Guest speaker John Watson is the founder of DLAC (formerly Evergreen Education Group), which has been a leading consulting and advisory firm serving school districts, state agencies, foundations, and companies in the K-12 digital learning field for more than 20 years.

The computer-generated transcript is below:Kevin HoganOK. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Innovations in Education. East School News podcast, where we explore the innovation, shaping education in the digital age. I'm your host,Kevin Hogan. And on this month's episode, we're diving into the evolving world of remote learning strategy. Now, the COVID pandemic thrust schools into emergency remote teaching mode virtually overnight. But now, years later, how have those experiences shaped more intentional approaches to digital education? And what does the future hold as? Yep, there's that acronym again, AI. Begins to transform what's possible. My conversation with John Watson today features insights from his experiences working with school districts around the country. He shares how schools are moving beyond emergency measures to create purpose driven online and hybrid programs. In this conversation, we explore how today's remote learning differs from that pandemic era emergency teaching. We talked about why relationships remain critical in virtual environments. John talks about the surprising ways schools are using digital platforms for everything from dropout recovery to career education. And of course, we touch upon the potential revolutionary impact of AI on educational content. So whether you're a district leader, tech director, or classroom teacher, I think you'll discover how schools are strategically implementing remote options to be something that you might want to think about for your own work. Have a listen, OK? John, thanks so much for joining me today. It's great to see you, although virtually remotely right as as we use these remote learning platforms and as we mentioned and talked about before, we started recording the last time I saw you, we were in the depths of the pandemic and now thankfully we're kind of on the on the other end of that however. You know, we still have the vestiges of it for, for better or for worse, and especially when it comes to the ideas of remote learning strategies, maybe we just dive right into things, talk about the state of play. From your perspective, when it comes to the idea of remote learning.

John WatsonWhat we're seeing in remote learning, digital learning broadly is. We defined digital learning as all these instances where students are learning outside of the time and place constraints that you see in a traditional school in a traditional. Trick now that sometimes takes the form of a fully online school, but that's actually fairly rare. What we're seeing much more commonly is students who are mixing on site and online learning. Sometimes those are formal hybrid schools, a hybrid school, that is, that actually has some days where students are learning from home, other days where students are learning from school. What we're also seeing, though, is a lot of really interesting different use cases that people don't necessarily think of as online or hybrid or digital in any form. So for instance. When you think about CTE, a lot of CTE is combining online and face to face, in part because there's a lot of CTE that you can deliver remotely. But then the other piece is that we see a lot of cases when schools are implementing really impactful innovative CD programs that may involve students leaving to go work on a job site. Or work at a different building and in order to free up, let's say, when I say a different building. What I mean by that is it might be an Innovation Center or maker space or something that the school district has as well as it might be something out in the. In order to free up the time for the student to be able to go have that experience that may be during school hours and that student may now be taking a couple of online courses to free up the time. In their schedule. So there's these two examples of how CTE taps into online learning. Seeing some really interesting early college and middle college schools that are located on Community College campuses. Was that one of these a a really great one out in California just a few weeks ago. These are using online courses as well as and and a hybrid schedule and students are taking Community College courses. So when they graduate from high school, they're well on their way to an associates degree. I was chatting with a longtime friend of mine who's. Working in dropout recovery, so there's a lot of dropout recovery programs that you may be. You're with and. To my knowledge, what the examples I'm seeing are hybrid or online, and it makes a ton of sense because it's not like these students who are coming back in are typically going back into a regular mainstream school in the traditional district. So these are hybrid digital programs. As well, so you have all these different examples that are out there. Really important to recognize these are all different than the remote emergency learning that happened during the pandemic, which was so recent, although it's hard to believe it was what, five years ago now. Yeah, all these schools had to pivot to being remote and incredibly short periods of time and they did incredibly. Valuable heroic work to pull that off, but it was very different. There's no way that you could expect an entirely new instructional model to be implemented in a few days or a weekend or a week like we saw a lot of cases where the teachers and school leaders were putting their plans together over a spring break. And then. The school, quote UN quote, came back, but it came back remotely after a week. You know, these online and hybrid school. Those will often go through a year of planning and then a year of A at A at a deliberately small number of students in a pilot status. And so instead of a year of planning plus a year of of small size or pilot status, the programs for emergency remote learning were being put together. A weekend or a week.

Kevin HoganYeah. And so you know, for our readers and for our listeners who who went through that, and again, I, I'd like that distinction between that experience and what you see these tools being implemented now is. There are a strategic difference when district leaders should be thinking about these things. I mean, you talk about dropout recovery for instance. I mean, it's program first technology, second right? I mean it's. Not.

John WatsonYeah, absolutely, yes.

Kevin HoganPrograms aren't there for for the sake of the technology, it's the vice versa.

John WatsonAnd not only that, I I've seen exceedingly few cases where you could really say the technology is driving the problem. These programs in almost all cases are being driven by. What's the need that a school or student or a family or parents are trying to figure out? What? What's the problem they're trying to solve? And at a school or district level, it may be trying to offer more course options. It may be trying to bring students. Back in who have dropped out and maybe from a traditional district perspective, cause we see a lot of trade. Districts offering their own online or hybrid academies, they're trying to reach students and families who may have left for a different option. Some of those have gone private. Some of those have have become homeschool families, but those students and families, even if they like some aspects of let's use the home schooling example, they may like some. Aspects of homeschooling, but they also realized they missed some of the socialization they missed. Some of the extracurriculars that they may be able to get in other ways, but they all felt like, hey, a school is a great option for sports and music and theater and all those. The other clubs and other pieces that they're interested in, and so you see these districts that have some level of an entrepreneurial spirit and some of them do not as many quite honestly as I would like. And I think there's no question that when you think. About. What creates a successful school and district? There, that's not necessarily selecting for people who are entrepreneurially minded. And I mean that in a very value free way. It's just the way it is. If you're climbing up the ranks of school or district leadership, it's probably not because you're taking a lot of risks. There's a lot of reasons. The public schools are. Tending towards the side of being, risk averse and some of that starts with all the regulations that the States and the feds put onto public schools. That's a whole different conversation. But The thing is, what what we see is that more and more district leaders are having to be entrepreneurial. They're they're having to think about in this time of declining enrollments. How do we bring? Students and families back and thinking about innovative ways to do that.

Kevin HoganYeah. Now there are a lot of products and services focused specifically on the education space, especially kind of like at a district wide sort of level. On the other hand, there are a lot of kind of traditional vanilla. I mean, we're talking on zoom right now, right. But then you could go through Microsoft 365 and you can go through Google Classroom and and a lot of these tools are kind of baked into the kind of the everyday tools that we're using already. Do you have recommendations for districts? On whether or not they need to go to another level when it comes to, depending on what the program is that they're looking to make remote, or at least offer those sort of remote aspects into that dynamic.

John WatsonAbsolutely. When you think about most of the technology that gets used in a mainstream school in a traditional district. Most of the technology is being used in a classroom that doesn't look too different than a classroom looks like when you. And I were. In school, what that means is that technology use case is very different than the technology use case in an online or hybrid school. In which that remote technology, the need for communications between students and teachers, quite possibly the need for communications and collaborations between students, the much higher level need for sharing of resources and using them and really interactive way. All these things become mission critical for an online or a hybrid school, because if you're in a mainstream school, traditional district technology fails one day. What do you do? Well, you go. Back to what you were doing prior. If that fails and you're on a remote day in a hybrid school, you got major problems, so you just lost your infrastructure. And so it's a different level. Without any names specifically, I'll mention there's a there's a product out there that. Probably everyone of your listeners would know, and some people refer to it as a learning management system, but people in our delac community would say now that's not now on us because that is not powerful enough to support real instruction and learning online. At a distance. And that's not to say it's a bad product. It's a great product for a certain use case, but it's not the digital learning use case as we define it.SpeakerYeah.

Kevin HoganYeah. Now I know that you find that relationships are hugely important when it comes to the establishment of remote learning situations. Can you talk a little bit about how to make those relationships work in a remote environment? It's. Talking about the students and the importance of inclusivity in the classrooms and I I know. Dei has suddenly become a dirty word somehow, but I always felt in our conversations before there was a good thing. How are those things applied in a remote setup? Have you seen examples of that working, and if so, what are some of the best practices to kind of establish the culture that all Ed tech leaders know is important in person? How do you extrapolate that to the to the to the Internet?

John WatsonSo first of all I want to just echo the point that you're making in your question, which is in these online settings relationships and student engagement are absolutely critical and I don't. Want to make it sound like this is a completely solved issue we have within our digital learning community. These conversations all the time with our member schools about, OK, how do you engage students? What does that look? Like it actually starts with some pretty simple things. If you're an online school. The experienced online school, make sure they're reaching out to make contact with students and for younger students with caregivers, with families from the start, let me give you a super simple example. Relatively inexperienced school might say. Ohh yeah, if a student. Wasn't logged in by three or four days after the start of the semester. We reach out to them. Experienced school says, Oh no. We started the outreach the week before this. Muster like if it's day one and we don't have a sign of engagement, we know we already have a problem and we don't start collecting the data on day one or day 2 or day three. We start thinking about what we need to do ahead of time and then doing that outreach. So make sure that students and families know that we are there and we're seeking. To connect with them. So that's, that's one thing. Second thing, interesting thing that came out of the. Pandemic. That emergency remote learning that I talked about and a lot of cases there were traditional school districts that. Were having kids on video for hours a day. That wasn't a great approach. The deal like team works remotely. We don't wanna spend hours a day on video, right? We're we're working in different ways and online students are doing the same. But having said that pre pandemic. Online schools were tending to not use very much video. They weren't tending to use. All that much synchronous interaction with and synchronous interaction these days does mostly mean video. Now I think part of that is because when you think about a lot of these online schools, they date back to the earliest ones were in the mid to late 1990s and then you have a lot of these schools that were starting in the early to mid 2000s and certainly there been plenty of others that have started more recently. But some of these more experienced ones started in the days when bandwidth and video technology simply didn't allow. You know for high quality video discussions like you and I are having now, we couldn't do this when online schools were starting. And even after online schools have been around for a little while, we'd be doing this and then you'd be frozen. And then I'd be frozen. And wow, that does not work. If you got a group of students with a teacher that's different now and online schools are recognizing and so. One of the things that we see them building in. Are more opportunities for synchronous video interaction. That doesn't mean a student and a teacher being online for four hours a day, but it does mean regular check-ins. It might mean some tutoring opportunities. It might mean check-ins like we've seen with some younger age students and and schools and classrooms. They'll do something that that they'll call home room. It's like everybody. It's online at the same time in the morning for 1/2 hour and it might be a discussion about hey, how are you feeling today? What are your plans, how what we know we've got these different things that we're working on. How are you all thinking about doing those things? So it just creates this sense of community and.SpeakerIt's.

John WatsonIt's incredibly powerful. Not just having the one-on-one engagement between the student and the teacher or the family and the school, but between students as well, and between families. And you create the sense of, yeah, this online school or this hybrid school is a community, and we've got. Each other, and yeah, we might not see each other face to face, but we're gonna be able to see each other over video. We're gonna be able to chat sometimes text chat in real time. Sometimes being on video, all these pieces and being really creative about the ways that those things. Work.

Kevin HoganNow talk a little bit about where you see. This evolution continuing right, I mean we were kind of watching it come from where you say, you know, making the distinction between that emergency real time experience that we had to some maybe real solid-state sort of models of remote and hybrid that are here here to stay look into your crystal ball a little bit. I mean where where is this heading? There are some if if the technologies play out. If the the funding plays out, if all things being equal and and positive, where do you see some of these strategies and technologies going?

John WatsonI'm going to give you 2 answers to this and answer 1 is during the. Mimic a lot of students and families and teachers realized that emergency remote learning. Wasn't for them. At the same time, even though there wasn't time prep time to make it a great experience overall, there were a bunch of students and families and teachers who felt like, yeah, I really like this and that has led to an increase in the number of students in all of these different online and hybrid schools. And these digital programs pre pandemic, there was a steady. Growth. It wasn't explosive, but it was steady growth and basically what we saw was this jump up during the pandemic and then a drop off after the pandemic. But a settling down at a higher level. So basically you see this increased pre pandemic. You see the numbers go up come down and if you were to draw a. Line. It's like line up step function up and then the trajectory of increase of slow steady increase continuous but now at a significantly higher level and that's significantly higher level. Really encompasses a lot of these pieces that I mentioned around CTE and dual credit and drop out recovery programs. All these other things, so pre pandemic. When people used to say things like, Oh yeah, there's blended learning all around us and and my response was, you know, in in more mainstream schools and be like, you know, there's a definitional issue there. But to me that looks a lot like using technology in a traditional classroom. Now we are truly at the point where there's a lot more of these different cases of these. Digital programs that are transcending barriers of time and space, and part of that is the experience that a lot of people had during the pandemic. Part of it is the pandemic spurred a lot more adoption of computers, laptops, better Internet bandwidth, all those pieces. That schools and students are now more likely to have and and if you have that embedded it in the district or in the school, it becomes that much easier to adapt that basic foundational technology to a different type of use case. Again, I'll use CT as an. Sample so we see all those things going on and we see that growth in. These different ways. So that's one version of the answer to your question. Here's the other version of your of an answer to. Your. Question because of what AI is doing, we have no idea. What's coming next?

Kevin HoganWe. That almost 20 minutes in and and we hadn't mentioned AI, that was pretty good. That's a world record.

John WatsonI think there's a Kevin you and I have talked over the years. So you you may recognize this about me. I have over the years been a technology skeptic in our field. Our our field depends on basic founded foundational levels of technology. But over the years. When people would say things like Ohh VR, it's gonna transform education. Augmented reality, gamification on and on is like like every one of those cases. Like I'll believe it when. I see it. I don't believe it. Yeah. This is the first technology that I think is gonna do it, and the reason is because I think this technology is going to completely overwhelm society and I am quite concerned that education is not ready. One of the things that we do with our small delac team, we have a we share consistently like what's the latest crazy thing you've done with technology, with AI. And. I worry that especially within the mainstream schools. Those folks don't have the time to do this kind of experimentation. I think the teachers who can do it tend to be outliers. And I also think that when you consider the changes that are going to. Need to be made to take advantage of AI technologies that can't happen at an individual classroom level. They have to happen in a school and systems level. And I'm just not seeing it. I see the guidance that comes out and I know it's it's well intended and it's needed, but it's not close to being sufficient.

Kevin HoganYeah.

John WatsonSo since we're doing this as a podcast. Are you familiar with the podcasting, quote, UN quote, podcasting capability of the Google product notebook LM? No. Let me give you an example. I uploaded we did a a recent Delac report on remote testing, so it's just the idea that online students, students and online schools have to test in a face to face environment. It causes all sorts of problems. I uploaded that report into this product called Notebook LM, which is a Google product because we use Google for our workspace, it's it's free for. I mean it's no additional cost right in 4 minutes notebook LM produced. What sounded exactly like a podcast of two people discussing that report. And when I played it for somebody who is highly experienced and knows this field has been in technology for education technology for decades, but just didn't know this particular thing to to blown away, people are blown away by this and. And so this is. Why I say like it's like. Every few weeks, something comes along. That's just mind blowing and.

Kevin HoganYou just made. You just made me obsolete in 2 minutes. But I I know I understand what you're saying. I.

John WatsonMean it's you're not absolute that you can say so here's what I expect of notebook LM. Apparently I haven't played with this tool. You can inject yourself in so like you can interact with the AI to have conversations as well. Actually, what's happening is I made myself obsolete. You can run podcasts.SpeakerThat's why.

John WatsonWithout having to without needing guests.

Kevin HoganAll we need is our avatars, right?SpeakerIt's.

John WatsonYou know it. It's the. The concept of AGI, artificial General intelligence, and I know that that in some circles that term gets banded around a lot, others are just are not as familiar with. It's just basically the idea that where somewhere on the order of two to three years and I see this from a lot of different sources that I trust. 2-3 years from the point where AI's will be indistinguishable from people. Except the way they're distinguishable from the average person is these AI's will know everything that's been known to people at all. So it's like talk to all the smartest people in every field, wrapped into one person. That is what's gonna be available. And the latest thing that I've really noticed around. What I think of as people who have a sense for how impactful this is versus those who don't. And so if there's one thing I would around AI that I would leave your listeners with. If you're not using the voice function. Of AI you have to use the voice functions because AI talks back to you and it doesn't sound anything like Siri from not too long ago or any of those other ones like this podcast through notebook L that I'm telling you about, there are the umm. In Oz that people like us have, there's what sounds like breathing. You know, it's like, I mean it's it's, it's crazy, it's crazy. I already I I'm aware of some of the schools in our community that are using AI technology to completely rethink how they're developing course content.SpeakerWow. Wow. Yes.

John WatsonSo one of these is a a state funded program that is absolutely convinced that. Just about every school district in the country will be able to create all their own content with within a very short period of. Time. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. I could. I certainly see the argument, and even if that's not exactly true or exactly true in that time frame, yeah, it's certainly going to be transformative for how all sorts of content. That's created and you think about within content creation, you think about the idea that how hard it is for anybody who's created. Being content across multiple states to think about state standards and things like that, now it's going to become incredibly easy once you train an AI to do it. But then you think about all the other things you know that there's been. There's been discussion about personalized learning, obviously for decades now. I think it's truly gonna be here when you think about you. Take the US history course you develop it. The capability. If it doesn't already exist, we're not far from being able to say OK, now give me a version of that course for an English language learner. Now give me a version of that course for a student who's a little bit behind on their reading skills. Now give me a version of that course for this and that and the other. And it's gonna be pretty close to like, hit a button and and wait for the AI to kick it back to you in a little while.

Kevin HoganYeah, it's amazing stuff and always exciting and maybe a little bit scary at the same time as this decade has proven out to be so John well.

John WatsonThank you so much.

Kevin HoganThank you so much for your time and and your insights. I really appreciate it and I know our readers and listeners do too and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.

John WatsonThank you, Kevin. Always appreciate your work and the opportunity to be on with you.

Kevin HoganAnd that's about it for this month's edition of Innovations and Education, be sure to go up onto eschoolnews.com to check out other episodes as well as dig into the multitude of resources that each school has to help you properly integrate technology into the day-to-day workings. Of your classrooms? I'm Kevin Hogan, and thanks for listening.

Guest speaker, Doug Levin is co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange (K12 SIX), a national non-profit dedicated solely to helping schools protect themselves from emerging cybersecurity threats.

Computer generated transcript below:

Kevin HoganOK. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Innovations and Education, eSchool News's podcast on the latest and Greatest and Everything, Ed Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Hogan on the content director for eSchool News, and I'm glad he found us in this episode. I'm joined once again by our resident cybersecurity expert, Doug. 11 to discuss the evolving landscape of digital threats in schools. Doug is the co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information Exchange. That's a national nonprofit dedicated solely to helping schools protect themselves from emerging cybersecurity threats. He brings over 3 decades of experience in at tech policy issues to this. Role. Those school districts increasingly rely on technology for both classroom instruction and administrative operations. They face growing cybersecurity risks. From ransomware attacks, forcing school closures to sophisticated fishing skins that target administrators, these threats continue to evolve. So in this episode, we explore the current state of cybersecurity incidents. We look into how attackers are becoming more sophisticated in targeting schools, and we identify practical steps that district leaders can take to protect their systems. Have a listen. I think Doug's Insights will be very valuable for you. OK, Doug, as always, a pleasure to see you through the zoom and to have a conversation. I always appreciate your insights over the years on, on what our readers and our listeners can do to help protect their schools and districts. So, thanks for joining me.

Doug LevinYeah, my pleasure to be with you, Kevin.

Kevin HoganI guess usually we have our annual updates. We did these through COVID, right and you think that that might have been the craziest of times as we sit here, it's a different flavor of crazy, but things, things continue to be interesting, right?

Doug LevinRight, I think it's what may you live in interesting times, right? Is is the curse as it goes.

Kevin HoganYeah. So let's dive right into it. I'm assuming from, you know, reading your work and and others that it's not like cyber security has gotten any less worrisome, right? If not it it, it's gotten even worse.

Doug LevinThe trend lines are certainly continuing, right. We're seeing school systems, you know, pretty frequently becoming victims of cyber security incidents, typically seeing nearly one a day happen to some school system, large or small, across the US we are seeing an increase in sophistication and target. Running against K12, so less drive by and more targeted, they understand they're attacking schools. They may understand who the Superintendent is or who the principal is. They may be grabbing graphic elements, you know, from the school system website or spoofing that. So that's. Certainly quite worrisome. And then of course, we've seen the impact of these incidents continue to grow as well. Well, and we can think about impact really anyway you want to conceive of it, whether it's the amount of data that has been stolen and leaked from school systems, the sensitivity of that data, the amount of money, maybe that school systems have been extorted out of or has been stolen from them through scams or even through operational disruptions. And it's increasingly common that we've seen school systems literally have to close, send students and teachers home and not even be able to deliver any services whatsoever. And responding to a significant incident. The only bright side on that latter point is typically when school systems are, you know, essentially have that worst case scenario happen. They usually they'll limit closures to maybe two or three days. Usually book ended around a weekend or something like that. But even still, when students and teachers are back in school, it can be weeks, or sometimes even months. Before their IT systems are restored. You know, it's just what needs to get restored in order to guarantee sort of the safety of kids to come back to school is is what they're dealing with. So definitely still a challenge for us and frankly, you know, we continue to rely on technology more and more for everything from the classroom to operations. And so this is. Risks and threats that we're facing and we're going to continue to face really forevermore, I.

Kevin HoganThink and one of the distinctions that I know in our in our. Past conversations. It's as much about human behavior as it is about the technology itself, right? I mean, it's most of these. Things get more sophisticated and you know, I just personally find myself continue to have to fend off, you know, that text from the boss, right, asking me to go buy a gift card and not talk a little bit about, you know, that it might not even suit me as much as the software as about training of your of your faculty and students.

Doug LevinYeah, I may have a little bit of a contrary take on that issue, right. It's certainly something that I hear all all the time and there's no question that people being aware of. Of scams and common scams in ways that you know, cyber criminals are trying to convince people to click links or share information. I mean on on offers ways that that certainly is common. But I think what we try to focus on in our work, our technical solutions that hopefully. Protect all users if we can avoid getting that phishing e-mail into somebody's inbox, we don't have to worry about them clicking it. If we can neutralize that malware or ransomware before it takes hold in a school system. Without a user having to intervene so much the better, because I think at the end of the day, even the training programs that send simulated phishing attacks and try to get people to click less and identify those phishing emails more accurately, you know you're never going to get that down to 0. The real challenge I think we're facing and. And you know our members school, it directors are facing. Is creating systems that are resilient enough that a single teacher, a single student, their access being compromised doesn't result in the downfall of everybody's being affected. And I'd also note we've seen this, you know, pretty dramatically in recent months. The weakest link that can bring down a system in some cases that link is within the school district. Itself, but in other cases it's maybe their vendors or partners, right? And given that so many of the solutions that schools rely on are cloud hosted nowadays, it turns out that if a threat actor can compromise A vendor, they may be able to get data information from hundreds or thousands of school systems versus just. One district at a time. Couple that with the fact that school systems and a lot of these online systems have data that is not just on current students and staff, but historical records going back 10/20/30, even 40 years, just staggering to think of. About the amount that that amount of information, but also if if it gets breached like how do you even find people who were associated with the school system 20 years ago? It's nearly an impossible task. So what?

Kevin HoganSort of suggestions. Would you have in terms of measures that our readers, our district executives right now? Let's say they have some sort of level of cyber security.

Doug LevinSure, of course.

Kevin HoganYeah, everything's basic. There's an understanding that's that's there. What are some?

Doug LevinNext steps that they should be thinking about taking, or even just should they be asking their vendors and their partners? Yeah. So I mean, we are big believers in in simplicity, right? School systems don't have their resources of Fortune 500 companies with the federal government. It's a rare school system that has. A siso or someone with a cybersecurity background in an IT role and they've got tremendous number of responsibilities and things they're juggling every day just in supporting the teachers and administrators and students and doing their work and keeping the systems up and running. What we do is we focus on the ways that school systems are frequently compromised, most frequently compromised versus the edge cases where folks are taking advantage of sort of super sophisticated attacks that may involve 0 days, things for which we hadn't seen before. They may hit school systems, but the fact of the matter is that. The cyber criminals, who tend to go after schools tend to use well worn techniques that we have pretty good defenses for. One set of practices is around password management and multifactor authentication. It is frequently the case that when school systems are compromised, it is through a compromised credential, so literally the threat actor has stolen or social engineered someone into giving a username and password to them, and then they will try that against a school system, and then once they're enabled, you know they're able to escalate and get. Into a lot of mischief, so multi factor authentication is a a super important step to to guard against that. School systems have made tremendous progress in rolling that out, but too often it is just on some systems or maybe for some user. And interestingly, in the last few years, we've seen students become a vector for school incidents as well. So I think it wasn't that long ago we thought of student accounts as being pretty innocuous and it wouldn't be unusual for a school system to assign easily guessable username and password to a student. Maybe their birthday, and maybe that wouldn't change for their whole academic career. Well, it turns out that you know kids reuse usernames and passwords across services. Once you understand how that algorithm works, it's easy to generate it for us. Others as well, and that's led to some some large incidents that have affected school systems nationwide, coupled with sort of over sharing that's going on in either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, depending on the system that the school system uses. So locking down those credentials. For all users. I think is a big thing to do. The second is really limiting what school systems are exposing to the. That right? So it's trivial for folks to use scanners online to look for known vulnerable software. So people issue patches, issue vulnerability alerts and then the bad guys can go to search engines online that are sort of very similar to Google and search for servers that are running vulnerable. Software and then take advantage of that using known exploits. So there's really two things that we ask all systems to do. 1 is to sort of know what you have facing the Internet. And limit what you can. If it's a service running and you don't need it, shut it down. Or if you can't shut it down, find a way to limit its exposure to the web. You can Geo IP block to keep traffic from certain countries coming. You can put a web application firewall in front of it. You can put a VPN. In front of it, but just something that is not just leaving it exposed unprotected to the web and then related to that. Making sure to keep tabs on when patches are are available for your Internet facing products and making sure that you're patching those systems frankly pretty promptly. Some threat actors. The time from vulnerability to actually, you know, vulnerability and just disclosed to an exploit built and then sort of used in the real world. That timeline is shrinking rather quickly. And so, you know, there may be older rules of thumbs that you want to patch with in 30 days or 90 days. Well, we're seeing, you know, exploits in some cases within hours. So we certainly encourage folks to get onto a faster patching cadence and particularly for security patches for Internet facing systems. So those are really the things that we encourage people to focus on most. I mean, there's a whole set of other practices that are good that are important, but those, you know, working on those I think would go a long way to reducing the the challenges that that a lot of school systems continue to. Face.

Kevin HoganYeah. Now in terms of resources, obviously your organization is is up there at the top of the list to to reach out to, but also in the past few years there there were a number of federal programs and federal kind of initiatives that we would point to these school news to say you know upon. Further review and you need to do so. What is that looking like these days? And I'll assume that those are limited now versus in the past. Where else would they reach out to?

Doug LevinAn interesting story, right? I guess interesting in quotes. So I think you know over the last couple of years we had started to make I think pretty significant in roads with the federal government to help them understand that the K12 sector was under assault and needed needed support. And we saw support being marshalled out of Sisi. The Federal cybersecurity agent. And see, we saw the US Department of Education starting to embrace its role in in helping school systems navigate this issue. We've seen the FCC launch a cyber security pilot program as well, and there was other money devoted to sort of SLT, state and local governments, broadly speaking, for which schools could benefit. Depending on your. Unfortunately, what we've seen in the first what three months of this new administration is a pretty significant sea change in how this administration is viewing the federal role with respect, at least let me speak narrowly to cybersecurity, right. So the US Department of Education's work has ceased. And there's obviously been large cutbacks there, so we there's no longer an A venue for stakeholders to engage with the department on these issues. We're not expecting more resources on these issues. That we're aware of to be coming out of the department and some of what they. Have. Produced previously is no longer to be found on their website. For its part, this is still provides resources for K12, but just even earlier this week there been announcements that they are going through their own significant downsizing. And one of. The projects that SISA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, have been funding is a group called. Msac or the multi state Isaac. And so they serve all of state and local government, including school systems. They've had flat 50% funding to them, cut suddenly without warning. And I should say so far, right. And so that support is gone from schools. And at least right now it does appear that the FCC pilot program is continuing the pace, but obviously I would say that right now its prospects for becoming. A permanent part of the E rate program and the Universal Service Fund, I think are probably a little bit longer than they were. You know a few months ago. So you know, in talking to some colleagues, it it almost feels like we're just sort of back to where we were maybe about four or five years ago where you know, enterprising groups of districts and regions and states. Working together or really having to bootstrap this support themselves. So on a I guess a good news front at K-12 6K12 security information exchange. We we act as a Ketel specific isec. We don't have any federal funding. The federal government doesn't dictate what we cover and they're not the primary source for our threat. Intel for our members. So we work with a number of private providers and others to source. That threat? Until so, our work continues apace, but it's a big country and there's a lot of people engaged in it and. And there's no question that, you know, while some resources remain, these sorts of cuts, coupled with other financial pressures that districts are facing from threats to school lunch funding, you know there's concerns about, you know, Esser, stimulus money being yanked back without warning, right? All that creates uncertainty for school systems. And at the end of the day. The choice is between, you know, busing kids to school and feeding them, or buying that new advanced firewall system, or, you know, getting 24/7 sock. Monitoring like you know where that money is gonna gonna go and and there's sort of no argument with that. But it does suggest that schools are going to be even softer targets than they have been in the past. And there's certainly no reason to believe that the threat landscape is going to be changing whatsoever as far as schools are concerned. Certainly cyber criminals are have been successful and. Getting money one way or another from school systems, either by directly extorting it or or selling data that they've stolen from schools. So we don't have any reason to believe that's going to change so challenging times. But opportunities for us to come together. Continue to come together develop, you know, sort of common sense. Best practice, really. Our emphasis is really just focusing on a few key things and working to kind of raise the tie for all the boats there on those, you know, getting the basics.

Kevin HoganRight. Yeah. And it desperate attempt on my part to leave this conversation with the glass half full. Talk a little bit about the fact that districts do come together, right? I mean, there there are those sort of grassroots sort of things that I know from various Ed tech conferences that I go to. It's like sharing best practices as an industry. It seems like this group wants to help each other as opposed to keeping secrets to themselves.

Doug LevinYeah, you know, that's absolutely right, Kevin. So I I was contacted by a reporter in regards to the power school incident and they felt that it was remarkable that they saw online and in various groups that school systems were collaborating with each other to respond to this incident. And because I guess they don't see that in other sectors and I think it's just the most natural thing in the world for us. You know, I think we're used to not having a lot of resources certainly as compared to other sectors, we're in no way really competing with each other on this stuff, right. And everybody is under resourced. Everybody you know, people change jobs and go from district to district or from the district to the state. Or to other you know, outside groups and so you know, we build these networks of support and I think they're critically important. I mean, one of our primary recommendations sort of in our long our list of recommendations for school systems and what to do is to communicate a. Celebrate right. And when I first started getting into this work, I joked that it sort of felt like Fight Club, which is, you know, the first World Fight Club is you don't talk about it. Yeah, I think we are well beyond that now. And I think people are actively talking about it and sharing in groups within states, in groups, across States and even, you know, just based for instance. In our national conference, which you hold in February of every year, the conversations are a level. Upper right and people are sort of engaging with much more nuance about these issues and sort of talking through like trying to figure out how to to meet this moment, if you will. I also think by the way, that there's an incredible opportunity right now for E tech vendors and suppliers to come together. You know, there's been some recent research that suggests something that we've seen coming, which is that school systems are going to be asking more from their vendors and suppliers with respect to cyber security, and they're asking for many more assurances that they're doing the right things. This feels very much like the emergence of the. Student data privacy issue about a decade ago and right now, it feels like school systems are struggling with figuring out what questions to ask and then kind of what the right answers are to those questions. It's a complicated thing, but I would argue that this is a moment in time where, you know, the tech companies. Probably could help the K12. Get smarter about what to ask for, like what are signals of trust with respect to cybersecurity that school district leaders should be looking for before they make a purchase or adoption decision. And so we're relatively low in our maturity as a sector compared to others. The good news is that we can make. Pretty dramatic progress. Pretty fast if we can drive to some consensus. On some key issues.

SpeakerNo.

Kevin HoganWell, obviously you're very busy and get busy here every day. I really appreciate you taking the time out to speak with me. Always really informative conversation with insights that are are really helpful for our readers and listeners. So thank you and thank you your group for the work that you do. It's hugely important and look forward to keeping the conversation going.

Doug LevinYeah, you beg Kevin, keep up the good fight.

Kevin HoganAnd that's all we have for this month's edition of Innovations and Education here at East School News. I'd like to thank you for getting to the end. I think the conversation with Doug was really instrumental, and I hope that it's helpful for you. Until next time I'm Kevin Hogan and thanks again for clicking through.

The computer-generated transcript is below:

Kevin Hogan, Content Director eSchool MediaOK. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Innovations in Education E School loses podcast on the latest and Greatest Trends in Ed Tech. My name is Kevin Hogan. I'm the content director for East School News, and I'm glad you found us. Well, they did it after decades of threats by the Republican administration. And. The Department of Education was slashed and burned by executive order last week, and while the records will be analyzed and fought over for weeks and months to come, there's still very little clarity of what will happen to the current programs and processes. That's why I appreciated this conversation with the Cato Institute. Neil McCluskey, he's the director of. The Center for Educational Freedom on what he foresees as possible next steps you might not like what he has to say, but you might be able to glean some insights into how things will operate going forward. Have a list. OK, Neil. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Neal McCluskey, Director for The Center for Educational FreedomThanks for having me on.

Kevin HoganAnd as I mentioned before, we started recording the hot topic, right? I mean it's one of many, but. One that I haven't been able to find, to be honest. Want to talk about it in terms of folks in DC or folks from my traditional sources of information? You know, whether it be various nonprofits in, in the area, other folks just there seems to be just a confusion and just kind of an uncertainty. About what's going to happen, and I know there hasn't been anything you. Known as our. Our recording today, anything definitive in terms of Miss McMahon or, you know, and putting things together, but maybe we can start by talking about. Where you see the current state of play is for the fate of the Department of Education, and if we're going to assume things progress into what seemed to be the intentions for our readers and for our listeners, what should they be expecting next?

Neal McCluskeyRight, so I have to agree with a lot of people that there's a lot of uncertainty here. So everything I say is going to be based on sort of what I've been able to gather by following this for a while. And I think that the proposal we're going to see from the administration in the form of an executive order is going to be. One saying I think that the President believes he has the authority on his own to do a lot of hiring, firing, so he will continue to see what we've been seeing through Dodge and other approaches of saying, look, I think the Department ofEducation has too many employees and we're going to reduce that just as they've been saying lots of things in the federal government have. Too many employees. But it gets a lot more complicated when it comes to, well, what do you do with the various programs that, that, and laws that the Department of Education has been tasked with executing by Congress? Because Congress, the one who writes laws, creates programs. And I think what we're going to see is an effort to move. Most of those functions are to other departments than the Department of Education. In part, that's because a lot of people have been talking about that. There's been one bill in the Senate so far that starts to get into how we handle the Department of Education. Addition, it used kind of the dismantling of moving things to other departments as well as block granting some funds. It wasn't totally clear what would be blocked, granted what would be moved, but that sort of set the tone. And then when Linda McMahon was at her confirmation hearing, she talked a lot about. She can't, you know, the president and the secretary don't have the author. Ready to end? Really any programs or parts of the department or move them, but that she would be working with Congress. And then it makes sense to move, at least, you know, a lot of the parts to different places, not necessarily get rid of them, but move them. And in the last few days, she's been talking especially about the president. About the student aid functions. The department has you think about Pell Grant, student loans, things like that. There's been a lot of I think maybe additional emphasis on moving those maybe to the treasury or the Small Business Administration. But that seems to be what we should expect is some sort of plan or order to develop a plan to move the parts of the Department of Education. Other departments.

Kevin HoganOK, so if I'm an administrator in a public school district that relies to a certain degree on Title 1 funding for their district, or also when you look at the idea of the idea funds, IDEA funds. Will there be a disruption there from what you can perceive or is this going to be just letterhead from a different office?

Neal McCluskeySo a lot of that depends. I don't think anything will happen if it's just the president saying it. But if Congress does it and these things actually are moved, in theory it would be totally seamless. It would say we've seen 180 days. I think that's too short, maybe it's 365 days or a full year between when the law is signed and when things have to. Move. But during that transition period you would hope and the expectation is everything would be moved seamlessly. So when you shut off the lights at the Department of Education and you shut on some new lights at the Department of Health and Human Services, they're ready to go. And people who work with the various programs, including titles. Mine or I DEA would just see a seamless transition, so that's ideally I don't know that the federal government or even most organizations are capable of a seamless transition like that. We certainly haven't seen when the federal government has tried to. Make sizable changes that it's just kind of gone off like clockwork and nobody noticed. So I think there would probably be some probably temporary, maybe even minor disruptions in who you're talking to and how the information flows and money flows are working just in terms of the logistics of them, but that that would probably be temporary.

Kevin HoganI've only come to some more of the big picture issues and maybe some of the topics. That I've covered over the years, specifically from the Office of Education Technology, when you look at things like advancements in the past 10 years, when it comes to digital equity, which was certainly one in terms of trying to ensure access to the Internet, to all students, especially from underserved communities or underserved. During COVID, when we had gone into that great remote beta test of education and people trying to figure. And discovering even district administrators themselves, not realizing that within their own districts there were a lot of students that didn't have access to the Internet from home. A lot of those things, you know, kind of driven by the Department of Education then led to an increase of those students actually having access. So those, those big picture things blended learning. Is there another one that was in effect during COVID that I know that there were programs put together by the department which were soft and squishy, right? I mean, maybe there's. Like particular data that comes from them saying this, this is maybe increasing literacy scores, but kids still have access to the Internet. But also I guess the other big Picture 1 is when it comes to data. I mean I think that is one of the things currently that the Department of Education did was to try to track data across. Districts and across states of which we have 15,000 different school districts, some are going to be better than others, right? And some are going to be more of. Aggressive or even progressive when it comes to what they do with their students. Maybe you could talk a little bit about those things that you think should be left to the states or even individual districts versus some sort of overall umbrella that the federal government had.

Neal McCluskeySure. When it comes to the federal government, the first thing we ask is, well, is it constitutional? Does the Constitution give the federal government authority to do these things? In education and the first thing we see well or don't see is the word education in the Constitution. It's nowhere among the specific enumerated rights. So we start off with sort of an assumption, or at least I do that the federal government should be involved in these things. And then I look at effectiveness and what if the federal government weren't? What we tend to see is people like to blame other people when things don't go well. So when you've got the federal government, it's easy for the states to say, well, the reason we dropped the ball or the districts to say the reason we dropped the ball on being prepared for something like COVID or on covering sort of digital access or whatever. They are saying the problem is it's easy to say, well, the federal government should have done this or didn't do enough, or if your district, you say the state didn't do. Enough. And that's a problem when there's no accountability, you reach each level, blame another level, and the federal government, interestingly, has never actually said it's responsible for education. It's set up a Department of Education, said we're here, we kind of help with stuff, but constitutionally, legally, we can't actually control anything. So it makes a lot of promises and then doesn't follow through on them, and then the States and local districts and say. Well, it's really the federal government's fault or we need leadership from the federal government. That's something we saw a lot under COVID with school districts saying the U.S. Federal government, we can't make our own decisions. And I think it's actually better if you have much more clear accountability. It's either your district or your state set. Get rid of the federal government. It's well-intentioned. But there's so many unintended consequences that go with that it's problematic. And then one of my I wouldn't say hobby horses because I use a lot of federal data and I in a way, I like the data and people who want to talk about the nationaleducation system. They like the data. But on the flip side, it's really kind of poor. So I do a lot with you know, how much are we spending per pupil. And I think the last time I checked, which was a few days ago, the federal government will give you spending data. I believe the most recent is from the 2020-2021 school year and maybe up to 2021-2022. Right now, but we're into the 2024-2025 school year and so the data is really old. I track private schools, the private school universe data is really. Sold most of it's not useful then so well, I like the data. I'm not sure that the federal government even does a good job of that basic function of data collection, certainly not collecting it in a timely manner. So while a lot of these things sound good, I think we'd actually be better off if the federal government was not a player in this. And in particular, people couldn't say it was the federal government's fault when it wasn't their responsibility to begin with. It was the state or the school district. And then the other sort of thing that you can take is encouraging. I think at the state level it is. While the federal government was supposed to come in and do some compensatory funding, it was originally its main job for low income districts. Not sure I did a good job, but in the states you have lots of states have lawsuits to compel the state to have equitable funding. And that's really the way to do it. That's much more. Concrete and kind of hoping that the federal government will keep pitching in some money when again it says we're here, but we don't really have any responsibility in this area.

Kevin HoganBut then do you see them, the duties of say, the data collection and that analysis going to a different department as well, how do you, how do you track? The overall results of the nation as a whole.

Neal McCluskeyFor me, if I were setting it all up and this is not what most people are aiming at, we would have to separate what I'd like from what I think is going to happen. But for me, I think that you could still have data collection at the state level and there would be lots of private entities who would collect that. Data and use it on a national basis. In fact, you can go to the economics lab at Georgetown University, and they're much more quickly gathered together. Data on all sorts of things in education than the federal government has. Stanford has big data sets that you can use, and they're more accessible than what the federal government has. So. Even though I think data collection is one of the more innocuous things that the federal government does, I just don't think it does that well. And it's a mistake to rely on them to do it. That said, I haven't seen any proposals that actually remove the federal government from that role. What I've typically seen is that the data collection should be done usually for the Census Bureau. Actually, they already collect a lot of education data, so it wouldn't even be necessarily a new thing they do, but they're already sort of a data collection. Entity agency and it would make more sense for them to do it, since again, in many cases they're already collecting data on. Then to keep it at the Department of Education.

Kevin HoganHuddle with the other big squishy topic when it comes to and I mentioned digital equity, and I can even just focus it on that idea of digital equity when it comes to E school news.

Kevin HoganIn reading some of your blog posts you see some of that being connected to civil rights. Responsibilities in a big picture and those being moved over to the Department of Justice, does that. Am I describing that accurately?

Neal McCluskeyYeah. You got it.

Kevin HoganYeah. So what would that mean in terms of say, digital equity, even if I go back to the idea that you? So every student should have some sort of access or the ability to have access to the Internet in order to do their learning. I mean kind of an essential part as much.

Neal McCluskeyYeah. So civil rights. Ohh sorry, sorry.

Kevin HoganAs much as having indoor electricity or or water in.

Neal McCluskeyRight. So civil rights enforcement is a legitimate job of the federal government, but it's enforcement against States and local governments, but in particular states that discriminate in their provision of. Things that they say are going to be available to everyone. So if the and then again, this is what a lot of these equity lawsuits are about that we've seen in states across the country is, hey, state, you say you're going to provide an equitable education for everyone in the state and you're not providing it. And so again, in many cases. States and the state justice systems are doing that, but the federal government does have a role to say, OK States, you know, state of Montana, I don't know that they have a problem with just picking them randomly but. State of Montana. It looks like you know you are under funding your low income districts. So I don't know if $2000.00 of people or something or you clearly have inadequate access to the Internet in your rural districts versus your more urban ones. We think that that violates equal protection and so if the federal government says that and the federal government takes it to court and says, look, we are suing you to do what we think you should. New that means the federal government is taking an enforcement position, but not a provision to enforce a position. There's nothing in the Constitution that says it's the federal government job to provide it. It is their job to make sure that other governments don't discriminate in their provisions of things. Of course, there's a lot of law involved there and you know, it has to be a particular class of students and things like that. But that's the role it should have as an enforcer, not as a supplier. And we should want more, much more emphasis on people in states saying to the states. You are responsible for this and what you are doing is inequitable. It can also apply to districts, of course. I mean, if you have a big district, lots of schools and they are inevitably providing things within the district, the same thing should happen. It should start with state enforcement of equity or equality under the law. But if they don't do it again, then the federal government can be involved. But it's not the federal government's job to pay for this, and I think I should always remember, and I never do. But in the background of all the things that we tell the federal government to spend money on is that we have a 37, almost $37 trillion deficit ordebt. And so the federal government, well, it seems to be able to print money. It can't print money forever. And so everything we ask it to pay for, we tend to ignore. It doesn't actually have the money to do it. It's got to reach into many future generations and say, well, you're going to pay for this. And so that's a problem too. And we need to remember that there are lots of great things. Valuable things the federal government could pay for.

SpeakerThere.

Neal McCluskeyBut we've got to remember, it's got limited resources just like everybody else.

Kevin HoganYeah. So I mentioned this earlier as well, just talking about the confusion and some despair involved with our readers and our listeners about what's going to happen next. And I know it's not under the umbrella of the Department of Education. The E rate is one of these federal government programs and you talk about providers versus enforcers. I think it has been identified amongst our community as one of the great successes of the federal government, enabling the use of the Internet in schools. So and, and you're going from 1996 when it was first introduced to where it's basically been a bipartisan agreement and it has progressed year over year over year. Is that and and now there's a worry that that's gonna go away too. I mean, that's kind of it's kind of like part and parcel of the idea that, you know, the part of education. What's next is that. Do you have thoughts when it comes to regards to E rate in general and that effect or or that worry?

Neal McCluskeyYeah. So as you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of E rate. Again, I don't think this is something the federal government should be involved in. I haven't focused on it a whole lot in part because it's not part of the Department of Education. And that has been the focus. But I do follow a lot of education news and I haven't seen anybody. Mentioned E rate as something that they want to eliminate, at least not somebody in the Trump kind of doge ambit. But maybe someone would go after the E rate. My guess would be if someone is going to do something with it. It could be that the Congress is heading to budget reconciliation and that seems like the kind of mechanism by which irate might be affected because it's a whole lot of tax and spend kind of stuff. That's very in the weeds, and there's going to be a whole lot of things thrown in there. Honestly, I have no idea how E rate would sort of measure in their accounting calculus, good, bad, indifferent. But that's probably where it will be affected. I don't think it's something that Trump will necessarily target or Doge will necessarily target because it's not really exactly a program or an agency. It's not something you can just kind of pin down and say, look, here's the building where all this happens and it employs all these bureaucrats. So my guess is it's probably. Safe for now, because it's probably flying under most budget cutter radars. But if it isn't that, it's probably going to be. If people are paying attention, it'll be part of this budget. Reconciliation is my guess and it has not been one of the major topics of discussion for that. But the main thing they're discussing right now is just can the Senate and House agree on basically how to do it.

Kevin HoganRight, I know the toughest part of this conversation would be to end it. There's so much. There's so many different aspects of this, but maybe to wrap up, I know in one of the pieces that you wrote, I guess it was last week or the week before when you were dressing kind of like state officials, it was reassuring, actually, or 1 pager in terms. While the department might be going away, some of the elements of it warrant. If we can wrap up a little bit, maybe do you have a similar message to our readers, our listeners, who might be at that district level who again are concerned about the way they manage their buildings, their schools?

Neal McCluskeySo again, I haven't seen any talk. Talk from the administration, now, originally just from Trump or from Musk, but also now Linda McMahon. That suggests there are big cuts to programs coming, and so, and that includes the big pots of money, like Title 1 and IDEA. So if you receive money those ways, I don't anticipate there will be. Any or at least not sizable cuts in those. Where we are seeing more cuts and this is kind of developed just since Trump took office and we've seen dodge operating, it's a lot of targeting of employees. So what could happen is a lot of employees that are at the Department of Education. Sort of moving money along and administering programs as they may be gone and they're it's possible that that will. Have a negative impact on how quickly things are done, or how accurately they're done, so that might be something to look out for, but the worry that a lot of programs and and or large funds are going to be zeroed out. I haven't seen anything from the administration that says they want to do that and they acknowledge that they can't do that. Without Congress acting and for Congress to act except in budget reconciliation, but generally, if we're talking about eliminating programs, it's not through budget reconciliation and then they would need 60 votes in the Senate. There are only 53. Tokens and I think at least two of those are unlikely to vote for any major cuts, so I just don't think there will be large slashing reductions made in spending that used to be on the Department of Education, but may be under a few other departments going forward.

Kevin HoganWell, you know once again. I appreciate your time and your insights. I know that you're really deep into all of this stuff, and I think your words actually couldn't be reassuring to a lot of our audience about that. They'll be able to continue to do the work that they do with what they wish to do. So thanks again.

Neal McCluskeyMy pleasure. Thank you.

Kevin HoganAnd that's all we have for this edition of innovations in Education. Be sure to go to eschoolnews.com for all the latest news, analysis and other resources you may need during these uncertain times. Once again, thanks for listening.

The computer-generated transcript is below:Kevin Hogan, Content Director, eSchool NewsThis episode is brought to you by ascend now. Ascend now is an online education platform focused on providing personalized, academic and beyond academic coaching and mentoring to students aged 7 to 17. With a particular emphasis on fostering entrepreneurial skills and mindset by integrating entrepreneurship education into their curriculum. Aiming to normalize kid entrepreneurs through tailored programs and personalized learning paths. OK. Hello and welcome to this special edition of Innovations in Education, the podcast that explores how tech can enable districts to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. I'm Kevin Hogan, content director for eSchool News. And I'm glad you found us. Believe it or not, it's been five years this month that the world and schools shut down due to the COVID pandemic. Since then, so much has changed from student behavior to the way that schools respond to that behavior. Many through the use of social emotional learning, or SEL techniques. I had the pleasure to speak with Jesse Bushman. Jesse is the senior director of SEL at. Fayette Valley Community School District in Iowa about their efforts by using a new program called the. We also spoke with the creator of that curriculum, Devi Sahny. She's the CEO and founder of Ascend now, now designed in collaboration with educators and aligned with the Castle Framework. The. The first curriculum to meet educators demands for high quality instructional materials for SEL and life skills readiness. The curriculum helps students cultivate communication, problem solving and self-awareness, as well as essential life skills like entrepreneurs. Negotiation, financial literacy and networking to boost their academic abilities. I think you'll find their insights valuable. Have a listen. OK. Devi, Jesse, thanks so much for joining me today. Really appreciate it.

Devi SahnyCEO and Founder, Ascend Now & The EdgeI'm happy to be here. Thanks for having us.

Kevin HoganAnd as I was mentioning right before we started the recording here, I guess it's hard to believe, but it's five years ago to this month, it was actually Friday the 13th. Believe it or not that Jesse, I mean I know a lot of school districts, that's when we. Into this great. Beta test in education with remote learning and COVID. Years. So tired of talking about it. However, it is still really kind of with us in the way that it has changed education and especially with the work that Jesse you do and Devi that you do that really took one of those acronyms I've always heard in education SEL, which was kind of like a nice to have probably for districts who might be kind of more well off than others. That would introduce that to where social emotional learning became front and Center for everybody in this. Group trauma together districts have spread apart. If they had the luxuries or the privileges to be able to set up remote right away. Most of the, if I recall correctly, in my conversations, most of those conversations involved around social emotional learning. You OK at home? How are you doing at home? People those first few months. No more worried about standardized testing, right? Everybody was worried. Just kind of keeping it all together. Jesse, we can get. Let me talk about that time for you in. In your district, in what you were doing in what SEL mean back then. And what does it mean? And Devi, I promise we'll get into the news of the edge and how this all comes part and parcel.

Jessie BushmanSenior Director SEL,North Fayette Valley Community School District,Yeah. You're totally correct. At that time it was like scary. We're all learning to adjust. The kids were learning to adjust to and as educators. That was our most important thing was to tune in with the kids. Sure, they were safe. Check in on how they were doing and as staff we did that together as well, so we would check in on each other. A lot of our first meetings were just talking about how everybody was doing. So coming back, it did change a lot of things kids were. And teachers were. So as a school, we had to change things.

Kevin HoganYeah. And Devi, let's get into the news a little. I mean, just here in January, now you've announced this new curriculum called The Edge. How have the past few years informed the work and the ultimate release of this new service? You're providing.

Devi SahnyYeah. And and just to answer that first part of the question about COVID, I think COVID certainly transformed education for K12. In a lot of ways, I think in one way teachers overnight had to have this accelerated adoption of technology, some that was super helpful and integrated really easily and others that may have perhaps even. Slow down learning. I think teachers out of all stakeholders during Covic with the heroes, because overnight they had to change their delivery and immediately adapt. And I think that's in a very entrepreneurial thing. One of the other big changes we saw through Covic was this increased emphasis on social emotional learning. Think there was a report. Brookings stating that nearly 40% of teachers report students struggling more with depression and anxiety than before. COVID and over 80% of those teachers still have students that are struggling with depression and anxiety. So I think the overemphasis of technology combined with an entirely new world landscape reframed this focus of, hey, we should maybe turn back the pendulum and focus on the important skills. And with AI and technology, everything is advancing. But certain skills like networking and grit and resilience and communication, they still remain incredibly important. And one of the reasons we decided to create the edge is we felt that students in their middle and high school years did not really feel those skills were learnable. They thought I'm either born with strong public speaking skills or I'm not. I'm either born. With a learning mentality and a strong mentality or I'm not and we wanted to break that belief and provide them with student friendly resources, but I think yeah, COVID certainly changed a lot and I think now more than ever SEL is critical the amount of times we hear. Teacher saying we don't have time for essay and I always. Well, that's actually going to reframe and support your your students to be ready for. But even the teachers need SEL. I mean, Jesse and I were just talking about one of her students who I think Jesse was saying, like, found purpose through essay.

Jessie BushmanYeah, we had a great conversation when we were working on a lesson. It would just like the light bulb went off, he and he said. Now have a purpose like. There's a reason, like I understand why I need to learn this, because this is my future. And so it wasn't just another thing to teach. At that moment, for him, this was like I need to learn this. Is life.

Kevin HoganYeah, it seems to me with both you're talking about two is the change in student behavior right? Of the experiences of the of the past couple years. One of the net positives, if you can call it that or a silver lining, whatever cliche you you wanna use. You're describing a self-awareness that I still don't think I have for myself. That said, students of that age and having gone through this experience, are aware of their learning journeys. Aware of where they might need to improve and also don't kind of shrug it off as. This sort of like, well, that's just for people with depression. Or that's just for certain part of the kids in class, maybe who aren't succeeding like, this really is beneficial for everybody, right?

Devi SahnyAbsolutely. And I think that when we talk about soft skills and we talk about Sela, lot of the resources that currently exist remain a bit outdated and they're not student friendly and a lot of the teachers we've spoken to have said we're using the same curriculum, that's 50. Older. 30 years old to teach, you know, stress and anxiety, and it's not as simple as just a deep breath. There's more to it, and there's more conversation involved. So one of the things we did when we created this program, the edge is we try to identify what the future skills are. How do we actually figure out what are those skills? And how are they learnt? Are they acquired? So we went on this crazy research experiment where we interviewed different stakeholders. We interviewed 500 educators from different demographics and socio economic backgrounds to ask them what are the scales you wish you could teach in your classroom but don't have the resources for. Then we interviewed 500 students different ages in middle and high school to understand what skills they wish they could learn, and some really interesting responses. Like networking, which is one of our more. Skill. And then we interviewed about 200 chief learning officers from different Fortune 500 companies to ask them when you teach your employees in these higher Ed programs whether the skills you focus on. Then we cross reference that with HR and recruitment industry to understand what they hire for across sectors, whether that be education, technology, human resources, fin. We came up with a list of about 6000 schools. We then took that. We spoke with OECD World Economic. We're actually one of the partners and I was at Davos recently in January speaking about this and we looked at the future of jobs report and we took all that data and all that research. To create our own framework which is called the Life readiness playbook by. Edge and this playbook is not necessarily, as you pointed out, Kevin, for students to get ready for an outcome like good grades or a university outcome or a good job, it's actually just to have them ready for life. And these are skills that are lifelong. You know, I'm constantly working on my listing skills, my stress management skills. And the way that students can consume this content is pretty exciting. Like if a student wants to. Consume the content, grit the skill, grit they can learn from Michael Jordan. Not making his high school basketball team and the cool thing is the video format. It's funny. Quirky. It's engaging. But it still has all those learning outcomes tied to it, which is something, frankly, I wish I had when I was in middle high school.

Kevin HoganYeah. Jesse, talk a little bit about what that means on a day-to-day basis for our listeners, our readers who are either running districts themselves or their principal of a school or even at the classroom level, I mean. These are great theoretical topics, but what? About science class between 10:30 and 12:30 on a Tuesday. How do these curricula? Do these topics kind of show themselves in the day-to-day of educating students?

Jessie BushmanWell, I'm gonna step. Just one step and kind of explain how we. There. I think that'll make a little bit more sense looking for something. We just know that we needed something to add for our students and looking for a curriculum we couldn't find what we needed. They were not rigorous enough. Wasn't the correct content. Not engaging for our students or didn't have enough depth as as far as lessons to make it through a school year or to do a 612 model so. Once I saw the edge, the skies parted and I was like, this is exactly what we need. And so once we started teaching those things, we noticed that the students confidence changed. They became more confident in themselves in what they can do, looking forward to their futures. And so we had a lot less behaviors. So those started decreasing because. There was. We've also seen absentee change. Kids want to be at school, they want to be engaged. It's great with our staff as well. Like you said, adults need this too. This is stuff for all of us. It's been great teaching it because it's a reminder myself as well on a lot of these skills that you don't think. Every day.

Kevin HoganYeah, especially when you look at again. I hate to go back to COVID, but there really was a significant chasm there in, I would say the soft skills versus the hard skills. But we we kind of focus on the on the reading and and the math scores that go down. I see it from my own kind of COVID kids here to see. Of having a person to person in person conversation with someone if they weren't in school for 18 months between the time they were an eighth grader up to sophomore, they're still struggling to recover on how to. Behave in person for for a lot of stuff, right? But maybe Devi, you could talk a little bit. I know that you you had this integrated school framework, you had this educator friendly design that you put these things together. What is your hope terms of turning those soft skilled potentials into real world accomplishments?

Devi SahnyYeah, I think that in the digital age and like you said, the students that were were most impacted during COVID. Many of them have lost what's called human skills. Actually hate the term soft skills because I think soft and hard skills, but all human skills, right? Portions of soft skills have pieces of hard scales, etc. We actually focus on both soft and hard. But I would. That turning the pendulum back and saying how can we help these students develop self-confidence, self-awareness, resilience, grit through stories of themselves through activities, through gamified examples that will really take them forward into the real life. It's funny that you say this because I gave a talk at one of the leading international schools and recently and I asked the students, I think it was about 200. I asked them who here is confident with the skill networking and is confident speaking to people they have never met before in person. And I have 200 students, maybe 3 raise their hands. Then I reframe that question. Said. Who here in this classroom is confident speaking to someone they haven't met before online? Maybe 30 raised their hand. So there's this confidence and this comfort with online communication that is so easy for students to accept. It's interesting. I I I will say that sometimes I'm like that too, right? When I'm in person, meeting changes into zoom, I'm like, yeah. Like I don't have to like wear anything. Know too too fancy. I can do it in my hoodie. There is a bit of that right and I think there there's an honesty to that and I think that's important. But I think the. The fear with this new generation is that the human skills are not getting practised at all. Again, very weird example which I'll put in quotations. You may want to cut out, but some of our students, one of our students I'm speaking to recently, she's 19 years old, she said to me, I have a boyfriend. I said, oh, great. Where did you meet him? She said no. We've been dating for a year, but I never met him in person.

Kevin HoganIt's amazing, yeah.

Devi SahnySo it's like is the world changing that way or is it, you know, the skills or what's happening, right? But I think you know, Jesse's been Jesse's such an inspiring educator for this reason. Jesse's smart enough to know that teachers themselves also need to work on their SEL. All do. Adults, professors, everyone and so in parallel. If teachers working on their SEL, they're teaching students SEL. The students are teaching the teachers. And that's such a beautiful process because. Learning can happen in any sort of. But that's really our. My hope is to help students to fundamentally figure out who they are, their purpose, like Jesse's student who figured out what made himself tick. The Edge is designed for students to figure out who they are, what their strengths are, what skills they'd like to work on and for. Kevin, I'll be honest that the edge is designed as a one stop shop, easy to use resource that helps them use these skills in their classroom with no prep that gives them maybe 10 minutes extra with their, with their kids or their partner. That they don't have to write a whole Lesson plan or learning sequence, right? And that's important to us too, because they're the heroes.

Jessie BushmanThat was a huge. Point that I fell in love with when I saw it is these are lessons that I can just pick up. I can pick it up, I can read it, and I can teach it, and it's not something that's going to be another thing on. Plate right now I have a lot of things on my plate, so when I'm able to pick it up, the slides are ready for a whole group. Very little needed. It also has the online component. It has all the pieces to it prepped and ready, so it's not one more thing for me to have to do.

Kevin HoganYeah, another aspect I know which is important for districts. Again, when it came to social emotional learning techniques in the past, you might have had that guy, usually a guy on the school board saying. Show me the results. Show me the data. Show me how this is actually been effective and don't give me the squishy anecdotes. Me the the hard numbers. And I know that with the eggs, there are some real time analytic techniques that are connected with it.

Devi SahnyAbsolutely. So you as a teacher or a district can see how your students are performing across every. Personal development, communication, employability, skills, active citizenship and learning, and you can actually get a score to see how your students are progressing on a grade level. Age level. Student level. You can compare that data geographically so you can see what kids. In China or in Asia or Europe are doing compared to your students, at least those of our school partners that are working with us, we work with quite a few international schools too, like International School partnerships, Dulwich College, Xcl Cognita School, some of the American schools and so. Interesting to compare that data with some of the data in the US and to see how students. But overall, we're seeing that a lot of students are like, wow, I didn't know I could learn financial literacy. Didn't know I could learn about. I didn't know I could learn about entrepreneurship in such a friendly way, so that's really important to us, but also to feed the schools with unique data to see where the holes and the gaps are, because as schools. Ton of things you have to, you know, kind of take care of chronic absenteeism, teacher retention, you know, school leadership. So many things involved. I mean this is really just designed to see how can we. And we also have a mental health teacher track coming up too, which I'm really excited about because that's something that can really support the teachers.

Kevin HoganYeah. And Jesse, to kind of to go back a little bit, give us a little bit of a day in the. I mean, are these seen as extracurricular activities that happen after the Bell ring in the afternoon or they are they tied into actual classes? Kind of give us the specifics there.

Jessie BushmanWell, the one thing that I love about this curriculum is it's super. So according to your school, you can adapt it and switch it to. However, it's going to work best for you. We as a district started off with it in the special Ed program. Actually, and we needed a curriculum there 1st and looking at that then we saw the need like the rest of the kids need this information as well. Looking into putting it into advisory, that portion of time. A lot of times teachers are trying to fill that time with lessons themselves or create these types of lessons. So using it as universal gives the kids the the vocabulary, the information, and then we can use it all the way into special Ed. So it's an intensive program as well. It's very. That was huge for me that my students are going to have the same vocabulary from 6:00 to 12:00. In. Ed and special Ed.

Kevin HoganAnd it says to me that it's pretty much teacher driven or educated driven. That fair to say.

Jessie BushmanYeah, it's very engaging. All the material is very. And it's very relevant to the kids. The kids can relate to it. Stuff that's happening in their lives. The discussions. It's not just role. It's great discussions on actual problems in the world and tools that they can actually use right there in the classroom as well, so. They're discussing things that are happening right around us.

Kevin HoganExcellent. Now I think we've gotten a really good sense of the state of play of where we are with social emotional learning. Now, if you are up in progressive schools or districts like Jesse's, let's talk about. Next steps, Devi, where do you see? This is just the edges that's been launched here in January. What are your hopes to see your services as they continue to evolve over the next several months and and years?

Devi SahnyYeah. What we're doing in parallel supporting districts now, 200 schools and total. So we just enter the US, but we already work with seven districts here as well as Georgetown University Summer School and two other summer schools in the process. But my hope really is that as we have all these amazing districts using us to take as much feedback and see how we can make this product as easy to use and helpful for teachers. One of the feedbacks we've gotten is we love this so much. You include a teacher mental health track. And mental health videos for teachers to help us do what we're doing every single day. We have tracks that include entrepreneurship and internships. A lot of employability skills in college and career readiness, but we have two more tracks. Is called AI interpretation and another is graphic design in the making. So what happens in these tracks is the students can reapply the skills they were learning. But through an experience through something a different context where they can basically trans context, apply that skill again. So that's really cool because at the end of the entrepreneurship track, there's a Shark Tank for kids where they can compete, and the best business gets funding. Actually, that funding is funded by Ascend. Now, over the past seven years, actually we've. We funded student businesses as prize money essentially, and the internship track they can, you know, apply to different companies to apply for internships. So there's a bit of that, but overall my hope is. Is that we have this next generation of future ready, SCL, smart skill, savvy students across the world that know themselves that find their own edge through essay. Because essay everywhere and to have 30 minutes a week in SEL. I don't think that's enough. You know, I really Don. So it's a. It's a good start, but we need to do better, so I think valuing the Selma as a society would be something that I would be very interested to see what happens in the next few years.

Kevin HoganYeah. And Jesse will leave the last word with you about where your hopes to see this sort of work and how we can kind of continue to evolve and benefit your students.

Jessie BushmanI'm just excited to see what they can do with their futures as we're learning these skills and you see the light in their eyes and they're able to you do the challenges and apply the skills that they're learning in real life. Talking about networking, the challenges to go. And network and come back with three business cards. So we're putting it right in their. And so when they're learning, it guided with us, I mean, just excited to see what they're going to be able to do in the future.

Kevin HoganYeah. Well, once again, it's a difficult topic and you add in COVID. It's just always a tough conversation, but at the end of it I come out feeling better. Congratulations on your launch. Congratulations on on the work that you're doing. Jesse at your district glass always seems half full. When I when I sit. With a few educators for 15 or 20 minutes this way, and here the the real work and the real successes you're having. Thanks again for your time and for your insights.

Devi SahnyThanks so much Kevin for having us. We really appreciate it and love talking to you.

Jessie BushmanThank you.

Kevin HoganAnd that wraps up the special edition of Innovations in Education, which was brought to you by ascend. Now a US based education startup committed to increasing both college and career readiness for all students. For more information, you can find them on the web at buildmyedge.com.

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Laura Ascione, Editorial Director, eSchool MediaHi and welcome to another episode of Innovations in Education. I'm your guest host Laura Ashley owned editorial director of E School News, and I have with me Antoinette Banks, the founder of expert IEP. She's an award-winning cognitive scientist and advocate in the special education space and the mother of a child who has autism. Antoinette, thank you so much for joining us today.

Antoinette Banks, Founder, ExpertIEPThank you for having me, Laura.

Laura AscioneAbsolutely. I think this is going to be a great. There's so much happening with special education, and I know that on some days it seems we have a million moving parts. Today's conversation is just going to dive right in. I thought we could start by chatting a little bit. About some of the challenges in the special education space, and that could be challenges that parents and caregivers experience as they advocate for their children. Could be challenges that schools and districts are up against, or it could be policies and practices that that should be in place or should change. And I know that is a very broad question, but I'm looking forward to your insight on this one.

Antoinette BanksIt's very broad question. But I think it also fits because there is so much nuance that's involved within the ecosystem of special education and everything touches each other in different time. Is what I like to say. But what I always go back to is what I've constantly been talking to my colleagues and parents in generals that we know that special education has been underfunded since the individuals with Disabilities Education Act was enacted, and that was in 1975. And Congress committed to fund 40% of the average per people expenditure for special education services. So you can imagine if it hasn't even reached 40% and it's been around 14.7 maybe 15 on a Goodyear. It creates this sort of tension between families, between educators, between policymakers and states federally, across the board of how do we serve students without impacting families without impacting well meaning educators. And I really think that that's where it starts.

Laura AscioneAbsolutely. So that's 14.5 to 15% instead of 40%. Is a massive, massive shortfall.

Antoinette BanksYeah. Can you imagine if you knew that you were supposed to receive these funds and all of a sudden, now we have to be creative and understanding? How do we support students that really have the most emergent needs? It's it's ridiculous.

Laura AscioneRight. And part of that is knowing on the parent and caregiver side is knowing how to advocate for your child and what avenues you have. I know that it can often be very overwhelming to support a child with special needs in terms of getting them the access. And inclusion in their school that they deserve, and that they're entitled to. Where do some of those challenges crop up as parents and caregivers are navigating that scenario?

Antoinette BanksYes, I mean, I want to just paint the picture of you have a family and they're all of a sudden here as a mother, as a father or caregiver, seeing differences in your child when they play in the schoolyard or they play. Other kids. And all these other inputs coming in of knowing that, OK, my kid is presenting a little bit differently. Have to understand what's going on. So that's number one. And then #2, they make it all the way to receive a diagnosis and then they understand that their student now has a learning difference or disclose disability. And so while managing this and therapeutic support and all these things, they really think that the public school education is going to be where they can find some care and support.

Laura AscioneMm.

Antoinette BanksBut then it becomes this maze. That they have to navigate rather than the support system because you can have anywhere between 8 to 13 different people that will do assessments and it's deficit focused. In reality, parents are trying to figure out, OK, am I battling between? Speech therapy. Behavioral supports appropriate classroom accommodations while feeling like they're positioning my kid as something that we need to remedy rather than support. Hugely an emotive. Process that is definitely hard to navigate because the questions are #1 why be OK. And all these services that I now have to sign on on an IEP plan, will these truly support them? And then should I agree to this plan or is there is there something that I'm missing? A lot of anxiety that's involved.

Laura AscioneYeah, I can imagine that anxiety both as a parent and then trying to ensure that your child is receiving those services in school. Kind of like A2 fold anxiety. You're you're focused on your child, their development. And then you have to bring the school component in.

Antoinette BanksInteresting to that though, is the opposite side too, where the educators have spoken. Are struggling with their own anxieties. They're saying, hey, am I doing a good enough job?

Laura AscioneMm.

Antoinette BanksDo the goals that I suggest. Are they rigorous enough? Are we going to push this child to achieve and then can they achieve and then will this IEP also stand up to scrutiny because my job could be on the line? And so if there's unspoken fears and then there's tension and mistrust? Then how do we create a better system that dismantles this cycle?

Laura AscioneYeah. And I'd like to go into that a little. You mentioned how do we create this better system and maybe pulling from the areas where you've seen schools maybe not have enough resources or kind of struggle to rebuild that trust? What are some of those avenues that we could look at to maybe better this process and and build more trust between parents and the educators?

Antoinette BanksOh yeah. Communication. Yeah. Communication. Communication is king. Yes, I think that there are some well meaning people that say, oh, if we involve the family or if we tell them sort of what they're entitled to under the law or what this might mean, they'll they'll impose too much.

Laura AscioneMm.

Antoinette BanksBut what I've seen the opposite, especially with my work. The more a family understands, then the more they can appreciate what is happening in the school environment. And then it becomes a team rather than a fight. Because schools have to meet legal requirements, period. And then if they're pushing compliance because that's what they have to meet, then families are already they're walking away, feeling unheard and uninformed, of course. If we modernize how families engage with the IEP process. Whether or not taking away these 30 and 50 page documents, but they can see it, they can read it, they understand it. It's not as. Of a hard read. I mean, I think we can all look on our libraries and home and we all have that one book that is such a hard read and you keep saying I'm going to get to it. Never get to it because it's difficult to understand.SpeakerMm.

Antoinette BanksYeah. And imagine, though that this is the same feeling on an IEP. And now instead of, you know, some make believe person, you're actually talking about your kids. And what that actually means, one family said to me that ieps for them is like doing taxes. And trying to understand what is being asked of me to sign off on, because if I sign off on it then I agree. And so I think it goes back to communication. If we tell families what they can expect confidently from the school environment and the school environment knows that the family is on board and we do regular check. Not just when a student has a behavior problem, but when a student is also. Well, then I think that you know that puts positive deposits into back into the family to want to support what's happening in the school environment.

Laura AscioneYeah, I think that's an excellent. I love that positive deposits and you know there there is that saying you know catch them doing good. Right. And I think that kind of applies when you talk about sending positive feedback and and positive feed. And yeah, really just that idea of communication. I think that the more informed everybody is and the better the communication is, the more everyone like you said is going to feel like a team and like they are all working together for the child. The students best interests instead of approaching a meeting. Being very wary of of maybe what's what's going to be brought up or what changes are going to be implemented.

Antoinette BanksYeah. So.

Laura AscioneI wanted to touch very briefly. Just talk a little bit about how special education has always been underfunded and now, with a new presidential administration entering the picture, we have talked about dismantling the Department of Education, which this is not the first time that has been brought up by an administration, but I think. Is certainly the the first time we've seen such swift and. Movements that. We hear about everyday news coming. I think the latest is there is a lawsuit. Involving Texas and a number of other states trying to get rid of 50 fours and ieps between all of these events and what we're pretty sure is going to be limited funding for education. What challenges do we think special education programs are going to be up against under this new presidential administration?

Antoinette BanksYeah, it's not something to be taken lightly. I think that everything that gets published is so vague and almost a prelude to what we know can certainly become under attack.

Laura AscioneOK.

Antoinette BanksAnd cause huge strain and stress across the board and and it's very real and I don't want to, you know, skate by and pretend that it's not and people are feeling fear and that is valid because. They've probably often fought for their kids. And across the board, educators as well. And so when you have something. Like this in your. It's very difficult to manage because we know if the Department of Education is dismantled. Then we special education could become a state by state issue that creates even more disparities. And we know now that some districts are very well. There are other districts that aren't well funded, but if we cut programs entirely. And we leave students without critical services. And that's just a fact. It there's no way to get around that. It's 100% effect and the best way to do that. The best way to combat that is to understand what advocacy groups are doing. Programs like mine, what we what we are offering, we've gone to the drawing board. Since January, to really revamp how we communicating real time advocacy tools with our families so that they're less dependent on schools or other programs that are seen as. And then for schools, how do we offer insights that, yes, insurers compliance, but also has student centered programs as well? And so I feel like there's a lot of tension, but at some point, maybe I'm delusional. I think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity here. For parents to come together like they did, which is the reason why we have special education from the grassroot efforts of families. And I do think that there's going to be a light at the end of tunnel.

Laura AscioneWell, I think if that makes you delusional, that makes a lot of us delusional. 'Cause I. That's what we all have to hope for. Because at at the bottom of it all, every student deserves to be on an equal footing when they leave high. No matter where they go, they deserve the same access to opportunities. They deserve to be supported in the ways that help them learn and achieve best. No matter what their different challenges are, and we all have challenges, right? So with that. I did want to turn the page just a little bit and ask you. We've talked about some of the challenges and maybe some of the more discouraging things that we might be facing. What have you seen that encourages? What have you seen from parents or from districts or or, you know, in your work? Have you seen that really inspires you?

Antoinette BanksThe inspiration is always with the heart. The people. I have seen incredible organizations really take a stand and then say hey, we. Have you and we have your families? My organization is one, but I see them a lot, especially the Ark in DC, the National Center for Learning Disabilities, as well as one of them. And people are not backing down in terms of wanting and a drive and a need to first, let me explain how the current law says that families are protected regardless of where funding goes. Families and their rights are still protected. That's number. And if anyone is listening, I want you all to know that too. Yes, we're understanding that funding does have an impact. Your rights are still protected. At the end of the day, and that would cause me to have a little bit more of an umph in my step. Not going and talking to people. I mean, the voices of the Community will continue to rise as we're already seeing now, in an effort to support, to protect and to continue to love despite of because I am. I am a person that understands that love. Will be able to trample fear and that love creates more intuition. It creates more purpose and it creates more meaning in our work. Because we've gone back to revamp the way in which we do things to support families, especially to understanding this, we do have a wait list. And if there are families that really need support right now, what I can do is bump you up. And if you just e-mail. At expertiep.com, I promise I'll get you connected. That.

Laura AscioneAwesome. Yeah, that's a powerful. And certainly even more powerful to know that you have allies and advocates behind you helping you.

Antoinette BanksSpecial education in General, I think makes a lot of people feel alone and isolated just by #1 the diagnosis and depending on what community or culture you're a part of, it is very. But at the end of the day, I think that is one thing that most of the families and educators in this ecosystem are going to feel. They're going to feel like you've been doing the work alone. And it may feel like that, but you're actually not. There are people who are supportive of where your kids are going to end up wherever you are across the pond.

Laura AscioneAbsolutely. Well with that, Antoinette, I want to thank you so much for being here and for chatting with me. I feel like we could probably talk all day on this, so at some point I'm probably going. You're probably going to get an e-mail from me wanting to catch up and maybe check in and see what else has developed since we chatted. But I I really thank you for your time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Innovations in Education. See you next time. Thank you for joining us on this edition of Innovations in Education, which was sponsored by managed methods. Stay tuned for more insightful discussions about what's next in Ed Tech. This episode was brought to you by managed methods. Managed methods is the only company providing K12 specific cybersecurity and safety for Google Workspace Microsoft 360. An online. Browsing our product suite makes cybersecurity and safety easy and affordable for school districts working to keep their students, faculty, staff and community safe. Gain the visibility and control you need to monitor, alert and respond when time is of the essence. No proxy, no agent, and no special training needed. Our newest product classroom manager is the classroom management tech that teachers have been waiting for. Contact manage methods today to learn how other districts are benefiting from unifying their cybersecurity students. Web filtering and classroom management systems. District Tech teams love our products, reliability, ease of use, and lightweight construction, which has minimal impact on the end user experience.

Kevin HoganHappy New Year. Happy New Year 2025, Laura. This is our annual Gabfest on the latest and greatest of eSchool News. We saw last year and what we're kind of looking forward to. The future happy holidays, Laura.

Laura AscioneThanks. Happy holidays. Yeah. I look forward to this chat. I love talking about this.

Kevin HoganYeah, it's. It's fun to kind of look back and see, you know, all the various different topics and aspects of our worlds. You know, we covered a lot of stuff. E school between. Events between the CoSN and the ISTEs and the FETCs, as well as just all the you know, stuff that our contributors are bringing in and some of the conversations we're having, there's a lot to unpack, right.

Laura AscioneAbsolutely, yeah.

Kevin HoganLet's dive right in. I don't think we could go more than 3 minutes in 2024 without mentioning. The acronym of the decade. No, not COVID, but AI, right?

Laura AscioneYeah, who knew that something would eclipse the number of headlines we had about COVID and COVID gaps. But AI has done it. And I think that's really evident in our predictions stories, and we've solicited predictions and trends for 2025 from educators, from industry leaders, from policy makers. And I was expecting a number of AI predictions, and I was not disappointed. I think this is an interesting thing. In 2025 is, you know, for the past couple years we've had AI is kind of this novel thing, right? And a lot of people have been worried about it. Students use it too. Will it impact their writing ability? They really. And will they absorb what I'm teaching them? And I think I think the number of people who are worried about that is going to decrease. It already is decreasing, and I think in 2025, we're going to see an emphasis on. I think two things. One is really what AI can do for the classroom beyond just alleviating administrative tasks or being a quick reference tool for students. Think we're going to see it get into. Deeper part. Of learning and then the second thing. Is that I think we're really gonna focus on ensuring that students are building AI skills so that when. Leave. School, whether they're entering the workforce, entering a certification program or going on to a two year or four year. Program. They have the beginning of these AI skills because we're hearing so much about having the ability to use AI to know how to prompt it to learn more about it as it evolves. Those skills are really going to be critical for competitiveness, not just. In the US, but really globally.

Kevin Hogan

100. And you know, it's really kind of interesting when you think of it.

SpeakerA.

Kevin HoganTopic and you know, some mornings I wake up. Was like that. Going to talk about this again. But it really is something that is kind of, you know, it's affecting all aspects, not only of education but society. But when you look at education itself, there's so many different flavors of it, right? You mentioned the classroom and the idea of cheating. And students are definitely at the forefront of. Like you know that that's the one that is kind of maybe the most sexy or the most like. That people talk about. But there's so many other different ways in which it's infiltrating. The way we teach and learn, and as you said administrative, there are as many tasks being automated that way in the back office as they are kind of in the classroom. And I think our coverage kind of reflected that, right. Meaning we at first maybe 2023, there was a bit of a fear cycle. Right, every teacher. To lose their job to AI. Students. Every student was going to cheat. And then there was a hype cycle. And then you saw it reflected in a lot of the Ed tech shows where everyone was suddenly. An AI company. Because they're implementing it into their technology and I and I think you're right, I mean we are approaching the kind of the. Then I call it the reality cycle where. As transformative and disruptive as it is. It might start to become a little bit boring, especially to the students, because unlike us oldies, I mean this is something. They've been used to and a tool that. Had, right? But again, teaching etiquette, teaching literacy in the right ways and wrong ways to use it. It's just like the same as you're teaching them how to use the Internet.

Laura AscioneAbsolutely. And I think that is one of the critical pieces of this and that kind of illustrates, again, where human teachers are so necessary, human teachers are. Going away. But yeah, and I think I shared this story in an internal conversation we had. My daughter was working on a biology project, and she knew what she wanted. For one section of this. But she needed it. Inspiration and. And you know, without sharing too much. Her personality. Detail if she does have ADHD and you know. So, if something stumps her, she might just kind of Chuck it to the side and and not complete that portion. But she went right to an AI tool she already had. The genesis of what she wanted, but the AI tool really helped her expand on what she wanted and helped her organize her thoughts. And she mentioned it in a very offhand way, and it was so natural. Control way, I think is a great illustration of how kids are using it. It's not this big robot in the sky that, you know, I think those of us who grew up with, you know, crazy sci-fi films and stuff might initially think of. It was another resource for her and I think I think again, teaching kids OK, this is. Great resource. When do you use it? When do you not use it? Is it acceptable to? What do we cite and how do we? How much credit do we have? You know, and there we've run a lot of contributed pieces from educators and industry experts who were getting. Just that. Hey, instead of telling your kids they can't use AI, let's create an AI rubric. Let's look at it. Appropriate to use when is it. When is it not OK as long as your original voice is coming through? This is great if you're using it to write an essay and turn it in. Not so great. So I think it's really interesting. I think it's pretty fascinating to see. How have we gone from? You know, like you said, the. 2023. Period to where we are now.

Kevin HoganYeah. So the general consensus is that we welcome our new AI overlords. But know that we can still have some control over, right? Mean we're gonna. We're gonna keep writing. This in 2025.

Laura AscioneOh, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin HoganSo what? I mean, what else? When you look back over your editorial calendar of the hundreds of stories that we've posted up to E school news that you see worthy of kind of doing an A once over.

Laura AscioneI think another area and this again is another topic that really came through as I'm gathering our predictions for 2025 is not just a focus on student well-being for improved student mental health, but kind of linking better student well-being. To positive student outcomes to improved outcomes and student success. Achievement is 1 area that I think is really growing and I think we've always known, you know, a child who is hungry or stressed or has anxiety at home, cannot sit in a classroom and learn as well as a child who does not struggle with those Challen. But I think there's a lot more attention being paid. To this area now, and I don't want to leave out teacher well-being either because I think teacher well-being and teacher burnout, those are another couple areas in the school mental health umbrella that we don't want to neglect. I do think we're seeing more attention paid to student well-being and how that translates to improving a student's academic achievement, which I think is important.

Kevin HoganAbsolutely. I think it's kind of a byproduct of the pandemic, really, that mental health is always something that was nice to have maybe, especially in maybe wealthier districts, you would have the budgets to maybe have extra counselors or things on the side, but it wasn't front and. Until March of 2020, right. We all. Everyone experienced this group trauma and this realization that before you begin any sort of instruction, whether it's in person or in a remote set up, you ask people how they're feeling. And for the students and. And as you say, it's just as important for the faculty. It's like. Do you feel safe? You feel? Like, OK, are you, you know? Are you ready? Ready to learn? And one of the ironies I think that when we went through this great beta test of remote learning and using zoom and using, you know, other tools where we were apart, there were some innovations that came about that are helpful in that space of. Mental health, specifically one-on-one meetings with teachers. Instead of having that back-to-school night with 3570 parents for the 35 students in the classroom, maybe you just set up a zoom. And you had a one to one that way a lot of the special education dynamics of IEP meetings. Other things that you know. Weren't even allowed to be. They had to be in person and. Because of the pandemic they did. Had to. Remote. They said, you know. This actually works a little bit better. The dynamics are a little bit better than being in person with a principal or a guidance counselor. Open up a little bit more, so I agree with you that that is something that. Thankfully, it seems to not have gone back to normal, right? Mean it. It's kind of stuck.

Laura AscioneYeah, I. I agree, and I think all like you said, all for the better.

Kevin HoganYeah, yeah. I know one thing I have here on my list is something that never went away. Even enduring it is the idea of cybersecurity and network security that continues to be a big headache and you know. A big challenge for most of the districts across the US. Any takes on that?

Laura AscioneYeah, I think. And again, this is another stand out from our trends. I think that as we have more, you know and people have been saying this for a while. Have more devices connecting to school networks as we have more student data that we're trying to keep. Safe and secure, bringing in more Edtech. And also as the bad actors become more sophisticated, I think the need for really strong cyber security practices and evolving cybersecurity practices. Becomes really, really. Imperative and it's interesting. And I think part of this, you know, going back to COVID all of a sudden we had one to one, you know, remote access. Know that poses a threat to school networks, and then, even as things kind of normalize. And kids are back in classrooms. You still have personal computing devices and sometimes multiple devices accessing or multiple devices per user accessing school networks, and I think sometimes it's hard to stay on top of it. I know in my children's school district we were told very much. Specifically, no personal devices will be allowed into school this year. Yeah. That has not been the case. So you have personal home laptops connecting to the school network, and then they're at home downloading whatever they're downloading. I think it is hard to stay on top of things like this, particularly in large districts, even though you tend to have larger teams for larger districts. But I think you also know there is a lot of talk of hackers becoming more sophisticated and as personal data becomes more valuable to people who want to take advantage of it, right? This round the clock vigilance that will be needed to really keep networks safe and secure. That's not even going into, you know, the kids. Might be. Trying to hack into their. Networks just to see if they can. Which can open up, you know, a lot more headaches. Those kids realize.

Kevin HoganAbsolutely. That kind of leads into my predictions for 2025 and what we're going to be. Writing and talking about is just that, the use of devices limiting screen time, limiting device management within the district it seems it started. In June this year, when I was at a press conference with the Superintendent from Los Angeles talking about how they were going to be, you know, starting what you're saying, that your kids' districts are doing it, which is limiting those uses.SpeakerThat's it.

Kevin HoganGoing to be a big deal. That's my number one projection going forward, but. To wrap things up, what? What are they? What are you looking for? I guess we can try to keep the glass half full. What's happening in 2025?

Laura AscioneYeah, I think there's a lot of uncertainty. I do think that talks of perhaps dismantling the Department of Education, while that has been brought up, I know we have talked before about how that is a pretty heavy lift. And there's a lot that goes into it. So while that is something that has been mentioned, I don't know that that's something that is necessarily going to occur, at least not in 2025.SpeakerIII I.

Laura AscioneThink uncertainty is probably the word of the day around that I know. Not sure. About funding, it is likely, I think, from what I've read and heard that the Department of Education is not going to receive as much funding, or maybe it will. You know, education is not gonna get the bucks, and so when that happens, we'll see. Because we're already dealing with, you know, the Esser funding expiring and a lot of districts are realizing, oh, now we've got to cut back on staff or now we suddenly don't have the funds to maintain all of these. Programs and hardware and everything that we brought in. I think it's definitely. It's going to be a tricky time funding wise, but I think we can all agree that we're very hopeful. That it won't be as bad as some people worry it might be.

Kevin HoganFrom your lips to God's ears. Well, as always, great having a conversation with you, Laura. Always fun working with you. I think we really hit all the high points and the low points over 2024 looking back and looking forward to seeing what we can cover and seeing. The advancements and the progress of our industry and our schools in 2025. As always, thank you. And once again, happy New Year.

Laura AscioneAbsolutely. Thanks Kevin.

Kevin HoganAnd that's all we have for this month's episode of Innovations in Education. Be sure to go up to eschoolnews.com and add your name to the subscription list if you want to get this podcast every month. If you're not already doing so, be sure to go into our webinars where we have other conversations. Some of the top and most important issues that you need to learn for the way that you operate your school districts. So, thanks again for listening and. A great day.

The computer-generated transcript is below:

Kevin HoganOK. Hello and welcome to another episode of Innovations and Education. The podcast where we dive deep into the intersection of education and technology. I'm your host, Kevin Hogan. I'm the content director for East School News, and I'm glad you found us. In this episode I am joined by two longtime advisers to both me and to dozens of school districts throughout throughout the country. Keisha Ray and Susan Gentz Co, founders of K20 connects, are a group whose mission is to guide K20 leaders with vetted, research based information, knowledge and expertise, which ultimately improves the outcomes for all students no matter the topic. I'm always able to gather insights and ideas from this pair. Today we're diving into two big buzzwords that are flying around the Ed tech world. Personalized learning and of course, AI. One of these terms, personalized learning, has been around for a while. The other AI is obviously the hot new topic that's infiltrating every conversation, from curriculum development to classroom management and beyond. You can't escape it. I think you'll find their conversation on how AI can affect the actual use of personalized learning techniques, both in the classroom and scale, to districts illuminating. Have a listen. OK, Keisha. Susan, great to see you. Although not in person. We're on our uh zoom platform here the the the new conversational platform for the ages, right. But great to see your faces.

Dr. Kecia Ray Founder-CEO K20 ConnectsGood to be here and see you too, my friend.

Kevin HoganI guess I always enjoy seeing you guys in person more than than just on zoom, but when we were at our usual Fe etc. Or is he gatherings? I'm always relying on both of you to kind of take the temperature. Basically, take your insights to make me sound smart throughout the rest of the year for E school news. And the the you know, putting together our editorial calendars and the topics that we're doing. So I always appreciate those insights and wanted to tap you this month. It's it's been a few months since we've had you on Keisha and Susan, I think. This is your first. One to help me take the temperature of kind of two of the phrases that I'm finding. Being thrown around in the Edtech sphere, that one which has been always there for for over a decade and one that's brand new, that we can't escape for more than 5 minutes. Personalized learning and AI through a lot of the work and the conversations I've been having, of course. You can't talk about anything without AI being somehow attached to it, whether it's developing curriculum, when, whether you're talking about classroom behaviors, whether you're talking about things on the back office side in terms of administration and the use of AI to kind of help put things together. But one I I keep hearing more and more. Is how AI can affect personalized learning and more specifically. Account AI can be a great tool to help enable teachers to actually put together effective personalized learning strategies, so I'll put you both on the hot seat. Keisha. I'll. I'll. I'll hit you first, though. Talk a little bit about the work within your context. 820 and you know the the districts that you've been talking to and the superintendents of the leadership, what do their conversations sound like when it comes to AI and and personalized learning?

Dr. Kecia RayThat is a quasi loaded question because I think that districts are challenged right now to kind of figure out how like what the proper use of AI is in their district, recognizing that they've been using AI for at least a decade. Without having any kind of policy change or any kind of. You know, let's call a consultant in and have a big, you know, meeting about it. But I do think that especially with the generative component, I think districts are struggling to find the line. Of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable with instruction from the teacher's perspective, what a teacher should and shouldn't be able to do in a classroom. With regard to her instruction or his instruction, and then with the student perspective. And I think when we think of personalization, we think of helping find a way to meet the student where they are with their deepest, greatest passions, so that they can have the most success. And feel the most empowered about their own learning and that, I mean, obviously to me, that's what every piece of learning should be like. It shouldn't just be personalized. But we've had to put A tag on it and we've caught it personalized and. I think the generative component of AI has less of an impact on that than the AI that preceded that, if that makes sense.

Kevin HoganIs that resonating with you, Susan?

Susan Gentz Associate Partner-COO K20 ConnectsYeah, that's interesting. And I see, you know, you say we help make you sound smart. Our clients are the ones who are sometimes doing cutting edge things where we're really seeing some new things come. And I would say I have one client that keeps telling me about these AI bots that are going to be here in three years and they're going to be doing all of these things and how right now, there's still a great deal of people that are scared of what's happening, right. And so we're seeing a lot of, especially, policies react to that by we're banning everything. That's the swing that we're starting to see with that which is not going to serve students in a future where they're, you know, their career is going to touch on it and have it. And so to me, the question. That is, how do we yes, personalize and use AI? While also bringing people along who just want. To shut it. Down. Because I think we are definitely seeing a large portion of the population that is no cell phones in the classroom. No, we're starting to see that swing back with some of the policies that have been introduced.

Kevin HoganYeah. I mean, I've kind of recognized that the you know, of course there was the initial fear cycle, right? That AI is going to replace all the teachers that you know, there's not going to be teachers anymore. There's no need for them, which is absurd on its face. And then there's kind of the hype cycle where it's going to solve everything. Right.

Susan GentzRight.

Kevin HoganAnd then now when you start to see Microsoft and Khan Academy start to bake in, copilot and some of these AI tools into just every day, the teachers are already using now it's kind of maybe more of a of a reality cycle, which I think is is is is productive, but they're still kind of just. Layers of of confusion about where. These new techniques and these new strategies are going to come from and I kind of wonder is like. It's like a lot of stuff in the tech. Is it top down? Is it the director of technology and the Superintendent who's going to say, OK, here's our new policy. Use it or lose it, or is it, is it going to be more coming from the bottoms up where it's just you have innovative teachers who? Our listeners and our readers who are already passionate about this stuff, they're already invested in this stuff. They're figuring out the way, as you said, Susan, that they just start doing it. They ask for forgiveness instead of permission when it comes to using these tools in school. But again, ultimately to this, this idea. Of 35 kids in your classroom. How are you going to be able to manage that and have some sort of effective personalized learning strategy? Enter in every kid has their own bot. Maybe you can.

Dr. Kecia RayWell, I mean, there's plenty of tools out there that teachers use that have AI incorporated into them that we use to personalize instruction anyway. I mean, there's a lot of software applications that have AI embedded in them that have been used for a very long time and we. We adopt those to incorporate a kind of a personalized approach for our instruction, I think, where the generative AI can really accelerate that, if you will, is looking at a teacher putting in design a lesson into Gemini or copilot. For example, design a lesson for a fifth grade boy with a reading learning disability who is interested in sports. Now you get. At least it's not going to be a complete lesson, but you'll get a spike. You know you'll get a template for a lesson that you can then take, and it'll give you some ideas of where you can go with teaching a lesson to a kid who has a disability, a learning disability, you've got to teach him. Reading. He's interested in sports. Here's where I can get started. So I think for that kind of teaching, you can use the generative to help you develop lessons that can be a little bit more tailored to student interest, but I don't think that. You can separate the two. Pool of those softwares that have the AI embedded from that lesson planning, you're going to have to have both of those things because the tool offers that really unique personalized pathway that a teacher can't do as easily in their in their individual lesson. They can design them, but they'll still have to, otherwise they can't design 35 individual lessons. That's a little bit challenging. I mean, we would all love to as teachers, but it's super challenging. But I can create, you know, a series of lessons that are for this type of kid, like 10 types like pick your, you know, we used to call him. Secure a pathway or, you know, design your own mystery kind of thing and let the kid kind of come to the type of lesson that they're most interested in and follow that. And I can do that with AI's generation.

Susan GentzYeah, I think a lot of that is just kind of the scalability of it, right and how we're able to scale, which is always been the argument with technology, right? That's how we can we can use online things to scale and reach more students. But even going back to the reauthorization of the every Student Succeeds Act Succeeds Act. The whole point was that we could use adaptive. Assessments we could use different ways of accountability, and you can do more of that through the use of these AI tools because you can then differentiate better through these tools. I think the whole idea of the flexibility within ESO was to really promote these pathways and these options and these different ways of assessing and teaching using tools that can help you do that. And that law was signed in 2014. So we're coming up on 10 years ago already.

Dr. Kecia RayI do think something you you asked does it need to be. Top down or bottom up. I think the bottom teachers always need to challenge administration in doing the right thing for kids because they're the closest to the kid they have everyday contact with a student and the further away you sit from that classroom desk, the less you really relate to what a teacher. Is encountering every single day, but the teacher doesn't see the policy implications and the legal implications that happen. From the district perspective, so I think the tension is we need this. We're you know, we need this in the classroom to make things awesome. And the Superintendent or district level people saying we would love to do that for you, but it would create a tremendous amount of legal liability that we just we can't take on. And helping everyone understand what that looks like. And with AI that can be around data and privacy, it can also be around bias. We know that since we have introduced systems, software systems that have had assessment embedded that we might have an over identification of special Ed students. We might have an over identification of students with disabilities that are in a particular demographic, so there is inherent bias in anything that is AI generated simply because of the algorithm and the way that it is developed. Looked I'm working on a National Science Foundation grant and related to AI and one of the things one of the researchers said this morning is when we design AI algorithms. We design them for a particular population in mind and what happens is you put it out there in the ecosystem and then it gets translated. To every population. And then there's bias. Well, of course they're biased. There's bias because it was never intended to be used for that group of kids or that type of. Person so you can't, you know, in his speaking, creating an AI algorithm has to be. If you've ever done coding, you know how discrete it is to. A population to to, you know, a sentence to what it is actually trying the task it's trying to complete and to say apply to all isn't like practically nothing you would ever see in code so. We take things that are developed for a population, apply them to many populations. Bias comes in, and then we have kids that are over identified because we've used a tool that has AI. So the district people have to be engaged and they have to look out for that because of their role in the whole system of education. But the teachers need to say, here's something that we know can engage a kid, and we believe it will enlighten them, and it will. Spark their interest and you know, get them excited about math or reading or whatever. And so we want to bring this to you to consider for approval. So there has there, that natural tension has to exist for really good learning to be taking place in a classroom.

Kevin HoganSo probably much in the same way that I would assume the teachers would have to advocate for going to a particular website, say, or a particular YouTube channel, or to use the use to use YouTube at all, right? I mean in terms of. Like getting permission to use tools that might be going if not against, but just you need to get exceptions from overall district policies.

Dr. Kecia RayI think we can get in the habit of developing policies based on technologies or events. But if you have really good policies, they will stand the test of time independent of the event and event or technology. And right now people are getting caught up. In my humble and personal opinion, in the frenzy of the what ifs. But your policy, if it's written well, which it probably is. Should stand this test. I mean, we've had these exact same conversations when we talked about bringing Internet into schools. Students having e-mail addresses. Having software assessments. These are not new conversations at all. It's just a new technology.SpeakerYeah.

Dr. Kecia RayThat we're introducing.

Susan GentzYeah. And I mean, I've been doing a lot of work with deep fakes lately, which is, you know, even kind of this newer version.SpeakerAnd uh.

Susan GentzI can see the plus if someone can deep fake George Washington and bring him to life for a lesson and have really cool history conversations with people through that and it feels real and we know that the retention, when things feel real is much better than when we don't find them as real or in context or meaningful. But then again, you know there's a lot of other negative sides that could come from the deep fakes and. Seen where that will go? We've already seen a few examples in administration and everything, but I think there's this really cool opportunity of like there. There are great learning tools that can happen with AI, but then not always being so sure of how far the unintended consequences will go and what you do need to be prepared for as. AI even keeps advancing within itself.

Kevin HoganRight. And I guess we we also just need to consider the student as well, right? I mean while these are all brand new technologies and techniques for us, they're kind of. Old hats for. The average third grader, they've just always kind of been there, right? And so once again, we're kind of at this disconnect with the adults. Are dealing with these new technologies that that these students themselves and. See is a status quo. Any suggestions for the faculty out there who are trying to take those first steps Susan and and to kind of use these tools in the in the classroom when it comes to managing, managing the the students when it either comes to, you know, ethical ways to use it. You know you know what? What is cheating.

Dr. Kecia RayYeah.

Kevin HoganIn in AI and what it means to write a hundred word essay as well as just kind of the bigger the bigger picture ramifications.

Susan GentzYeah. Yeah. Well, I do think that a lot of it is going to come back to how your district is guard railing, right, like that's where it's going to have the biggest effect. And I know Keith just said a lot of the policies that are good and will stand the test of time, but also it's still a little bit the wild Wild West. I mean, especially it. And if you go above the district level at the state level and. Federal level. It's a lot of task forces right now, so people are still trying to decide exactly how they want to put those guardrails in and what it looks like. And putting guardrails in and not limiting is the hardest conversation you're going to have around it, right, like. How do we make sure they're safe, but not limit what we? Can do with it. And I think that's really where the biggest opportunity for districts is right now as students come in and they ask for these tools or they use it somewhere else and they don't understand why. They can't use it at school. Or different scenarios like that. I think those policies are really going to set the tone for future use in whichever district.

Kevin HoganThat resonate kasha.

Dr. Kecia RayIt does. I think that we, you know, we've seen a lot around. The AI frenzy, as I like to call it. But I do think it is causing people to to look very carefully at their policies at their practices and think about. How do we need to to susans phrase put guardrails so that we can protect our kids, protect our data, protect our system and also you know guard rails are meant to protect the person in the car and the car. But the guardrail like takes the brunt of it, right? So how can we put a structure in place where the guardrail takes the brunt of it, but the kids are still safe? The system is still safe. We're still able to kind of move ahead and. I. Think not hitting any of the potholes, which would be the bias that could potentially be present. And any kind of data usage that could potentially happen that's not approved. I know some districts are like, well, should we bring our data back on Prem or you know can should we get rid of the cell phones? I mean it's creating. It's creating conversations and discussions that we thought we had already had, and now we're second guessing them, which may or may not be a bad thing. It's just, let's not second guess them in in a vacuum. And let's not second guess them in a state of frenzy. Right, you never make good decisions when you're in a state of frenzy. You make them when you're calm, collected, soaking in all the information, really thinking deeply about it. And then. And reacting accordingly. There are some really great resources out there, some phenomenal districts doing great stuff. I'm doing a series of interviews across the country just specific to AI. They'll be housed in their system, but I will also have them accessible through the K20 Connect website. And I think it's super telling because I'm just asking them. Are you using that? What's your approach? What are you doing? What are you thinking?

Kevin HoganSo when you when you're talking to these districts, you said there's some really innovative stuff going on out there and then you have districts who are, say, two or three. Here's kind of behind. I mean, maybe they're still just kind of recovering from COVID any particular, if not pieces of advice. It's just kind of a heads up of what might be coming their way over the next two to three years when it comes to further advances with personalized learning via these AI tools.

Dr. Kecia RayMy personal opinion is in the next 5 to 10 years, education is going to have to look very, very different than it does today or you will have a massive amount of people not choosing. Public education. And AI is attributing that if I can enroll my kid in a program that gives access to all of these things versus a school district that shut it all down, in my opinion is it's a good thing. And I want her to be. I mean, it's not going away. I'd rather her learn how to use it. What's appropriate? What's not appropriate? How to? Incorporated into her daily life rather than, you know, I'm going to put all the elect stuff in my house. It's literally never going to happen. I I'm waiting for the Alexa that's going to deliver a peanut butter sandwich to her when I want to come.

Kevin HoganBut your 3D printer for.

Dr. Kecia RayThat I do need that you're right. But you know, I as a parent, I might choose a different path. And I think you're going to see more and more parents.SpeakerOK.

Dr. Kecia RayAdvocate for I want a personalized experience for my kids. It's not even personalized. It's just I want an experience for my head that's tailored to what their needs are and what their interests are. And yes, that's personalized. But that's more than what 1 teacher can do. That's really what a whole school and a whole system needs to embrace.

Kevin HoganExcellent, Susan. Well, we'll leave you with the last word on this.

Susan GentzOhh boy. Yeah, it's true. I mean, wouldn't we think especially to with S or funds dropping off now, districts are going to have to be making some hard decisions on the tools to keep and the ones that are helping the students the most and the ones that are attracting students to their district. When you look at? A couple of years ago, economics put out before atypical shocks coming to the education market, declining enrollment, a shortage for labor recession. All of these things. This is what districts are fighting against, and if you can attract both students and teachers to your district, you're going to be in the best place because everybody is fighting those issues to some extent. And if it is because you allow students to truly have a personalized learning experience that gets them into a career path. That they're passionate about and they want to be in and they have awesome opportunities to get into there and meet the people that are doing it in their community. I'm here in Iowa, we have a brain drain problem. If we can get students excited about the communities they live in, that is a win for everybody all around. And I think if you're open to using transformative learning. Models and transformative tools. It's going to put you in a way better place for drawing people in and keeping people there.

Kevin HoganYeah, well, I need the toughest part of my job here would be to end the conversation. We could go on for a while. That the topic is so important and so many different layers and so many different aspects of it. But I appreciate your time for this little aspect of it and look forward to talking to you both again soon.

Susan GentzThanks.

Kevin HoganAnd that about wraps it up for this episode of Innovations and Education, be sure to go up to eschoolnews.com and click on to the podcast and subscribe. I think if you like this conversation and you made it this far, you probably find enjoyment in our other episodes. Also, be sure to bookmark E school news.com for a variety of resources to do your job when it comes to exploring the latest and greatest trends in education and technology once again. I'm Kevin Hogan, and thanks for listening.

These EdTech experts explore how their districts initially approached online learning, their successes, challenges, and the pivotal shifts they've observed in teaching methodologies. We'll also discuss the emergence of virtual academies, hybrid learning models, and the long-term implications for education post-pandemic. 

This episode is sponsored by Stride Professional Development. Are you tired of one-size-fits-all PD? Do you want to differentiate your professional learning? Discover our expanding library of on-demand, bite-sized, and mobile-friendly courses that meet teacher and school learning needs. Based upon microlearning principles, our courses are developed by educators for educators as content experts are paired with instructional designers who have been teachers as well. To learn more go to https://stridepdcenter.com/

• Cybersecurity Assurance:Compare comprehensive cybersecurity solutions, which safeguard school districts against digital threats and protect sensitive data.
• DEI Empowerment:Ensure equitable Internet access for all students, regardless of background or location.
• Future Technologies: Leverage advanced bandwidth solutions to unlock the full educational benefits of AR, VR, and AI, enabling enhanced student engagement, deeper understanding, improved academic outcomes and fewer administrative tasks for educators.

Listeners takeaways include:

• A clear sense of the system-level challenges that schools and their leaders face in providing effective, inclusive instruction for students with dyslexia
• A fuller understanding of the intersections of dyslexia-inclusive teaching and instructional equity
• Effective and evidence-supported strategies that have systemic, long-term impact to improve learning outcomes and foster instructional equity

The discussion hits on various aspects of this ubiquitous yet vague phrase. Dr. Callison emphasizes the importance of keeping human interaction central while leveraging technology to provide authentic learning experiences tailored to individual student needs. Superintendent Ochoa highlights the necessity for districts to align personalized learning strategies with broader educational goals, also emphasizing the need for student-driven learning experiences.

They go on to discuss the evolution of personalized learning solutions in the EdTech industry and emphasize the importance of involving educators and students in the design process to ensure effectiveness. Looking ahead, Dr. Callison aims to expand personalized learning opportunities, while Superintendent Ochoa plans to implement innovative, individualized programs to engage students in underrepresented communities. 

This episode is sponsored by Stride Tutoring, an online education platform that closes learning gaps by connecting students with state-certified teachers who bring lessons to life. Their tutors personalize instruction to each student, ensuring everyone receives the support they need to succeed. With their on-demand online learning model, students can get help anytime, anywhere—and education leaders are never left searching for effective tutoring solutions. 

Stride Tutoring is powered by parent company Stride, Inc., a leader in online education with over 20 years of experience serving 2,000+ districts in all 50 states. Through personalized solutions for students, educators, schools, and districts, Stride encourages every learner to build the skills and confidence they need to make their way forward in life. To learn more go to https://stridetutoring.com/schools-districts/

Conversation highlights:

• Equity and Support: TPR Education emphasizes providing support structures for all students and districts, highlighting their services' accessibility and effectiveness, particularly for underserved communities.
• Evolution of Remote Tutoring: The transcript illustrates how remote tutoring has evolved, especially during the pandemic, becoming more accepted and beneficial for students, particularly those in underserved areas.
• Changing Landscape of Test Preparation: With the introduction of digital SATs and shifting educational priorities, there's a focus on training teachers and providing effective test preparation services to adapt to these changes.
• Focus on High-Dosage Tutoring and AI Integration: TPR Education is prioritizing high-dosage tutoring programs tailored to specific student needs and integrating AI into their services to provide faster and more insightful support, aiming to enhance student learning outcomes and streamline processes for educators and parents.

Below is a machine-generated transcript of the conversation

Kevin Hogan

OK. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Innovations and Education, E School News. This podcast on the latest and greatest techniques and strategies happening in the Ed Tech world. My name is Kevin Hogan. I'm content director for E School News, and I'm happy you found us here today. In this episode, we bring you some more takeaways from this year's FTC show in Orlando, FL. I had the chance to speak with John Calvello. He's the VP of Institutional sales@tudor.com and the Princeton. We were able to explore the evolving landscape of educational services and we particularly focused on remote tutoring and standardized testing. Obviously to of the particular services and products that are coming out from from John's group, you can hear how high dosage tutoring programs are tailored to specific student needs. That can provide faster and more insightful support for educators and parents and students, obviously, especially when it comes to underserved schools and districts. It's another aspect of the emerging strategies, technologies and initiatives that are aimed at bridging educational gaps and providing equitable opportunities for all students. Have a listen. OK, John. Thanks so much for your time today. I appreciate it.

John Calvello

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Hogan

This time I don't know where you where are you clicking in from the. It is.

John Calvello

So I'm based outside of Philadelphia, but currently today it just happened to be in New York.

Kevin Hogan

All right, well, right in between in Trenton, NJ and we're both freezing cold. So, but let's get let's get into it. So next week down in Florida kind of give us a background of of where you're from, what you guys are doing and what you're intending to bring to the table at FTC this year and what you're hoping to take away.

John Calvello

But this is a really exciting event for us. You know where the bigger events that we do, TPR, education, true.com and the Princeton Review, we really want to make a a big presence. The theme that we have for our booth this year is called the equity grow, right? We're two trusted partners, Princeton review cheer.com one incredible team and really the overall thing that we want to do this year. And we have services for all students, no matter where you are in your educational career. We have something that can help those students and really be a great support structure or for districts or schools for admins, right? So and so between both organizations, the Princeton Review and cheer.com. We have over 65 years of experience, you know, working with schools and districts and helping families. We're looking to do is take all of our core services, meet tons of great new people, administrators talk to our partners and really try to find out what is the need that you have and how can we help.

Kevin Hogan

Interestingly, you talk about the the equity piece of it amongst all the other things that were turned on their heads over the past few years. Was this idea of DEI is the acronym that people were using but. The pandemic brought into stark reality a lot of the inequities that were out there, one of which obviously was the idea of tutoring. I know the perception BP before the pandemic was that was kind of something for. I mean, let's just say it to rich kids, right? I mean, that was it was something that was a bonus for people who could afford. To bring it to the if the student is struggling their parents, or if they're in a wealthy school district, might have those sort of resources where in underserved communities it. Isn't there? It seems that the platform, the remote platform of tutoring you look at, Khan Academy, I guess it's probably poster child, but then other products and services such as yours is giving those underserved communities more of an opportunity than may be in the past.

John Calvello

Yeah. And I think it's, it's a great way to reach as many students as we can, especially underserved students. And one of the things that I'm really proud of for a long time right over 20. Years we have been doing tons and tons of work with different kinds of programs. We've been supporting gear programs for a long time, especially around even things like test preparation, right. So we're really trying to drive first time generation college bound students and families and historically, you know he's never taken. Standardized tests that translator student who's not familiar with it, right? So just really do whatever we can to drive exposure or understanding how a test works on the test prep side of the business. And then with cheer.com, you know we've been around for over 20 years. And believe now actually started in the library space before everyone had a 1 to 1 device, because libraries were really innovative and that was the great way to get in front of students and families who didn't have a computer at home may not have had Internet access and could go somewhere in their community. To get real time tutoring, that's actually how we started.com business. And then we really built it from there, right. So you know, integrating our work into districts all over the country, helping drive scale. But this underlying theme of getting students what they need at that exact moment when they're stuck, right. And that's where so many. Students lose hope, they get frustrated, they give up, right? So having that resource to anyone, I mean, that really makes such an impact in students and families. Lives. That's a big part of what we're trying to do.

Kevin Hogan

So kind of what is the state of play right now when it comes to remote tutoring again? I mean, as I mentioned, there is there seemed that there was a forced acceleration during COVID, right where people are using it now we're back to whatever. Normal is, but have general behaviors. Change or be are people more accepting of the idea of having a tutoring session online than maybe they were before kind of give us where you see the space right now.

John Calvello

Yeah. I mean, I think the space is continuing to evolve. One of things I think about after the pandemic is how quickly K K12 is evolve. Usually it's a slower space, right, it and now there's so many changes happening. And when the pandemic hit, everything was about questions of scale, right? Students are in the classrooms or home. We need to get something the students can easily. Access and they can get that real time support exactly that moment of need and there still is a ton of need for that, right? Students still need that wrap around service. They it's incredibly helpful. We just completed an S level two study through learned platform where you know we've made lots and lots of improvements for our you know, our partners where students are seeing an increase in. There are Gpas reducing the percentage of D's and apps for students increasing attendance, so we're seeing we're making big, measurable impacts with our own. The thing I am see changing is really now becoming specific of different types of students need different kinds of support, right? It's still great that all students can get this wrap around service that access and that's why we launched our high dosage tutor. We really wanted to make sure if there was a specific subset of students that really need algebra readiness. You know, we're triggering from 8th grade into ninth grade. They need a very particular curriculum. They need something that is pre scheduled multiple times a week St. Trader. So we launched that right because needs are changing. Not everybody always needs everything. It's never been that way. And so we really wanted to then start, you know, holding in listening to our partners still offering the wrap around service because it's incredibly beneficial. It makes an impact. But then we're really sitting down and figuring out these are the students that we really. Need to move. The needle on how do we have a program that does that high dose sharing is a way that we started to launch that. So I'm seeing that kind of need change in this space.

Kevin Hogan

Yeah, well, let's flip over to the assessment side. The prison review side, I mean that there's certainly a lot of upheaval during the past few years when it comes to standardized testing or take the temperature. Uh, on on that side of the.

John Calvello

Yeah, I mean. I think like test preparation has has really been a state by state thing, right? So certain states. Really funded. Really. Pay attention to it. Like places like New York, New Jersey, Texas, right. They always sort of had this like. Hold and making sure like big push and and spending allocations for test preparation. And so now that you have the digital S at you know we're seeing a lot of interest in how can we train teachers in the classroom who want to be able to understand how this test type works and make sure they know how it works and they can help their students be successful in it. Make sure it doesn't feel like something they've never seen before, right? So we're spending a lot of time training teachers how to deliver print serving contents in the classroom. Then we also run courses in different programs throughout the country as well. If they want to use. Our staff, our tutors.

Kevin Hogan

Yeah. So I guess two other questions, so down to the show floor there, anything in particular that you're going to be highlighting when it comes to your, your products and services that our our, our readers and our our listeners should look out for?

John Calvello

Yeah. I mean, so one certainly I think people are familiar with. Interview test part, but we'll have that people understood and I think on demand is something people are really familiar with, but two things that we're really excited to talk to more partners about and you know people that we're gonna meet one is you know the work we're doing with high dosage, right so get we really aligned to ourselves to the Annenberg. Things to really looking at. You know what makes that kind of tutoring successful? What moves the needle right and so how to work with partners to deliver tutoring 3 * a week, you know, small group instruction assessment based, high quality curriculum, right, building that relational, you know learning right. So it's a big part of what we're going to be doing. We actually just won the general's new product. The year word for high dose. Meetings and then the other piece that's really exciting. The other launching in 24 is the work that we're also doing around incorporating AI into our on demand services, whether that's through an AI chat bot or an essay review. Really a great way where we can take all the methodology, the things that we know that's made us really successful with tutoring. And train an AI around. To give students. Faster support pumping them with an essay within 3 seconds, but really important to not rewrite an essay that's not beneficial. We're really giving students clarity on something like how strong is your thesis statement, beginning, middle and end source, right? So really what we want to do is to use our AI skills that we have. And give additional resources to our partners to go faster to have no insights. So they're doing the things that we're looking to bring to FTC and have lots of great courses.

Kevin Hogan

Well, we always made it 10 minutes without talking about AI, so that was pretty good.

John Calvello

Yeah, I got to bring.

Kevin Hogan

But obviously that is going to continue to be, I'm sure the the main theme going forward down in Florida, so many different aspects of that are are positive. And I think as the hype goes away, people are starting to see the real value in it. But as you said, just the way in which it's implemented. And also teaching students and their teachers and their parents the proper way to use this.

John Calvello

Yeah. I mean, I think when I think about AI, right, a lot of it to me or especially when you incorporate. It's really about driving insights driving data right? I don't believe that all of a sudden it's going to be it's going to fix everything for every student, right? It if it gives them an opportunity to rewrite and submit an essay two or three times before they turn it in. To a teacher, that's a great way and they get more practice, you know, before the teacher gives them the final grade in their feedback. Right. So they're evolving, they're getting more drafts than which I see is a really powerful tool. But then giving all that insights to the staff or where they come to us for how many drafts did they submit? You know what are the parents seeing? So really then getting all that data back to me, that's a lot of the value, the insights. That are happening and always making sure that students are doing the work right. So the student that does the work is going to be the students that's doing the learning, right? So I think that's for us. That's an important thing for us to really remember.

Kevin Hogan

And that about wraps it up for this episode of Innovations in education, be sure to go up to eschoolnews.com and click on innovations and education where you can find an entire archive of conversations and other information that I've been having with the leading experts in the Ed tech field. I think you'll find something there that can help with your everyday work as well as a bigger picture of what's happening in the world of education and technology. So thanks for listening and I hope you find another episode soon.

Frontline HCM, a connected human capital management suite, equips schools with everything needed to support the entire employee lifecycle from recruiting to retirement. Built exclusively for K-12 education, it includes applicant tracking with proactive recruiting capabilities, seamless onboarding, connected time tracking and absence management functionality, professional learning and evaluation tools, and the ability to oversee benefits, compensation, and position management with automated workflows across the suite. Designed around the unique needs of K-12 and flexible enough to support state and local regulations for time tracking, performance evaluation, and hiring practices, Frontline’s HCM suite brings greater efficiency, productivity, and performance to school districts so leaders have more time to focus on what will most support great teaching and student learning.

The white paper, released under the brand ClassVR, Avantis’ award-winning all-in-one VR/AR headsets for schools, is available for download at https://bit.ly/BBSwhitepaper.

As stated in the white paper, “issues such as underfunding, understaffing, the digital divide and the impacts of the pandemic have set the stage for an ambitious revival.” It notes that ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funding has provided school districts with opportunities to leverage new educational approaches and technologies and that “these innovations serve as the catalysts for rejuvenation, charting a course toward the restoration of educational excellence. U.S. education is building back stronger.”

The white paper examines several specific approaches and technologies being used in schools, including:

• The flipped classroom
• AI-generated teaching materials
• The no-grades movement
• Data-driven learning analytics
• Post-pandemic expansion of SEL
• VR and AR
• Maker-based learning, makerspaces and STEM labs

The white paper includes insights from five education thought leaders:

• Dr. Rupert Rawnsley, Chief Science Officer for Avantis Education
• Christopher Klein, Education Consultant for Avantis Education
• Simon Luxford-Moore, Head of eLearning at ESMS independent schools
• Luke Knightly-Jones, Education Researcher and private tutor for Royal Tutors
• Dr. Lorah Sirri, Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University

It also provides examples of how some of these approaches and technologies are being used in classrooms.

“The 2020s will likely be a defining decade for education as schools and policymakers rethink their approaches to education,” said Avantis Education’s Chief Executive Officer, Huw Williams. “In this white paper we provide an informative look at some of the innovations happening in K-12 schools today and their potential to engage students and support academic growth. It includes thoughtful context offered by experts in the field about these practices and technologies in order to help inform the conversation about how best to support students in moving forward.”

In this special edition of Innovations in Education, Content Director Kevin Hogan speaks with McGraw Hill’s Patrick Keeney about various aspects of career and technical education (CTE), including its expansion beyond traditional vocational or trade-focused subjects, the importance of soft skills, and the curriculum and teaching methods used in CTE courses for middle school students.

Patrick emphasizes the value of helping students explore different career paths and develop essential skills early in their education. The conversation also highlights the evolving nature of CTE in middle schools and its potential to provide students with a more comprehensive and purposeful educational experience.

Kevin Hogan sits down for a conversation with Ki Karou, Senior Director of Product, Content for MIND Research Institute, on the evolving landscape of education, gamification, and technology integration.

In this episode of Innovations in Education, Madeleine Mortimore, Global Education Innovation and Research Lead for Logitech details how classroom technologies, if used properly, can increase engagement and ultimately test scores.

O’Hagan shares his insights on the continued emergence of esports as an integral part of any school’s overall education experience; how student use of tech in esports compliments and clashes with other onscreen activities; and what strategies educators can use to make the best of this phenomenon.

In this episode of Innovations in Education, host Kevin Hogan has a conversation with Sonny Thadani, CEO of Robin, to explore how SEL can be integrated into district policies and school curricula. The key? Get everyone involved.

In this episode of Innovations in Education, hosted by Kevin Hogan:

• An interdisciplinary approach to STEM can help close equity gaps
• How teacher agency has improved post-pandemic
• The need for STEM starts early and sets students up for success

In this episode of Innovations in Education, hosted by Kevin Hogan, you’ll hear from Jason Innes, Director of Curriculum, Training and Product Management at KinderLab Robotics, Inc., discuss why robotics is an excellent way to introduce young learners to coding, computational thinking, and design principles.

• What is computer science education lacking?
• Why educational robotics is a critical STEM learning tool
• STEM Lessons Straight from the Classroom

• Finding the learning loss data needed to drive learning recovery
• Education must keep pace with evolving ransomware
• Current Challenges and Trends in K-12 Education

• 3 strategies to support student well-being and SEL
• Building culture and community takes more than a committee
• Fostering student well-being

• Teachers are burning out. Can AI help?
• Using AI to improve accessibility
• AI in the classroom: Supporting innovative teaching and increased productivity

• 5 of the biggest education trends in 2023
• 5 ways our district streamlines edtech ecosystems
• Using Federal Grants to Hire Personnel: Advice for Districts

• 8 predictions about literacy learning in 2023
• 6 tips for tech-enabled instruction in the early literacy classroom
• How Active Learning Environments Help Students Engage in Content

• 5 ways virtual tutoring reinforces our after-school program
• 5 ways video improves school-home communication
• Virtual Reality Gets Real

• Virtual school nurses can play a pivotal role in schools
• 5 ways tech helps create calmer learning environments
• All About Accessibility: Enabling a More Inclusive Classroom