AI in Action: What’s Working in the Field

We're happy to make podcasts available for selected Ed Webinars for your listening pleasure. If you'd like to receive a CE certificate, you must watch the video recording. Recordings and quizzes can be found in the Ed Webinar archives. Please visit home.edweb.net/podcast for more information. Hello, everyone. I'm Lisa, the founder of Ed Web, and I am delighted to just do a quick introduction this morning for Trailblazing Leadership Week. And our second presentation, there is one yesterday, and we'll make sure you have the link to that if you missed the one that was yesterday. But today, the topic is AI in action, what's working in the field, and this panel is amazing, and are going to tell you so many different perspectives. So say hello in the chat. Welcome everybody, Jen. Thank you so much for ERDI hosting this presentation. You and Jeff McCoy have just done a great job bringing this panel together, and we're thrilled to host it. Thanks, Lisa. So excited to be here. All right. Do you want to ask that opening question while we get going? Do you want it like a little teaser for folks in the chat? Yeah, so AI is all the rage right now, and we wanted to ask all of our participants today to give us a kind of a number one through five about where you are in your district in the AI journey. So if you're just kind of waiting in and you're just getting started, go ahead and give yourself a one, and if you feel like you're about as far as it gets in this moment in time, then give yourself a five and kind of everything else in between. So name where you're coming in from, and where you are on the AI continuum. Oh, I love the two slash three, too. Yes, if you think you're in between, no problem, tell us. I would love to see that. This is great. All right. Let's do a quick round of introductions for everybody, and then you'll get to the panel discussion. So Dr. Jared Bloom, say hi to everyone and give a brief hello to everyone. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me here. Superintendent and Franklin Square going on my eight year, and again, just happy to be with all of my colleagues today. Wonderful. Great. I always love to see you on Ed Web. Shall we have the great? Yep. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Shea McRae from Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Florida. We're excited to be here and to share. We're looking forward to answering any questions that you have, and so welcome everyone. All right. It's great. You know, I'm going to hide my webcam. So all of you are up at the top. All right. Great. So Dr. Debbie Durant. Good morning, you're a good afternoon, everyone. Excited to be sharing with colleagues this afternoon. I have the opportunity to lead data governance for Gwinnett County Public Schools, where a large school district outside of Metro Atlanta, and along with my colleagues, look forward to a great conversation about AI today. Wonderful. Who's up next? Dan Bridges. Say hello. Hello, to everyone. I'm Dan Bridges. This is my 15th year of Superintendent and Naperville Community Unit School District 203 at Naperville, Illinois, suburb of about 30 miles west of Chicago. Excited to engage with everyone today. All right. Great. Jeff McCoy. I'm Jeff McCoy. I am the current Chief Education Officer for ERDII. I've retired from Greenville County Schools last September. So happy to be here and thank you guys for joining us. Jeff and Jennifer, did a presentation yesterday on screen time? So you're going to want to catch that. We'll put the link on that in the chat. So if you missed it, you can get the recording for that one and Dr. Jennifer Ferrari. Thank you so much Lisa for having us. We're always excited to be on Edweb. I'm Jennifer. I proud CEO of the Education Research and Development Institute, also known as ERDII, or ERDI, depending on where you come from in the country. We are a 40 plus year organization that brings top leaders from across the public education sector together to really tackle those big problems of practice. And we are super excited today to have this esteemed group of amazing national leaders here to talk through their AI journey with you. And I'm going to pitch it back to Jeff to kind of set the context. And thank you so much all of you for being here and for sharing your wisdom and knowledge with this group. Thanks for being here. All right, and we're going to take the slides down so that you all can talk with each other more easily and take it away. Thanks Lisa. Thank you all for putting your your level of knowledge or usage of AI in the chat box. It's always interesting to see where people why no matter where you are on that spectrum, hopefully you'll get something today out of these amazing panelists that we have. Jen and I have had the privilege of working with them for several years now in various aspects. And so they're going to talk a little bit about their journey of AI. Again, kind of specific to what they're working on in their district. As Jen and I have the privilege of working around the country with districts on AI, one thing we know is that much like the chat where the levels were put in place, the same as for districts as well. We have districts that are just thinking about AI, just starting. We have districts that are kind of in the middle of doing a little bit trying to figure out where to go next. And then we have some districts that really know the more the pores or fods. It really have been doing it for quite a while and haven't figured everything out, but they certainly are staying on top of things too. So again, you'll see different perspectives today as we go. So we're going to start off actually with Debbie Durance from Gwyneth County. Debbie, you kind of have the unique position. I don't know many other positions in the country and districts that have your title of data governance and that that's usually a part of somebody's job in CTO role. So you have a unique experience of being able to focus on data governance in technology, but I know AI has been a big part of your journey recently when it comes to data governance and how critically important it is. So how have you guys really in your role in your district really ensured privacy and safety of that data and that data governance role to ensure that kids are and students are protected when using AI and technology? Absolutely. So, you know, I would start with saying that we're all definitely on this journey together. I don't think any of us could say that we've arrived because the destination seems to change by the second for each of us. And so our journey actually began in 2019 when we were looking to build a new cluster of schools in the district and a cross-section of community and school and district leaders came together and we decided that it was going to be AI themed, which was a little bit before the generative AI boom came to us and so we had the opportunity to start thinking about what does AI look like in a kindergarten classroom and a sixth grade classroom for our high school students. And so that cluster of schools gave us the chance to start imagining this new world and then as generative AI came to us we recognized that we really needed to move from this pilot cluster to a systems approach and think about how do we build the systems and structures to support the entire district. So we created an AI governance team with the charge that that cross-divisional team would build first a position statement that included what do we believe the role of AI should be in the district and that human-centered AI approach has led all of the work that we've done. From there we built out a true guidance document. We weren't quite ready to jump into policy and procedure. We really needed to think about how do we actually navigate this space once that governance document was created. As an organization we decided that we really wanted to lean on some of the other systems and structures we had already built. So we looked at things like our acceptable use policy. We looked at some of our other related policies and embedded AI into that work and thinking specifically about privacy and security. One of the things that we did is we have an entire process that sits in our policy and procedure around at vetting for third party vendors. And so we added some specific components and we think about AI in our school district that we would use as the benchmark with that governance team being the person or the group that would decide final approval of all applications in the district even once it traveled through that process. And we really anchored on thinking about where is the data being stored? Is it a model that lives within that application? Are they using a third party? Is any of the data being used to train the model? And then creating some walls and guardrails for our schools and students so that they would have space to learn and grow within this policy and procedure. But I think having that cross-divisional work to think about how do we come together and decide what are we going to use for what purpose and what is going to be that guidance that we use as people interact with tools that often come to them with a free label on it. And that's probably that area that we've worked the most on is helping people understand that free isn't free. And so how do we help them in that space? So I think a lot of it has been that collaborative conversation and thinking about how do we build upon work that had already started in the district with a recognition that if we are really explicit about individual applications or functionality as soon as we write the paper, it's going to be out of date. And so really trying to build things that would evolve over time. Awesome. Thank you, Debbie. And it's so important as we have a lot of teachers I see in the chat kind of chiming in. And so it's so important to have some of those guardrails, but there's policy or not in play so that teachers can feel free. They know where the boundaries are and they can innovate. We know teachers are amazing innovators when it comes to everything. And so being able to innovate safely and securely is always the goal. So that kind of ducked out perfectly into Shea. Your policy development that you've done, similar to Debbie, and similar to when I was in Greenville, it was so new. We really couldn't develop policy right away, because we didn't know enough to develop policy. And so it's not that districts are behind now developing policy. We had to really figure it out first a little bit, and then develop policy. So, Shea, you talk a little about, in our last institute, about the emerging tech policy to you guys build. In your district, I thought it was very unique, and the folks in the room really thought that was a unique. Please, given how fast technology is changing today, how do we keep from happening to go constantly back with the board to revisit updates? And I think you guys had a great solution to that. So I love to hear a little bit about your role in your district, and kind of how you guys want to develop that. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for everybody in the room on the Deputy Superintendent for Academic and Transformation. And we've been really focused on generative AI for the last couple of years. And when we thought about a policy, we were very thoughtful about making sure that we weren't creating a air quotes AI policy. That'd almost be like, I'm creating a policy for Google. We didn't do that for Google, but we all use it as a browser. AI is going to be as common as that. And so we thought about what could we create a policy around? That would allow us to be inclusive of AI, but really bigger than AI, any type of emerging technology that comes about over the next couple of years, it would be all inclusive. So we created a school board policy called Emerging Technologies. And that emerging technologies is really centered around six constructs. The first being in that policy is that we have a human-centric belief. We believe that humans are the most important part of any type of technology integration. Technology isn't going to do away with the humans in the classroom, in your school building, at a school site. So we start with the human-centric belief. We also were very clear around universal access. That this access is for everyone. It is for every student, every teacher, employer, ESC, kids, non-ESC. So we really, really talked about universal access. Responsible use. And this kind of piggybacks with Debbie Durant. You all did a thoughtful job, Debbie and Gwyneth County, around thinking about data governance. And so that dovetails into now that we have those guardrails around data and governance. How do we responsibly use AI within the instructional setting, as well as in the work setting. And so there should be some clear guidelines in both areas or aspects of that work. We talked about innovation and collaboration. And how AI can be utilized for innovation and collaboration is not to take away metacognition from students is not to take away the thinking, but to add and enhance that thinking when we're using AI in any place in space. Professional learning is going to be critical when it comes to AI or any type of emerging technology. And so your policy should address professional learning. And finally, what everybody is talking about is the idea that we are building future ready skills. So if you are a district that has not tackled AI, the question might be, are your kids going to be less prepared than any other district that is focusing on AI now when we think about future ready skills and preparing our students for the future. You cannot do it without integrating AI. And so if you're thinking student first, you really have to jump on the bandwagon to create a plan. And hopefully today, in some of our conversation, you'll get some ideas around starting points or get some ideas around where you can continue to grow your AI implementation and integration practicing your district. Thanks, Shay, that was terrific. So when you think about this implementation and you think about how quickly things are changing, right? The adaptability quotient that we have to bring to the table is very, very strong. And Dan, in your district, you guys have done a really good job with your invested party engagement. And I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about the way that you've brought all people on board with your adoption and talk about the importance of that stakeholder engagement. Yeah, thanks, Jen. One of the kind of foundational beliefs we hold in our district is that an exemplary school district is the result of a collaboration among its students, staff, parents, and community. And so that means all of the things that we introduce and the things that we do really require that collaboration among all of the stakeholder groups, not just on one off, not just top down. It has to be something that incorporates the voice in perspective of everybody impacted by that. And I think when you do that, you have an opportunity to really get an array of diverse voices and perspectives, right? And so as we have embarked on the AI journey or worked on introducing emerging technologies into what we do, we've been very deliberate and intentional about, first of all, where we stand with technology, that technology should be used to enhance education and experience and not drive it, that it's just a part of what we do and not the thing that we do. And being really clear about, you know, kind of our vision of how we use it to support learning and to support our kids and to give them the experiences we need. But then I think, you know, kind of taking those broad stakeholder groups, then I'll focus like initially really on kind of parents and community as well as staff. You know, from a community standpoint, when we look at some of our committees that we have community committees like our Workforce Innovation Council, for example, which is made up of industry leaders throughout our community and our region, as well as local governmental leaders. You know, we ask questions about how we're using AI or other emerging technologies in your workplace. And what are your future employees going to need to know and be able to do to be successful for you? And then taking their feedback and their input back into, you know, the work that we're designing and the experiences that we're creating for kids to ensure that we're aligned. With parents, it's been about, you know, kind of the mindset of we need to bring you along, kind of slowly, purposefully and very clearly on the work that we're doing, being very clear about our message and our why. You know, right now there's a lot of dialogue around the country around screen time. Just, you know, so kind of things like that and so that they don't see this as just putting kids in front of the screen. So one of the things that we did that has been successful is, you know, with parents is like, through different avenues like our home and school associations like our PTA, meeting with those presidents monthly and providing updates on the work that we're doing, being transparent about the professional learning that we're providing to our staff on how to use it, clear about where our policies rest, but we've also introduced what we call core connections. Our logo's an Apple, so we do a lot of things out of the core of an Apple, right? And so we created a parent series around evolving technology that have included things around digital citizenship, but also really understanding what AI is, what it means for education, how we're using it, and then really kind of talking about how we balance screen time to ensure that, you know, students are well, and not just planning themselves in front of a screen. So you talked about community, you talked about parents, but then, you know, a key driver for us has been staff. I remember when, you know, November of whatever year that was that, you know, chat was really out there, and it was, we were sitting in a cabinet meeting in one of my level superintendents overseas, it was middle school, said in a cabinet meeting, you know, the middle school principals are wanting to know if we can block chat. And I once in a while got accused of being a curmudgeon and having some pretty colorful language. And I just said, hello, I mean, it's here, it's not going away, we've got to learn how to use it, right? And so now our job has to be, how do we bring them along? How do we work side by side with them to ensure that they're getting the support for the need for the understanding, which ultimately led for us to like an AI steering committee that we called our innovation think tank. And we partnered with an outside group, leap to really kind of work with our staff to dive deep into a lot of components related to AI. But beginning by really building our staff's knowledge about what AI is and what foundational skills are necessary in order to implement and use it in your classroom. When we introduce a new tool as a district wide implementation, we require asynchronous and in-person professional learning on what it is, how to use it, and why it's important. So we've created a series of professional learning experiences. This summer right before school kicked off, we did what we call Inspire 203, which is where we brought some outside folks in to really talk about emerging technology and education. But then we tapped on and invited educators from across our district to present breakout sessions on what they're doing, how they're using it. So learning from each other, so really kind of being learned, lead learners in our schools. And then kind of tying back into the governance structure is really kind of developing our guidelines in alignment to what's in policy, our acceptable use policy. But working off of we develop an acronym of Ready, right, where our focus on working with educators, our kids, and our families on use of AI, it's how we're going to use it responsibly. What are the ethics around the use of AI, ensuring that you're getting accurate information, disclosing when and when AI can and cannot be used. Yes, I'm ready. Now I can do it. Right. So we've talked about all of those things. First, but I think to kind of get back to how we've done that by being very intentional. Despite my initial note, there's no way we're slowing down. We're going. We're not going at a rapid pace to where. where our staff aren't with us, we're going at a pace really that meets our staff where you're at, providing them with the tools that we think will be important for them to be successful and how can help them in really continuing to listen so that we can go back and revise, change and just be, you know, adapt as necessary to kind of meet the situation. Thanks, Dan. And Jared, I'm thinking back to guys, whatever that year was, it was kind of early in the mainstream AI time and you kind of jumped out in front as a superintendent and got into AI very quickly and soon thereafter brought it to your district. I was hoping you could talk to us kind of about your approach in your district and really bringing people along and then also you inspired me earlier in our conversation about kind of your theme for the year, so take it away. Yeah, so, you know, it's unique being in a pre-K to 6 district in Franklin Square, so we have to think a little bit differently, although very similar to my colleagues, when AI first was accessible, I thought, wow, if we can use this to differentiate in ways that we have not been able to do this quickly, why would we not do this? If we could personalize learning for our students in ways that we are doing, but can't do as quickly. I remember as an English teacher and Jen, I'm sure you did this as well, right? We would find, you know, passages, different passages and we would pull them around a similar theme, but at different levels and it could take a week or a two to find all of those passages that we're going to use for a lesson. And now, oh my gosh, we could do this in 15 minutes or less, and now probably five minutes with the latest AI. Again, why wouldn't we put this in the hands of our teachers? And so, as I thought about that, I thought about ways that we would be able to explain this to our teachers. We could help them to see that they could move the dial for kids in ways that maybe they wouldn't be able to do again as quickly, but again, it takes the teacher to make that happen. This doesn't replace, I think my colleagues said this so well and all of us believe this, right? Human first, our theme for next year really is balanced, bold and built for tomorrow. And that is, it's built on a human first approach. The teacher is the most important thing that student is the most important thing in the room. And that human first connection is what it's all about. But the technology allows us to elevate that learning in a way that we just wouldn't be able to do fast enough for our kids. And we look at AI in different ways in our school district. So, you know, we have the AI that we've taught our teachers to use the chat bots that they can, again, personalize learning. The way that students can use it to speak to a character in a book or speak to historical figure, and no, we know they're not really having those conversations, but utilizing all the information that's out there, they're able to gather information. And then fact check that, right? And then we want to make sure that we are using products that we have looked at very carefully and that we have vetted. And again, yes, there's lots of free products out there, but we know, I think Shay mentioned this, there is a cost to some of those products. And so we vet everything that we use. That's where this balance bold and built for tomorrow comes because we're not going to just use every technology product that's out there. We're going to be very, very careful and selective about what we're using. Those products that use AI, if it is intentional, if we make sure that they are not using our student data to teach the models. And we can make sure that it's helping to move the dial for our kids. Again, why wouldn't we use those tools? And so we're bringing those into the fold. But again, we want kids to play in a K-6 district, especially. We want kids to write and read books. We want kids to do intentional learning outside with nature. We don't want kids in front of a device at all times. And so it's just creating this balance for our teachers. And then finally, I've taught our administrators and just not me, but we've worked as a team to create a story using AI. And so AI allows you to tell your story in a way that, yes, again, we could create 20 slides, but you can create an infographic that tells your story in a much more succinct way. And it helps to elevate what we're doing in our district. And so, for example, we just passed a $37 million bond with overwhelming support. And I think a lot of that had to do with utilizing the tools to help tell our story, what we've been doing educationally, what we've been doing as a district academically, what we've been doing from a social emotional standpoint, and what we need as a district to continue the work that we're doing. So all of these are just tools. It doesn't replace the human. The human needs to know how to use the tool. And I think that is so critical. Thanks, Sharon. All of you have shared so many great things. I was going to ask before we go on to another set of questions. You all have been listening to another. Is there anything that you'd like to add or punctuate from one another? Go ahead, Jay. So, I'd like to just kind of capitalize on an opportunity that Jay talked about. And it's really around professional learning for teachers. And so, one of the things that we have to think about as districts is who are we going to invest time, energy, and resources within your staff to become the AI experts? So, many of us are going out and we're doing research and we're using tools outside of the district, but somebody within the district who ever is leading your professional learning. They're probably on your AI governance team. But there should be some emphasis around building some AI experts on your internal staff so that you have the go-to that's keeping up with the latest research that's checking in with data governance. That's kind of staying ahead of what's happening with everybody else. The second thing is in Hillsborough County, we kind of on the onset, we reached out to our research-based university partners. And so, we have an amazing partnership and relationship with the University of Florida, who helped us to build our implementation guide that guides our work for the district we are on version 6.0, by the way. So, those of you that are thinking about implementation guides, don't get caught up in the idea that, oh my gosh, when I create this, this is going to be antiquated in 10 minutes. It is. And you're going to get up to probably like an iPhone, right? We're going to be on version 110 next year. But it's okay, you start somewhere, you get the foundation, you build your implementation guide. But we also partner with the University of South Florida for professional learning. And the University of South Florida as a research-based institution is really big on credentialing. It's really big on working with local districts to create AI infrastructures and frameworks. And so, they have been a great partner with us to provide professional learning for our staff and professional learning for teachers. And from that, we've taken that learning and we've created professional learning pathways within our own organization now with our trained staff to be able to do professional learning within our organization. And so, we have quick learn, self-paced introductory course. We launched an AI Institute where we had this summer over 850 teachers trained, over 300 administrators trained around AI concepts. So, I just wanted to piggyback on Jared, the idea of professional learning and thinking about what that looks like as you build this pathway. But that you don't have to do it alone. There are partners right in your neighborhood. Your post-secondary partners are probably grasping to reach out and to work with you. And that's a great place to start. If I can, if shape, if shape piggyback, I'm going to pile on, right? I think when we first introduced professionally, once a chat GPT was accessible and available, two of the first people to step forward to English high school English teachers in terms of, hey, here's our understanding of it. Here's how we're using it. Here's what it means. Because, you know, the cliche is that people who weigh to most are high school English teachers, right? Because they're afraid of the right. Right? And so, we tapped on them right away to help develop a series of asynchronous modules to introduce chat GPT to our staff, right? So, now there was no, you know, the ivory tower is saying, this is what you must use. And you have to do this. This was two people in one of the department's most critical of it and how it's going to be used to really walk through in a very casual way. I like, I went through all the modules as well. And just this is what it is. This is ethical use of it. So, these are the downfalls. And here's what you need to do to a stat like. And so, I think to get critical for those districts or those folks who enter the initial chat with a one, two, three early, early adopters early in the beginning of it, it shades right, tap into those folks within your own system who want to be early adopters. I think what, you know, we're always, we always so slow in public education to innovate and make change because I think we too often want to make sure everybody's on board. And you can't do it. You've got to adjust and power those that are early adopters and support them with the right guardrails in place and then leverage their talent and their strength to be able to help others because it's a lot easier for them to bring someone along than to me to walk into an eighth grade classroom and see why are we using AI here right that's a little intimidating. Well when your colleagues are saying here's some examples of how I'm using it and how it works. We have an English teacher at one of our other high schools who I would say is a good teacher. He's not always one of my favorite teachers because he's a very outspoken person, but right? One of the first lessons I watched with the implementation of AI was in his English class where essentially the lesson was to use CHAT GPT to do a literary analysis of Macbeth. Critical thinking was involved there because when you walk them through it is the importance of evaluating the output and understanding the information that you've got. Does it align to really your understanding of what the book had to say? And then also the experience of how to prompt it, right? How to get what you need out of something. So I do think, when we talk about maybe lessons learned, one of the things is tap into those folks who all already are seeing some success and are excited about it and it can be infectious. Now just add, you know, our teachers along with our coach and our director of technology, you know, and I think this system is kind of out there but developed this traffic light system, right? And that has worked really well for both parents and teachers and the administrators as well to understand that a green light assignment is something that you can use AI both for the research and actually for helping you to create. And then the yellow light assignment is something where you can use it to generate ideas, but not for the actual writing or development of the project. And then there are red light assignments where there is no way I use. We want your own thoughts in this. And I think that has really helped elevate the work. I do think we need to be careful. I just want to bring this up as we are training our teachers, as we are taking these incredible leaders that we have in our district and helping them. Technology is changing so quickly and I don't know if you saw that, you know, Claude is now embedding watermarking, right? So even if you edit your assignment, let's say it watermarks some of that work. And so how do we make sure that a student who is just, you know, grammar checking isn't tagged for plagiarizing their work. So I think, you know, we just have to be up on the latest things that are happening because it changes every single hour, not even every single day at this point. And here that's a good point. Do you happen? Oh, I'm sorry, Debbie, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to share, you know, as our colleagues have talked about great ways to think about building those systems across your organization. One of the things that we created was a group of AI teacher innovators because Dan, you highlighted how important that teacher voices and hearing it from a colleague is quite different than hearing it from someone else in a different role. And so each of those teacher innovators had supports and training, but they all had an opportunity to implement something new and different in their classrooms and with their colleagues. And this year, we're actually launching that same cohort concept with our principals. So the principals can then have those conversations with each other, thinking about how are they leading this work in their buildings? And how are they building capacity? What are those systems that they're using if I'm at a high school versus an elementary with that concept shared of that red yellow green? What do those structures look like and how do I leverage it? So I think that power of colleagues sharing with one another is so important. And if you're looking for the Stop by Strattis, North Carolina was one of the first to kind of jump off with the Stop by Strattis. So for those of you who were posting, maybe that's the first time you heard that from Jared. A lot of districts have now adopted that. But if you go out and Google North Carolina Stop by AI Stop by Strattis, they've got a great framework and many districts have adapted it and adopted it in different ways. But it's a great starting point if you're looking at going down that path for your journey as well. There's another rubric as well for those of you that are looking at rubrics to kind of create a system across the network. And Leon Ferz, FURZ, has level one no AI all the way to level five AI exploration. And that's a great, that's a five level. So not a three stop wide is a little bit easier, but this one is a five level rubric and high schools really like this rubric because of all the opportunities to integrate AI. But it's Leon Ferz, which is the name, and you can look up that rubric as well if you wanted something that had a little bit more neat and information in it. We were talking yesterday in the screen time kind of discussion and there's a lot of concern about AI with kids not having guardrails about offloading the cognitive lift, right? And so your stoplights and the Leon Ferz rubric, are there any other things that you're doing explicitly or that you've mentioned or some strategies that you're using to help kind of combat that and help kids see how to best approach AI and to put guard rails around that? Well, you know, I think one, you know, kind of not directly with the kids, but with our educators is intentional professional learning on instruction and lesson design on being explicit on, you know, AI or other technologies, what its role is, what's appropriate and what's not. So I, you know, I think kind of being very clear up front in terms of how we approach our instruction with kids, like we would with anything, you know, we'd be very clear and explicit about resources that are accessible, that are prohibited should, you know, can be used, should not be used. So the kids have clarity. I think we, we cannot make an assumption that a student understands the expectation unless we're very explicit about, you know, those expectations. Do you think about similarly to any behavior, right? If I don't know, I'm supposed to be in the seat before the bell rings. And I think as long as I'm in the room on good, right? And the teachers never have been clear or explicit about that, then how can we punish the student? Same thing with AI. If we're not very clear about, you know, explicitly when we can and can't use it, we're not providing those guardrails. And then I think just the reinforcement of it, and I think again, from the instructional design, it's how do I, how do I personalize the experience with each student to ensure that, you know, if I have some questions or I'm not sure, how am I, how am I asking probing in deep questions or thought questions or providing appropriate feedback to help the the students show me in another way? And I'll just say yes. I'm definitely attacking the, oh, I'm sorry, Jared. I'm never going to push it. All right, so we are definitely thinking about, you know, cognitive growth and and MIT study shows that to minimize student depth, students should write with their brain and then use AI to edit their drafts. And just thinking about where the entry point is for AI, maybe not on the front end, but after students have had some opportunity to have cognitive lift, both in writing and with their voice, and then have AI edit is one of the ways that we can ensure that we are not depleting students' opportunity to think for themselves and to have an overreliance on AI. Also, metacognition and knowledge retention improves when students document their prompts, and they know how AI responds differently across prompting experiences. And so when you ask kids to engage and why they wrote that prompt, how they're writing that prompt, and how that prompt influence output, now you're getting them to think. And so you know how people say, "Hey, I take the thinking out of things." Well, how do we use AI to improve thinking? And those are just some ways that you can think about AI engagement that allows students to be able to medically think and lift while using AI. So I'll just add to both what Shay said and Dan said with number one for, you know, from student standpoint, and from a parent standpoint also, we kind of dropped the ball when it came to social media. I know I've been saying this and lots of others have said this, but if we just ignore it and we don't teach kids how to use it appropriately and how to teach other adults how to use it appropriately, and if we don't help parents to understand how kids may be using it at home without them and without us, we're making a big mistake. And AI is a wonderful tool, but it's a lot more dangerous than social media if used incorrectly. And so I think we owe it to our kids and to our parents and to our communities to make sure that we are doing a really good job at helping to guide students along the way. And from a teacher standpoint, I know I've told the story before, but great book, are you there? God, it's me, Margaret, right? And, you know, the Margaret's being pressured not to put her name on the test along with all the other students and she doesn't. And none of the students do. And the next day they all get their tests back and their names are on it. And it's only appropriate deaths, right? And how, right? Because the teacher knew the students and knew their work. And that's really what it comes down to, right? We have to make sure that our teachers really know our kids, human first. And if we do that, we're going to be, we're going to be okay in all of this. And we're really going to help elevate the work with AI versus letting AI do the work. If you, and some of you have been chatting in the chat box, which is amazing. If you have some ways or I saw somebody post another resource similar to the Stoplight Strategy, if you have some of those, you guys are using out there in the community, please share that. That's part of the power of these webinars that you get to learn from each other or just ways you're using AI in your classroom or your school or your district. How are you utilizing AI to maybe get more time back to spend with students. I am curious, I think Jared and Dan Boe kind of hit around this a little bit, maybe, but for really, for any of the group, the panelists, how did you engage your stakeholders? You know, Dan talked about teachers and getting teachers on board and now you're going down to students, but as we talked about a little bit about screen time and some of the misconceptions with screen time and this movement, how did you guys make sure up front before you launched your AI initiatives? How did you make sure your parents were on board in your community, was on board to you weren't kind of half in a backtrack and maybe deal with noise later on? How did you set that up so that people were, it was building trust in transparency and what you were doing around the AI work? Well, I think for us just being very explicit about its use, what it is, where we're at on kind of the journey, but also showing a willingness to iterate and evolve ourselves. As an example, you know, as I said earlier when Chad's GPT came out, wide open, let it, and then we dug in a little bit more, realized that there's some age restrictions. We got to be time out, we blocked it for a short period of time until we could just say, let us catch, we're catching our breath, we're going to put some governance around it, we're going to put some procedures in place and things to ensure that we are safely and ethically using it, then reopened into appropriate audiences, right? So I think it's just showing the parent group and community group that we're evolving also, and that, you know, we're allowing our teachers to take safe risks with its use in class, but we're going to be explicit about its use. You know, other things we've put in terms of our academic integrity. Gardery is in place that just don't unfairly punish a student for submitting work that a teacher believes through some kind of AI detection system, it was generated completely by AI. You cannot use that as the only determining factor on when a student's assignment should be rejected, right? You as an educator have to go back in and say, walk me through how you did, you know, ask the right questions, the probing questions, as Jared said, no your kids, right? And so I think it's just for us, the first being very clear and explicit about about the why allowing kind of an opt out in terms of certain technologies being available on the district device that the students use, so the parents feel that they do have voice, but then as I mentioned earlier, that engagement series for parents to be able to learn themselves and learn alongside both our staff and our kids has been helpful for us. So piggyback on Dan. Guys, there is to my knowledge and my team here, you can kind of chime in, but to date, there is no foolproof AI detection program that exists. There isn't one. And so you can't trust and rely on an AI detection tool as a way to kind of circumvent whether or not kids are using AI or not. And so Jared and Dan are absolutely right, definitely know your student. If you suspect somebody using AI, that's an opportunity to have a conversation with a student to see if they can indefinitely speak to what it was they turned in or there might be a written assignment or something they do in class that you watch them physically do the work, but I just please caution anybody. There's a lot of programs that are out there and everybody saying they do AI detection, but to date, there's not any that is foolproof. And so that is something you do have to be careful around. Jeff talked about what are ways that we engage our community, our parents, our staff. I will tell you in Hillsboro, we started first with our students and our staff. And so we did launch with the use of K-12 inside an organization. I'm sorry, in a bank K-12, organization that helped us to do some polling with our internal staff. We did a survey with fifth graders. We did eighth graders, 11th and 12th graders. We targeted those groups because we felt like in each grade band, we wanted to identify and recognize students that had voice and that could give us good feedback. And then we launched our survey to all district employees across 8,000 responses. We were able to identify where there were concerns with both our student group and our teacher and employee group. And what we found with students is that there was a variation between skepticism and curiosity when it came to AI, optimism over potential. Students want it clear guidelines. They want it to be clear around when we use it and when we don't use it. But they also wanted to know what was their place in AI in the actual learning environment. For staff, of course, there's concerns about ethics and the need for guidance and professional learning. They wanted to prioritize best practices and enhance efficiency in the workplace. And so once you get a feel for the readiness level of the organization, I think then you can take that information and really think about where parents and where the community might have some insight as well and put all of that together to inform some of your practices and some of your guidelines in your guardrail. So just a different way of thinking about it, we started internally before we went externally to get feedback. And I would add that in Guinet as we started to develop our guidance, we wanted to intentionally include guidance for parents. So we saw their feedback in the development of those initial documents, which I would agree I'm not sure which version we're on now. I think it's something like 12. But I think that continuing to seek their levels of understanding, but also understand their questions, their concerns and find ways to have resources. We have a wonderful family engagement team that makes sure that some of those opportunities for our families include those chances to both learn, but also to seek understanding, ask questions in the spaces where they're not sure. Because I think Jared brought up how important it is for families to know about both the power and also the challenges and potential dangers of AI use. And so we felt like it was really important for us to empower our families to be partners in this work as we walk through developing what it would look like within our framework. It's all great. I'm thinking about if you all knew then what you know now, what are some key considerations, especially those of you have been kind of running out in front with this, that you might offer the group of lessons learned or things that you might avoid or things that you would double down on. I think there's a few things for me. And I think the first one, you know, lesson learned, I would say I'm going to call lesson emphasized. The importance of student voice and amplifying opportunities for them to share their voice and to talk about their experience of their own hopes, their own thoughts, their own ideas about how AI should be used in their classes by them. But we also learned through a student advisor group that we put together on AI and technology. They don't want feedback on their work to be strictly AI-generated feedback. They want that human interaction and human approach. So for them, I think they were very explicit with our innovation think tank. You know, you can use it for feedback, but you have to use it the same way you let us use it for our work, right? Use it as a tool to help you. And then I want to know that I want that personalized feedback from you and what you know about me as a human being, right? So I think, you know, amplifying student voice is probably the most important. I think a second important lesson learned for us was just because you open up a tool or you make a tool available, doesn't mean that tool has to be on and available forever. As technology evolves and changes, your needs may change also. So thinking about what is appropriate for use at the right time and focusing on it as a tool to enhance, not as the solution to the problem. The educator, the instructor, you're the solution to the problem in terms of diagnosing what has to happen in the classroom, your experience with the kid. And there are certain tools that you can use to support you with that. And I think, you know, finally, honestly, I would like to say that our school district is a fairly innovative, forward thinking school district. And even though that may be true, not everybody in the organization is ready for it. And so take your time, provide the support necessary so that, you know, we can experience levels of success that are appropriate to where everybody is and hope that they grow and take them next step. I've been pleasantly surprised at how many of our teachers and administrators have taken to using AI because they see the value in helping and supporting students in the community. And so, you know, for me, we have kind of doubled down on the idea that we are going to use it, but we're going to continue to make sure that we're using it in an ethical and effective and appropriate way with all of our stakeholders. I think the other thing, though, that Dan had mentioned and that has been really important for me is to understand that these are just skills. And we have to be able to swap in and out different tools. A tool today may be available, they may be at a business tomorrow. And we have to be able to take those, the learning that we had, for a particular tool and be able to use it with the next tool that comes along. Or if there's something better for our kids that's going to move the dial, why wouldn't we make that move? I think for too long, sometimes we say, well, we've invested in this product. We've spent all this money, you know, we're not going to make a change for at least 10 years. Those days are kind of over. We have to be able to kind of make a change, but not just make a change for the sake of making a change. It has to still be researched and smart and again, safe for kids and for staff. Before we get to, there's a couple questions in the chat too. But before we get that, if you guys haven't seen, there was several articles recently on the convening, I think it was in Boston, the convening in Boston, from two ad bills, two representatives from every state in the country, to almost do like this mock legislative bill around AI. If you haven't seen it, there's some powerful work that those students did. I think they made a lot more progress in our own, our real legislators have done. Oh, there, Shay's got to, was your, Shay, was your students part of that? No, they weren't part of it, but it was a great article that really talked about student voice. So if you guys haven't seen Ed Week, it was the August 7th article, and Ed Week, really good. Yeah, I highly recommend you take a look at it. It was amazing, my county that I came from before a returner. They actually sent two students up there that were able to be part of that. But some of the work and some of the insight Dan talked about that too, just some of the insights that came out from students about wanting clear direction and wanting to know what's the, where the role is in the line. There's always going to be people that go over the line, right? We have that in society. There's always going to be a small percentage to do that. But for the vast majority, they wanted those lines in guardrail. So it's really, really good. If you get a chance, they're going to take a look at it. I think there was a couple of questions. In a few minutes that we have left, the folks had put up there. One of the questions for our panelists there that came from Lucy is just how how is the increased availability of AI and easily accessible instructional materials affected instructors' expectations of students regarding time, resource, and effort required to learn the course material. I think that's a big challenge. A lot of districts are kind of maybe grappling with right now. So what does that look like for those of you kind of maybe tackle that? I would like to answer that question by saying, I think as a district, you have to identify what are the district AI supported tools that you want to be able to make accessible to everybody and block out those things that are noise or that becomes to cumbersome or free. And so we have done a really good job of identifying what are the AI district approved resources tools and curriculum that we're using. And we have clearly defined what those lines are. We are a Microsoft district. We've adopted co-pilot. Our instructional tool is Magic School. We've done a great job with integrating Magic School across all of our K-12 curriculums and those things. And so I think as a district, just really honing in on what are the AI assisted or AI tools that are going to be used, put that guardrail there so that people can stay within that box. And people have maybe 10 or 12 tools that they put out there, but I think getting clarity around what is acceptable and what's not acceptable is established out up front so that you don't have a mess on your hands and everybody pulling in resources from everywhere. It could clog your data systems anyway. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think and then I think being firm and only supporting those that you have adopted. But providing an avenue by which educators may bring forward a recommendation of, hey, I came across this free, you know, it'd be nice if we all had, if everybody had, can we look at that, right? And so having that opportunity to just, and then it goes back to listen, right? What are your educators asking for? And then seeing how it just integrates across systems with other things that you're using. Great. All right, we're coming up on the hour here. I always like to leave with some closing words or some wisdom from the group. So if you had to give out some walk-out statements from the panel, what are some last-minute guidance you would give people? Quick advice. Don't be afraid to get started. Put together your AI implementation guide that directs AI implementation across your system. Guidance for students, clearly defined. Guidance for teachers, clearly defined. Guidance for district staff, clearly defined. Guidance for parents, clearly defined. Put that guidance in place. Don't be afraid that you're going to make a mistake. Trust me, you're going to have several iterations. It is a live document. You can change it as often as you like. Everybody knows technology changes. So if you haven't done an implementation guide, get started. Contact any of us. We'll be free. We'll feel free to share. We will share whatever we have with you. But just get started. Get going. Get your guide. Get your guard reels. I would. Go ahead, Debbie. Oh, thank you, Dan. I think my plus one to everything that Shade just said is don't feel like you're on this journey alone. There are incredible resources from districts all over the country. And they're willing to share. I know even when we started our guidance, we pulled things from every source we could possibly find. You adapt, you adopt, you figure out what works best in your district. But don't feel like you have to start with a blank sheet of paper. And AI can actually help you. Good bit with finding all those resources out there that already exist. So use the tools at your fingertips and don't hesitate to reach out to others that maybe we're at a two or a three if you're sitting at a one and all the way along the journey. I would say my advice would be lead from where you are if you're a superintendent think about it in your use with with cabinet. If you're a curriculum specialist or a director with the coaches where people use supervisory if you're an instructional coach with the teachers you're coaching. Be very visible transparent and open about how you're using it. The successes you've had as well as the challenges and just you know kind of modeling that you're on this learning journey with them and that is technology evolves so rapidly and so quickly. You can't keep up with everything but you're trying the best that you can. And I would just add be transparent help people to see what is happening along the way because when people see it when it becomes visible it just makes it much easier for them to get on board and so and just step in try some things and don't be afraid to make mistakes because that's okay. We do make mistakes along the way but we learn from those mistakes and it's a wonderful it's a wonderful thing so I've really enjoyed listening to to my colleague today so thanks for having us. I'd say just kind of with a you know the Jared's point you know it's okay to make mistakes just don't put student data in open sources of AI don't make that mistake. Well I want to say thank you to each of you for taking time out of your busy schedule especially at the start of the year to come and share your insight special thanks to Edweb as well they're wonderful strategic collaborators and we always love the opportunity to spend time with them and use the community to get the word out. We do have a couple we have one more trailblazing leadership week sessions happening tomorrow with Steve Merle and this is really meant to be about change leadership and just how adaptability is the skill of the moment. We also have an exciting opportunity coming up through the ERDI organization and I'm trying to advance the slide. Jeff tell us all about the AI bootcamp many of whom the folks in the room are going to be a part of. Yeah so for those of you who are working on your plan regardless of what phase you're in we are hosting this bootcamp in San Antonio October 1 and 2 for district teams and I could be involved a principal a teacher as well but we're looking for those district teams that can come around and really do some thought leadership around what where their work is we've got a rubric that they can work around to kind of determine where they are and more importantly what's the next phase of their AI implementation journey so regardless of whether you might rate yourself before 5 or 1 or 2 the bootcamp is meant to take you to that next level of AI implementation in your district so if you're interested scan the QR code or go to the link and you can learn more about that and also register sign up. So that is a wrap thank you again so much for being here today and best wishes to all of you for a bright 26 27 school year we're excited for all the good things that are going to come about. Thank you all this is Lisa from Edweb just want to thank you wonderful panel just amazing discussion I think you hopefully were able to follow around some of the comments in the chat you know as you were talking with each other we're really happy to be able to host this for you and spread the word I'm really happy that you talked about student voice I'll just say that Edweb started because I learned what my daughter was doing on Facebook you know almost 20 years ago and I said okay the students are way ahead of us and we need to create a sandbox for teachers and I think with any technology the students are always going to be ahead of us so we need to learn from them and in terms of what we hear from staff just finding ways to help people save time teachers and staff to save time it's the easy win if somebody isn't you know quite on board yet but you know any of us love something to help us save time so thank you all thank you all so much we hope you enjoyed this Edweb podcast if you'd like to receive a CE certificate you must watch the video recording recordings and quizzes can be found in the Edweb webinar archives please visit home dot edweb dot net slash podcast for more information