Hear from ISTE's CEO Richard Culatta as he shares his unique professional journey and vision for the future of education technology. Learn how the merger of ISTE and ASCD aims to better support teachers and students through innovative practices. Discover Culatta's predictions for 2025, including the importance of prioritizing the student experience in school design.

• International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)
• ASCD - professional development for educators at all stages of their careers
• Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World by Richard Culatta - framework for preparing kids to be successful in a digital world
• Coalition of Leading Education Organizations Introduces Five Quality Indicators for Edtech and AI Products, ISTE press release
• Pica AI, AI photo enhancer

Phil, welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina Lewellen,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina Lewellen, the

President and CEO of the Association of Technology

Leaders in Independent Schools.

And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey.

And I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher

school. Hey,

I am Peter Frank. I'm the Senior Director of

certification and operations for Atlas.

Hello, gentlemen. How's everybody

today? Excellent, glorious. Counting down the

hours. Our

intro was a little different today because

the Atlas Board of Directors decided earlier this week that

my title would change to be more reflective of what other

associations in The Independent School world have as the title.

So I transitioned from executive director to President and CEO.

So nothing really happened. I

was wondering what was going on. I was like,

seriously, how many times have we done this and you're messing

it up? What's going on?

No, I mean, really, all it meant was that I

just put on the same clothes and showed up at the same office the

next day. Nothing much changed, but that is my new title,

the big ring that you now have to kiss Exactly. We'll

get down and kneel down

before you Well, I will sit on my throne.

We're doing our intro today with Peter Frank. I normally start

out and ask you guys a couple questions see how you're doing.

I asked my staff for recommendations on what I should

ask Bill in Hiram today, and Peter came in hot with a good

question, but I refuse to ask it, so I'm just gonna go ahead

and turn the mike over. Peter. Instant,

as soon as I saw the question from Kristina of

what do I really want to know from Bill and Hiram, having

heard all of these podcasts, all of the various topics we've

covered, I mean, you both share so much expertise and knowledge

about all these different things. And so as soon as she

asked, I thought, if I'm in a confrontation on water, for

example, a boat, would you risk using fire to battle the

zombies, or is it better to reserve that only in case

everything else fails?

No, I'm not using fire, right? Fire is a last

resort, because that is going to damage you as much as it is

going to right damage the zombies, because in that sense,

you need simply distance from them, and you need to be able to

somehow get them into the water. Because they're not swimming,

they're kind of sinking at that

point. Can zombies swim? No, no,

zombies don't

swim. And then there's a little bit of wisdom,

if you remember the scene in Jaws when the lady shot the

flare gun after she used gasoline to put it on the shark

and she ended up blowing up the boat. Amateur hour, we always

have a melee weapon on hand right

in the game that I play religiously, which is The

Walking Dead no man's land. You have different types of

fighters. You'd want to be in your bruiser mode, because you

have your assault team, you have your ranged weapons team, then

you have your melee weapon team, and then you have your bruisers.

And this is where you would employ your bruisers, those with

bats, those with things that are going to just not necessarily

get at them in the same ways it's going to get them off

you're you're teeing them up, golf clubs. I mean, you could

use golf clubs at that point.

So I'm going to reference World War Z for you,

Christina. The actual weapon that you might want to have in a

boat is the Lobo.

Oh, the Lobo. Yes, I remember them talking about

the Lobo.

I don't know what a Lobo is. Chat GPT, what

is a Lobo? We

can get Nicole Furlonge on this call, and she

can explain all about the Lobo from their in depth reading of

that.

So essentially, the Lobo is short for the

lobotomizer. Oh,

that's terrible. We're

talking about dead people to begin with. We're

talking about zombies. I mean, we got to put this in context.

What

if there's zombies already on the boat, and

all your weapons are gone and you can swim? So do you then

burn the boat so that they drown and then you swim away? You're

in the ocean, the middle of the ocean. Well, maybe not the

middle of the ocean,

yeah. I mean, are we on a pleasure cruise here? Is

this like a center console boat, or are we in like a yacht? Like,

seriously, like, Hiram and I, you know, we're on small boats

here, so we're, like, we've got oz, because we could probably

use Oz, because that's our level. That's how you have to

think, maybe a pedal bone, that's our level. We're not at

the price. Resident CEO level, where you're on much larger

boats. Now you've got the new title, so you've got these new

expectations for how you might be traveling. So you're thinking

bigger boats than Hiram and I.

There are no bigger boats. No,

the ring bill may actually be a Green Lantern

ring. Maybe she was selected. Yes,

true, Peter,

you started this. I

know. I wish everyone could see like, this

isn't a video podcast, but these are the moments that I really

lament that we don't have a video podcast because for our

listeners, we can all see each other. And when Bill and Hiram

start going off on zombies, the facial expressions of Christina,

the body language. Sometimes she'll just get up and we'd

like, we don't even know where she went, like, she just leaves.

It's gold. We could do a whole video montage of the reactions,

because it's priceless.

We're gonna sell out another Atlas member,

though. But it's really important that people understand

that the quiet Barry Cole Meyer, oh yes, is also a

huge zombie fan.

Why you got a Chuck Berry underneath the

bus? The zombie laden boat? That's not fair. He's not even

here to defend himself.

He would jump in.

He'd be on this so in Orlando, he walks up to our

group. Now, Jason Ramson is also a zombie afficionado. First

question we ask him, all right, new hotel, how many exits for

the zombie apocalypse? And within 30 seconds, there he

goes. Looks around four and he's spot on.

Oh my gosh. This just goes to show the

mistake that I made number one in allowing Peter Frank to come

ask you anything

100% we'll check the stats. We'll look at the

analytics. This will be the highest rated, highest listened

episode, all

right. Well, before we let Peter go, you've

been observing us quietly in the background. You're usually in

stealth producer mode, and you've been a huge instrumental

part of the success of this podcast. You keep things running

smoothly. You yell at us when our audio is not good. So since

we have you here for a quick minute, has there been any

favorite episodes that you can recall, any of our guests that

you particularly enjoyed, or what have you thought of this

journey so far? I certainly didn't think we'd be logging 50

plus episodes in a year, but here we are. So it's been just

about a year since we really started rolling with this. Any

thoughts or reflections as our behind the scenes Wizard of Oz?

Yeah, knock

on wood. When we first talked about the pace of

the podcast, when you were instructing us we're doing this

every week, there was definitely a question like, Man, I don't

know. I mean, we definitely have the right people involved, and

it seems like we have a like, a deep well from which we can pull

guests. But I feel like there was still a linger in question.

And gosh, at this point again, knock on wood. We just had a

planning meeting the other day, and God, it's just the ideas

keep coming. And we just heard this morning, Andre who does her

scheduling, who does an amazing job with so much of this

production, Andrea reported this morning that she reached out to

a new batch of guests, and they're all just elated. There's

a lot of energy and excitement to be on the podcast, which I

think is fantastic. Yeah, I don't know that any episode

sticks out, because everyone's been fascinating. It's always a

different spin and a different topic. It sure is, and it's

definitely great. You get the personal it's not even the AI so

much of the cyber security or the other things we cover. It's

like they have some personal story about their journey in

this world, and that is often what's so interesting. I've

loved being a part of it, and I'm glad I get to do it, and I

appreciate

that. Yeah,

thank you for all of the help. Really

appreciate it. Bill and Hiram and I have not yet managed to

strangle each other, so we've been having a good time, and

it's been a real pleasure. So thank you guys so much. Okay, so

now that we've got all the zombie questions out of the way,

it's time to pivot, and we're going to finally welcome to the

podcast our guest today, Richard gullata, Richard, you are the

CEO of ISTE and ASCD, a combination organization. Now

let me pause there for a second and let you explain that piece

of things you brought together ISTE with another organization.

And for those who are listening primarily the Independent School

world, they may not be tracking what ASCD is. Yeah,

happy to first of all, hi, Christina. It's

always fun to be back. Hello, hanging out with you. So glad we

could do this. Yeah? So almost two years ago now, we brought

together these two organizations. It's been a

process, right? We've been working on this ISTE, which is

very focused on accelerating innovation in education, and we

spend a lot of time talking about how we can use technology

to help be a lever to move that innovation along. And so that's

one organization. The other is ASCD, which is really the

association of curriculum leaders. So if there's a chief

academic officer. Officer, head of Curriculum and Instruction.

There's all the different titles, but that's really the

role that goes there in the public schools, it could be a

district reading specialist or something could also fall under

there. And we just thought, in this post COVID world, having

one group over here that's really about tech and innovation

and another group over here that's about curriculum and

instruction being two separate organizations wasn't serving

anybody well. Wasn't serving teachers Well, wasn't serving

kids. Serving kids well, wasn't there anybody well? So we are

bringing them together, and we have a our very creative new

name is ISTE ACD, for now anyway. And what we're doing is

we're keeping elements of both organizations, but we're also

gradually pulling the two together. So for example, this

summer, in June, we will have our co located annual

conferences. So we'll still have ISTE live, and then we'll also

have as CDs annual conference, but they will happen in the same

place at the same time. If you register for one, you can go to

sessions from the other, stuff like that. So we're just working

to bring these groups together to help make learning better for

kids. Sounds like that's going really well. There are days

where it goes really well. And there are days where I'm like,

how many forms does one have to fill out in order to merge to

organizations, in order to

be legal with ignorable right? A lot many

forms, lots of

forms. But from a team side or staff side, it's

been fantastic. Our team has been wonderful. And you know,

our community of educators around the world has been very

supportive, so that helps us get through the other logistics.

Having attended both conferences over the years,

when I heard about the merger, I was very excited by it, because

I would go to each of them and whether we were talking about

curriculum pieces and I was looking for the tech pieces or

or vice versa, you know, attending ISTE and trying to

find those different things, it was one of those things. I don't

think I necessarily would have thought of it on my own, but

when I heard about it, I was like, Oh, my God, that makes

perfect sense. You know, in terms of the way in which the

two of them have come together, the Co Location is great. And it

was funny, you mentioned it because I had a conversation

with one of my colleagues about the conference this year in

June, about sending some people down to ISTE, and I didn't

realize it was going to be co located. So in terms of the

running of those two, they're going to function as two

distinct conferences, but the registration will allow you to

move between both seamlessly. That's right.

So we'll run two separate programs. There'll

be a shared main stage program, and there'll be a shared Expo

experience, so there'll be some overlap, but then the programs

will run separately. But as we said, the badge, if you register

for ISD live. That badge will let you into any of the ASCD

sessions and vice versa. And so people can have as much or as

little if they want of the other event or just stick with the one

that they came for. Either way,

that's awesome.

And what I think is great about that, and you

mentioned it, and this, again, came up in the conversation I

had this morning is the expo portion of it, one of the things

I remember distinctly about the conference has been walking

around that floor and just the sheer number of vendors and

people that were there to talk to and connect with and really

find out so the fact that that's going to be a shared Space, I

hope you booked a big venue, because I'm expecting you're

gonna have a ton of people and that, I mean, if nothing else,

that experience, getting all those people in one place, I

think is worth the price of admission alone,

100% No, I totally agree. And a couple

things, if any of the listeners here aren't aware, one of the

things that we have is our expo experience at ISTE is a little

different because we don't allow sales. You can do demos, you can

ask questions, certainly, if that leads to a sale down the

road, that's fine, but we don't allow sales on the expo floor.

We are specifically not a sales floor because we want educators

to be able to go and explore without feeling like they're

getting their arm twisted into buying something. And that's

part of the magic of it. It's why, you know, we have our

companies that come and participate and say, Why do we

have so much more engagement at ISTE live the expo than we do

other places are like because we've made it clear that it's

the same space. You're not going to get pounced on. So we'll

continue that with the co located event. And one other

thing that I should mention while we're talking about the

event is that for several years now, we have also done a CTO

forum, a meet up that we do in partnership with Atlas, and so

we'll be very excited to keep doing that again this year, and

we really try to carve out some topics for that that are really

targeted at people whose role is overseeing technical

infrastructure and issues related to supporting learning

from a technical side.

Yeah, we've already started brainstorming a

bit with our partners at ISTE and cosin to put that program

together, so we're really excited about it. And thank you

so much for continuing to have Atlas be a part of that we love

that. Let's take a step back. I would love to talk about your

professional journey, because it is a unique one. I can't imagine

that you anticipated that you would find yourself at the helm

of ISTE when you first started walking down your path. So tell

everybody a little bit about your professional journey. Yeah.

So you know, it is not the journey that anyone

would have planned, which actually suits me just fine. I

have always just been fortunate to ask the question, Where can I

make the most difference for. Good, right? That's always the

question I ask it every time when I have a job opportunity.

And so it's led me in some interesting paths. I started as

a teacher. I taught high school Spanish. I then went on and

taught pre service teachers, so teachers getting their

licensing, which I love. I'd be happy to still be doing that.

And a unique opportunity came out for me to come out to the

Washington, DC area and help do some work in government, and I

did that for a bit, and ended up being appointed by the White

House to serve as the Director of the Office of Education

Technology for the US Department of Ed I did some work on the

Hill too. So I sort of lived the policy world for a bit, also

something I never would have guessed that I would have done,

and then had a chance to go back to my home state of Rhode Island

and work as the Chief Innovation Officer for the State of Rhode

Island for a bit, which, again, was fascinating to have that

federal experience and then State experience. But all that

time, you know, Mike core wanted to be back in the education

world, more directly in the education world, and so when the

opportunity came up to come join ISTE, an organization that I'd

been a member of back from when I was a teacher, I jumped at the

chance, and that's where, where I've been ever since. And then,

obviously, recently, now it's merged into this new combined

organization.

When you came into your role at ISTE, you

know, when I came into my role at Atlas, one of the first

organizations I heard about was ISTE, and I think a lot of our

tech leaders on the Independent School side tend to love ISTE

because of that experiment on the floor situation that you've

designed, which is that they can go and check things out without

a lot of obligation, and get a lot of great ideas to bring back

to their schools. Over time, we have found opportunities to work

together, and really it's been so incredible of ISTE to welcome

Atlas into the fold, because we're much, much smaller, and we

represent just one piece of the educational pie. But we had you

come over to our event in Orlando, as we were all scraping

our way out of the pandemic, and you joined us, and you were a

main stage speaker at the Atlas event. They loved having you.

Loved hearing about your perspective on the world, and

that was even before AI became a part of the conversation, just

talking about what is going on with technology in education

today? I know that's a huge question, but you probably get

it a lot. So what do you think of technology today in

education, and how has it changed since you were teaching

Spanish all those years ago. Well,

back when I was teaching Spanish, many years

ago, at one point, I did something really, really crazy,

which is, I made a video, I brought it in, and we used

videos to explain some key concepts. And it was like, Wow.

You know, just in case anybody's wondering how old I am, but

we're at a really interesting crossroads right now, I think.

And actually, I think back to some of the things that we

talked about when I visited your event not that long ago. We were

talking about, how do we create healthy conditions for tech use

in schools? In fact, we created a guide, a joint guide, with

ISTE Atlas and cousin around how to help create healthy

conditions for tech use. That was before. I don't think any of

us in our crystal balls could see this whole cell phone in

schools thing blowing up the way it has, right? It's like the

only thing that we can talk about, other than AI. So as I

look today, we have an interesting situation, which is

one where we have unprecedented amounts of technical

infrastructure. It was the digital infrastructure that I

dreamed I would have had back when I was teaching, and never

could have even imagined that we would have been in a world that

not only would every kid have a device, but they would have

multiple devices, at least one from the school, probably two

from home, right in many cases. I think what we are seeing,

though, is in the rush to improve infrastructure, which

was largely accelerated by COVID, by the way, and it's hard

to think of a silver lining coming from COVID. But if there

was any silver lining, having some attention drawn to the fact

that we needed better infrastructure was something

that came out of it. But in the rush to do that, we moved faster

with infrastructure than we did with conditions for healthy use,

and we're feeling the backlash of that now. I think, though, I

would say my worry is there is a movement, and it's a powerful

movement that says, whoa. The way to solve this is pull all

that tech back out, shut down all those devices, turn off the

networks, right? And that, unfortunately, does not help set

up our kids today for success in their future, learning or life,

and so we have to do is get ahead of that narrative and say,

Wait a minute. Yes, we know there are a whole host of

digital dysfunctions that we have created that we've allowed

to be created because we haven't provided enough structure and

context around helping our kids be smart users of technology.

But the way to fix that is not to ban access to technology. The

way to fix that is have those conversations. Talk about what

appropriate use is. Talk about what it means to use technology

for good. Talk about what it means when technology becomes a

distraction and really help build those great digital

citizens that we need to be our future leaders. Yeah,

and so Bill and Hiram my. Co hosts here are

both former educators who moved into their Chief Technology

Strategist role at their schools, and so we talk about

these issues a lot. One of the things that I know that the guys

are most excited about and have actually helped on the Atlas

side be advocates for, is the product index, because another

piece of this puzzle is sorting all of that with all of these

vendors and making sure that we understand our cyber risk and

making sure that we're protecting our young people's

data. And so there's also those issues too. So not just the cell

phone bans, it's just more complex. We talk about it all

the time, and I know that I'm beating the guys to the punch,

but my question lies in we often talk about how schools are even

more complex than businesses and enterprise, because you're

dealing with young humans and you're dealing with adults in

different roles. So when it comes to some of those safety

issues, what some of the work that you guys are thinking

about? You know, obviously it's great to have technology

amplifying education, but then there's also these concerns that

we need to kind of keep our hands around.

Yeah, by the way, that is such an important

point, I think, is that in businesses, in companies, in

even higher education, you're essentially creating structure,

policy strategies for adults, and you can kind of group them

all in one category, right? In schools, you don't get to do

that. And it's not even two categories, not adults and kids,

because a kindergartner is in a very different situation than a

middle school student or a high school student. And so even

policies, you know, we talk about creating healthy digital

use policies, you can't have one of those and expect that it will

apply to an entire range of students, right? We have to be

able to be thinking at different levels, what does privacy look

like? It's again, very different for kindergartner than for a

junior in high school. What does access look like? And so yes, it

is very complex. I did want to just circle back you mentioned

something this product index, which I'm really excited about.

Excited to be working with Atlas on it and several other amazing

partners. And you know, what we basically found is there wasn't

a good central place that anybody could go to to see how

individual ed tech products lined up with any sort of review

or validation. Is the term that I use right right now, if you

want to see, hey, is this particular product, whatever it

is? Is it accessible? Does it meet privacy requirements? Does

it meet basic pedagogy requirements? You'd have to go

to eight different places. We did some research and found that

schools, on average, spend around 40,000 hours, 40,000

hours reviewing apps to know if they can be put in front of

kids. That is an enormous amount of time that should be instead,

put towards helping kids in all kinds of other ways, or, if

you're adults in the system, helping support your teachers

better, right? Not reviewing apps. So what we're trying to

do, and it's a big lift, but we're excited to be working on

it with you, which is create this thing called the product

index, and say, here's all of the products that we're aware

of, any that we find, and we assign them a number. It's like

an ISBN number, right? But it's for a learning product and a

digital product. And then anybody who has made a

validation on that product, it doesn't have to be just ISTE.

Doesn't have to be just Atlas. But if there's an organization

that says, Hey, we are an expert on accessibility, we've reviewed

that product, and we can tell you, here's its good parts,

here's where it might be struggling, we will list that on

the product index. And so the hope is that we can at least cut

down some of that 40,000 hours and give some time back to

schools by offloading some of that review, some of the

validation of products, to others, which

is so valuable to the Independent

School world too, especially for our smaller schools or less

resource schools that maybe have a lone ranger tech department,

and they're trying to keep up with all these privacy policies

and interoperability issues, and so having the product index,

what we're trying to do at Atlas is encourage vendors in the

Independent School community to get into that index, get listed,

follow the steps, work With the ISTE team, the ED search team,

to get the product listed. That makes it easier for our user

community to then go and find independent school resources, or

just ed tech resources in general, for school. But if

there's independent school specific products or tools, S is

for example, we're wanting to make sure that those are listed

there so that our independent schools can get the benefit of

it as well. Bill and Hiram are huge advocates.

Yeah, yeah. And just in case, if we have some

companies that might be listening to this, some product

developers, we don't charge for that, you can list for free if

you want to have your product reviewed and validated. There

are ways that we can do that, and there are some minimal

charges for that. But to be listed, we're not charging. We

want people to get in, get their product listed, so it's easy.

Listed, so it's easier for schools to be able to find the

right tools and apps.

This is something that Hiram and I are going back

and forth on. I mean, I've got probably three emails in my

inbox right now from Hiram going back and forth on these types of

issues. But again, I alluded to the conversation I was having

with a colleague this morning and this. Came up at that point

as well, because we were looking at a product, we were looking at

a tool that we were using to help evaluate that product. And

one of the things that I looked at, and this is a question that

I have, because on certain pieces, you know, you might

evaluate something, and there's one version of it to evaluate,

but I think where we get caught is that there is, and this is, I

think, partially a result of COVID. We've mentioned this

before, is that there is the free version of something, and

then there is the paid version of something. And when I was

using the tool that I was looking at, there wasn't a

distinction as to what version of that they were evaluating,

because there were literally three tiers to this product, and

each tier offered different levels of data protection. They

offer different levels of other types of services. So when

you're using the product index that you have now, how is it

evaluating those tools, and is it making those distinctions

from that freemium version of it, where you're paying with

social capital, or the ones where you're actually entering

into a financial arrangement? I specifically avoided the word

contract, because even the free ones, you're entering into a

contract with these people. How are you approaching those types

of tools? Because those are the ones that come us at us from the

faculty, more so than some of these other ones that are just

kind of box products.

Yeah, great question. And I really like your

distinction there. There really aren't tools that are free,

especially if you consider the value of data. So if you are

putting data from your school into a system, there is value

being exchanged there. So nothing is free. Sometimes it

might involve a transfer of currency. But, you know, I think

your point is really a good one, and it's tricky. Instead of

giving you a really good answer, I'm going to actually complicate

it even more by the fact that not only do we have the sort of

the freemium version, or a plus version, or whatever. And we do

try to indicate that whenever we can on the index. But it's even

more tricky, because, you know, back in the day, right? It was

very clear what version of a particular piece of software you

were on, you know, it's 13.5 and we'd upgrade to 13.6 right? And

so much of the software that we use in the education space

doesn't even have versions, right? It's just being

constantly, iteratively updated, which, on some ways, is a good

thing. It makes it even harder, though, to be able to evaluate

and it's part of why traditional research sort of these long,

random control tile, you know, three year RCT style studies

just don't work in the digital space. One of the ways that we

try to do that is with the validations that we issue on

products. They have a life cycle, and so after a certain

amount of time, I think it's three years, a product has to be

re upped, as if they come back, and they have to be re evaluated

to see if those elements that were evaluated the first time

either are still there, or if they've improved, or in some

cases, if they now are not meeting the criteria, we would

be able to state that. And so that's sort of our crude method

right now, is just to say, Hey, you don't get a ones, and then

you're good for the rest of your life. But I'm sure there are

better ways and other ways that we could be thinking that. And

so maybe an invitation to your members and others that are

listening to that is if you can think of ways that would be

better without being too onerous, right? It's hard. If it

becomes too onerous on the developers, and they're like,

Ah, we're out. We're not going to participate. So how can we

make it easy but still make sure it's clear you know when and

where a validation has been done. So any feedback that you

have, or others have, I'd love to hear, Richard.

I love the fact that you are working hard to try

and streamline it and make it as easy as possible. I will tell

you right now I've already benefited from the time savings

because I've also provided this information to our instructional

text, because they get questions about software from the

trenches, and they're very interested in trying to support

their folks. And now it kind of takes the first level or layer

of the review out of my desk and places it with the instructional

text to provide them the agency to say, Okay, I've reviewed

these things. These are the gotchas that you got to wonder

about. And if we need to pass this on to the next level, I can

then review it. And so much of it is educating your faculty

about the nuances associated with terms of service. The other

issue is the terms for the AI learning of the bot itself,

because so often you have to look carefully that they are not

training the machine with your information from your particular

school. And this is where Bill and I have had the conversation

of using AI to leverage the terms of service than

demonstrating to our faculty are these are the points that AI has

said are problematic with this particular application that you

need to be cognizant of. This application leaves its site and

goes to other third parties, which now means you need to look

and review at all those terms of services for each and every one

of those third party apps that they. Connect to thank you.

First of all, you've been a huge help to us, along with the other

partners that we are utilizing, and it's really an important

part to our tool kit.

Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. And you bring

up some of the complexities here, right? Miraculously, we've

been talking for, you know, 15 minutes and haven't brought up

AI yet. But Hiram, your point is, AI adds a bunch of

complexities too. One of the things that I worry about is I

visit schools and I'll hear somebody say, Hey, don't put any

data into AI because it will be taking all of your data. I'm

like, Well, wait a minute, that's not necessarily true. And

then on the flip side, right? And it's done with good intent,

right? But like at our team here, we have AI tools that we

use that we have licensed, and part of the license is that our

data stays protected. But that doesn't mean that doesn't mean

that you could then just go grab another tool off the internet

and use it and have the data be protected. You all know this,

but trying to take something that's complex and nuanced and

simplify it enough is just a tough challenge, and I think we

all need to keep our heads in this game and be constantly

thinking, how can we make this easier for educators to

understand and make sense of when, when they aren't tech

experts, and they shouldn't have to be in order to be able to get

a fairly simple answer on is this tool, one that I can use

safely in my classroom.

And the interesting piece there is that

all of these applications are now introducing AI, and that's

another layer that you now have to not only review it initially,

but it's now a new version because of that AI.

So Richard, you authored a book that is

really popular in our community. I always have a copy nearby as

well. It's called Digital for good, raising kids to thrive in

an online world. And you wrote this a few years back. I'm

curious now, if you think that you would include any thing else

in it, if you were to go back to press, are there pieces of the

puzzle that you understand a little differently now, given

that AI has sort of burst onto the

scene, you know, it's interesting you asked

that question, because I do think about that. The good part

is, I actually think the framework, the principles that I

present there, and if you're not familiar with the book, there

are five key principles that I present around helping young

people become healthy digital citizens. How to have good

digital well being is a term that I like to use. And those I

wouldn't change at all. I think they are spot on, and I think

the concepts underlying them really make sense. What is

interesting, though, is to see how the world has shifted

because of AI. And I do talk about AI in the book, because

that was something that was clearly, you know, could see

that coming even before the major explosion, but I think

it's accelerated some of the concepts that I bring up. So for

example, one of the things that I talk about is this sort of

binary of this information is good or bad, right? Or this

information. And one of the things I talk about the book is

it's not that simple. Most of the book is just saying, hey,

it's not that simple, right? So one of the things I say is,

there can be information that is biased, but if the purpose is to

be persuasive, if it's to provide a persuasive argument

that might be very appropriate to hear a viewpoint, it would be

totally inappropriate to use that as a factual piece of media

if you were doing a different sort of assignment in school and

so helping young people understand the nuance of when do

I want Something that's opinion. When do I want something that's

fact? When is something that the purpose is advertising that has

all been complexified to make up a word with AI. And so I think

what I would say is, if I were to do anything else, if I were

to rewrite the book, I would just increase the level of

urgency that I would put behind having some of these

conversations that I suggest with kids, because it is moving

much faster, both for positive and negative, but you can get

answers much faster, but also you can get misled much faster.

And so I think really getting ahead of that matters. The one

thing that I've been pondering recently I would have another

chapter in the book, maybe on this, if I were to rewrite it,

is in the AI world, the value of answers becomes much less and

the value of questions becomes much greater. And I think that

has some major implications for our schools that we haven't

grappled with yet, right? And it doesn't mean that having an

answer isn't important, right? Air is much more important for

us than gold, but the value of gold is much greater because

it's rarer, right? And so in a world where answers are much

easier to come by, the value goes down. Questions,

interrogating, those answers, questioning, knowing how to make

a right question, that value goes way up. But our schools are

largely designed around valuing answers, not questions, and

that's something that we're going to have to really start to

grapple with over the next couple of years. It's

interesting, because the question represents

your ability to synthesize the answer, synthesize the content,

hear what you're saying, and then engage in that dialog back.

So it's that give and take is a great point. I mean, I literally

wrote it down, yeah, in my notes, and I'm highlighting

there's some like, that's spot on in a way that I really hadn't

thought of before.

And, you know, think about that even just for

assessment alone, right? Almost all of our assessments are based

on here's a thing. Give me an answer, right? And, you know,

imagine what it starts to look like when we say, you. Here's a

scenario. What questions do you have about it? That's a far more

authentic assessment, but it's also not the sort of assessments

that we're preparing teachers now to be able to create and to

deliver. And so there's a lot of relearning that we're going to

have to be doing as we shift into this world. That leads me

into something that I had planned to

kind of ask you about something that I'm interested in, because

I say often on the pod. You know that I have a daughter. My

oldest daughter, is going to school to be an educator, and

shockingly to me, they're not teaching her about AI in school.

She's a junior, she's done practicum. She'll be in the

classroom in a year and a half, teaching, and they're not

talking to her at her school about AI tools about changing

how we assess, really the scaffolding to know how to use

AI for younger students. Just curious, what you think about

that. Do we have to get going here? Folks like, do we need to

get step in?

Yes, is the answer to that. Look, this is a

huge issue. One of the biggest concerns that I hear when I talk

to school leaders is the lack of adequate preparation for

incoming new teachers coming out of teacher education programs.

It's such a big deal actually that we started recently the

coalition of educator prep programs that also agree that

this is a problem, and we're working together to try to do

something about it. And so we've created this coalition of about

100 now teacher education institutions from around the

country, and we're coming together and saying, what do we

do to help really rethink the role of technology? AI, of

course, but it's beyond that in this group, in fact, just next

month, we're bringing all of those Deans together out in

Silicon Valley to sit down and say, and we're going to meet

with some of the top leaders from the AI world and just say,

How does this impact what you're doing? How do we think

differently about this? One thing that I'll share is that

all of the institutions that are part of this sign a pledge, an

agreement that they will actively build in key elements

of effective technologies to their curriculum for pre service

teachers, and they have to do work to help their faculty be

more prepared in order to deal with these issues. But I mean,

we are just getting started. This is a huge issue. There are

1000s of teacher preparation program just in the US alone,

and we have got to spend more time helping them get ready,

because the teachers that show up in the classroom today are

not coming with the depth of understanding that they need,

because their teacher prep programs have not built that

into the curriculum,

right? And look no shade, right? Because

there's tons of other stuff that has to get handled. So she's

learning all the basics, and she's learning about the

pedagogical foundation that she needs to have to be effective in

the classroom. But it's interesting because it does put

a lot of pressure on atlases technology leaders to have

teachers coming into the classroom that really are just

not grounded in the options. It puts a lot of pressure on our

tech leaders to then get them caught up in a hurry, you know,

in terms of what's possible in the world, and also what kind of

graduates we're trying to send out into the world,

100% and if I could make it, maybe an

invitation back, which is if you are, particularly if it's a

school that is in an area where new teachers tend to come from

one or two institutions, right? And you know, I realize,

especially if it's a smaller independent school, you're not

hiring 2030 teachers. You may be having two or three teachers,

but even if it's two or three teachers, and you're finding

that they have some skills gap, particularly around how they're

using technology, please communicate that back to those

higher ed institutions. One of the things that we found as we

were working with these EPP programs, they were saying we

aren't hearing any problems. And we went, are you kidding? And so

we started facilitating conversation going back, and

they're like, well, like, you know, I think there wasn't an

awareness of how far the gap had gotten. And so just in a nice,

like you said, Christina, in a supportive way, we're not

throwing anybody into the bus, but a nice we just say, Hey dear

so and so, head of the Dean of such and such school. Just

giving you a heads up that we love hiring your students, but

they are showing up without the expertise that we need in these

areas. If there's anything we can do to help you, please let

us know. And just keeping that on their radar, I think, is

really, really important.

I think that's a great shout out for the merger

of the two organizations, because I think it takes the

idea of putting those curricular leaders and connecting them on

the IT side of things. My degree is in early childhood Ed. You

know, I think I had one computer class, and it was in college and

it was in the stone age, but there was one course on that,

but it was not really focused on anything that had to do with

pedagogy, as Christina saying there wasn't any connection to

it at that point. Granted, it was harder back. You know, this

is late 80s, early 90s that I'm talking about here, so the

connections weren't as evident. But again, it's one of those

things that continue, and I think the merger brings the two

of those things closer together, because it puts them both in the

same conversation. Because organizations. Nationally, those

two groups are now one in the same so I think that's fabulous.

The question that I do have to follow up on the topic of the

book and the idea of raising kids, and talking about where

schools fit into that, when we talk about everything that

people put upon schools in terms of educating our children and

raising our children. Where do the parents fall in this mix?

Where do we as adults with these kids outside of the classroom

fall into that mix? And we've talked about this before, in

terms of our own modeling of the use of technology and how we're

going about doing it. Where do you see that distinction, like,

Where can we let the school off the hook a little bit here, and

say that this is not something that institutions are going to

be able to solve on their own? What are the parental

responsibilities here?

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for asking

that question. I really appreciate that. So I have a

chapter in the book that's called Digital well being is a

team sport, and the whole purpose of that is to make this

point that you're making, which is, this is not something that

schools can do on their own. And one of the things that we really

need to be clear about is that we see in schools that do this

really well, where we visit schools and you're not having

cell phone issues or having good technology use, what you notice

is that there are principles that are reinforced at home and

principles that are aligned similar language that are

reinforced at school, and both help each other, because parents

will say the same thing, by the way, they'll be like, well, if

kids go to school and there's no structure around this, how hard

is it for me to create structure at home, right? And it's this

tension. What My recommendation is, and I think this is really

critical, is schools can help parents provide some structure,

they should not determine what their conditions for tech use

are at home. That's a parent's job. It's a family's role. But

some basic guidelines can be very helpful. Parents we know

trust their schools, and so when they go to their school, and if

the school says, hey, here are some of our principles for

healthy tech use, and it can't be written in some legal

language that nobody understands right? Plain language, right?

And by the way, also, please watch out for the positive

versus the negative. It's like, here's a list of all the things

you should never do with technology that's not very

helpful because you can't practice not doing something. So

if the school says, Here are some core principles, we use

technology to help encourage curiosity. We use technology to

help make other people feel welcome and involved. We use

technology to help make our community a better place. We use

technology to fact check, right? We use technology to engage with

people that we know and trust, particularly if it's with

younger kids. You want to work some of that in. If you just

provide some of those guidance to parents and say, here's our

conditions at school, how could you have some conversations at

home to mirror some of those? And when you do that, what we

see is that parents often are willing to pick up and run with

that role. They just haven't been given enough of a framework

structure to know how to start those conversations. And there's

a lot of misinformation out there on the interwebs about

this. And so a lot of parents think they're doing the right

thing, they go, I said an hour, two hours, and my kid has two

hours of screen time every day, and you're like, really, what

are they doing? I don't know, but it's two hours aren doing

the right thing. You're like, Nope, you're not, because there

are some things that they shouldn't be spending five

minutes doing, and other things that you could probably spend

even longer than that. And so just helping redirect the parent

energy with some context can be really helpful in actually

taking some of that burden off of the schools because the home

can support it. Richard,

I'm so glad you mentioned that partnership,

because it's just another chapter in the parents

experience about at risk behaviors that they're going to

have to deal with with their children at a very young age.

You're talking about drugs and alcohol, then you might be

talking about fast driving and staying out late, and what games

you're playing online, and this is just another piece to that

puzzle, and the ongoing conversations are absolutely

essential, and you're right, the best schools have that

partnership with parents, and they really have developed great

relationships with the parents associations, and that can

really carry that message out to the broader community.

And Hiram, I think this is such a great

point, because parents in other areas generally do a pretty good

job, right? Yeah, we all have our faults. I have four kids.

There's lots of things I haven't done right, but generally we do

okay. And so I find that often, if we can compare digital well

being to other areas, it also helps lower the burden. So

here's one that I often use. You know, I talk to parents, they

say, Who's responsible for helping their kids be healthy

eaters food well being. We'll just call it that, right? Do you

have food time? Do you come in and set a clock and say you can

eat whatever you want for an hour? You can eat Twinkies for

an hour, but as long as the clock, you'd stop it. No, of

course, you don't. You talk about there are some foods that

have, what is it more value than others? There's broccoli and

chicken, and then there's Twinkies and Doritos. And it

doesn't mean we can't ever eat a Twinkie or a Dorito but, boy, we

better have balance. And when do we know when we're done eating?

Is it because the timer goes off? Or is it because we

recognize that we're feeling full, right? If we talk about

how parents can do that in other areas, they go, oh, yeah, look,

it's the same thing. We're just applying it to our digital diet

as opposed to our food diet.

That is a fantastic analogy. I don't think

anyone will forget that absolutely. So let me ask you,

Richard, I'm curious, what AI tools are you using regularly?

What kind of captures your curiosity? Right now, I use

every AI tool I can get my hands on. I think

that's actually really important, as an education

leader, that we are testing out a lot of these tools so we can

see what's impressive. You know, I love when we're like, Wow, I

can't believe how cool that is. And then also I'm like, That's

it, right? I think that's important. I really love some of

the image generating tools. I think a lot of times when we

think about AI, we think about text, but I do a lot of

presenting and teaching, and when I do, I generate all of the

images using AI, because you can just get these really awesome,

creative visualizations that you can't get other ways. Recently,

I've been playing with a tool called pika, which is or pika, I

guess, a tool that creates video, generates AI video,

amazing. It's just mind blowing. And then I've been trying to

push myself to use some of the text based tools in ways that

are pushing their bounds a bit more. I worry that sometimes we

slip into using AI like just a search engine, right? Just give

me your answer. Hey, can give answers? Yeah, it's okay. It's

far better when you push the limits on it. So one that I do

is often when I'm presenting and I'll have a big number, right, a

number that's hard to comprehend, how many 1000s of

hours schools use reviewing apps, right? And so one of the

things that I'll do is I'll go into AI and say, Hey, give me

some analogies to help think about how to convey a big number

or a large concept. AI is great at coming up with analogies, so

that's a way that it helps me be able to communicate better. I

also think it's really interesting to use AI as a

feedback tool. So I'll take something that I've written,

I'll put it in there, and I'll ask, you know, if somebody were

to find a flaw in my thinking here, what would it be? And it

gives some really good feedback to that. I speak two languages.

I speak Spanish and I speak fluent Spanish, but I'm not a

native Spanish speaker. And so sometimes I'll take something,

I'll put it in that I've written in Spanish, and I'll say, if you

were going to detect that I was not a native speaker, what about

this thing that I've written would be the clue? Awesome. So

pushing these tools to really give me input and feedback to

improve my performance, actually, I think helps me

become a better human. I love

that. And as we're winding this down, if a

school leader comes up to you and kind of sheepishly says, I

haven't thought about AI, our school's not using it. We don't

have policies in place? Do you have any recommendations on

where to start? It's the question I tend to get most

often. So I'm curious what you would say if a school kind of

admits to you that they feel behind the ball on this, where

do they begin? That's

a great question. And I often say this

is a no guilt, no shame space, right? But we do have to get

involved, right? So the worst thing that somebody could do

say, Yeah, I'm gonna sit this AI thing out that will be

detrimental. And so please, please, don't do that. But I

think if you're just getting into it, you know, I would say,

give some time to explore. That's the advice that we give.

Is sometimes schools want to rush right into making policies

right. And policies are really not what we super need here,

right? Some guidance, yes. But if you have a good digital use

policy, if you have a good data privacy policy, honestly, review

them a little bit. But I don't know that you need a special,

separate AI policy. What you need is, sometimes to explore,

and we recommend for school leaders making sure that you're

giving that time to your teams as well. So take a chunk of

time. Maybe you get a two hour faculty meeting. Maybe you say,

hey, instead of doing what we normally do and talking about

stuff, we're going to take this time and we're going to let you

explore how you could use AI to generate assessments that are

more exciting and more aligned to the work that you're doing.

And then just play for a bit, and then come share what's

working and what's not. And so that idea of just starting to

explore is the best thing you can do. And then the next steps

become much more obvious, because you'll see what AI does

well, you'll see where there are problems, and you can start to

build what those conditions are for how you want to use it in

your

school. Richard, by time we release this

episode, we'll be in the beginning of 2025 right now we

record at the end of 2024 as we're all kind of stepping out

the door. But my final question is, what do you predict for the

coming year? What do you expect we'll be thinking about and

talking about in 2025

Wow, that's a great question. I will say what

I predict, and maybe I'm interpreting that as what I hope

maybe I'm manifesting by treating it as one in the same

nothing wrong with that. I hope and

predict that we will

have deeper conversations about the

experience of school for students, I feel like we've used

a lot of lenses to help us design our school the

experience, right? We rigor, accountability, state test

scores, and by the way, not that those are bad things, tradition.

And there's another one, right? Those are bad. But there is a

lens that we often forget we often leave off the table, and

that is the lens of student experience. We often design

schools without really prioritizing making it an

amazing experience for students. All of you that are listening to

this, I'm assuming you have some tech expertise, right? Just

given your community. And you know what it feels like when you

pick up a piece of software where there was just no good UX

team, and you click and you click the back button and it

logs out. And you know, you have to read all this sorts of stuff.

You information is hard to find. The menus don't work, right? It

doesn't work on mobile. Those are all UX problems, right? And

we know how you just want to, like, poke your eyes out when

you get software like that. Unfortunately, we have not

prioritized UX of school. And I really hope, and I'm going to do

everything I can do to make this a priority in the coming year,

is say, what would it look like if we designed the school around

an amazing user experience for this student? What if we had

IKEA design our school right now, I don't mean just because

the fur should be cool, but you know what I mean? You know what

I mean, like the walking through an experience, as opposed to

just pulling furniture off of racks. What if we had Disney

designer school or whatever? Think of an experience that

you've had. It feels like a lot of our schools maybe were

designed by the DMV. What I really want to do is think

about, how do we have Disney or IKEA be the designer of our

school, and really pay attention to things like, what does a form

look like and is it written in language that's appropriate for

kids? What does it test look like? And is it test a joyful

experience it should be. There's no reason why assessments

shouldn't be joyful experience. What does our tech look like?

Can I log in with one simple password? Do I have to change my

password every 30 seconds and not hit the back button, because

it's going to explode, right? Going to explode, right? All of

those things turn into creating what the user experience is. And

I think we just need a lot more attention on making sure school

feels more like Disney than like the DMP.

Richard cullata, every time I spend 40

minutes with you, I feel inspired for 40 months. So

hopefully it won't be that long until we speak again, but you

have been just a delight. Thank you for giving us such

incredible food for thought, to think through and be inspired

by. You're doing great work, sir. So keep it up. Stay

healthy, stay happy, because we need you in this space.

You're very kind. Thank you so much. It's

always a pleasure to get to talk to you, and thank you for the

great work that you and your great group of school leaders

are doing. It's really, really impressive to watch the

innovation that comes out of the independent school sector. We

need that. So please, please, please keep it going.

We will. You know, we will. Thank you,

Richard, appreciate you being here.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

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