Educators and AI: Enthusiasm or Skepticism?

00:19.42

Sean Strathy

Greetings everyone! This is another exciting edition of the Tech in EdTech podcast where we discuss technology that powers education and improves learning for all. In today's episode, we'll be focusing on AI in the classroom. How educators can move beyond their cheating concerns and leverage AI to improve teaching and learning. I'm your podcast host, Sean Strathy, from Magic EdTech, and our guest for this special edition is Liz Lee, Director of Online Learning at ISTE. Liz, thank you for joining me, and welcome to today's show!

00:50.14

Liz Lee

Thank you so much for having me, Sean. Happy to be here.

00:59.40

Sean Strathy

Liz, can you give us some background on yourself and how you got to your current role?

01:02.56

Liz Lee

Sure, so, I have been in my role as Director of Online Learning at ISTE for about 5 years now, and our goal is to accelerate innovation in schools and really empower educators to grow their skills when it comes to innovating and incorporating new technologies into the classroom to really improve instructional practices and improve pedagogies. So I got into this field, my background was in online learning and product development. I come from the edtech sector and when I went back to school to get my Masters in Education with a focus on technology innovation and education, I really realized how important it is to not only develop awesome edtech products but to provide really quality professional learning to educators so that they can build up the skills to use it meaningfully. You can have the best product in the world, but if it's not being embedded into the classroom in a meaningful way, then it's not going to have the impact we want to see. So, that led me into this professional development role that I'm in now, where we work with tens of thousands of educators across the world - every year through courses, certifications; we publish books, we have ah, events like our annual ISTE conference. And yeah, really looking forward to sharing more about our insights into artificial intelligence so far and what teachers can be on the lookout for.

02:45.17

Sean Strathy

That's excellent. Before we dive into that since you've been in this role for about 5 years maybe you can just give us a brief timeline of some of the innovations that you saw that you saw when you started. I think we've been in this role through the pandemic. And that'll lead us up to where we are today. Can you just talk about some of those trends that you've seen?

03:01.73

Liz Lee

Yeah, definitely. So, five years ago there was already a lot of momentum with schools and districts, you know, moving to one-to-one and better devices and access to connectivity in schools, but we were seeing a lot of like substitution - you could call it, where we weren't necessarily transforming what teaching and learning looked like, we were just doing it more efficiently - maybe, or in cooler ways by using technology. Over the pandemic, obviously, there was this huge sudden shift to actually depending on technology and we saw a lot of just emergency response and needing to react to that event, but we also saw a ton of innovation and teachers, who were, you know, forcing themselves to try new things and to do new things for maybe the first time in their career, and so since this is, so couple of years since then, we've seen a kind of a mix a lot of the time. It's been a lot of going back to what we were doing before- like it's been a really tough couple of years - I think everyone understands that the role of teachers has been especially challenging the past few years for a number of different reasons and, so there's this temptation to let's just go back to what we were doing before and it was easy now they're back to face-to-face. But at the same time, we're pushing and we're seeing some schools and districts really take advantage of that - all that learning and that innovation that happened  - and keep that momentum going and then as new technologies come out, we always see the kind of, a similar set of like initial resistance, initial skepticism which is healthy. But you always have those early innovators who are really interested in trying things out and then they can kind of help to scale and spread that innovation to others.

05:07.94

Sean Strathy

That's awesome and I love that background there because I think it ties in nicely to setting the stage for where we are with AI. I think there's a lot of similarities between how we got to where we are with AI and how we got to where we are in the teaching and learning process and digital adoption, digital strategies, and everything. So, before we dive into the discussion itself let's just talk about that that AI for a second. AI has been around for decades. It's currently at the forefront of technological advancement though. The real catalyst for today's AI can be attributed to the proliferation of smartphones, the Internet of Things, and just internet usage in general. These developments have led to a massive surge in data generation and access - making machine learning a powerful tool for predictions. For example, it can recommend the quickest routes to the airport or suggest products based on your online activity. I swear, if I get one more Instagram ad for a  “chunky” sweater, I'm going to go through the room. But recently, a new breed of AI powered by large language models like ChatGPT and Bard has emerged. These models trained on vast Internet datasets employ advanced deep learning techniques for a wide range of natural language processing tasks - the results they produce are remarkably human-like and have had a profound impact, especially in education. So with this in mind, let's dive into the AI in the classroom conversation. So, what are you hearing? How is AI currently perceived by educators?

06:44.43

Liz Lee

Yeah, well, first of all, you're right. It's been around, AI has been around, for a while and ISTE has actually been training teachers on AI for like over 6 years now but now all of a sudden there's a lot of attention on it. Um, I think for the first time over this past year educators are seeing it as something that's real and something that's truly here. It was always something that was like science fiction or five to 10 years out from having huge impacts on our lives. Um, and a lot of that was because of the release of ChatGPT, obviously which is, you know, widely spread around a year ago. And I think the initial reaction to that a lot of teachers are having is like a little bit of skepticism because what was flying through the media was that students are using it to cheat. And so there's this kind of initial nervousness, or initial reaction to like stop usage of it. But at the same time and that's not just teachers that's school leaders as well, so it's coming from multiple levels, but at the same time, I think, teachers know that it's something that's here and it's something that's here to stay and there's this desire to learn more to like keep up like what do I actually need to know about this for myself but also to prepare my students for success. So I think we're seeing this kind of dual reaction to it where it's like - I don't want students to use it in the wrong way, but at the same time, I know that I can't “not use it at all” - and so what's the next step there.

08:20.94

Sean Strathy

Whenever I hear about this, and we’ve talked about this when we met at the ISTE conference back in June. It feels a little bit like Wikipedia when we were in college and how professors were wary of Wikipedia. They said, “Don't use it for anything.” We secretly were using it to start research and then jumping to the sources that were cited and actually using it for efficiency purposes. Do you see today, teachers acknowledging AI as a facilitator to improve teacher-student interactions or individualized attention, like are you seeing in it for any other purposes as they're using it today?

09:02.89

Liz Lee

Yeah, I think like the thing that most people think of when they first think about AI use in the classroom is like this a chatbot interface, and again, there's kind of this initial fear or like this narrative that AI is going to replace teachers as facilitators because they're the ones interacting with the students. But I do think, teachers know like good teachers know - that's absolutely not true, an AI tool could never actually replace a teacher because there's so much more to, creating and designing a learning experience and managing, you know, a learning environment that that goes into it. I think, that like the kind of low-hanging fruit, seeing AI as helpful for like automating administrative tasks - there are tools that are helping teachers grade more quickly or taking attendance and kind of finding those efficiencies there. Um, and then there's also this area, of like improving student learning, so as you mentioned like giving students more individualized attention - if there's only one teacher for 25 or 30 students, how can AI help give that individualized feedback or you know play up the appropriate learning content at the right time and that helps to increase engagement. So, I think there's like a lot of perspective benefits that they're seeing, but we also need to look just beyond those areas and think about like students being active, actually using AI or creating AI and kind of taking an active part in their learning experience - understanding how it works and how it impacts society and this is not just computer science classes or STEM classes - all teachers need to be aware of the various uses and how to integrate it into the curriculum.

11:14.20

Sean Strathy

That's really great! So, you kind of broke it down into three areas there. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's automated administrative tasks, grading attendance things like that provide individual attention with feedback, and then showing students how to have them use it in an active learning environment in a way. .

11:32.70

Liz Lee

Yeah, exactly and I think the first two are probably more common or at least more commonly perceived as it now, and so we're trying to push for that more in that third category, you can't have the first two without this - without this third area. But I'm sure we'll go into more detail about that.

11:52.30

Sean Strathy

Well, actually I'm curious to hear how are you kind of guiding educators to go into that third - that third area they're you know making students more active in the use of it.

12:04.27

Liz Lee

Yeah, I mean there are a ton of great resources and tools out there. Already, there's a great curriculum that's available for free online. There are already awesome AI tools that are being procured by schools and used by teachers to do some of that. We think you know, a lot of professional development is needed again going back to what we saw with the general use of technology, you can't just provide great tools and expect teachers to be able to - to really transform what their classrooms look like just by providing the tools. So, we're focusing on a lot of professional development. I'm happy to talk about some resources there. But a big focus is um, you know, kind of the same instructional approaches that we use with any topic area, real-world applications, project-based learning like using design thinking as an instructional design strategy with your students so that they're not just learning about AI in isolation, it's actually something that they're making connection real-world connections to, and career connections to, um, and that's a student-centered approach where they're having like agency over what they're interested in learning about and how they're applying it.

13:36.39

Sean Strathy

I love that. Thank you! Um, what are the concerns among the educator community about how to use AI and how much they might need to learn in order to use it well!?

13:49.97

Liz Lee

Yeah, again I think it's that there's this initial barrier. Um, and yeah, we talk about a lot of times like first-order and second-order barriers or internal and external barriers to usage. There's the external barriers that are like there's a lack of training being provided around this and part of that challenge is that the technology is changing so quickly we can't actually keep up with the students you know and what they're learning and what they know about the tool um, or various tools. But then, there's also these internal barriers where we're seeing like self-doubt about being able to learn about AI and how it works, how machine learning works, how natural language processing works um, and so providing that foundational understanding, can help build that growth mindset about like oh! this is something I can do, you know, I don't have to be a computer scientist or a data scientist to understand the basics of how AI works and to be able to integrate it into my classroom. So you know, those are the concerns I think we're seeing from educators, but there are ways to help overcome them.

15:09.69

Sean Strathy

Yeah, I always, I always love when you know people segment the differences between you know student’s learning and teacher’s learning, and at the end of the day, you know, your role and your academy helps teachers learn and it's still the same learning process, you have to give them agency, you have to build up their confidence and learning and everything. So um, it's so interesting. What, um, what ethical considerations should educators and institutions keep in mind when implementing AI in the classroom?

15:43.72

Liz Lee

I think like every new technology that emerges there are pros and cons and it's good to be skeptical, um and look at various AI applications with the skeptical eye, you know, there is so much potential that AI has but it can also have negative ah, negative consequences, like when it comes to the data privacy, just from the mass amounts of data that that it's being fed and that it's spinning back out - also with reinforcing biases. I mean I think, educators need to understand and help their students understand that any AI tool is created by a human still - at this point at least - so what data is being fed into a model and how that data how that data is being fed is there's always going to be some sort of implicit bias that's introduced and we can try to mitigate that as much as we can, but you just need to have that awareness of like, okay, who are the stakeholders in this, who are the creators, who are the users - who might this tool benefit, who might this tool harm. And I think especially as these tools get more prolific in like the media and any just sort of digital, um information spaces, that skill sets of like digital literacy and media literacy are super important. They've always been important, um, in students digesting information, but now we're seeing these like super hyper-realistic deep fakes of politicians or other celebrities, and students need to understand like, that it is possible to create this based on this these models that it's that it's being fed. 

17:45.31

Sean Strathy

There's so much to unpack in what you were just talking about there. 

17:46:00

Liz Lee

Yeah I know, there's so much and there's so many blurry lines like with ethics when it comes to ethics like and any example you look at you know, like facial recognition that could help prevent crime but at what cost to our own you know, individual privacy or like there's AI therapy chatbots out there which providing basic therapy to people who wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise. Like that's awesome, but what if the bot gives terrible advice and has terrible consequences - there you know so many ethical considerations and that's an awesome opportunity for teachers to explore with students like it's going to be part of their lives and so walking through those ethical explorations is like a great curriculum project to focus on.

18:38.25

Sean Strathy

So using the challenges of AI to actually improve to actually inform how you're instructing your students essentially. 

18:48.40

Liz Lee

Yeah, exactly. Like it is scary, but to to start using it in the classroom, but there's actually in almost every subject area approach where you can kind of meta-reflect on AI and apply it to whatever learnings you're trying to accomplish with your students.

19:09.64

Sean Strathy

On the data privacy front  - you know and you you mentioned like deep fakes and everything. There are all these apps out there that I'm sure students are using today - that right now there's a popular one that generates high school yearbook photos on a certain decade or something. right? And it's like where does that data go and why are they collecting that data you know collecting your face you know, different features of your face. Why are they collecting it where does it go? Those are questions that I think everybody needs to be asking when you're using any sort of Artificial Intelligence because again, it's data in that was informing the models your usage of it could also inform the models too, or it could also be used for other reasons and we need to know that. 

19:52.50

Liz Lee

Right! That's a great point like even just by using an AI tool you are feeding it more data, and being aware of that is super important.

20:03.44

Sean Strathy

Yeah, um, let's move on to some other trends here. So um, you mentioned you know a couple of AI applications. Do you have any specific examples that you might be able to pull from of how AI is currently being used in classrooms that really excite you?

20:25.20

Liz Lee

Yeah. and you know ISTE doesn't endorse one tool over the other and you know it's all about pedagogy and how it's being applied but there are some really great tools that we've heard feedback from teachers who are using them and they're finding helpful, There are tools to help teachers create lesson plans based on various inputs like learning objectives and time and schedules and everything like that, or create rubrics, or even create student IEPs. Um, there are a ton of tools out there to, you know we talked about chatbots a little bit earlier, actually have students create their own chatbots. So they're getting that inside creator’s view into what goes into developing a chatbots a chatbot, and they don't even need advanced coding skills to do that with some of the tools that are out there. Um, we're also seeing a lot of writing tutors, you know, tools to assist students in the writing process by providing this immediate feedback as they're going through, as they're creating content, which you know is beneficial to the student because they're getting that in-the-moment feedback and it's beneficial to the teacher because it ah, allows them to sort of multiply themselves and give more specific and individualized feedback which would take a lot more of their time, usually.

22:39.94

Sean Strathy

That's cool! I think, you know, the creating lesson plans, creating rubrics, even to some extent creating IEP is like when you were talking about before some of the you know the 3 different areas that we were that you mentioned administrative tasks, individual attention, and then you know actively students using AI. Some of these seem like lower hanging fruit right, like creating lesson plans, rubrics, IEPs, even, I love the ability, you know, I mentioned to you when we were talking offline how I'm coaching soccer, and throwing in the kid’s names to generate first names only for data protection privacy reasons, but throwing their names in to create the lineup for the week and who's starting and how I'm going to manage subs to make sure everybody gets equal time on the playing field and also equal time at different positions and creating practice schedules and things and teachers can leverage, you know, just ChatGPT for some of that stuff and it sounds like you're seeing some interesting tools coming out of the EdTech market for some of these tasks as well. What are some practical steps that teachers can take to start integrating some of these tools and techniques into their classrooms? Especially, for those who are pretty new and I think you know your perspective here is helpful for some of the listeners of this podcast too because a lot of these listeners are thinking are creating these tools, and trying to figure out how they can help teachers implement this stuff. .

24:09.92

Liz Lee

Yeah. I mean, I think the main and the main step is like start small. It doesn't mean you're transforming everything that you're doing as an educator in your lesson design in your classroom. Am, there are small steps, that you can take to start trying out and just experimenting in sort of low-risk ways. Um, you know, as we said before like don't be afraid of AI - it's not going to replace your role as an educator. It actually helps shift your role to be something more meaningful where you can spend your time in more valuable ways and so you know come up with your your own goals as an educator of what you want learning to look like in your classroom like think blue sky about student-centered learning and individualized attention and students being able to gain knowledge and demonstrate their knowledge in really cool ways and then find a tool that can help you meet that goal. Don't look at it like - I need to start incorporating AI tools into my classroom, um, it's supposed to be about what's helpful to you with your expertise as an educator, not I need to try out this tool just because it's the latest technology and I need to stay up to date.

25:37.27

Sean Strathy

That's ah, that's really great advice. I love that um you know I've seen that at different at different stages of digital development right? These new tools come out and people think about implementing technology for technology's sake. I think that's something you even mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, um, whereas thinking about you know what tool do I need in order to accomplish this goal is almost a better question, Right? So um, with that in mind, I'm curious, sorry to put you on the spot here, but do you see any gaps that could be filled or any interesting things areas that you're not seeing being filled right now like if there was an AI tool for this or if there there was an AI tool for that type of challenge that teachers are facing that would be really cool. 

26:23.94

Liz Lee

That's a great question. I certainly am not an expert on the entire AI market and there are more tools being developed out there that anyone can keep up with so I'm sure a lot of these are in progress. Um, but I think there's a lot of potential for using AI first of all to help understand how students learn better like learning sciences. You know, we've always approached that from a psychology a cognitive psychology approach. Um, but I think, there's so much potential to learn more about how we learn and then leverage that for other tools, other training, um you know. AI or not AI and just gather that information. And then I also think there's a lot of potential with how we're assessing students’ learning, especially when it comes to mass amounts of data. You know, there's always been this tradeoff, if we wanna be able to capture and analyze tons of data from students all over the country or all over the world we are relegated to these like multiple-choice tests, auto-graded assessments, that kind of thing. There's so much more about what we know, a good assessment could look like that's more realistic or more reflected in what they're what students are going to need to do to perform in the real world. So, if we could design assessments in that way and then leverage AI to be able to scale, um the actual assessing - that I think is a really great potential that I'm excited to see filled.

28:09.63

Sean Strathy

Yeah, wow, That's um, that's some powerful stuff. I mean on the the learning how we learn piece - I mean then you're really getting into not just personalized learning in the sense of like there's a decision tree or like you know providing you with the next content piece, but, really understanding how each individual student learns and presenting almost like ah um, not just ah I don't even want to use someone - there's so many buzzwords that are overused at this time but you know a personalized learning path that has personal, you know personal, it goes really deep into personalization if you can get that granular right? .

28:45.58

Liz Lee

Yeah, totally. I mean there's always been this gap between what we know good teaching and learning could look like and what we're just able to do within the restraints of funding, and time, and staffing, and everything like that and so thinking about how AI can help bridge that gap is where I think we'll see the most value.

29:14.77

Sean Strathy

That's really cool and then on the um, the other side of it, you know how we assess and collect massive amounts of information and how we collect that information, this is a challenge that was a topic in our at our Magic partner day last week, actually - we were talking about standards and not just academic standards but technology standards, right? Because, if we're going to collect all of this information you need standards in place in order to make sense of the data in a meaningful way. You're collecting it across lots of different platforms, there's lots of different inputs of the data. The data exists in different formats. How do we then collect all that to make sense of it to inform the teaching and learning process and form instruction in that way? 

30:04.88

Liz Lee

Yeah, that's great, that's a great point and I don't even think I mentioned in the beginning that one at the core of all that ISTE does is the ISTE standards which are a framework for not the same as you know content subject area standard, but, what do students and educators need to be able to know and do in today's shifting world. But it's things like they need to be empowered learners and they need to be global collaborators and knowledge constructors. How do you go about measuring that in a scalable way right now, like that would be awesome if we could actually assess students on those kinds of skills that are actually valuable and going to help them succeed rather than rote learning or rote memorization - that kind of stuff.

30:56.81

Sean Strathy

Can you, for our, listeners who might not be familiar with the ISTE standards, can you just elaborate a little bit more on the goals of the standards and you know, maybe some resources that people can check out?

31:07.40

Liz Lee

Yeah, absolutely. So, the ISTE standards are a framework for what teaching and learning could and should look like in today's kind of ever-changing landscape and I'll just share that we've gotten a lot of questions - like oh! Are we going to be incorporating AI into the standards or why don't we have specific standards around AI, and you know we might eventually, but the idea is it doesn't matter what the technology is; it doesn't matter what the tool is, the standards provide those competencies that students need for whatever they're doing with technology and some of it might not even involve technology, it's just about moving innovation forward. So there are sets of standards for students, and that I talked about a little bit earlier. There are also, sections of the standards for educators, so educators also need to be digital citizens and constantly learning and growing in their profession and then we also have standards for education leaders and for coaches as well.

32:15.19

Sean Strathy

That's awesome. Um, I want to be cognizant of our time here Liz, so, let's start to wrap up a little bit. What advice do you have for educators and education listeners listening to the show?

32:29.60

Liz Lee

Great question. I was speaking with an educator the other day who was kind of at that crossroads where she was like I know I need to know more but I don't understand and I'm nervous about how students are using AI. But where our conversation eventually led is that she feels like she would be doing her students a disservice by not incorporating AI into the classroom by not - by ignoring it the same way that, if you would if you didn't integrate any technology in your schooling for 12 years, your students would be screwed heading out into the real world because they wouldn't have developed any of those skills. So, I loved that assessment of hers because she actually sees this as a must, she needs to develop her own knowledge in order to help her students succeed. So, here are some awesome resources out there that I'd love to share about. We have some that are free. We have ISTE offers these project guides that have tons of project ideas on integrating AI into the curriculum and we have them for elementary, for secondary. for electives, for all different types of subjects, and content areas. We also offer a course through ISTE U. It's an online course that educators can take called AI Explorations. It's 15 hours, it's you know - it's somewhat rigorous. It's actually led by an instructor who's going to be giving you feedback and you work on a Capstone project throughout the whole course experience where you're applying what you're learning and into something that you can use in your role whether you're a classroom teacher, a coach, a leader. So you're not only learning the background about how AI works, you know, how does a machine learning model work, how does AI tools perceive information and process information, but you're learning about all these different applications like a lot of what we've talked about today and then you're working on applying it in your own role as well. We also have yeah I also want to mention that um ISTE is in the process of developing our own chatbot that's going to be available for teachers to ask questions specifically about EdTech. So, it's fed all the ISTE standards and courses and publications that we've done and students are going to be I mean teachers are going to be able to ask things like how can I implement high-quality project-based learning, or help me design a lesson plan around this topic area, and I have 30 minutes and for this age level, and the chatbot will be able to spit that back out. So, that's still in development but it's going to be a really cool resource for helping teachers take those small steps to up their knowledge.

35:26.71

Sean Strathy

So, we're only about three weeks out from District EdTech coaches saying that ISTE’s trying to replace them is that right? 

35:33.60

Liz Lee

They will never be replaced.

35:37.90

Sean Strathy

Last question for you. What advice would you give to the developers of EdTech who have tuned into this podcast?

35:45.39

Liz Lee

I think that developers, you know, there's often this disconnect between what EdTech developers are working on in terms of what's possible and what classrooms actually look like - like what is actually happening in a classroom in a school. And so product developers have to understand what learning really looks like; what does it look; what challenges our teachers faced with, um, and how can we actually solve those problems not create something that flips learning totally upside down. And depends on this scenario, where, you know, school looks completely different from how it actually looks today because that's going to deter teachers and deter leaders from adopting new strategies and new tools. Um, you know we talked about we talked about the restrictions that that we find ourselves under-resourced, or just not enough time to do things, and I think there's so many opportunities to solve those problems so understanding those challenges and allowing teachers to take those small steps that actually help them in their role instead of being faced with a whole new set of challenges by trying something completely new that flips everything else they were doing upside down.

37:08.55

Sean Strathy

Well, that's great Liz. Thank you for joining me today on the latest Tech in Ed Tech Podcast, AI in the Classroom edition. We appreciate your insights and look forward to you in our audience joining us in future podcasts. 

37:22.52

Liz Lee

Thanks so much for having me.