Join us as we debunk the myth of 'digital natives' and explore the crucial tech skills students need to succeed. Discover why explicit instruction in digital literacy is essential, even for those who seem comfortable with technology. We'll discuss the importance of integrating technology into pedagogy and how educators can empower students to navigate the digital world effectively.

• Kent School, coed boarding school in Kent, CT
• TPACK AI Framework
• ATLIS AI Content and Resources
• AI Literacy and the Evolving Role of Educators, episode of Talking Technology with ATLIS
• The Importance of Vendor Vetting in Schools: Ensuring Privacy, Security, and Compliance (including “Evaluating AI Technologies”), article by Mark Orchison, founder of 9ine
• ATLIS Leadership Institute
• The Lorax, book by Dr. Suess

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, Director of Information Systems

and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in Richmond,

Virginia.

Hello, gentlemen. How are you today?

Doing? Well, doing a little Cole, but it's all good. A

little chilly at this time of year. We're excited at Atlas, I

think that we're flowing into 2025 really excited about all

the things that are coming up, and we came into the year with a

lot of energy. I love the spring, like we're getting to

where we're engaging with our community. We get to see

everybody soon at our 10th anniversary, annual conference

in Atlanta, coming up in April. We've got a new edition of our

magazine dropping that's really exciting. We've been doing some

partnership with other organizations in our space to

just really talk about things like the certification program

that we run and all sorts of fun stuff. So it's just a really

energetic time of year for the Atlas team and the Atlas

community, the Atlas board deep in the selection process and all

of that with our nominations committee. So it definitely

feels not just like the start of the early days of a new year,

but also just the more energized and exciting part of our year

too. So it's good to see you guys, and I got lots of cool

stuff coming up. Are you guys excited about Atlanta?

It's funny you mention it because I literally

just did a tally. Very excited. I think we're actually coming

with six people, including myself. Wow. What

kind of titles, Bill like, who on your

team are you bringing? We've got

the three different campuses. We're spread out. So

we're bringing each of our ed tech focused people at each of

those campuses. So our primary and middle school person,

myself, our Director of Academic Technology, who is also at our

Upper School and does that role at our upper school. We're

bringing Alek Duba, who's been on the podcast from a data

perspective, to do the work with the CIRIS track and all of those

things. And we have a new director of STEM

and innovation, right? I know that's

a big project in your world right now, yep. And we're

bringing

him along and then myself. So if my math is

correct, which it often isn't, but if it is correct, we've got

like, six people coming, and it's one of those things where

it's like, you want it to come quickly, because everyone's

getting jazz for it and excited for it. And now we're just,

we're in this waiting game,

I know. Well, you know what? Art

teacher, math, that's okay, so we can accept that either way,

it's close enough. Yep. So I was just

going to ask Bill, are you guys going to drive down as

a team? There will

be no driving. We will be flying. Thankfully,

Newark to Atlanta is a quick, cheap and easy flight, so no,

there will be no driving this time you're

proposing a road trip, Hiram, they can stop

and pick you up in Richmond on the way down. Oh, wow, that's a

fun bus.

Absolutely pick me up in Richmond. Pick up Lewis to

Ravenscraft. Now

that I didn't think of that would be some quality

time that I think we'd all enjoy an RV. There you go. I think

we're just building this out an

RV or a bus, and now I know that we will end

up with new clip art to post on social media of Bill driving a

bus full of people down to the annual conference. This is bad,

bad planning here.

I'm gonna need a bus just to move people around.

I know that because Ubers would be really tough when we get down

there. So we gotta figure all this out.

Awesome. Well, you know, I think that

what's really exciting, as always, is that we spend some

time together, and we get to talk to a lot of different

people on this podcast. And sometimes we go into these

conversations really kind of understanding and knowing where

we're going to go. In this particular case, I sort of love

that our guest is like, what are we going to talk about? And

we're like, you know what? We'll just decide as we go so very

brave soul. Welcome to the podcast. Rachel stock CO, how

are

you today? I'm great, excited to be here with

you guys today. Awesome.

So Rachel, I'm actually going to let you

take some time to introduce yourself, because I think that

you cover a lot of ground. You're an adjunct professor in

the School of Education for the University of New Hampshire.

That's really cool and kind of crazy. I have college age

students, as do the guys, so we have questions that we need you

to answer, but you also are involved in independent schools

as well. So tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah. So

currently, I am the Academic Technology

integrator at Kent School in Connecticut, but I started my

career as an English teacher. I started off. In charter schools

in Washington, DC, and did that for a little while, and then I

moved to Connecticut and taught in Title One schools in

Connecticut, also as an English teacher. But in both of those

roles, I did a lot of work as a tech person where, you know,

Hey, I saw you were using this at tech tool, like, can you show

me how to do that? And, you know, kind of just kept getting

asked to teach teachers how to use tech, and my kids would be

like, hey, the teacher next door is not using Google classroom as

well. Like, can you show them how you use Google Docs or how

you do this? So I was kind of wearing two hats all the time of

teaching tech to teachers and also teaching English. So that

sort of led then to me working with the University of New

Hampshire, they ran a program called I learned New Hampshire,

which started during the pandemic, and they provided

Canvas Cal Perez licenses to any k 12 school that wanted them.

And so with the partnership between UNH and the DOE, we

supported schools all over the state teaching them how to use

Canvas, and we really thought a lot about blended learning, and

what did that look like during the pandemic and then post

pandemic? What could we learn and what is effective ed tech

use look like, and they're still going strong, helping teachers

across the state. But I moved back to Connecticut to be with

my family and landed at the Kent School where I'm now the

Academic Technology integrator. And I continue to adjunct for

the University of New Hampshire teaching research methods and ed

tech courses to pre service and Master's level teachers. That's

really cool. So there's so many paths we

could walk at this moment, but one of the things that strikes

me in what you just said is about the effort that you made

during the pandemic. Do you think having had this background

of being the techie teacher and being good at ed tech tools

before the pandemic, and then now, how things are after the

pandemic. Let's just go straight into that like, how does it feel

to you with that perspective, what has changed, and what are

your observations in that realm? Yeah, so I think

it was kind of funny going into my career, I

was always just really curious and excited to play with

different ed tech tools. And I saw so much potential in how

they could support my students. You know, I was forcing kids to

make copies of Google Docs and share folders with me long

before we had a learning management system or any of

those kinds of things. And so throughout my career, seeing

those things like grow and become real things was really

exciting. And pre pandemic, I think there were a lot of people

who were clinging to kind of very traditional methods, like,

oh, I don't have to learn the tech. It was just for testing

day. There were some kids who are like, my teacher only

wheeled the Chromebook card in on the days we're taking

benchmark assessments or we're doing a research paper, those

are the only times we'll use them. And you know, I did a lot

of work with teachers across the different districts that I've

worked with in trying to train them on how Google Docs, how

Google Drive, or Google classroom or other learning

management systems. I use tools like Ed puzzle. I was showing

teachers how these things could help them assess their students,

to differentiate, personalize instruction, help them speed up

some of their work. Because we all know grading takes forever,

and we don't always get that feedback back to students as

quickly as we would want to. And some teachers were excited to

try that, and others were like, Yeah, that's for the younger

teachers, or that's for the other people. Somebody else will

do that. And then the pandemic hit and the world shut down.

And, you know, we were in class on Monday, Tuesday, it was

teachers only, and everyone's like, what are we going to do?

And I was like, I'm gonna keep posting on my learning

management system, and I'm gonna keep doing what I've been doing

and just do it remotely. And a lot of teachers were like, Wait,

can you show me how to do that? And I was like, I've been trying

to show you to do this for five years, guys. So it was kind of

an I told you so moment of see they are useful.

I mean, it definitely accelerated for many

educators. Oh yeah, the need to kind of walk this path. And now,

do you think they're sort of there, or is there some similar

resistance? I

think that resistance still exists in

different ways. I think there are some people who are like,

Okay, we're back to normal. We're gonna just do those things

and go back to the way we did it, or the kids they all learned

online during the pandemic. So I think part of the struggle is

that sometimes teachers think that absolves them of having to

teach kids how to use some of these tools. They're just like,

Okay, go write a paper, or go do research or use this new

program. And I think that's where the idea of digital

natives has sort of led people astray where they're like, well,

the kids grew up with these tools, like, they know how to

use the internet, they know how to use Word processors, of like,

actually, they don't, you know, I still have kids who hit the

space bar 100 times to center something or forget how to

attach things to emails, or who Need we use Canvas as our

Learning Management System kids who don't know how to attach an

assignment or link their Google Drive so that they can upload

and submit so even some of those basics, there are things kids

are still missing because nobody has instructed them directly,

and we've sort of seen that continue to spiral out, not

just. With tools like word processors or learning

management systems, but into the realms of things like social

media or Internet safety and data privacy, so long kids, and

even people who are adults now are left to their own devices,

literally and figuratively, to figure these things out, because

school said this isn't pedagogically relevant. This

isn't what we do. Parents don't have the skills, so it's sort of

this black hole of nobody taught anyone how to do it, and kids

are going to be kids and make bad choices. And so I think it

has to become a communal responsibility for us to teach

those and I think the pandemic highlighted a lot of those gaps,

and people were eager to get back to normal, but as tech

continues to grow, the emergence of AI, we've seen how important

it is for kids to have all of those skills, not just to keep

themselves safe, but to effectively navigate the world

in which they live. And so I think it's a really complicated

issue that the pandemic really shed a lot of light on and

continues to shed light on post us returning to schools, one

of the things that you've touched on is something

that we're struggling with as technology has become more

ubiquitous, as it's become part of just daily life. There is

this assumption you mentioned digital natives term been around

for a while, but there is this assumption that everyone's got

it, everyone knows how to use it. And I think that's a flawed

assumption. People do not know how to use it the way in which

we want them, where we need them to be able to do in the context

of what we're asking them to do within schools. And I remember,

I've been at this for quite a while, and our initial

professional development was largely around the teaching of

skills, the teaching of how these applications were used,

and as we thought we reached a certain level of proficiency, we

kind of switched over into more of like the teaching and

learning and the Pete logical and all of that skills training

kind of just went to the side, and we really weren't doing that

as much, and what we're finding now is really the need to come

back to that, that you need to have a healthy balance of the

teaching and learning and the skills training and the number

of tools complicate that you're in a very interesting situation,

because you're in a school and you're living and breathing it,

and you're working at the university level where you're

actually teaching this. How are you talking at your school? How

are you talking at these future ed tech people about striking

that balance and finding a way to leverage both of those things

within the context of what you're doing on a day to day

basis, and what these people are going to have to plan to be able

to do to support both sides of this coin? Yeah,

I think that's a great question. I like the way

that you put it around balance, because I think for a lot of

people, they think of Ed Tech as like something else to learn,

something separate from their content area or separate from

their pedagogy and Atlas, has a really good graphic of the TPACK

framework that they shared early on in the emergence of AI, which

I think sums this up really well, because TPACK as an ed

tech framework, I think is a really great tool, because it

explains the intersections that you have to have technical

knowledge of how to use these tools, which intersects with

your content knowledge of whatever subjects you're

teaching, and it also intersects with pedagogical knowledge, and

you have to have a little bit of all of those things in order to

be an effective teacher. So it's not just, Hey, I love teaching

English, so I'm just gonna wax on about Shakespeare all day

long to my kids, because I love it, and then I'll make them love

it. But rather, how do I think about my content to teach skills

that my kids will need in the world beyond their schooling

experience, and how do I use that content as a vehicle to

also teach them about effectively navigating things

like tech and other things that they'll encounter in their

lives, and then how do I do that in a way that actually resonates

and sticks in their brains? Because I understand how kids

learn, and I think that's a lot to ask of teachers to hold all

three of those things in their head at once when they're trying

to plan their lessons, but they have to think about all of those

things and what they're trying to achieve. And I think that

when we don't use good pedagogy and making our decisions about

tech or anything we do in our classrooms, then we're doing a

disservice to teaching all of the students in front of us. And

so I think that it's really important that we don't just

fall in love with like a tool, right? We've seen that happen

several times, where people are like, I love Jamboard. And

that's like, poop jam boards got it's like, everyone panics, you

know, flip went away. First it was flip grid, and then it

became flip and then it was now Microsoft owns it. And so

everyone who's not at Microsoft school is like, panicking

because they're like, What do I do instead? And it's not about

the tool itself and following them with like that. Out, but

teaching skills that are transferable. How do I go from

word to Google Docs or whatever comes next? Like that's what we

really want both teachers and students to know, is I have the

foundational skills. It doesn't matter what name you put it on,

but I can apply that and move it to different situations. And I

think that's sometimes what's missing in that balance is we

want to get through the tool effectively. We want kids to

know our content, but how do they then take that into

whatever their life is going to lead them to? So

Rachel, have you had conversations with colleagues

and in your work at the university level, discussing the

challenges with learned behaviors by the faculty during

COVID and post COVID, and trying to break bad habits of using

tech in the COVID world, because I'm still struggling, in some

instances, with different folks at other schools as well, where

they develop these habits, thinking that there's this magic

bullet associated with teaching online, that it's really a bad

habit that they've created thinking that they can teach the

exact same way online as they did in person. I love the fact

that you're emphasizing good pedagogy, because so much of it

is different in those two spaces, and I don't think many

teachers understand that? Yeah,

I think this might be sort of an unfavorable

opinion on that. I think the pandemic highlighted a lot of

bad teaching practices. It was, this is how I was taught. You

know, someone stood at a podium and they lectured at me with,

you know, no slides, and they were like, take notes and there

will be a test, and that's it. And a lot of people are like,

well, that's how I was taught. I turned out fine. I'm a great

student. It built character and grit and all of that. And then

they keep doing it. And then we went online during the pandemic,

where a lot of universities have shifted to just fully online

classes, or hybrid or high flex classes, for a host of reasons,

but then they took those practices and they just put them

online. And the same way, a kid probably didn't listen to your

45 minute lecture when you they were sitting in front of you,

they maybe looked attentive, then they weren't doing it

online. And we had the data to prove that right. You know, part

of when I was working with UNH, we used Kaltura as our video

software, and we could see the analytics of how long were kids

watching videos, and where were they dropping off, and what were

those points? And it was really eye opening when I would sit

with a professor and look at their classes, or look at their

Canvas engagement, or look at their video engagement, and they

would see that drop off 20 minutes in. And we know from the

pedagogy that kids college kids, too, don't have a super long

attention span. If you're going really more than 10 minutes

without some sort of interaction point, be it in person or

online, you've lost them because they don't know what to grab

onto, what's important, what am I supposed to be getting out of

this? We have to have that give and take of giving those

formative checks along the way to make sure kids are engaged

with what we're teaching. And so I think that when we moved

online, some of it was bad habits that we actually had, pre

COVID, that we really had to grapple with, and that made

people really uncomfortable. I think they were like, Why aren't

they listening to my lecture? You know, they always hang on my

every word. And it's like, how do you know that? What data do

you have to back up that they hung on your every word, other

than your perception of what was happening in front of you. And

so I think that's the power of that shift, was we were able to

actually have data that made us understand better the different

learners in front of us and about their engagement and what

engagement really is and what it really looks like. And I think

that was people thought they could just return to some of

those post pandemic and, you know, I sort of joke even now my

work at the Kent School, when I get teachers who are like, Oh

yeah, I used Canvas in my college, or I use it as a

student. And I'm like, actually, I gotta break you a lot of bad

habits of using that learning management system, like I put

them into a class as a student that is poorly designed. And I'm

like, find your homework. And they're like, I don't know where

it is. Like, what do you want me to do? And I'm like, great.

Imagine you're a kid with eight classes a day, eight different

teachers, eight different setups. What does that feel

like? And that, for me, I think it's usually a turning point of

when you have an adult learner experience something and they're

like, Oh, I thought it was going really well, or I thought it was

the right thing to do when they can actually feel what their

kids or their students are feeling. That's when we can

really have real change, because now we can have a conversation

based in fact, not just vibes. Yeah,

absolutely. I see a lot of head nodding and

thumbs up from the guys. They are with you on that. Let me ask

you about AI tools then. So I'm sure that this is a huge part of

your world and things that you're checking out, and it

obviously is something that kids are using. I've said before on

the pod, but it's a great example. I have a daughter in

school in college who is going to be a teacher, and they're not

talking about AI ed tech tools at all, and so she's using them

because I'm her mom. On, and I talked to her about them, but

like, the school and the professors are not talking about

them. So can you give me a little insight, both, what are

you seeing at your independent school, but are you also now

bringing this into your Adjunct Professor work? That's

such a good question about, how do we

integrate all of these tools? And we've seen that with kids

who are like, everyone's using AI, or I think all my peers are

using AI, and then the kids aren't using it effectively, or

they're not being taught how to use it, or they actually have no

idea what AI is. And so I think that for me, the first step in

working either with my college age students or working here at

Kent is to just help everyone understand what AI is, right?

Like, what is this tool? They've seen all the sci fi movies and,

you know, the Terminator robots and those kinds of things. But

they don't actually understand, what is an LLM, what is a Chat

GPT? How does it work? Versus an image generator? You know, they

think it's a search engine, they think it's googling things like,

they don't understand the pre trained part of it, and that

creates a lot of confusion. So I think, for me, when I think

about this work, it's less about policy and more about figuring

out position, like, what do we actually believe about these

tools, about their place in the world, and what do we want to

equip our college age students, our students in the classroom at

high school level or below, to know and do and effectively

engage with and so once you have your position where you can say

you know what, we're recognizing that these tools exist. We

recognize that our students are going to grapple with them, and

we believe it's part of our duty, our mission at Kenneth to

prepare students to do good in the world beyond their time at

Kent School. Well, then that means that they have to be able

to effectively engage with these tools. Because whether they want

to or not, they're going to come across AI generated content.

They're going to have to figure out if that thing they're

looking at was, you know, real picture. Was it AI generated?

Was that sound that you hear, AI generated or not, those are

things that will happen to them. And if we don't have

conversations about ethical and safe and transparent use, then

we're not doing our job to prepare kids to exist in a world

where the fact of the matter is these tools are here, and they

will continue to be here. And rather than letting the AI tools

themselves, the companies drive that conversation, how do we

empower our learners to think about what these tools are

capable of and how to still be the human in the loop, so that

these tools are something they can use effectively in their

lives, but not allow themselves to be controlled by right?

Human in the loop. That's the Department of

Education, right? We have a podcast dropping where we

interviewed Kristina Ishmael. She and her team did a lot of

that work. I love that image. We use that all the time at Atlas.

Do you have a couple of tools or categories of tools, if you

don't want to name a specific tool that have captured your

attention lately,

when I think about getting teachers engaged with AI

for the very first time, right? When I'm trying to get that buy

in, right? Because everyone kind of feels like, Well, I'm a

science teacher, I'm a math teacher, I'm an art teacher,

it's not my job to teach about AI, right? That's like, Tech's

job, or that's a computer science teacher's job, right?

It's always someone else's job. And I think part of it is first

getting everyone to recognize it's actually everybody's job.

And these conversations can fit into your class in a lot of

different ways. And so what I found in our initial

conversations, you know, when everyone was just talking about

Chat GPT, my teacher sort of stared blankly at Chat GPT, and

they're like, but what do I do with this thing? Right? And they

weren't writing effective prompts or anything like that.

And you're like, Okay, let's back up. We need a tool that's

like training wheels for teachers, that helps them think

about what AI is and what it can do. And so this year we're

piloting magic school, we looked at a lot of different tools to

kind of decide where was the best fit for us, and magic tool

has been a game changer, I think, for us, in a lot of

different ways, because you open up that dashboard and in front

of you is, hey, you can create a UDL choice board. My teacher is

like, wait a what? I would have never thought of asking AI to do

that. Or they're like, I don't know what UDL is. Like, what's a

UDL choice board. And so now we've got that pedagogy coming

into play, and they have an idea so magic school by having all

those choices for them, saying, hey, write a professional email,

or come up with a spiral review for math, or here's a

presentation generator. That's gotten my teachers really

excited to play with these. And even something as silly as the

song generator, they're like, on dorm duty together, and they're

like, let's make a silly song about dorm duty. And then

they're like, oh, wait, I could do this in class with my

content. And so just getting their hands on the tools and

letting them play has gotten them to a point where they're

like, Oh, I do understand. It's possible. And that's when I

start to see my teachers come to me and they're like, Okay, I've

exhausted my magic school options because it's so

scaffolded. They're like, I want to go to Chat GPT now, or I want

to go to perplexity. I want to go to Claude, because I've maxed

out what I can do in magic school, and I have bigger,

better ideas. And so for me, that's been the most fun, is to

just let them play with some of these tools, like magic school,

even the conmigos, right, where it's scaffolded for them, and

then they have all these cool ideas, because they know what it

can do. And so that's my favorite part, is watching them

jump to the Canva magic generator, to straight up image

generators, or whatever the case may be, yeah,

and I think you're right, because there's

not a whole lot of teaching of the tool. It's not another thing

to learn, it's something to experience. Is what I have found

as I travel and as I talk to different schools about this is

like, it really doesn't take a lot of teaching. Let me just

open it up and show you, because you're a smart human and you

will be able to figure this out in fairly short order if you

just open the tool and just play with it. So I love the idea.

Like you said, it's kind of a sandbox. You don't really need

to teach a kid how to make a house in a sandbox. You put them

in the sandbox, and pretty soon they figure it out.

One question I have for you, something that's come

up recently. You talked a lot about the ethics and the ethics

of use, coming off of a lot of college age students coming home

and a lot of conversations. And on a previous episode, we had a

conversation about my wife's also a teacher as his hirams,

and about their feelings around the use of AI as a tool to help

them with their lesson planning, and thought it was cheating the

kids, we had to have a long conversation about how that's

not actually cheating, how you're focusing your time and

your efforts on the areas where you really need to focus, and

not so much on the things that you can have ai do for you.

That's a lot easier. So take that kind of frame, and I'm

talking to my college Ed senior, we started talking with him and

his friends and his girlfriend about the ways in which they're

using AI in college. And it was very interesting, because my

son, at first, was saying that he doesn't really trust it,

which I think going in with a level of skepticism or just

questioning around what you get from AI is not necessarily a bad

thing, because you want to understand all the biases, all

the different ways in which it's been developed. And you can use

it as a starting point, but then jump off from there that

skepticism exists around the areas where he is taking courses

for which they relate directly to his major when it comes to

the general ed requirements, the things that he just has to take

because the school tells him he has to take, he's using AI more

because he's like, I don't have time to focus my effort. I want

to spend more time over here and less time on this, so I'm more

likely to use AI over here in a way that, let's just say, might

have some ethical questions about how he's using that. His

mother and I were talking about how you really shouldn't do that

regardless. I mean, it shouldn't really matter. But Has this come

up with you at all in terms of looking at using AI as the

thought generator for those things that really have meaning

to you and that are going to help you develop maybe greater

questions, greater levels of insight, versus those types of

things that I just need to get this done, and I'm looking for

An easy out, and how you strike a balance there, if there even

is a balance, or how you address that, I'm having a really hard

time even synthesizing. I think, what is the actual question?

There more just with, like, the shock around the conversation,

and how do we even talk about this? Because I can see the

reason for it, but I don't necessarily agree with it, but I

don't necessarily have a huge degree of fault with it, either.

So I mean, how are you handling stuff like this? If it even

comes up,

it comes up a lot. It's something I grapple with in

my own work. You know, what's ethical to use it for? What's

not ethical to use it for? But I think for me, it's been about

taking a step back to really think about the question of what

is worth spending my time on, and where is this enhancing my

work, and how do I check my own bias around AI and what we've

been like conditioned to believe about hard work and effort and

what's okay to do and not okay to do. You know, I think back to

when, you know, Wikipedia was new, and everyone's like, you

can't use Wikipedia for everything. And you know, now,

when we teach students study skills, like we're teaching

them, actually, you should go there, like, you know, do

reverse searching where you're like, where did they get their

sources from? But it took us a long time to get there, for

people to see Wikipedia, not just like anybody can edit it,

but it's a source that was worth. File. And the same with I

was an English teacher. So, you know, everyone freaked out.

English notes and Spark Notes were available online. You know,

kids will read anymore, and now we're like, actually, go ahead,

like, read that, and then let's go to the original text, and

let's do our close read. Like, let's really try to understand

this. Those kinds of things really shook our foundations as

teachers, as they popped up, but then as we got used to them, as

we thought about them, as we reframed our understanding of

what we were doing, we integrated them into our

practice, or even encouraged kids to use them. And so I try

to think about that with AI too, about what am I worried about,

or what am I biased against that I'm not inviting AI to the table

to have the conversation, and where is it actually the easy

out or cheating? And I think that's a question I don't always

have a good answer to. But for me, what it comes back to in the

classroom is, what is my learning outcome. So one of the

teachers that was one of our kind of early adopters of AI.

And we really started these conversations. It was our music

technology teacher, and he did this really cool project where

he's like, listen, part of the work my kids have to do in this

class is they have to effectively put music over a

text, over something spoken. And he's like, all the stories that

are out there, my kids have preconceived notions about

they've heard this story with music attached to it. They heard

it told to them so they think they know the tone and the vibe.

And so what he did was he went to Chat GPT. He had to create a

children's story for him, and then he went to a different AI

tool that generates music, and he had it generate the music. So

it was a totally new score that kids hadn't heard before, a

story they had never read. And then he handed both of those to

the kids and said, Put this music over this story in the

appropriate places, or modify the music to have the right

tone. And where should the crescendos be? Where should the

decrescendos be? How do you do that? And because it was

something entirely new, he was able to really see what the kids

knew he could actually get a sense of what their learning was

on how to use the tool, how to make effective decisions,

something he could not have done quickly or easily without an AI

tool. Because he's not an author. He doesn't have time to

go write a children's story or compose a bunch of new music for

one of his classes. On top of everything else he does, he was

a little nervous to, like, share the story. At first, he's like,

everybody think I'm cheating because I used an AI tool, or

was that unethical? And you know, when we had that

conversation, I was like, No, your learning outcome was not to

have these kids write their own children's stories or have them

compose their own music. It was to effectively use the music

technology and apply it in this situation, and so by using AI,

he was actually able to better assess student learning, but he

couldn't do that unless he had a really clear understanding of

what his learning outcomes are, and that then let him engage

students in much higher order thinking and higher order

learning, which was so much more effective and engaging for the

kids than It would have been had he not done that. And so when

I'm talking to teachers or thinking about my own AI use,

that's what I always come back to, is, what am I trying to

assess here? What is my learning outcome? The same way, again, as

an English teacher, I'm like, I'm really mad at you if you did

not spell check your essay before you sent it to me. Or I'm

mad if you didn't use the grammar check. But if it was a

spelling test, or if it was a grammar test, then, no, it's not

okay to use those tools. And I think what people are really

craving is this black and white. It's okay to use in this, this,

this and this way, but it's not okay ever, and this that the

other way, and that, I think, is the dangerous part of the

conversation, is there is no black and white. It depends on

what we're trying to do. And you know, I've seen that in

different pockets of things around my school, some of my

best adopters of AI tools have actually been my admissions

department, and they're like, listen, it takes me forever to

really synthesize my interview notes, or it really takes me

forever to put these things together. And so with some AI,

they've been able to create like rubrics that align with our core

competencies to think about, okay, these are the things that

we really value. How do I ask questions that align with those?

How do I differentiate those questions for various levels of

students? Right? An incoming ninth grader is really different

than a PG. They need a different kind of question. And it takes a

really long time for someone to be able to come up with all of

those. And that's not the part of our work we want to do. We

want to be with the people, with the kids, or with the people

we're interviewing. And so that, to me, is that cost benefit

analysis of what's going to get me to build those relationships

with whoever it is, whether it's incoming families, the students

in front of me, the pre service teachers I'm working with. How

can we decide when the AI is helping us and furthering our

understanding or getting us to a point where we can get some of

the minutia off our plate so we can do the higher order things

or the more important things? And that's a personal sort of

choice for people to. Think about is, what am I okay

offloading to the AI, and what am I not? And what does it do

well, and what is it not? And so those are the questions I try to

have people grapple with as they think about these tools. So I

don't think it's ever gonna be this is always okay. It's okay

to use in my Gen Ed courses, you know, like you said, Bill or

it's not okay in my content level classes. But again, with

my pre service teachers, when I say, hey, plan a lesson with AI

and see what it does. Well, they're really bad at lesson

planning right now because they're brand new teachers, like

they're baby teachers, and they don't have all the pedagogy, but

now they have something in front of them. They have to think

about the questions. They have to think about, Hey, what is a

way I can get my kids to be metacognitive? What are

different summatives or formatives? But then they have

to apply the pedagogy to be like, actually, know, I wanted a

project based unit, and that's not project based, you know,

here's the theory that's going to let me modify or edit that

lesson, and that engagement of a pre service teacher is really

different than, you know, a teacher who's been around the

block a time or two, who's going to have different questions for

the AI and get something different out of its output. And

so I think it's always going to be about, what do I need from

it, and how can I apply those and push my thinking

So, Rachel, let's continue down this disrupted

train route. I'm curious what your opinion is on using AI for

grading, for writing comments, for writing college

recommendations, because what Independent Schools pride

themselves on is knowing the child. The relationship is so

vastly important. And I've heard conversations where some schools

refuse to use AI because we want a genuine comment coming from

our faculty. And the same with college recommendations, if

you're looking at what the outcome is. In my mind, I have a

preconceived notion of what that outcome could be and should be

when using AI in these different areas. I'm curious about what

your opinion is on that, because that's a slippery slope for a

lot of schools. Yeah,

this is one I My thinking has evolved a lot

around over the last year or so, and part of my thinking around

this actually started last year's Atlas conference. Our

friends from nine, you know, hosted a really great pre

conference session on student data privacy, and they talked a

lot about AI in that session and how we make decisions around

when, how and if to use AI tools. And one of the things

that really stuck with me was for them again, it wasn't this,

it's right in these instances and wrong in these instances,

but it's this cost benefit analysis of When have you lost

the human touch and what risks or what data is worth putting in

to get an output that maybe is better than we would have

gotten, and so That, for me, really started a change in my

thinking around some of the ways we use AI and how it can be used

for things like grading and comment writing, which I sort of

separate into two buckets for me, because as a teacher, I'd

had like 140 kids on my caseload. At some points, that

was a lot of it, because I taught all English too. So they

were all due at the same time. I couldn't stagger them, and it

was exhausting to read through all of them and give them

meaningful feedback. But for me, I had to, I had to read through

them, because otherwise I didn't know what student A was

struggling with or what Student B was excelling with. If I had

offloaded that to an AI, I I could not then have made

decisions about my teaching to support where my students were

struggling or not struggling, or give students extensions who had

already mastered those parts of learning, but for things like

comment writing. You know, I was at the Oasis conference. One of

the sessions was on using AI for comment writing and the amount

of work that these teachers had put into using AI for comment

writing was mind blowing, because what they did in this

experimental version of AI for comment writing was they had to

keep copious notes over the course of the term on their

kids. So they had, like a running Google doc where they

would be like, okay, you know, Hiram did this today in class,

and he was really great at this, but, you know, he kept talking

out of turn, or whatever, you know, Hiram had done that day.

And then they would do it about Bill, and then they would do

about Kristina. But then they would also realize, hey, maybe

there's a kid I haven't written a comment about in a couple of

weeks, right? So maybe I should go and pay extra close attention

to that kid this week, because I want to make sure I have data on

them and their performance, and what they found at the end of

that the school did a blind reading of people's comments,

they didn't know which ones were generated with AI, which ones

had been written by a person. And in the end, overall, the

teachers rated that round of comments as the best written

comments that they had ever gotten, and they could not

correctly guess which ones were AI generated and which ones were

person generated. But what they found through that was, as we've

all experienced, is writing comments for kids. When you get

to like the 15th kid of the night, you can only say he's a

good kid so many ways. And so you kind of fall into these

templates, right. Here's your comment. Kid, your middle kid,

your low kid. But what they found then was, then, you know,

I'd say to Christina, Hey, what did Mr. Sykes say about you? And

then we realized we had the same comment. It's like, Wait a

minute. He didn't really put that effort in. So it actually

undermined our relationship. But what this school had found when

they were using comments with AI was they were way more unique

and actually way more tailored to how the students were

actually doing, and those comments were less bias. You

know, it wasn't just this kid is kind of being a paid at the end

of the term. So now my comment is really angry about him, and I

forgot all the good stuff he did. They were much more robust,

and actually did a better job of painting a picture of what that

kid was doing well and what they weren't. And so I tell it anecdo

to kind of say so much more work and data keeping actually went

into the AI generated comments by the teachers, so there was

actually more human input and more thought and more data about

student performance and where they needed to go than there was

when the comments were solely written by a teacher who's

exhausted at the end of the term trying to finish all their

grading and say all the things. And so for me, in that instance,

that actually was a reflective practice that we want teachers

to have, right? We want them to do those things and keep notes

on their students and personalize and individualize.

To go back to your point. Hiram at independent school, we pride

ourselves on that personalization, and if AI is

going to increase our ability to do that, to really connect with

and know our students and to tailor their education to what

they need to be successful and do, well, then that, for me, is

a huge win. This

is one of the things that I think we're seeing

a lot of the SIS and LMS tools starting to do. We've had

conversation with vendors in this space, where you talk

about, where are you keeping track of your scope and

sequence? Where are you keeping track of your assessments, your

rubrics? What's your grade book look like? Where are you putting

all of those notes in? And AI is assisting with all of those

pieces along the way. And then when you get to that report

writing piece, it truly is delivering a much more robust,

less time consuming, unique comment around the student. And

this is that hurdle to get over, that same hurdle I was

mentioning with that Hiram and I were having when we were having

conversations with our wives about the use of AI. You're

doing all of this work the final output of that comment is a

direct result of all of the work that you've done, tracking

information, putting in your own input, your own observations,

your own grading, into all of those things that's generating

this at the end. And you still have the ability to tweak and

change that, but it's definitely lessening that lift when you get

to that point in the year where you're having to do this for

hundreds of students depending on your teaching load,

absolutely, I think lessening that lift is so

important. We know teachers are overburdened and burnt out, and

if we can help them connect with their students and do their jobs

better and really push them to be more innovative, right, not

to lead on that same lesson that they've done 100,000 times. But

you know, what does my kid actually need in this moment?

And I think about one of my teachers I'm working with right

now, he came down to my office one day and he was like, I have

a pitch for you. And I was like, okay, like, what do you want to

try? This sounds great. And he's like, I play Dungeons and

Dragons. And I'm like, Okay, go on waiting for, like, how is

this going to connect to AI? And he's like, you know, I've been

doing this thing for years where I put in all these notes that I

take about, you know, what our Dungeons and Dragons adventure

that day was. And, you know, thinking about, what have we

missed, or What haven't we done, What haven't we explored? He's

like, What if I took that approach and I did that was

curriculum. And I was like, Okay, I'm intrigued. Tell me

more. And so he's like, what I would like to try? I want to put

in my curriculum as I go, right? You know, here he's a math

teacher. He's like, so, but we did a lecture based lesson this

week on, you know, fractions or whatever he was teaching, and

then the next week we did project based or group work. And

he's like, I want to keep all these notes, and I want to put

in, like the tests that I'm giving, and then see, did I

actually assess what I was teaching, or did I actually mix

up my instruction, or where were my kids performing better? And

so for him, similar to the comment rating, he is now doing

exactly what we asked teachers to do, right to be reflective

practitioners on their work, but he's doing it on this much

larger scope than he as a single individual, could have done

himself. And what he's now able to see is, oh, hey, my test was

covering 50% of this one topic, but I only spent one day

teaching that topic. That's not a fair assessment of my kids. So

I either need to change the test, or I need to change what

I'm teaching. And so it's made him go back and think about

that. And then other teachers heard about it. They're like,

Wait, do my test. Do my test. And then they say, wow, like,

I'm not testing on what I thought it was, or I'm only

doing lower order thinking skills. And I think that's where

these tools are super powerful. Powerful and really push us

forward. You know, again, as a teacher, I'd spend all summer.

I'm going to do my curriculum, I'm going to find new things to

do, I'm going to find a new text or a new supplemental to support

that book. But I'm exhausted, right? And I have a life outside

of there, and so these tools are going to help us reach our kids

and grow their understanding and their learning and grow our

practices. Then That, to me, is a huge win,

absolutely. So Rachel, before we run out of

time with you, I want to spend a couple of minutes transitioning

to the ALI program. The Atlas Leadership Institute is a

program that we're really proud of, a year long cohort, and you

have found yourself a part of that cohort. Tell us a little

bit about your experience. Are you guys talking about these

things in your projects and in your leadership challenges.

Yeah, Ali has been awesome. It's really pushed my

thinking, you know, somebody who came from public schools and

then, you know, working at the collegiate level. It's really

helped me open my eyes to a bunch of really independent

school specific needs and challenges, which has been

awesome. It's connected me with a whole network of different ed

tech leaders across the country to see what are they doing. And

so when we're grappling with questions around AI, or we're

trying to think about, you know, what cyber security tool are you

using, or how are you handling this situation? It's been

awesome to have a group of people to lean on. You know,

where my pedagogical background is really strong. My ed tech

background is really strong. But some of the more nitty gritty,

you know, systems management or hardware, things art, I'm able

to then reach out and think about those things with other

partners who can grow my skills and in our different challenges.

It's been really great. Just think about what's going on at

my school. You know, how can I be a better tech leader? How do

I grow my leadership skills, and how do I forge alliances as

somebody who works in the tech department? Sometimes it can be

hard to get into academic spaces. They're like, Oh, you

know, the curriculum doesn't involve tech. And I'm like, I

can't help you choose ed tech tools or help you use Canvas

effectively in your classrooms if I'm not at the table and so

helping think about how to frame those conversations. Those

strategic leaders at my school. How do I support them in my

work? How do we work together? How does data flow? You know?

How do we do things like change management and project

management? How do we learn from each other as independent school

leaders? All of those have been amazing parts of Ali, and we

actually have a session later today that we're going to keep

talking about these things when we'll see each other at the

conference to keep those conversations going. And it's

been really great, even to meet past graduates who have been

like this led me to my job now, or to this project that I'm

working on, or this idea. It's just such a great network, and

I'm so honored and excited to be a part of it and to continue to

grow my skills and learn from this amazing community that

ATLIS has put together. Yeah,

that's the thing we love the most about

Ali, is that now that we've been around for 10 years, I think

Ashley calls it the mega cohort, and then, like the mega cohort

is all of the past Ali graduates, and that network is a

powerful engine of moving and shaking here in the Independent

School technologist realm. So we're really proud of it. It's

so cool to have you be a part of it. Have you guys gotten to the

point in the year where you're looking at your ending project?

Yet? Not

yet. I have a feeling that's we're gonna

actually maybe talk about later today, as we, you know, kick off

this part of the year, in this next phase leading up into the

conference. But already people are talking about, this is what

I want to do. Or even at the past atlases that I've been to,

you know, people would be like, this was my Atlas project, or

this was inspired by my Atlas project, or sessions I've

attended that you guys have hosted have been like, you know,

grown out of someone's or if somebody we were talking about

AI, they're like, Oh, hey. Like, this person did this in their

Ali project last year. Like, let me share it with you. And so I

know there's a ton of possibilities, and our cohorts

already thinking about what we've seen these cool projects,

like, what's mine gonna be? So everybody's excited to really

start thinking about what those will be and how they can

contribute to such a wonderful network and amazing body of

resources. Can

I put a plug in? And you have to keep it a

secret, right? Don't tell Ashley that I fed this into the cohort.

Dr Ashley Cross is our administrator of this program.

So what I would love to see somebody looking into is the

idea of AI as a wellness enabler for a very stressed out and

overburden teaching population. I don't think we always think

about it that way. You know, we had a conversation now about

cheating, not cheating, but it's interesting. I've started

talking to some heads of school and to a lesser extent, some

trustees at independent schools, about their obligation to

embrace AI from a wellness perspective, and how that can

really help teachers, you know, maybe take control of this

profession that has really gotten quite overgrown in terms

of what we ask them to do. So that's my evil little plug, if

anybody wants to look into AI tools as the unlocker of health

and wellness for. Our faculty, that's what I'd love to see. I

love the connection between like AI as

wellness, because I think too often we don't frame enough how

Ed Tech and all of these different tools can be part of

that wellness that we're talking about. We use Canvas. I've been

working with Canvas for a long time now, and at their

conference a couple of years ago, they did a whole thing on

VR, and it was really fascinating to listen to them

talk about VR, not just as something to use in the

classroom, but as a wellness tool. And they were talking

about how when you're in a VR environment, your brain reacts

to that setting the same way it would as if you were really

there. And so they showed us like, you know, people walking

on like balance beams across skyscrapers, and how they were

just as afraid as if they were literally doing it. And so for

me, as somebody in like a New England School, we're very

rural. We're in the middle of nowhere. It's like, hey,

actually, those things can really help with all of our kids

who experience that, like they don't understand the dark and

cold of a New England winter. And that things like VR not only

have, you know, pedagogical purposes of like, let's

transport kids to x place that we're studying, but it actually

can help with wellness. We were talking earlier about formative

assessment, like these things will grade a little bit faster

give us the data we need. Use AI as something to, you know,

lessen that burden, or help us feel less of that burnout, like

there's so much potential once we're willing to put in the work

and to learn them and to think outside the box with what these

tools could be used for. You know, just cycling one more time

back to Bill's comment around ethics too. I think years ago,

Ashley did a session at Atlas about when AI was brand new. It

was like, you know, what do we do about this thing. And she

read us the book The creepy crayon, which is about like a

bunny with a crayon that writes for him, and eventually he's

like, wait, I want to write in color on my my own. And that

really inspired me to think about how children's books can

help people understand some of these complicated concepts. And

the one that's been sticking with me a lot lately is the

Lorax, and thinking about how AI has a goal, right? It's going to

do whatever it's one goal is to the detriment of all other

goals. The same way that feeling the Lorax, the one slur is like,

I'm going to create my need. And it doesn't matter that I cut

down all the trees, driven away, all the animals, there's smog

everywhere. But how do we stay as the humans in a loop to think

about? You know that wellness component, what is worth the

advancement of that goal, what's not worth the advancement of

that goal? And so, how do we take those stories and think

about, you know, when we give as teachers, all of ourselves to

our kids, to our profession, how do we not do that? How do we not

cut everything else out of our lives and not see the AI as

something that will only further that one goal, but instead

actually help us preserve and save the things that matter to

us before it's too late and they're all gone and you know,

it's just you and your sad little building waiting for

somebody to plant your seed. I

love that. I love that analogy. So as we wrap

up with you, I have a couple of more rapid fire questions. Just

because we're getting to know you on this podcast, our

listeners are getting to know you, Bill and Hiram will

probably ask something obnoxious about zombies, but my question

is, so you're up there in the cold, and how do you fight the

sad I grew up in a wintry area, and so I also know that vibe of

like you get to this time of year, you're like, Oh my God,

will I ever feel warm again? Do you have a coffee beverage of

choice? Or how do you stay warm and cozy through these long

winter months? Anything

with coffee in it is my coffee beverage of choice.

I love a cappuccino. I love a good latte. And during the

Christmas season, only in the month of December, I am a

peppermint mocha fan, but the rest of the time I am a coffee

flavored coffee person. I love

that I can get into the holiday peppermint

mocha vibe. My husband calls that the Pepe Moke. I love that.

Do you want a Pepe Moke? Like, not. If you say it like that,

I'm gonna throw my wife under the bus because we

bought an espresso. So, like, now we're fancy with our coffee

at home, but one of her colleagues, they're all

teachers, gave her a, let's just say, a spiked version of

peppermint, which he decided to use. So if you really need a

thing to kind of get you over something a grown up Pepe. MKA,

exactly. My wife would highly, highly recommend that version of

it. Rumpelments, yes. Now this was a peppermint alcohol of some

sort. I'm not sure what exactly it was, but she enjoyed it

immensely. I

would say, when I'm not working, I'm a hockey

mom, and I manage a seven year hockey team. Oh, so I'm very

familiar with, like, a coffee you had chocolate plus some sort

of flavoring, because it's early and it's cold and the days I

want with a bunch of seven year olds who play hockey. You are a

special breed

that is a special level of momming that

not all moms get to. Mom so well done there. Rachel, it has been

such a pleasure to have you on the podcast with us today. Thank

you so much. You bring such a vibrant and forward looking

approach to Ed Tech, which is why we ask. Test you on we like

to mix things up a bit and not be too techie all the time.

Thank you for coming and talking some pedagogy with us and kind

of living in the space of AI with us for a while too. It's

been really helpful. Thanks so much for having me. It's been

great to hang out with you guys today. Let me know if you end up

getting my project approved at a Li, okay, I will. I'm

already thinking about ideas for that for you, so

I love

it. I've got a minion sending her into the

ALI program undercover. Thank you guys. It's been great to see

you. Thanks so much.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent Schools. For more information about Atlas and

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