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From Burnout to Breakthrough: How Socrait Is Redesigning Teacher Support
Episode 79 • 2nd November 2025 • Digital Learning Today • Jeffrey Bradbury - TeacherCast Educational Network
00:00:00 00:13:37

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Welcome to Digital Learning Today. In this episode, Jeff Bradbury explores the strategic systems shaping the future of education—Instructional Coaching, Artificial Intelligence, Professional Learning, and Educational Technology Trends. Dr. Maria Anderson shares her journey in education and the creation of Socrait, a tool designed to reduce teacher burnout by streamlining classroom data management. She explains how cognitive exhaustion affects teachers and how Socrait captures spoken data during lessons, freeing educators to focus on teaching. The discussion includes user feedback, data privacy considerations, and the mission to enhance teacher happiness and effectiveness.

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This episode is just the beginning. To get the complete blueprint for designing and implementing high-impact systems in your district, get your copy of my book, "Impact Standards."
  • Strategic Vision for Digital Learning:Learn how to create a district-wide vision that aligns digital learning with your educational goals, transforming how standards-based instruction is designed and supported.
  • Curriculum Design and Implementation:Discover practical strategies for integrating digital learning into existing curricula, creating vertical alignment of skills, and mapping digital learning across grade levels.
  • Effective Instructional Coaching:Master the art of coaching people rather than technology, building relationships that drive success, and measuring impact through student engagement rather than just technology usage.
Purchase your copy of “Impact Standards” on Amazon today!

Key Takeaways:

  • Dr. Maria Anderson brings 30 years of education experience to her work.
  • Socrait enhances teacher happiness and strengthens school communities.
  • Teachers face cognitive exhaustion from managing overwhelming data and responsibilities.
  • Socrait captures spoken classroom data, helping teachers remember important interactions.
  • Socrait quickly drafts parent communications based on classroom observations.
  • Teachers report feeling calmer and more focused when using Socrait.
  • Data privacy is central—no audio is recorded, and the platform is FERPA compliant.
  • Socrait is user-friendly and accessible on mobile devices.
  • Teachers can leverage Socrait to refine their instructional practices.
  • The platform empowers educators to focus on meaningful learning experiences.

Chapters:

  • 00:00 Introduction to Socrait and Dr. Maria Anderson
  • 01:54 The Journey to Socrait: Addressing Teacher Burnout
  • 05:22 Demonstrating Socrait: A Classroom Tool for Teachers
  • 12:18 Feedback from Educators: The Impact of Socrait
  • 13:48 Data Privacy in AI: Ensuring Safety with Socrait
  • 15:23 Final Thoughts: Empowering Teachers with Socrait

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

About our Guest: Dr. Maria Andersen

Dr. Maria Andersen is the Cofounder and CEO of Socrait, her 2nd EdTech startup. With a 30-year career dedicated to improving teaching and learning, Maria has always kept one foot in the classroom. She’s taught across community colleges, private colleges, universities, and K-12 schools, covering a wide range of subjects, including math, business, chemistry, ELL, and her personal favorite, a middle school elective she designed and is still teaching, called "Technology & Society."

Links of Interest

About Company

Co-founded by two previously successful edtech founders, Socrait is an AI-powered class assistant that's solving teacher burnout in K12 school districts across the country. Built specifically by teachers for teachers, Socrait's class assistant technology uses teacher voice and AI to save educator time by tracking behavior, taking attendance, summarizing lessons, and even helping with parent communication. Instead of juggling sticky notes, spreadsheets, and end-of-day exhaustion, teachers just speak naturally (as they normally teach) and Socrait listens to key moments in class and turns their words into clear, actionable insights and data. Teachers then get more time to teach, stronger communication with families, and support that actually feels like support. Administrators love Socrait too, because it provides real-time data without the need for classroom visits helping identify trends, support interventions, and reduce burnout across the board. Try Socrait at: https://socrait.com/try-socrait

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Jeff Bradbury (ISTE “20 to Watch” Award Winner and ISTE Certified Educator) is available for keynote speaking, workshop facilitation, and live event broadcasting. With expertise in educational technology and professional development, Jeff brings engaging content and practical strategies to conferences and professional learning events. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ [gravityform id="2" title="true"]

Transcripts

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

Hello Everyone and welcome to the TeacherCast educational network. name is Jeff Bradbury. Thank you so much for joining us today and making TeacherCast your home for professional development.

On today's episode of Digital Learning Today, we're gonna be taking a look at an AI application that is revolutionizing the way that teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators are able to provide feedback not only to parents, but their students and their colleagues.

I'm so excited for what we're going to be sharing with you guys today. Stick around. If this is the first time you're checking out digital learning today, you can find us over on Spotify and Apple podcast. And our video version of this show is going to be found on our YouTube channel over at [teachercast.net](http://teachercast.net/) forward slash YouTube.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

My guest today has had a 30 year career in education dedicated to improving teaching and learning in our classrooms where she's inspired students both in K-12 and higher education. Today she's here as the co-founder and CEO of Socrait where she and her team are on a mission to enhance teacher happiness and strengthen school communities by empowering educators to focus more on what truly matters, teaching and fostering meaning learning experiences. It is a pleasure to welcome to the program today

Dr. Dr. Maria Andersen Anderson. Dr. Anderson, welcome to the program. I am so excited to have you here. We're talking all about Socrait But first, let's talk a little bit about yourself. 30 years of education. What has that ride been like? And how did you come about creating Socrait?

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

Thank you, Jeff. I'm happy to be here.

Well, I'm going to give you like a really condensed

Tune. When I sold that one in:

and got them to hire me as a teacher. And I've been in the classroom with them teaching middle school and high school since, ⁓ this is my fourth year there.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

And what gave you the idea to create Socrait?

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

Well, last year when I was teaching, I was really feeling the effects of burnout. I'm very organized. I can handle doing multiple preps. Like it's never been a problem for me before, but last year got me. And I started to think about what is it about K-12 teaching in particular that is more exhausting than any other kind of teaching career?

And I realized that there were two things happening to me. One was just cognitive exhaustion from the day. Our brains are so tired at the end of the day. We encounter so much data during the day. We talk to so many students. We try to remember so much. We don't have any time to write anything down. And we're just exhausted at the end of the day. Our brains are tired. There's so many memes on the internet of teachers just collapsing at the end of the day on their couches, never to get up again, right?

That's a sign people. The second is that at the end of the day, there's all these things you could do to make tomorrow go better. If only you could remember what they were like, ⁓ there's a student who acted out today, but I can't remember what they did in class. So I can't really call the parent or email a parent. don't remember what happened. There's like, I know I reminded myself to do 20 things during the day. What were they? we, our brains process between I'm estimating based on our numbers that are coming in on Socrait.

Our brains process between 1,000 and 1,500 data points a day without having time to write any of them down. Human brains aren't designed for that. There's no way any of us remember enough data to follow up at the end of the day. So think about that cycle, cognitive exhaustion all day, a bad end of day experience where you feel like you failed. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It's a lot, yeah. And so somewhere in that time I was...

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

It's a lot.

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

As I was, you know, awarding students in class and praising students in class and all the things we do, I just thought, wait a second, I'm saying all this data out loud. We say it all out loud. If I could grab the data from what I say out loud, I'd be there at the end of the day. I would remember what I had done during the day. I would be able to take that data and quickly write parent emails, have, even get assistance from AI, things like that.

And that's what I realized there was a product there for us to build to help teachers. And, you know, it's maybe a little self-serving because I'm still teaching. I teach two classes a day in the afternoons now, and I use it every day.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

and talk to us a little bit about where we find out more information about Socrait.

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

So can go to our website, is [Socrait.com](http://socreate.com/). It's S-O-C-R-A-I-T, you know, for [AI.com](http://ai.com/). ⁓ if you click on the Try It at the top, you can give it a try.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

You know, Dr. Maria Andersen, I completely agree with what you just said. I mean, I teach long days. We all teach long days. Instructional coaches are out there going classroom to classroom, office to office. Who has time to remember all of those data points? Would you be able to show us a little bit about what Socrait can do for us in our classrooms?

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

Absolutely.

So Socrait works on a little app and ⁓ streams from your phone. It doesn't record. And so as the waveform of your voice streams by, we collect the data from it. And that data is just textual snippets of data from things that you say. So I'm going to go ahead and press Start on my phone here. And I'm going to pretend to be teaching for like a minute to two minutes.

And then when I press stop, we're going to go look at the data on the screen. Okay. So I'm pressing start.

Okay, ⁓ Joel, please take your seat. The bell just rang. Everybody needs to take a seat. Take out your textbook, your notebook, and your pencil. All right, let me do a quick count. It looks like, let's see, it looks like everybody is here, but ⁓ Carter and David. Carter and David are absent today. All right. ⁓ Evan, thank you for having all of your materials ready. Great job.

⁓ One quick announcement, our reading quiz is not going to be Tuesday. It's actually going to be Wednesday this week. I want you to have a little bit more time to study, so make sure you use that time wisely and write down to do some homework tonight. ⁓ Joel, can you keep your hands to yourself, please? All right, let's begin. Today's topic is on character motivation. And simply put, that's the reason a character does something. It's what drives them. So think about the last story we read.

Why did the protagonist return the lost money? Drew?

Yeah, exactly. She was motivated by her honesty. That trait drove her actions. Great answer, Drew. Okay, Elizabeth and Karen, I need you to focus on your lesson, not each other. Thank you. Okay, and Joel, can you please keep your hands to yourself? How many warnings is that? Okay.

Okay, understanding motivation is key to understanding a story. If you know why a character acts, you can better understand the story and predict what they might do next. And that leads directly to the homework we're going to do today. I want you to think of a character from any book or movie, and I want you to write one short paragraph explaining their motivation. So tell me what the character wants and why they act the way they do. For example, Batman is motivated by a desire for justice because

blank and you would fill that in with your paragraph. ⁓ That is going to be due tomorrow. ⁓ Your phone should not be out in class, Joel. Please put it away. It's actually illegal now to have it in class. Are there any questions about the assignment? No? Okay. Well, you can use the remaining time to brainstorm some ideas. So I'm going to go ahead and press stop on my screen here.

All right. So you can see that my session is processing. I just finished that. And so we'll give it just a second here. And I will hit refresh and see if it's done. I'm still processing. Give it a sec. You can see things starting to come in here. For example, there's a ⁓ message I can draft about Joel. There's a class summary that's ready to go. It's just still tallying up this over here. So let's give it another refresh. There we go.

So what we have here is what you see after class. That was a very short class, right? But already we can see things like this is the class summary, which always is in three sections. There's assignment clarifications or changes, which are really helpful for knowing what you said, right? So a new homework assignment, the reading quiz was moved. There's like what happened in class today. And then

Here's the content I talked about. What is character motivation, its definition and importance, a class example, and the homework guidelines that I gave out loud. So it grabbed everything. It collected the data about class from what I said. It collected some warnings and praises to the students in the class, some presence and absence data from the class. So remember, I said that two students were absent.

And it knows who's present because of who I talked to out loud in class. And then the real kicker here is that if you have students that have at least two warnings or praises, you can go ahead and draft a message about them. So if you want to let the parent know what's going on, or the principal, or the special ed department, or something like that, whether it's a praise or a warning, you can review that. And we get it right from your voice. And we draft a nice, neutrally worded message for you.

So here I wanna inform you about some concerns regarding Joel's behavior in class. They've been reminded multiple times to keep their hands to themselves, which is important for maintaining a respectful and safe class environment. Additionally, Joel had their phone out during class, which is against school policy and is now illegal during instructional time. all the words are there for you. You said them out loud and we'll give you the email that you can send as a result. And of course there's a nice follow-up too. I'd appreciate it if you could assist.

Like all of that's done for you, right? It's up to you to copy that, edit it how you would like and send it off, but at least you don't have to remember it and it's already there waiting for you. ⁓ And so, this is just the tip of the iceberg for what Socrait does right now. ⁓ We aim to build out everything we can do for a teacher in class and starting.

By the time you publish this maybe, starting next week, we'll have reminders in here too. So anytime you remind yourself of something in class like, I need to remember to copy that music for stand four, or I need to remember to bring rocks for the lab tomorrow, those are gonna show up in a reminders panel here for you as well.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

You know, Dr. Maria Andersen, that is absolutely something that I would love to have each and every day, not only as an instructional coach, but as a teacher. I can't tell you how much value that would bring that only to my teaching life, but to the coaching life. And I got to ask you, what kind of feedback are you getting from teachers, from coaches and from your schools?

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

So our teachers say their brains feel calmer in class. They have more patience. They're able to follow up on things faster than they were before because the data is right there. They say things like they don't feel gaslit by students anymore because they can always go check. Did I say something? How many times did I remind you about that? ⁓ They can look at their own data and see and improve their instructional practices.

I think a lot of us try really hard to praise more than we've worn, but it's difficult when you have really squirrely classes. And if you teach middle school, you've got that right now, right? ⁓ So we could get a ton of positive feedback. ⁓ Coaches are really liking to work, to have the data to work with the teachers they're working with. It's not like they go observe once and that's their data point. They can look at multiple days of class. They can see the structure of class from those class summaries.

things like that. Principals are happy teachers are using it because when they need to talk to parents, they can say, hey, teachers, can you send me some of that data you have about the student? And they can go grab exactly what types of things that the student is doing in class. No worry about misremembering, right? And so it's really powerful.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

Now Dr. Maria Andersen, the last question I want to ask you is the one that I'm sure is on everybody's mind because this is an AI based platform. That question of course is around data privacy. Could you talk a little bit about how all that works and how Socrait is helping keep the data safe?

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

Yeah, so first

students are interacting with Socrait. We're interacting with the teacher, right? And so we're listening to the teacher's voice and what the teacher says. Now with that said, we do have first names in the system, and so we of course have to be FERPA compliant. And we are. We abide by the same rules that any other tech company abides by around FERPA and securing the data. We have multi-layered security. ⁓

We are private by default. We have no audio recording. And you might be surprised by this, but we actually built ⁓ anonymization of names into our process. So we never send something to an LLM, even when we're testing the product. don't send something to an LLM unless it anonymizes the names first. so it goes to the, any data we send has no student names in it. It just has a weird snippet like,

Person one, stop using your iPad, right? Like it doesn't know who it is. And so when it comes back to us, we put the names in. And so many companies tell teachers, just can't use names in our product. Well, you can use names in our product. You can say names of students in class, it's no problem. We just, we take care of it for you.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

And that's really important to know that everything is going to be taken care of. Everything is private. And of course, making sure that all of your student information stays where it is. Dr. Maria Andersen, it is an amazing product. Tell us one more time where we can get a hold of it and take a look at that camera and talk directly to our teachers and our coaches. Why is so great the application for them?

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

We want you to be able to teach with a happier self, a calmer brain, and to really enjoy your time in the classroom. When somebody else is doing the remembering for you, you can do that. You can absolutely be present with your students, not let the things happening in class get to you, and just have it all there after class.

To use Socrait, to give it a try, go to [Socrait.com](http://socreate.com/). It's S-O-C-R-A-I-T. And click on the Try It at the top and you can sign up for a free account. Give it a try in one class. You can use it for the semester and see how it works for you.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

We're gonna make sure that we have the links to everything over on our show notes. You can find it over on [teachercast.net](http://teachercast.net/) forward slash so create Dr. Maria Andersen, thank you so much for coming on and sharing so great with us today. ⁓ And guys, look, we've all been there busy days, busy classrooms, you get to the end and you don't remember what you had for lunch, let alone what you taught the last period. If you are one of those teachers, if you're one of those principals, and especially if you're one of those instructional coaches,

Dr. Maria Andersen (:

Absolutely, thanks for having us.

Jeffrey Bradbury (:

Check out all the great stuff over at so create and again, you can find out all the information over at teacher cast net forward slash so great

Well, I gotta say Dr. Maria Andersen, this is a absolute fantastic platform. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. If you like this episode, please make sure that you hit that like and subscribe button. You can of course find us over on [teachercast.net](http://teachercast.net/) and you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts the video for this is going to be found over at [teachercast.net](http://teachercast.net/) slash YouTube. And that wraps up this episode of Digital Learning Today on behalf of Dr. Maria Andersen from Socrait and everybody here on TeacherCast. My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with

your students.

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