Wolfgang Soeldner of the International School of Geneva joins the podcast to discuss the evolving role of IT and ed tech leadership in a global context. The conversation dives into the "collective responsibility" of data compliance under GDPR and the EU AI Act, alongside a provocative look at why AI necessitates a total revolution in student assessment.

1. Ecolint: International School of Geneva
2. Technology Readiness Council (TRC), global organization connecting and supporting senior leaders in international schools
3. 9ine, specialists in data privacy, cybersecurity, and vendor vetting
4. Council of International Schools
5. History of Mardi Gras
6. Carnival, Wikipedia article

Matt, 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.

Hello, everyone. I am Dr Ashley cross, Senior

Director of Education and content here at Atlas, filling

in as your atlas co host this morning, and I'm also joined by

our regulars. Y'all say hello, hi.

My name is Bill Stites. I'm 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 in Richmond, Virginia.

Guys, so good to be joining you this morning. I

know Bill's just coming off of a conference, and my question to

you is, How soon is spring break? What's your countdown?

It's not soon enough. Regardless of coming off

of a conference and getting some time away, we have all of next

week, and then we have two weeks, though, at MKA here, we

are responsible for being in at least one of those two weeks, so

I'll be working for the next two weeks and then taking a week off

and then coming back in to get some much needed projects done,

putting some APs in the ceiling and cleaning up all the little

bits and pieces before we get ready for the summer season of

much larger and much more detailed projects.

So we are actually approaching the runway from the

skies. We are set for spring break next week. We have a half

a day tomorrow. We are good to go. So my daughter comes in from

Virginia Tech this evening, then we jet set to Florida to

celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. Then we'll come back

and then drive back up to Virginia Tech so she can finish

up her sophomore year, which is hard to

believe. Nice. You can stop and see Sean

Absolutely.

So I have young kiddos there in school, and we

just got out of a whole week break for Mardi Gras. So this is

not their spring break that is still coming and approaching,

but a fun little fact that I thought I would bring to the pod

this morning. So I live in Mobile, Alabama. It is actually

the home of Mardi Gras in 1703 and we had over a million people

visit our city through Mardi Gras season. So that's kind of a

cool little fun fact, but I wanted to also bring that to the

table this morning as we welcome our guest. So we have an

international guest joining us today, very excited about this.

We have Wolfgang Soldner, and he is coming in from an

international school. So Wolfgang, I also wanted to ask

you, do you have any fun regional festival celebrations?

Do you have some breaks coming up? What's going on in your

world? Yeah.

So Well, first of all, thank you for

hosting me and welcoming to your show. It's a great pleasure to

meet you all, some of you for the first time, and some of you

as a reconnect. So Mardi Gras, I'm guessing, is sort of the

equivalent to fluffing in Germany or Austria or carnival.

And that's just a break we've had. So we've just had a week in

February where basically the tradition, however long it goes

back, is to get rid of the evil spirits of winter and welcome in

the spring in some parts of Austria that still with very

scary costumes and people with horns that throw others into big

buckets and sort of replicate, I suppose, the historic origin of

that festival spring break would be around the beginning of April

is really when we go on a two week break. So yes, we're right

in between two breaks. This is break season, and it's lovely.

Yeah, can't come soon enough, as Bill said,

very interesting. I didn't know about some of

those regional things. Super excited to bring you on with

this whole new perspective to the podcast today. But would you

tell our listeners? Where are you? Tell us a little bit about

your school, where you work, what you do, and just some

demographics about your school.

So currently I'm at the International School

of Geneva, which you always got to be very careful with

statistics. But according to statistics and history, it is

the oldest international school in the world, and the founder,

or co founder, of the International Baccalaureate, we

celebrated 100 years last year, and it's also known as probably

the largest international school, with about 4500 students

across three campuses. The one I'm predominantly at is out in

the war camp Canton, which is just the next Canton along

Geneva is a federal state, so there's lots of cantons, and the

other two campuses are basically city campuses here in Geneva,

each with around 1000 plus, or a little less students. So it's a

large organization. And.

Foundation that's really incredible history and

good context for our listeners too, as we situate the

conversation, I think that the size of the school matters a

lot. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do

there?

I'm currently ICT campus partner, which is for

all extents and purposes, somewhat an amalgamation between

an IT director and an Ed Tech coordinator. So we have IT

personnel on campus, and then we also have foundational central

IT personnel, and then I bridge that gap mostly between the

educational part and the technology part in terms of

teacher training, student engagement, curricula

integration, as well as then some of the infrastructure parts

and hardware things. So when it comes to things like, right now,

I'm doing a Chromebook rollout, then I'm at the front of this,

or the face of it, and with the support of the technicians, when

it comes to interactive board replacement cycles and things

like that, we have people doing it. But at the same time I'm

involved in the in the day to day, on the ground work, I

suppose, and then alongside that, which we'll come to a

little bit later, but I'm also the CEO of the Technology

Readiness Council, but I think that's a whole other

conversation that we'll have maybe a little bit later.

So Wolfgang, one of the things our listeners

really enjoy is kind of getting a superhero perspective of your

origin story. So how did you actually get to where you are

today in terms of the Ed Tech and the combo platter of

director of tech and Ed Tech responsibilities? Because we're

at an interesting point, I think, in just school histories

of technology leaders reaching a certain maturation level, and

we're going to have to have a new wave of new folks taking the

reins. So what's your origin story?

I wanted to become a musician, and realized

I wasn't good enough, and then I became a teacher, I suppose, in

a way, that's not totally far off the truth, but, yeah, you're

right. I mean, I see this too. So this is my 23rd 24th year of

being in education. And a lot of what I'm seeing and dealing with

is exactly what you're talking about, whether it's the change

of the guard, but also maybe a little bit in terms of looking

at how the world of technology in schools is evolving, slash,

what are the current trends and what's needed by or what's at

least perceptually needed by superintendents or heads of

schools. And whereas before, it was quite easy or easier to

categorize a tech director or a technologist into a tech type

person coming from the more traditional server room,

infrastructure, security, all of those things. And maybe on the

other side, having the pedagogical tech director, ed

tech director coming out of the classroom, the necessities, I

think, these days, is very, very different, because, of course,

as you and Bill are keenly aware, you know, with constant

cyber attacks, or cyber threats, with data protection and

compliance with all these other things, the pedagogical side,

again, is starting to maybe be slightly less important,

especially in times of maybe financial frugality and where

schools have to cut finances, especially on the operational

side. So it's a very interesting era and time for any young

technologist, really, to come into the field, because it's

quite difficult to predict how things are really going to go

and what types of skills you're going to be mainly required to

do you. I think that world is much more difficult to analyze

and predict at the moment.

So Wolfgang, one of the things I mentioned before we

came on air was that I spent some time over in Australia, and

my counterpart there had the title of ICT director, and we

often ask, What's in a name? What's in your title? Two

questions here, and one very simple, what does that stand

for? And then what does your department look like? How are

you staffed? I mean, you mentioned your size, but how are

you staffed like? Who do you have that is either reporting to

you, and then Who do you report to above? Yeah.

So the structure here is, I suppose, in

a way, a little bit more traditional, in that we have a

foundational it or ICT director. His origins, originally, is much

more from the corporate side, but he's been in education for

quite a long time now, and his centralized staff are

infrastructure specialists, security specialists,

programmers, and as you would imagine, for a size of our

school, lots of different specialties, as well as then

educational leaders like myself, which we have on each of the

campuses. So you know, your level one, level two, level

three, like you would have traditionally in the

International School world, it looks a little bit different, I

suppose, because one, as you've just mentioned, titles are

available galore. You can pick one and it probably exists. And

if it doesn't, it will exist soon. At the moment, it's all

about innovation and teaching or. Learning and innovation.

Those seem to be the directorship titles now given to

tech directors. There's still the ICT director, of course

around. And then, depending on the school, in some schools, you

have library reporting to a tech director. You have educational

technology facilitators and coaches reporting to the tech

director. You've got, of course, all the IT staff reporting to

the tech director. So like in Singapore, for example, when I

worked there, I had a staff of 32 people, and that included all

of those different people. And that's, again, regionally a

little bit different, because in some parts of the world, labor

costs are much cheaper, so you can afford to have people to do

very specific jobs. And that has pros and cons as well, depending

on how you want to look at it, because, of course, the less you

pay somebody, the less likely they're going to look beyond

their sort of remit of the box that they're in. But it also

really depends on the financial structure and safety of a

school. So right now, we're going through a time of actually

internationally, at least, there being quite a lot of strains on

operational costs, as I've already mentioned. And with

that, then comes the thinning down. So what do you not need?

And what kind of person do you need at the top, in terms of the

senior leadership position? If they can do multiple roles, do

you then also need to have one representing each of the other

bits? And so in times of I think, financial abundance, you

have much more availability of roles and positions. But of

course, as we all know, when times become a bit tougher, you

start slimming that down a little bit.

So Wolfgang, you mentioned something about the

variance in the staffs that you have actually worked with. What

is the Goldilocks zone, in your opinion, for a school, if you

had the capacity? And actually, I will probably get to this in

terms of your readiness Council. What is the recipe for having

that Goldilocks set up for school?

You guys will remember this as well. The rule

of thumb used to be something between three and 500 devices

per support staff on the first level, but that's like long

gone. Now in terms of both the support or the systems behind

that can support those devices, I suppose it's more of a

combination of it's quite difficult for schools to really

elicit their learning needs when it comes to technology, and so

oftentimes it's outsourced to the position of tech director,

but with that, then often comes a non equal voice in terms of

the decision making table or the senior leadership table. So we

all may sit, or have sat at senior leadership tables, but

actually a voice of a tech director versus a voice of a

principal, for example, or a Director of Teaching and

Learning are treated very differently in most scenarios,

unless something happens, and then we're brought up to the

forefront and suddenly our voice matters a lot more. And again, I

think it depends on financial situations and times, because

the Goldilocks scenario is that you have enough staff to

support, of course, from a technical perspective, but you

actually have enough staff to really make a difference on the

day to day teaching and learning side, which takes much longer,

and it's much more people based it takes a lot more relationship

building, but then also takes a lot more time in terms of

professional development, or continued professional

development. So schools are already really hard push.

Because, of course, every single year a school has a new goal or

a new something that they strive towards. And one of the big

problems in schools is that those goals never really get put

to bed. So we have a new school goal this academic year. Well,

what happened to last year's school goal? It's sort of like

it just gets added on without ever any real closure. And so

from an educational technology point of view, that makes it

really difficult to align yourself to school goals.

Because at least in my opinion, technology should never be the

driver of initiatives. It should be the supporter of initiatives.

But if the initiatives are constantly changing like a flag

in the wind, and it's very difficult to align yourself,

because technology planning is much more longer term. You can't

just plan for a year. It has to be for two or three or four

years, depending on life cycles, depending on technology

development. Just now, I don't know if either of your schools

are Mac schools, but the release of the new macro now, I mean,

that's a game changer. Apple has never been known for anything

other than a premium brand, and suddenly they release something

that's competing with a Chromebook, and that's nearly

unplannable, but it makes such a big difference from a budget

point of view in an educational setting. So what do you do with

that if you don't have clear educational goals that are multi

year?

What does technology look like at your

school in terms of you know, if I'm going to walk into a

classroom, if I'm going to be walking through the halls, what

am I likely to see?

The one advantage, I think generally, in

international schools, is that money is spent quite at large

when it comes to technology. So all of the classrooms would have

interactive boards. We're a one to one, even though we're a BYOD

school that teachers all have school supplied laptops. We're

actually moving to Chromebooks as we. Speaks, which is quite an

interesting journey from an educators perspective. But

basically, you would see that technology exists everywhere.

The debate that could be had, is that a good thing or a bad

thing? Is it deliberate technology where the outcome and

potential measurable is there? But I think we all face similar

issues. You know, ever since the release of the notion of one to

one or technology at large in schools, I'm not sure we've been

very good at trying to actually go the other way around and say,

what do we want to actually achieve with this?

So Wolfgang, as a follow up to that, given that

the amount of technology is quite rich at these

international schools, talk about the level of professional

development that should accompany such a robust

environment such that you can keep your instructors up to

speed.

It's something that I've been really

struggling with for a long time, because you've got your Google

for educators certificates or courses, level one, level two.

You've got the Apple Distinguished Educator. You've

got to see who does some certifications ATLIS, who

provides professional development. But actually, in

international setting, it's really difficult to find things

that a school can base standards on or take as a baseline. What

I, for example, try to do, or what we've been trying to do in

this school, is the word mandate never sits well in schools. But

how can we create the space line or the standard to at least

ensure that we're all talking from the same perspective and

from the same point? And that hasn't happened in any school

that I know where the school has said, similar to your child

safety and safeguarding training you have to do every so often,

you have to get x certificate in order to create that baseline

and that standard. Now we can all argue and say, you know, a

certificate doesn't necessarily ensure better quality of usage

and all those things, but it does create a baseline

understanding that you can go from and that's really what I

would love to see, is that schools become more I guess it's

like in that notion of becoming more data informed and also

looking at data, because if you can at least ensure that there's

a quality program that your teachers at large are adhering

by and continuingly taking like a Google educator certificate

has to be renewed every two years, so you can at least

Ensure that there is something up to date, something

developing, and that notion of continued professional

development not just the ticking of the box, and saying 99% of

our staff have got a Google educator certificate, I think

that's quite important.

There's a bit of a follow up, and I don't know how

transient the teacher pool is within international schools.

What kind of a challenge does that pose to you all, from a

support perspective, from a training perspective, in terms

of maintaining the standards that your individual schools

desire,

that's both a positive and a negative. I mean,

if you take the average International School, it's

usually like a rule of thirds. So you basically have teachers

if you're on average, leave every two years, two to three

years, you've got teachers who leave every three to six years,

and then teachers, you're there forever. So you've got that sort

of new, fresh middle longevity. And then, of course, you add to

that that Apple is very dominant in some schools as a prestige

product, Lenovo and Microsoft based computers are very

prominent in other types of settings. There's very little in

hiring teachers, and actually to that degree, in educating

teachers or training teachers to become teachers that is

specifically focused on technology or the skills that

are surrounded with technology. And I don't mean brand specific,

but are you able to produce proper presentations? Are you

able to navigate around certain systems with ease? You know,

doesn't matter which LMS you use, but once you know one

properly well, you can navigate yourself around most LMS.

They're not all that different. But that's never really, as far

as I know, been made as a priority when it comes to hiring

teachers, because, of course, first and foremost, they have to

be good at instruction and delivering content, and whether

masterful, but at least the experts at their curriculum. So

that causes, I think, one of the biggest challenges, because

you're right, you can determine standards based upon

certification, but that doesn't necessarily mean that, because

it's not prioritized in the hiring, that you are actually

getting teachers who continue the growth of the school, you

may well have to retract quite often, which is okay as well, as

long as you pick them up. But if you go back too many times or

too many steps, it does impact the quality of the overall

delivery, I guess, and usage.

When I first got into this, I said I'd love my

job, because I get a play all day. I try different things. I

get to explore and just dig in on things and have some fun. One

of the things that I've noticed over the past few years is the

fun has been taken over by a lot of the compliance work that we

need to do. And Hiram and I, we spend a lot of time. I mean, we

had emails going back and forth, is. Early as today, we work very

closely with one of our vendor partners, with a company called

Nine around a lot of the vetting and the compliance work. And

it's interesting enough here in the States when we're dealing

with things from state to state in terms of what we have to deal

with, but what does that look like for you there when you're

dealing with an international population, where our states are

equivalent to almost like the countries that you're bordering,

in terms of the way in which you have to navigate all of these

different pieces. What does that look like for you on the day to

day? And how do you make that work?

Yeah, I mean, for us, it's quite similar. I

mean, Switzerland follows very similar data laws to GDPR and

the European Union. So it's quite clear, you know, you have

to have access to a DPO. You have to go through compliancy

and DPAs and DPI in terms of getting or purchasing or locking

into new solutions. So before we, for example, before a

teacher, a department, actually, anybody within the school

subscribes to new service or buys a new product, they have to

go through a whole process of basically, first and foremost,

is it GDPR compliant or the Swiss equivalent? And that's the

first hurdle. And then after that comes all the pedagogy. So

just like you said, you know, the sort of fun bit about

playing around and doing things has long gone, because if it

isn't GDPR compliant, then the buck stops right there. And

adding to that, I don't know how aware you are that, but the

European Union from August 2 is putting into play the EU AI Act,

which then addresses a lot of AI specific requirements for EU

citizens, alongside the DPO and GDPR work, but there's a lot of

overlap, but also a lot of differences. So we actually, at

the moment, we're running a whole workshop series on

specifically the EU AI act, because it's, again, a massive

document that puts a lot of onus on the educational institution.

Wolfgang you actually co authored an article

for the international school leader magazine, and it was

talking about technology as this collective responsibility, and I

think this pairs up really nicely with data privacy. But

can you tell us a little bit more about this approach? I

think a lot of schools really struggle with this concept as

tech as a collective responsibility.

Yeah, so I'm sort of looking at Bill and

Hiram again here, because I don't know if I'm totally way

off this, but data compliance or compliancy full stop really

should lie with all of us as a responsibility. But the problem

is when the way that it's been rolled out, and I guess going

back to schools, priorities and goals, most teachers haven't

really grasped the concept of what it is that makes it so

important for them to be compliant or to understand what

it is that the technologists within schools or outside of

schools are asking of them. So you mentioned nine which, of

course, we're well aware of, and Mark's done a great job at

helping schools from the technology side of compliance,

but the training of teachers to really understand that

education, I think now education as an industry, I think is the

single biggest target for cyber attacks and ransomware and other

things like that. And because it's such a relatively easy

target, because most teachers don't have that understanding of

exactly how much power and information they hold on their

machines, or the processes that they go through, the list that

they print off or may have lying around, or the computers that

may get stolen or lost, or something like that. I think

what's been forgotten about is that compliancy is mainly about

protecting people, and if that were brought to the forefront a

lot more with teachers and educational facilities, I think

would be very difficult for anybody to turn around and argue

or not understand. But because it's about computers and devices

and technology, there's a disconnect between, well, this

isn't really my job. It's your job. And I think that causes a

huge problem that I see everywhere. You know, I still

walk around, not just at the school, but I still walk around

with computers, unlocked, desktops unlocked, or laptops

plugged into screens and unlocked. And it's not that

necessarily our students are the problem or our parents. It's

that it's so easy to potentially do something very wrong and

cause a major data breach. I mean, we've seen big companies

be attacked and have loopholes that they obviously didn't

realize in very recent times, and the amount of data that's in

these systems that we host and run is scary. Yeah, there

isn't a week that goes by that I receive a letter

from a corporation that has said, Oh, we've been breached,

and here's your two years of free Identity Protection

Service, because we've lost all of your data, whether it's

health information, financial information, etc. I do find it

fascinating. I think this has become so symptomatic post covid

Because all of these ed tech providers were given. Software

away. And I think teachers were just salivating over the need

for applications to help them conduct their courses in these

remote settings, but there was a tremendous collective cost that

we all paid for as a result being our data this kind of is a

perfect segue, given the way our conversation has been going tell

us some more about how your technology readiness Council is

able to equip and support schools with some of the

challenges that we are currently facing.

Yes, I'll add one more little caveat before I

answer that. Hiram is so during post covid with a lot of

companies or organizations give things away for free, and now

we're an era where a load of the companies that we are trusting

and that we have vetted and that are compliant are suddenly

introducing AI tools or AI assistant tools and basically

giving away data. Yes, there may be some data protection

agreements that are made, but actually they don't even know

where the data goes yet. They tell us they're compliant and

have data protection agreements. So we've entered an entirely new

phase of basically unprotected data being given and sold on our

behalf, just because our LMS suddenly has a curriculum

writing tool and it's got a grading assistant, and we

haven't actually signed off on that properly, like some of

these companies, you can't even turn it off. So we've been

really forced into a tool that is extremely powerful, no

denying and extremely helpful, but at what cost? So I'm very

skeptical about the future of that and what that holds, and

it'll be very interesting to see how that plays out with the EU

AI act when that fully comes into play, and how companies may

well have to retract some of their AI integrations. So from

the Technology Readiness Council, so we're about 33

member schools spread across the entire world. You know, we've

got schools in Canada, US, Europe, Southeast Asia, Asia,

and the main goal is really the collective and the council, and

what we've tried to do ever since creating this is create a

community that supports each other on a much more granular

level. Co authors things very similar. I mean, ATLIS, I

remember actually the last time we actually talked to each

other, it was in a very similar vein, where you were organizing

your members to create coordinated and joint and

collaborative resources and such. So there isn't a million

mile difference between the organizations, I guess. What

we're trying to do is create some sort of, I earlier

mentioned, standards for teachers or educators, but some

sort of standard across the world where, without being tied

to an entity, a money making entity, we can wholeheartedly

say that subjectively and and objectively, both ways, we're

not going to be influenced by anything other than a collective

agreement and work towards what best practice looks like, what

Working through worst case scenarios looks like, you know,

tabletop exercises providing tools that allow schools our

members range from schools that could afford pretty much

anything, to schools who find it very difficult to afford

anything, and I think especially the schools if you have more

financial restraints, those are the schools who are the easiest

targets, and they are the ones who need the most support. So

technology ready, in our eyes, isn't the tick box. It isn't,

oh, now I've gone through accreditation, and now we're

accredited. It's you understand that in joining us as a member

and working with us and potentially doing an audit and

beyond, you understand that this is a journey that was continuing

and is unfortunately never ending, but at least you'll be

part of a pool of other member schools internationally who are

going through a very similar thing, and who bought into the

notion and understanding that this is something that we can

only really tackle together.

Yeah, it may backtrack us just a hair at your

school, we were talking about how all of these applications

are out there. Can you tell us a little bit more about the

process that you guys actually go through to vet applications,

and then, does that have any ties to some of the work that

you're doing at the Technology Readiness Council?

Yeah, so like I said, I mean the first hurdle

or stumbling block is, are they data compliant in terms of the

law. So in Europe, you know, is the server base. In Europe, for

example, is a very simple starting point. Then we have to

have a Data Protection Agreement and the dtia, so there's a load

of data work that has to be done before any frugal or before any

continuation. And then we've got very much a process where it's

departmental. So it is more more trying to pull back from being

the ones paying for things, and even though it may all come from

the same pot of money, I think having individual departments be

responsible for the purchases they make digitally is a really

good way to go about it, because. They have to then

justify this as part of their budget. They have to justify it

as part of their usage within their departments. And I go back

to actually, when I first worked in Zurich, we rolled out iPad

one to ones, and one of the processes that I loved was, and

this was specifically in primary school and in the program called

primary years program, which is a an IB program. It was the time

when the similar to what you were saying, Hiram about like

free software, was the times of free apps and how wonderful

we've got 1000s and 1000s of educational free apps that we

can use any time. But actually the process that we went through

was that they had to fill in a form that linked directly with

their unit of inquiry, with their curriculum needs. And the

app in primary school could never be single usage, so it had

to be cross discipline cover multiple angles and aspects. And

I think that was a really good way, from a pedagogical point of

view, to look at an app isn't just a quick fix, it isn't just

a single thing. It's something that has to tie into curriculum

and have a longevity, otherwise, you spend a huge amount of time

basically just investing in how to do something and then maybe

realizing it doesn't work in the first place.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the

process that you guys have currently? So you mentioned

that, like, it has to be compliant with these laws. But

like, do you guys have a committee? Are they submitting

forms? Like, what is the actual process that an educator would

have to go through to get something approved?

Yeah, so they go through me. The process is

they go through me, I make sure it's data compliant with our

DPO, and then I have a bigger and better overview of what we

have at large as a school, and then I can make some

recommendations, whether we already have a tool that does

something similar or maybe even exactly the same. So then I have

a pedagogical discussion with the teachers or with the

department. I'm not necessarily the one that says yes or no,

because I don't think that should be my role, but I'm

certainly the one that can guide or steer that conversation. So

who ultimately makes that decision? The teacher. Well, I

mean, I guess the head of department, a teacher requesting

something, would have to go through the head of department,

because they've got access to the ultimate budget and account.

I mean, if you review it and it doesn't meet

your compliance standards, are you able to say no to it at that

point, because even if they want it, they made like, you were

going back to like what they understand.

Yeah, no, that's our absolute no go. If

it's not data compliant, it won't go any further. We've just

had that situation, actually, where we were looking at a tool

that isn't and even the alternative was basically saying

this was more to do with advertisements, and it was

embedded advertisements, so even ad blockers can't block the ads.

And the answer back from the company was No. First of all, we

won't be signing a DPA. And second of all, this is against

the spirit of our community, whatever that means. But

basically they're not compliant, and so that won't go any

further.

So with the work that you're doing with the

Technology Readiness Council. You mentioned the number of

schools that you have. Where do you see that going in the

future? You mentioned the work that you're doing, where you are

right now, with your global footprint on it, where do you

see that in the next one to five years?

So we've recently partnered up with

European ed tech Alliance, for example, which is a big

organization in Europe that looks after incubators and

regional ed tech alliances, we're targeting also or working

with various organizations to make sure that ultimately, when

schools look towards us for this standard that we've talked

about, that we also have others working with us to create that

overall quality, we've launched basically similar to many other

organizations. We now offer free workshops for our members that

are very much specifically to do with what's relevant for the

technologists that we serve and the schools that we serve. We,

like many other organizations, run a yearly summit, but again,

as the main organizer of the summit, for example, the

absolute goal has to be that every single session is outcome

orientated, so people can walk away and walk into their job and

use what they've learned. Because I think a lot of

conferences and professional developments are very

interesting to learn about something new or learn about

something you didn't know, but then it's very difficult,

sometimes, back in your own setting, to apply it to your

daily job. And I think it's very important for us as a technology

readiness council that at least for the most part, people walk

into workshops and walk out of it with tangible takeaways that

they can then implement in their daily job. So ultimately, it's

striving towards that standard that international schools

specifically can look towards and say, Here is something that,

across the board, looks similar and feels similar no matter

which school you go into, no matter which school you work

with. Nice.

That's really great work. So Wolfgang, we get

acquainted with each other about three years ago now, if you can

believe it, virtually. Me when AI really came onto the scene

and people were gathering together to share, and your name

popped up on my radar from some of my circles, but I'd love to

take us to AI and talk about, what have you guys been up to

over the last couple of years? How's it going? What's the

temperature like? How do your faculty feel about it? Where are

things with AI at your school right now?

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily single out

my school as where things are with AI. I think we've gone from

the excitement and discovery phase to the phase where, at

least for a lot of classroom teachers, it's gone out of

control. And so it's a great question. I don't even know

where we are with AI anymore. I think it's a tool that is

extremely helpful. I think a lot of educators are nearly at the

point where they'd be ready to disconnect, get rid of any

technology, and go back to paper and pen. But a lot of that is

driven really, from our traditional way of assessing and

assessments, because we don't know really how to assess for

understanding. We know how to assess for knowledge. And so

what we've traditionally been doing is passing on knowledge,

then assessing whether you've gathered that knowledge, and

then moving on to the next unit and the next topic. And then

eventually you go to university, you know a little bit more, and

then you get to your job, and you realize I didn't actually

need to know most of that stuff. I just need to understand it. So

if you turned around tomorrow and created an assessment that

was entirely fully open book and said, use whatever tool you

want, whatever platform, mechanism, system, hardware and

software, and you were still able to actually elicit and

extrude the understanding of something that would be amazing,

and then AI could be this wonderful tool that we all know

it to be, which would allow for individualized learning,

differentiated learning. It would allow different students

and adults to approach and to attack things in different

manners. But for now, it's just like the quick fix, right? Like

it's the new Google, it's the new Wikipedia. So most of the

efforts, at least from a student perspective, right now, is

going, how can I become a better prompter? It's not. How can I

understand this tool for the amazing potential it has? So I

don't know. I don't know where we are. I know that schools are

forever holding on to the notion that we need to serve what

universities require of us. And universities say, well, we need

to, kind of prepare our students for what the job market is, but

that's already massively changing. You know. Can you

imagine, for example, being a first year lawyer and the work

that they actually mainly doing that's obsolete already? Can you

imagine being like a lower level programmer that's basically

obsolete, so we can easily identify the jobs that are

basically already obsolete, but what we're still really poor at

at school is the really badly named soft skills. And how do we

actually teach those? Because they're not soft at all. They

are the skills that will inevitably help whatever

generations coming through our education system succeed and has

done forever. You know, presentation skills,

collaboration, any kind of soft skill that you've ever come

across is usually what makes a person succeed in life.

It's uncanny. Your comments there, because we just

had our board retreat here at school yesterday, and a couple

of things that were almost identical. One was reevaluating

how we assess our students, because traditional methods of

instruction can't compete with AI. And then when talking to the

leaders of our community, have had one attorney say So you're

telling me that now I can place all of my contracts into an AI

edge in a walled garden, etc, and then generate all new

contracts based on the framework and the way that we like to

design our contracts. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. I have

no need for young attorneys anymore. And I reminded him,

yes, but then you're going to eventually need senior

attorneys, and you still need to have some growth of your young

attorneys to become senior attorneys, because, yes, AI can

do a lot of this, but eventually you're going to need somebody

who really understands the law, and if they're not doing that on

a regular basis, they're not going to be able to compete.

What's interesting is our jobs, I think are so perfect for the

use of AI. We encounter problems daily that we were never trained

for. We encounter problems regularly that may not have any

solutions. And Bill mentioned that the two of us engage in

conversations frequently about vetting applications in terms of

service and data privacy. We don't have access to schools

attorneys on a regular basis, and they're very expensive, but

we can develop that cursory overview so that we can start to

learn what that landscape looks like. And so we're building the

plane as we fly it. But. But I couldn't agree with you more,

and it really is uncanny how your remarks are exactly out of

our board retreat yesterday. Yeah.

I mean, I think we're all facing similar

things where the, you know, the realization has been there for a

long time that the way we assess really is mainly money driven

because it's the easiest way to assess, right? I used to be a

language teacher, and you can't tell me that the best way to

assess whether somebody speaks a language is by making them write

a four hour exam, or the best way to take AP Computer Science

exam is to have them handwrite code. That just isn't the best

way to assess a subject that really isn't meant to be on

paper, and paper has nothing to do with that, but it's just the

way we assess. So, yeah, you're right. I mean, looking at a

paralegals work, is it necessary to then become a senior lawyer

and learn the ropes? I don't know. I mean, we've always

evolved jobs, and jobs have come and gone, and inventions have

made certain jobs obsolete and created others. But I just see

that, I guess that the closest thing I can relate it to is the

the evolution of really good DIY people through YouTube. You

know, people have built houses and converted vans and such,

because others have taken the time to create these amazing

videos of how to but now you don't need that video. You can

actually, for the most part, really go to a tool that will

guide you through things on a much more detailed and granular

level. It doesn't take a lot to be able to understand is what

I'm getting correct or incorrect? You know, we're not

talking about astrophysics. I'm talking more about things that

are comprehendible to the majority of people. So it'll be

interesting to see, because I feel probably what's coming is

more a natural revolution, as opposed to pivot by the

educational systems, because the masses will demand and so

students and teachers and so on that really discover the power

and how to use and apply this new technology. It's already

happening all around us, and it's incredible. So we're

playing catch up once again.

And the interesting perspective there

is, if you use the age of 25 as a mature adult, okay, so it's

going to take until 2033 for our seniors to get to that. And then

you realize that if you're a one year old that's 2050 that world

is going to be vastly different. And so we need to be cognizant

of the fact that this evolution slash revolution is already in

process.

Yeah. And then what do we have to do to be

able to, you know, just take things like deep fakes. What

skills should we be teaching our students to be able to be

equipped to go through an election process or to make

important decisions in their life based on the ability to

decipher what is real and what isn't real. I mean, I'm

struggling with it these days, and I've lived a fair part of my

life, and it's only going to become harder.

Yeah, for sure. We actually have Evan Harris out of

pathos group, coming to speak at ATLIS at the keynote, and deep

fakes is the topic for our annual conference main stage

this year, but it's a big deal. But you know, you were talking

about it from the student perspective. But I mean, it's

not just that. It's when you have faculty impersonating the

head of school and making deep fake racist comments out there,

or, you know, there's things where cyber bullying incidents

and the schools have really gotten into a lot of trouble

about not responding in the proper way. But again, they're

still trying to figure out, well, what is the proper

response and approach, like it's very new and moving very

quickly. And so that's an area that I think our schools are

paying a lot of attention to.

Yeah, and I think adding to that, like the

educational world, unfortunately, is kind of one

way you're guilty until proven innocent, rather than innocent

until proven guilty. So reputation and all that comes

with that is super delicate, and you add a frank but what does

that matter in the longevity of a career and reputation when,

sure, it might be found out to be a frank and yes, maybe the

school has got good response mechanisms, but the individuals

tainted forever?

Absolutely, yeah, that brand tarnishment And

anything you know, on the internet and when the media gets

involved, it escalates very quickly, for sure. Well,

Wolfgang, as we are wrapping up our time with you, if there are

people in our audience that are thinking, This sounds really

fascinating, I'd love to work internationally. I want to

explore this. Do you have any advice for them about the

potential of moving to an international school? Yes.

So there's a couple of big organization,

search associates, CIS, the Council of international

schools, the global recruitment collaborative. These are all

really good organizations that have for many, many years, been

big and major players in the recruitment scene. If it's

technologist, then we actually run a forum. That's free. So

join that. That's a really good free platform, open sharing. So

it's not just for the job market, of course, but it's also

generally about anything to do with technology. From the

perspective of a senior technologist, tech director, or

Director of Innovation, whatever we call it. Now, there are some

really good communities, of course, the TLC as well. And

myself, I'm always more than happy to help and assist in any

way awesome.

Well, thank you so much. We appreciate your time

and appreciate you being here with us today.

Thank you guys, awesome and really nice to

meet you, Bill and Hiram. Ashley, lovely seeing you again.

Bye, everybody. This has been talking technology

with ATLIS, produced by the Association of technology

leaders in independent schools. For more information about Atlas

and Atlas membership, please visit the atlas.org if you

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