is just really cool and kinda simply put, but it's just a really cool resource that can be used for all sorts of different things. And then for the hesitations, definitely, I feel like that resource can be abused. When you overuse it, you kinda lose that whole creativity aspect that is really important in learning. Good. Okay.

Good. So, next question. You guys ready for this? Here we go. What are some ways educators and institutions can evolve their respective practices to accommodate generative AI? And let it soak in, and I can even repeat it. But and I'll repeat it for anybody who wants to.

But, that's the question. And how about we start with Melissa? Yeah. Yeah. I'd be happy to. And I'm gonna pull you in, Lydia.

I think one of the interesting things is, teachers need need help, with guidelines. And I'm curious, Lydia. Do do any of your teachers share how and where you can be used in how and where AI can be used in their classes? Have they helped you all understand that? Or do some teachers do it, some teachers don't? Yeah. So, honestly, I was yeah. I was gonna talk about this, so this is perfect.

Really, I think AI, definitely at my school, like, where we are now, is kind of viewed as, like, this really bad thing. Like, I honestly didn't even know that it, like, it could be used for good, if that makes sense. Like, it's just super frowned upon. Like, if you use AI, you will get a zero, like, all these things. And so I think that it is very frowned upon.

And so one thing that I would say is that to, like, to accommodate generative AI is to encourage students to use AI in the right way and, like, a way that is beneficial and not yeah. So Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. It's it's been interesting as I've talked to the students, it's hit or miss.

Like, in some classes, teachers are really explicit about how and where to use AI and other classes, they aren't. And I don't see that as a fault to the teachers. They just need help. They need help crafting what are the guidelines, how could I be using this, what should I be telling my students, how do I create a safe environment for all of us to learn where everybody knows the expectations. So I definitely think that can help evolve practice, as we think about how to best use generative AI and and vision for the future, all these things we've been talking about.

Jeff or Paul, do you wanna chime in? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really interesting point, and I can relate to the perspective of Lydia's school a year ago perhaps. But as I've mentioned, things have just changed so fast. And one thing I'm really proud of about the corporation I work with is that we have historically been on the forefront of progress, and that's a really exciting environment to work in. Now that doesn't mean that everyone's always on board right away, but we have really we've defined some goals for this year, and one of our big goals is AI.

So we had a summer conference with a few teachers, and then in about two weeks, I'm leading a PD session on AI in the classroom. And our goal really is to bring the comfort level bring t teachers to a comfort level to where they feel like they can accurately and responsibly implement this into the classroom. One thing that I learned as I was doing some research to prepare for this webinar is that we think of AI as something that creates an output, and it it is very helpful in that way, but it's also a tool that can gauge so much as well. And so one thing I'm really interested in and would love to see teachers be able to implement is using AI to incorporate that into our assessments and not only assessing, cognitive skills, but also noncognitive skills. This is such an interesting time to be a teacher, and there's so much focus on social and emotional learning in addition to what we get from the textbooks.

And using AI as a tool to help gauge where our students are at with that, maybe through an assessment or a survey, is something that I would really be interested in seeing us incorporate into our respective practices. Good. And, Jeff, you were shaking your head on the assessment part and maybe some other parts, but, did you have some thoughts? Yeah. So I I think as far as, evolving our our practices, I think the first thing we have to do is we have just have to give permission. You know? We had we had a session at at at our, admin conference, just a few weeks ago, and the title of the session was, AI, it's not cheating, and you need to understand it.

And and I think that's, like, the first like, okay. It's not cheating? Are you sure? Yeah. We're sure it's not cheating to use AI to make yourself a better teacher. And and repeatedly, the comments that I heard and the conversations I heard among people in that session was how relieved they were to hear that coming from division leadership that we don't view using AI for a teacher to make themselves a better teacher as cheating. You know, any more than turn the lights on or adjusting the thermostat, which, you know, a hundred years ago would have been a very different practice.

And so it it to me, that's the step one. And then and then encouraging the conversation around it. How are you using? What have you found to be helpful? Who are your focus groups within your schools, within your division? Do you have a, you know, a a division wide committee to basically bring these types of opportunities and ideas to the surface? I I think that's where it starts. I and Paul's right on. Teachers are overwhelmed with assessments and analyzing assessments and figuring out what the assessment does or doesn't say for them.

And I think that anywhere that AI can help lift that that responsibility off the shoulders of our teachers, free them up to do the analysis rather than number crunching, spreadsheet building, item analysis, you know, and and and instead look and go, oh, look. My my students really get that concept. Oh, look. My students really don't get that concept. I'm gonna reteach that.

Or, oh, look. That was a terrible item. You know? It could be any three of those outcomes are certainly possible. And I think that that that's such a huge opportunity for our teachers because we know they wanna just teach, and sometimes the burden of the administrative tasks, keep them from doing that as much as they'd like to. Alright.

Thanks, Jeff. Lydia, you were, you were agreeing on that part, I think, about it's not cheating. Did you wanna did you did you wanna talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I will. I think definitely that's what it's viewed as well, I know for now.

And, I think part of it, like, I think Paul was saying and, actually, all of you, but, is that it just awareness of the fact that it is a tool that can be used, and it's not this whole evil thing that's gonna, like, take over the world by you know? And so I think that it it really is important to show that it's a tool and that even for teachers and for students too that we can use this as something that is beneficial and not just something that is used to kind of cheat, if that makes sense. So using it as something to benefit us in writing these papers or whatever it is that we need to use, but not using it to do the work for us. So just kind of finding, like, showing that it is, making awareness basically that it is something that can be used with without, like, the extreme punishment, if that makes sense. If I might add, Paul, you said it really well. We think of AI as an output.

But if we lean in on it as a process, think about all of the things that you know, I'm thinking, Paul, you're teaching Lydia your your learning where AI is such an important part of the process and demonstrating that is really valuable. And that's that's a win for the learning process, and is definitely not cheating, and and trying to, like, transform. I don't know. As you both were talking, it made me think we just need to think differently about that and transform it from output to process. Yeah.

And and I'm sorry. I know I'm sure we wanna move on, but but, Melissa, you just triggered a thought for me. You know, I heard an interview with, Dario Emodi, and and Dario Emodi, you know, anthropic, pretty well known name in the AI world. And one of the things he said is the greatest mistake we can make with AI is to treat it like technology. He said when you're working with AI, you have to think of it as an assistant, a partner.

He said you have to anthropomorphize it and treat it almost as a human so that you can tell it when it does a good job and that the results that it's giving you are in line with the way that you would think and the way that you would like to phrase stuff. You also have to tell it when, no. That's really not what I'm looking for. And and he was advocating for the fact that the more we do this and get in in in into the headspace of this is an assistant who's going to mirror and reflect me, and I need it to understand who I am, that it becomes more powerful. And and that process, you know, to Paul's point to your point, Melissa, that's exactly the kind of, process that makes us better thinkers.

Like, wow. I I would have assumed I said that very clearly, but apparently, I didn't. So let me, how do I make it easier to understand what I'm saying? And that is growth and that is learning. So just to you know, I think there's some some really neat thought processes and even thought experiments around that, that we can't just teach treat this like, oh, it's a new piece of software, or else we won't really take advantage of it in the way that it potentially offers to serve us as an education and and humans in general best. Yeah.

Absolutely. Good points, Jeff. And and it really flows into the next question that I had for all of you, and it is, what are some of the most creative ways you are seeing AI used in the classroom, students, teachers, and administrators. And I'm gonna leave the floor open for anybody who wants to chime in. I'm not gonna choose anybody at this one.

Yeah. I'll take this one. I, pulled some of my students over the last week to see how they're using AI, and there was a common trend of writing partner, throughout, which is to Jeff's point that there's this humanization. And I I wasn't aware that they thought of it that way. And there's certainly a wide range of results.

Some of them are very hesitant. Some of them are very excited about using generative AI. But I love that even without being instructed, they found creative ways to use this and to use this tool or any of the wide variety of tools to their advantage. I have just a couple of anecdotal, creative points. I know one of our art teachers, who teaches digital art, Kyle Hunnaman, he really emphasizes students using generative AI to help bring their ideas, from their brains to something that they can see almost like a reference sketch or an image, and then using that as inspiration maybe for what colors would look good together or the art style that they're going for.

And that I think relates a lot to how I use it in the English classroom, using it to generate some ideas or bounce ideas off of with that writing partner. And just last week, I asked my students to kind of do an experiment with me and we we found an, an image generator and my prompt to them was what what is creativity to you? And their answer, I asked them to use that to create and craft a a prompt for the generator to help them visualize that again, get it out of their head. So kind of going back to the personalized learning using this tool, not only creatively, but also in a way that helps students who learn differently achieve what we're asking them to achieve. And it was really cool to see the different things that people how people viewed creativity from all different kinds of perspectives, and I found that to be really powerful. Wow.

Yeah. Paul, that's that's amazing. You know? I wanna chime in here. When I think of, creativity, you know, there's there's talk of flow Mhmm. And being in the zone.

And so this unsticks any stuck flow, and it can help you that way. But, man, kudos to you. Hats off to what you're doing in your classroom. I think, man, right on. That's awesome.

That's awesome. Thanks. Yep. I'll share a few I'll share an example. So I work with k twelve teachers.

I teach in a certificate program around course design, and a fair amount of my students are are teacher teachers in the k twelve classroom, and they were building content that was scenario based content. And in, past lives, that's a huge lift. That's a lot of content to be able to branch scenarios. You know, you're, one of the teachers, it was, a foreign language class, actually. And so the student was off doing a tour in this country, and, you know, they had to be able to communicate with people they were running into.

So she used it to she she and I'm not quite sure she credits some good information and some prompts and built this whole scenario out that she could then, easily bring into a a con you know, a content design program or authoring tool. And now suddenly students are on these journeys in these countries and, having to interact and understand how to communicate in a really meaningful way. And, again, that content, that would have been impossible. That's the kind of content we would buy, if we were lucky as a a teacher or a district if we had the money to buy that, and if it existed. But it was just so easy for her.

It took her, you know, probably a week to put this together. And I think that's a really powerful example. Content creation where we haven't had the time or the ability to be able to build complex content. Very, very good. Again, the question is, what are some of the most creative ways you're seeing AI used in the classroom, students, teachers, and administrators.

One of you know, as far as administrators go, and and I wanna give all the ministers who might be listening to this permission to do this, unless your IT department forbids it, but then tell them to call me and we'll have to talk. Writing letters. I think that a a well written letter to the parents kind of thing is one of those tasks for our school level administrators that can take the better part of an hour given a given a typical day where there's somebody knocking on your door and the idea that I can train, you know, an AI assistant to understand my voice, my how I would like to write letters, give the examples of letters that I have written in the past, and then have it generate a letter about, hey. You know, we're having some attendance problems with Susie. Wanna let the parents know that we're concerned, and if they'd like to have a meeting, it might be a time for us to talk.

And getting a rough draft of that from AI and then allowing me five to ten minutes to edit, make it my own, improve the letter so that it it comes across the way I wanna make sure those parents hear it. If I can reduce that forty five minute to an hour task for a school principal down to fifteen minutes, the return on that and and freeing up that principal to be in the hallway, to be in classrooms, to be that face in the you know, around the school that students and teachers know care about them is more valuable than any letter that any principal's ever written. And so I think that's one of those menial tasks that takes our our admin, at least school level admin, you know, offline for for long periods of time as they're writing these kinds of letters and, having to do those type of administrative tasks. And I think this is one of those where it's like, wow. This is a this is a really simple application, but the return can be potentially huge if it allows you to see two hundred more kids and, you know, five to ten more teachers every single day.

Yeah. Great point, Jeff. Alright. Anything anybody else wants to add as far as the creative aspect of, AI, some of the most creative ways that we're seeing AI in the classroom? Okay. Well, that's fine.

I I didn't wanna I didn't wanna skip over that one because I think it's a it's a pretty interesting one. And everybody that answered, that it's it's actually quite amazing. So thanks for all your answers there. So next question. How are you helping parents overcome fears of AI? And then also not just parents, but other faculty and also administrators.

So we'll start with actually, we'll start with Jeff this time. Well, thank you, Victor. So I I think it starts granting permission to use for our faculty, and that's you know, we've been we've been really trying to make that clear that we are not banning, blocking, prohibiting AI, on our network. For parents, you know, we last spring, for example, we did a community outreach, breakfast, and I did about a thirty minute presentation. And and one of the big points in that was to talk about breaking down some of the biases that we all have, about what is or what isn't AI and about the fact that technology disrupting society at large education is nothing new.

You know? When we went from slates to paper, there were tons of concerns expressed about the fact that that what if there's not paper around? The kids won't know how to write on a slate. And in the eighties, there were protests across the country about integrating calculators and introducing calculators into the math curriculum. And and, Lydia, I know that's before your time, but that really happened. New York City teachers were on the street with pickets. No calculators in my class.

And so I think, you know, there's some really famous pictures out there that So I think the first thing to do is just let's start the dialogue, and let's open it. But then I think realizing that AI, the future of our economy, of the business world, of the career world, and AI are likely to be integrated in an inseparable way. And we're already seeing careers around this that pay incredibly rich sums of money. You know, the minute you point out the fact that the average prompt engineer today is getting two hundred plus thousand dollars a year, and you tell the parents that that means that they're training AI with their voice and their words. They're not even coding.

Parents all of a sudden go, what? My kid could earn two hundred thousand dollars a year. Yeah. They really could. Especially the English majors, which apparently we have several of them on the room panel here. They they tend to do very, very well at this type of work because the understanding of human language is at the core of AI and LLMs and, you know, generative AI models at large.

So so that's, I think, engaging and starting the conversation, acknowledging the fact that it we're we're new to this too, and we're gonna we're gonna approach it cautiously, but we're not gonna put our head in the sand and act like this is something we can ignore or run away from. Good point. Melissa, did you wanna follow on that? Sure. I think it it goes back and and and, Jeff, you're really you're getting at this. That literacy piece, We have to remember that parents are an extension of our community.

And when we're trying to lift up understanding of AI, it's not just for our teachers. It's not just for our students, but it's also for every member in the community that might interact with any of our students at any time, including parents, of course. So I think it's that piece. We're working on some resources at Instructure that we can share out to build up AI literacy across all of these populations. The other thing I think is, and, Jeff, you started you you started talk a little bit about this too is helping parents see tools that are safe and really useful for them.

So I think some translation work. We've done some translation work where, things like, you know, notifications coming from Canvas and and discussions and and some things can be translated so that if parents, if they're not a native speaker of the language in which they're in, in this case, likely English, but could be in a foreign language class, that that's translated. So it's more hands on for parents to be able to then more deeply interact in that student's, learning journey. And so I think showing them that, being very explicit about, by the way, this is also using AI, and this is how it can be helpful as opposed to just harmful or scary. Very good.

And so when we're talking about parents, there's two really interesting perspectives, and that's the teacher's perspective on parents and the student's perspective on parents. So, the question again is how are you helping parents overcome fears of AI? And I would love to hear from both the teacher and the student about that. Oh, you can go ahead. Alright. Yeah.

I have so many thoughts on this this whole question. So, in the context of parents, I think as a as a teacher, it's always our responsibility to keep parents informed and keep parents in the know. I I think many, many parents want to know what their their students are doing, maybe not quite day to day lesson plan, but know what's going on in the classroom and what we're encouraging our students to use and how we're encouraging students to use these things. I think something interesting, could be the reality that we probably have many parents who might not have a lot of personal experience with AI yet. Maybe they're not in a role where it would be useful or maybe they themselves are hesitant.

So I think in terms of making parents more comfortable, it would really be not only those honest conversations of what we're using and how we're using it, but also sending home successful examples of implementation. Whether it's, hey. Here's a lesson that we did and your student utilized AI for the first two parts and then the human took over for the last two or here's something that I put together using AI because I, as a teacher, don't have a lot of contact with parents beyond maybe email or seeing them in the grocery store. And so finding ways to let that information that I'm trying to share with their students, finding ways to let that filter into the home by either getting their student excited about using AI or having a product that was at least partially created with AI or inspired by it, I think could be a really interesting way to not only get parents on board, but also just keeping that connection between the parent and the teacher alive. Yeah.

I think a lot is, like, kind of everybody's been talking about is the connection and, the just awareness of it not being, like, an evil thing because I think if someone if I were to come home to my parents and be like, yeah. I learned about AI today. They'd be like, oh, so you didn't really learn anything. But, obviously, yes, because we're learning how to integrate it into our lives and because it's gonna become a prevalent thing. Like, AI is not just gonna go away.

And so I think it's very cool to learn, like, how to use it and incorporate it in learning and in writing a paper, but then also having the human aspect of, you know, like, I also did this. Like, AI didn't do it for me. AI helped me get started and was used as a tool, which is its whole purpose, and then I was able to continue and do this for myself. Good. It it's interesting you said that, oh, so you didn't learn anything with so how how do you figure that? Like, because your the parents see, like, you need to have reading, writing, math, science.

Is that what is that what you meant? Is that what you Yeah. I think, yeah, I think it's kind of the assumption that if I was using AI that it was doing it all for me and I wasn't doing it myself, if that makes sense. Yeah. I totally get it. Yeah.

Well well, good. That's funny. Okay. Well done. Cool.

So let's move on. We have we have a bunch of questions still. Believe it or not, we have we have a lot of questions. I have a lot of questions for you. So, this has been really interesting so far, and, I love it.

So AI. I mean well well, one question right off the bat, though, we we haven't really done this, but how would you define AI? Because we're talking about generative AI, but I'm gonna interject this question. It's not even on the list. How would you define AI before we go too far, forward? Just kind of a simple definition or what you're thinking when somebody, in this discussion at least says AI. Let's see.

Anybody? Well, I think for me, initially, when just in a broad kind of sense, you think AI, you think of, like, those movies where those robots come and, like, take over the world. But I think more specifically in this setting, I think of, like, using it in, like, for example, like, the chat g b t or the thing the new things that they have where you can just type in a little question, and it'll give you, like, a whole thing. That's really what I think of when I think of generative AI. But, yeah, not so much the robots anymore. Yeah.

I wanna echo that a little bit. I think when I when I think of defining AI, especially with people who might have hesitancies, I see it and try to define it as more of a tool rather than something that's going to take over. And we've talked a little bit about how education and education practices have evolved so much over the years, and there's always that fear surrounding it. Right? And I think that we're experiencing that right right now culturally on a very large scale. So to go back a little bit to the previous question, I think that one of the most important things we can do for teachers is remind them that teachers will always be at the center of the educational movement, teachers, students, administrators, parents.

And this is just something new, like Lydia said, that is going to stick around and is going to make a big impact on our teaching. And so in order or in terms of defining it, I think we need to define it in a way that is very accessible for teachers and for students and parents so that we see it as something that's not taking over what we do, but it will be a tool that we can use to redefine what we do. Wow. I I gotta tell you, I just admire the way you speak, and it's maybe it's the English teacher. So Yeah.

It's my, you know, it's my job. I do it for a living. So thank you, though. Yeah. So I think we have some quotables from Paul today.

We're gonna we're gonna, like, put them up, and we're gonna shoot them. And, anyway, but, very, very nice. Melissa, did you have some thoughts there? I think everybody covered it really well. The only thing that I would add is AI is more prevalent than we all realize, and it's been around for a long time. So just helping people realize that the use of intelligence coming from something other than typically technology, something other than us as humans is part of our lives, and this is just giving us more more direct access to how we can better incorporate that in our lives.

I mean, I think about I have a I have a robot vacuum that uses AI. I think about Grammarly it's been using forever. I think about the original spell check, in in a word perfect ages ago. Right? All of that is leveraging this idea of intelligence that's coming outside of the human and that it augments and and can, improve our worlds. Love it.

I love it. I love the way you, put put that because it's so true. And we might not even have realized that we're already here with it. So yeah. Yeah.

That's really very nice. I think I think we'll move on to the next question. Unless Jeff, did you have more? No? Oh, okay. Good. Alright.

So here's the next question for you. How is AI creating efficiencies in your role as teacher or administrator? And I should add student. That's the question. I'll start because I started this example earlier. Yeah.

I am gonna have probably the best course in teaching in September. I teach twice a year. It's in a certificate program, and my course looks dramatically different than it ever has before. I teach fully online. It's asynchronous.

My students, it's it's it's really about helping them build the skills to design good courses. And this is an area that as a it's it's a side job that I do. It's really hard to find time to build what's in your head. I think, Paul, you're the one that talked about getting this out, you know, getting out of your head and on paper. I'm getting this out of my head, this thing I've visioned forever and putting it in a class, which just is so awesome because I've got, the ability to leverage audio creation with audio creation tools and, some really interesting audio elements to my class.

I mentioned scenarios. I'm doing that in my class. I'm able to create, interactive, sort of simulations even, small little chunks. It's just I'm just excited for that because it's giving me all of these tools for skills that you know, I was trained to be a teacher. I wasn't trained to be a graphic designer.

I wasn't trained to be a programmer. I wasn't trained to be, you know, a a a an audio or music expert. And so it just unlocks that. That's where I'm using it right now. Very good.

Paul, did you wanna add on to that? Yeah. Absolutely. I think AI over the last year, to echo Melissa, has really just changed so much of how I approach my workload. And I have found that over probably last semester when I started incorporating it more and then now into this semester, we're about three weeks in. Just thinking about this almost the small things that I'm able to do now that are maybe fifteen to twenty minutes in the classroom, but would take an hour or two or three outside of the classroom.

And being honest, I'm not always willing to sacrifice that much time for a shorter, experience for the students. Right? I wanna focus on kind of the big ticket items. So I'm finding that it's really bringing a lot of efficiency and finally being able to bring some ideas to life that maybe were lower on the list that I I never got to. And I used this phrase earlier, but culturally at Batesville, we're really focusing on taking the mule out of education. We know how much work it is to be a teacher and, again, to Melissa's point, how many different types of work.

We use Canvas, and there's a lot of little coding tricks that I like to use. And people are like, oh, how did you do that? And then when I tell them, it's like, oh, I don't know how to code. Right? Well, neither do I, but I figured it out. And so little things that add up to a lot. Obviously, you know, we're not using AI to assess an essay or to do kind of bigger things that we still wanna rely on our human abilities and talents to do, but just taking a lot of those little things that might feel small like bell ringers or something like that that really add up over time and being able to then really dedicate more time to those larger projects like essays and even just student connection.

I feel like it's easier this year because I'm not working to the wire as much or as focused on my to do list because it does shrink considerably when I when I incorporate AI into the process. Oh, that's awesome. Now we have Jeff and Lydia. Which one of you would like to address this question? I can go ahead for just a second. So, Melissa, I love the way that you're talking about how AI kind of allows you to be things that you're not trained on.

And I think that's really interesting, especially from my perspective because I'm a senior in high school, so I have no, like, real training, I guess. But, so I love using AI specifically for flyers and things like that. I'm on student government at our school, so, we do a lot of flyers for dress up days or game days or whatever. And with a like, with the option of using AI, we're allowed we can, like, do all sorts of things I couldn't have done because it's I'm not a very good artist, so nothing that I can draw. But being able to use, like, AI online, like, it's just been so amazing.

I can create this beautiful thing, and I'm like, yeah. I made that. And so it's just kinda cool to be able to do things that I would not be able to do, like you were saying, with, like, graphic design and, like, the music and all of that kind of stuff. It's really cool, and I think that's something that AI has really allowed because without that, that's not something that I could do. So I think that's something pretty cool.

But, yeah, that kinda sparked from what you were saying that allows it to be things that you're not specifically trained on. That's cool. Yeah. Awesome. Alright.

Jeff, any any thoughts on this one? Yeah. I I think the the theme that is recurring here, great ideas, great thoughts, great, you know, examples by everybody. And I don't know that I have any specific examples to add that would heighten it, but but what I hear is the thing that technology has done for us, humanity, really for a long time, and that is that is democratize access to knowledge and information. And and to Lydia's point, you know, just because I don't draw doesn't mean I don't have a great idea for what would be a wonderful poster, a wonderful, flyer, a wonderful sign, whatever. But if the obstacle between me and that sign is being able to paint, but I'm not gonna paint because I don't like to paint.

I don't like getting paint out of my fingernails. Whatever my reason is. I still, with the power of of of certain tools that are now accessible to us, have the ability to be that painter, and do it in the way that I like. And so that that whole to me, the whole concept of democratizing access and democratizing knowledge and democratizing even, you know, abilities, so that you can do it your way is such a powerful thing and has such a great potential impact that, you know, it would be hard to sit here and for us to prognosticate on what will be. But I think what we're seeing is there are possibilities now that weren't possible, you know, two, five, ten years ago, and and there's a whole new you know, think about the production it would have taken to have six people, seven people on a video call like this forty years ago.

You know, that would have it would have taken, you know, a gargantuan act of incredible, technologically advanced, setup at the time. So if we think about that and and us being able to do this, that's that's the thing to me that that really gets me excited is what, you know, Lydia's generation and beyond will do and things that we haven't thought of and ways that they'll apply this to just supercharge their own skills, their own abilities, their own creativity. It's you know, it really is exciting, just to what the future holds. Jeff, I love that because I think about all those voices. So I back to my, I'm not a good artist.

Well, there are things I would have never spoken up or done, and maybe we're missing out on great ideas. Like, it's just it gives everybody's voice. I think it can. Everybody's a voice, and it just makes me wonder how different society will be because we'll be able to have so many more people contribute in ways that they never thought they could. Like, that's that just gives me chills, and how you talked about that just gave me chills.

That's awesome, Melissa. Yeah. That's so true. So let's see. We're we're gonna continue because I I do have a a bunch more questions.

And this is a fascinating discussion, and I'm I just wanna say thank you everybody. We're not done, but I wanna say thanks so much because, Paul and Jeff and Lydia and Melissa, you're it's like it's like it's music to my ears. All this stuff I'm hearing, I'm like, wow. This is so fascinating, and we're in such a moment right now. We're in such a a moment in time in history, really, with with all of this stuff.

And, you know, there's two there's two areas, education and technology that are both almost synonymous with the future. And so, you know, and and, I think that's just a really important thing. Another important area, is privacy. And so for administrators, what challenges are you facing in ensuring AI tools are privacy compliant? Alright. I'm going first this time.

This this is you know, I think the excitement and energy around AI right now, is is just just wild. And and I think that we have to be also cautious of the the IT or what I call commonly referred to as the Silicon Valley hype cycle. You know, we do have to we do have to be aware that, that's a real thing. You know, I I still owe somebody lunch because I swore we'd be in driverless cars five years ago, and I'm still waiting, for that to actually happen. Not that there aren't some, but they had they don't dominate yet.

You know? And that what what we heard, let's say, ten, fifteen years ago was how it was imminent. It was common. It's gonna be here. Driverless cars are taking over the interstate, and and obviously, we you know, that didn't actually happen. And that's because you ran into some compliance and governance issues that nobody thought of until we actually put it to work.

And I suspect the same will happen with AI. So this is an important one. And, you know, I I've heard speakers say, you don't need to buy that. You can build your own AI. You can, you know, leverage contract with, AWS and Google and Microsoft, and they're not wrong.

But I wouldn't ask, you know, my electrician, you know, to fix my car any more than I would ask my plumber, you know, to to build me a house. And so we're education, and I don't think that most of us have the capacity as an organization, not as individuals, but as an organization to say we're gonna create an AI team, we're gonna develop our own AI, we're gonna leverage this. And so I think for us, we have to lean on industry leaders. We have to look at the the Googles, the Microsofts, the AWSs, the Instructure's of the world who are dedicating many, many, many resources, monetary resources, human resources, personnel, all to, you know, and capital resources to figuring out how to do this. And we need to resources to figuring out how to do this.

And we need to be in their ears from working with those organizations to say, as education, privacy is important. I need to know that the information my teachers, my students are putting into your system is not then going to be farmed in order to train your AI model and potentially revealing some of our, you know, PI and information and even practices and secrets, you know, that that we need to keep internal, out to others as a service. So I I do think that's such an important part of this because we don't wanna get into the you know, and I and I'll I'll just show a little bit of my own bias here. But I but I think, for example, social media, we we we kinda put cart before the horse on social media as a country and maybe as a world. It's not fair to pick on just the United States because this happened everywhere.

But, you know, we we all participated in a giant global social experiment without ever actually signing off on being willing to do so. And now we're kinda going, woah. Woah. Woah. Hey.

Wait a minute. I think this was bad for kids. And so so so we have that concern around AI right now as well. And I think we need to have just like we said, approaching things cautiously, giving permission, learning, exploring, communicating, and having real conversations. We need to do the same thing here because it is imperative that we responsibly integrate AI into education.

And that we work with partners and vendors, who can help us to do that, who have expertise potentially beyond within our own organizations, our own hallways, and our own, you know, circles. Great. Before we hear from Melissa on this, I wanted to kinda save Melissa for last on this on this question that that Jeff is addressing. And because I really wanna hear from Paul and Lydia about what they think about privacy, and then we'll get back to Melissa, because I'd love to I'm very interested in what Melissa and instructor, have to say about about this issue. So, either Paul or Lydia, go ahead.

Yeah. So, obviously, I don't want, like, my private information all over the Internet web. So I think there is definitely some hesitation with, like, what you can and can't give to AI, if that makes sense. But then it's also like, well, I don't wanna tell them this, but I do want them to be able to do this for me. So it's kind of trying to weigh, like, the risk, I guess.

So I think it is very important to be educated on what exactly, like, that what exactly is AI privacy. And so that's why I think things like this webinar is so important is because it's, like, showing everyone that, you know, like, what you can and can't do and give, like, poor privacy, if that makes sense. Yeah. That's Yeah. Yeah.

It's a it's an interesting and very important conversation because, you know, as educators and anyone who works in education, we are responsible for protecting our students in so many ways, and privacy is a part of that. So we really have to be cognizant of training our students and working with them on using these tools in responsible ways because, you know, not only do we want it to come back on us if there's some you know, something happens with, information that's given to AI, but we we want to prepare students to use it in a way that will protect themselves. And I know there's a a TikTok trend right now of putting linking your Instagram to chat g p t, and it gives you a little review, and it's all kind of fun. And but, you know, the more information that we give over or that we input into AI, the more at risk we put ourselves. And it really is giving me flashbacks to being a student when Facebook was just becoming a thing and how exciting it was to post a million photos every every day and, posting exactly what I was doing all the time and having those conversations with teachers about, you know, what you what you should and shouldn't share.

So I am really interested because as as we've talked about earlier, we're in this, just kind of boom of AI with little guidance because we're not quite sure where to start. And I think that privacy needs to be at the forefront of, a lot of the guidance that we we should hopefully be receiving soon and in turn giving to our students. From from an Instructure perspective and and even from my perspective, there's two pieces to this. And I've mentioned a lot about literacy already. So how do we just extend our existing digital literacy? You know, we've had these conversations about when you go accept an app on your phone or add an app on your phone and it's prompting you with, are you willing to give up this information? That just needs to be we need to continue extend that into the world of AI.

So I think that's one piece of this. The second piece of it is Paul should never have to worry about it because he should be able to know that the district has a collection of tools that he can choose from to use that have been vetted against, privacy, security, protecting him, protecting his students. I mean, he's amazing teacher. It is so obvious. I want him in the classroom doing all of the amazing things, not having to go through and pour through privacy pages of different tools that he might wanna use or all of the work around that.

So I think it's on and I and I will I will shout out to all vendors out there. It's on you to be upfront and forward with how are you using AI, How are you using individual's information? What kind of PII is being collected? What is being done with it? And are you complying with your federal laws and your state laws? They just need to be forthcoming with that. Challenge is a lot of the new startup technologies don't necessarily, see the direct revenue associated. Like, I that's work for them to do. But if they're going to be in the education space, I think it is on them to be forward and, and very clear about how and where and what they are doing with AI and how that directly relates to privacy.

So I feel like and then I think that the districts and and states can then take that information and make the right decisions for their communities around which technologies are the best technologies to use or not use. One of the things that we are doing at Instructure is we're creating what we call nutrition facts. It's kinda cool. It looks like, you click a label on your food. And, like, just like if you're looking at a bag of chips and you wanna see what's in it and what are the different percentages of, you know, fat versus carbohydrates and all that, we're doing this specifically for AI.

So any tools that, are partners of ours that that happen to work with Instructure, and they'll be nutrition will ask them to fill out this nutrition label, and it's gonna say what models are you using and how are you using, how are you using PII if you're using it? What are you exchanging? Very specific technical things. Because while I think districts need to make the choices, we need to, as vendors, give you as much information as possible because that's not also your needs to be your absolute everyday consuming job. There's so much more that you can be doing to contribute. So I think it's really it's honest vendors, and it's it's we gotta empower all of our communities, whether it's the literacy that needs to be continued to add a two or it's the insights into how this is being addressed. We need to be bored and and and open about all of that.

Wow. That's, yeah, that's great example setting, Melissa. I know that you're, you're a leader in the field and and not just with Instructure, but among other EdTech companies as well. So when Melissa talks, people listen, and I hope they listen to you when you when you say those things. I think that's that's really wonderful.

Okay. Well, good. Well, we're gonna we're gonna continue along here. What needs to be done this is the next question. What needs to be done to introduce administrators, educators, and parents, and students to innovations in AI and education? And that's sort of a generic question, but I think, if it if it hits the right, you know, funny bone on you, then please, say something there.

And if not, we'll move on to the next question. Alright. Well, I think I think it's a good extension of the last question, Victor. And and what I'll say is the worst thing we could do is just roll out every piece of cool AI technology that comes at us. The the selection, the piloting, the introduction needs to be very purposeful and targeted.

And and in so doing, you know, I think one of the one of the hardest questions in education is to, you know, what are we not gonna do or what are we gonna stop doing? I think that's we we try to do everything, and and education has been doing this for so long. Like, we can do that too. We can do that too. We can do that too. But, unfortunately, all that rolls downhill and ends up on the shoulders of our teachers who right now, as we know, are drowning.

And it's like, let's stop pushing teachers, great teachers, out of education, and let's be more selective about what we are gonna do. So I think we need to decide that, well, which which sandbox are we gonna play in? Let's play in that sandbox. Let's introduce a tool. Let's collect data about that. Let's get you know, let's select that tool based upon vetted sources.

You know? And so Melissa, who is very humble, you know, on the OneEdTech board, but OneEdTech's a wonderful resource for helping to vet sources. They they do a beautiful job of looking at, you know, things that are out there that are reputable, that sign the student privacy pledge, so on and so forth. And, additionally, Instructure's learn platform, same kind of thing. I don't think, you know, if you're if you're not using a learn platform or something comparable to it to help you sift through the thousands and thousands and thousands of EdTech tools and what will inevitably become thousands and thousands and thousands of AI augmented platforms, you're you really are there's no as a human being, there's no way to actually do that without support and help from one of these type of solutions. So my advocacy would be towards be purposeful and intentional and one step at a time, one tool at a time, and and, you know, use those types of of, you know, organizations and tools, learn platform, one ed tech, to help you identify without the bias of, it's great.

I used it. I love it. You know, one of the things our teachers are wonderful at is if you ask them about the tool they're using, they'll tell you it's the best thing ever. They love it. They don't wanna get rid of it.

And that's true of so many tools because teachers figure out how to use it to the maximum potential that it has. But we need to be a little bit more empirical, a little bit more objective about our selections. And then like I said, I think that saying this is the space we're gonna be in. This is the tool we're gonna use. We're gonna standardize on it so that we get some cross pollination and synergy across our classrooms and our buildings and our division, and we'll continuously evaluate and review.

I I think those are just critical, ways for us to stay up with some of the innovations and keep the conversation going about, hey. Well, we're using this tool, but this other tool has now leapfrogged it. It's also offering all these other things that this one doesn't use. Oh, Oh, okay. Let's take a look at that.

Maybe we wanna make a switch. You know? But you can't have that conversation if they're if you're not at least playing in the space and familiar with the with the the sandbox they're playing in. Alright. Well, thank you, Jeff. And and that was a great answer.

And I think I think what we'll do now, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and, don't wanna cut anybody off, but I think we're gonna start wrapping up here. And and the way I wanna do that is, I want to hear from everybody kind of a lightning round, speed round of any last thoughts about AI in learning, AI in the classroom, AI in education. Any any kind of last statement, final thoughts about it. And we can start with Lydia, if you will be so happy to do that. Yes.

I can do that. I think and this was a consistent theme throughout our and the talk today, I think, is that promoting AI as a tool rather than, something that is, I think, yeah, something that is negative or bad, I think promoting it as something that can be used, beneficial, like, beneficially in the classroom. And, yeah, because it really is something that can help students to, you know, kinda get a boost with whatever it is. And I think that that's so important and really needs to be, put out there because that's something like AI is evil, but it's really not. It really is something that can be used and is super beneficial in the classroom for students.

So I think that's really important and something that came up a lot today. Awesome. Alright. Thanks, Lydia. Okay.

Paul, what do you think? Yeah. So I kinda wanna go back to the very first question just about excitement. And, you know, we are experiencing this unprecedented era kind of in in edtech renaissance that you don't get all the time. And even though technology has been incorporated into education for for quite a while now, this is something totally uncharted, and it feels very exciting and scary and and all of the things to be experiencing this. But I think if we can treat generative AI as a boon, as a support system for students, and allow allow ourselves and our students to experiment, to try and fail, to have real world experiences with AI that they will then experience when they leave the walls of whatever school they're in.

I think that we can use this tool a lot, as I mentioned earlier, not just to assess them, but to empower them and work on skills like like student agency and and self regulation and how do I nav I mean, really, it all boils down to that. Right? What we do is we we prepare. And this is just a new way to work on preparing our students to be the best possible versions of themselves for when they go out into the world. And as you mentioned, Lydia and her her cohort of students and beyond, I think are going to do some really incredible things, and and it's an honor to be a part of setting them up for that. Alright.

Thanks thanks a lot, Paul. Before we get to Melissa, I wanna hear from Jeff again real quick. Jeff, what do you think? I was hoping you wouldn't make me follow Paul, but, since you did, you know, I'm gonna go back to, we talked about what's the definition of AI, and this is this is, you know, our human need to create a word, to create a term, to create a phase phrase that explains something that is not easily understood. And and I go back to my own childhood when we used to go online. This was a thing.

This was a concept. Lydia, probably totally foreign to you, but we were either online or we were offline. There were giant swaths of our life when we were offline. We weren't online. We were offline.

And I think that we're in that moment now with AI to define it to define this technology that's behaving so differently and making our overall human experience disrupted. We've come up with this term AI, but I think that term fades as we move forward. But I think what it does is it accelerates the human experience. And and the example I'm gonna give is this. Deep Blue, the IBM chess machine, and the great Deep Blue Kasparov match was in nineteen ninety six.

So to to Melissa's point from earlier when, you know, AI is not new, and and this was the day that Deep Blue beat Kasparov was to be the end of chess as we knew it. But what we actually found out was it raised the game. It raised the challenge. And every single year since that match, we've had more grandmasters in the world than the year prior. In fact, it accelerated that and doubled the rate at which we were producing grandmasters even to this day.

So chess isn't dead because we built a computer that could beat the best human in the world at the time. That forced us as humans to go, well, how do we get even better? And I think that's the crossroad that we're at right now. AI, as we know it, is is a new inception of technology and the techno technological human experience and and interface. And what it's going to do is create great opportunities for us to be the best humans we can be and amplify, in my opinion, those really cool things that humans do better than any other machine or being on the earth. And I think that that this might be a really golden era for us as we figure out how to be the best versions of ourselves because AI demands it.

Let it be so. I love that. Love that. Well, here we are wrapping it up. And, Melissa, you get the last word.

So good good kudos to you. But I I just before before you do, I wanna say thank you, Paul. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Lydia. And, so, Melissa, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

So I'm I'm gonna take what everyone has shared and and sort of I will I will do another layer of amplification. I think it what AI I love that that we're talking about it as a thing, but what, in my opinion, it's doing, particularly in education, is getting us to have the conversations we should have about education and our practice. We need to be talking about assessment. Right? Do we why are we giving the same quiz that we've given for ten years to students that's not driving meaning or understanding or their thought process in how they're accomplishing or building the skill? Right? It's those things. It's the same with this privacy conversation.

We need to have the conversation about who owns the data and where and why and how do we take agency on that. So to me, what AI is doing is it's giving us a a a table in which we can have that those conversations that we need to about education. And I think that will point us to to something that Jeff and Paul mentioned about humanity. It will point us to that it's not just about being the best humans, although I love that. It's also about the being the best humans together.

And I think AI gives us an opportunity in and out of the classroom as we're learning throughout our lives to use the human connection as the central point to how we develop ourselves. We can finally do that, and let's use AI to drive a relationship first education world. Well put, Melissa. I love it. I love it.

So I just wanna thank everybody for participating in this. This was top ways AI will impact teacher student relationships. I think we covered a lot of ground here. We could probably have a part two or even a series on this, but I I'm very happy to have, moderated this. This was brought to you by Instructure. I'm Victor Rivera of EdTech Digest, and it's been my pleasure to serve as your moderator. Thank you.