From the ATLIS Annual Conference 2025

Relive the dynamic opening keynotes from the ATLIS Annual Conference with Felix Jacomino and Claire Goldsmith. Felix, Director of Technology at St. Stephen's Episcopal Day School, reflects on past tech trends to provide a roadmap for future innovation. Claire, Principal of Lamplight Education, discusses harnessing emerging technologies like AI and Web3 to build resilient, future-ready schools, emphasizing curiosity, collaboration, and ethical courage.

Resources

• Lamplight Education: https://www.lamplighted.org/
• St. Stephen's Episcopal Day School: https://www.sseds.org/
• Stanford Online High School: https://ohs.stanford.edu/
• Malone Schools Online Network: https://maloneschoolsonlinenetwork.org/
• Enrollment Management Association: https://www.enrollment.org/
• Zoom: https://zoom.us/
• Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com/
• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
• Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude

Ed, welcome to Talking technology with Atlas,

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 llewellen,

hello everyone, and welcome back to

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

president and CEO of the Association of Technology

Leaders in Independent Schools.

And I'm Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey, and

I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of Information

Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in

Richmond, Virginia.

Hey guys, thank you for joining me today.

I'm really excited. We are going to get to relive one of the

coolest couple of days of the year, the Atlas annual

conference. So we have a special podcast today, and what we're

going to do is we're actually going to take the magic of what

happened in the general sessions and bring it to our listening

audience. Isn't that kind of cool that we get to share some

of the general sessions with

everybody? Does this mean that it's going to be

reliving Hiram in my moment on stage with you? Bedazzled, yeah,

but that is this what we're reliving, or is it something

different? I'm thinking that that part has

been cut. What and for our loving listeners, that one's

better left to the video that was posted all over LinkedIn. So

if you guys don't know what we're talking about, Hiram and

Bill interrupted my welcome on day one of the Atlas conference,

and they came up on stage wearing a sparkly suit jacket

because I had my sparkly suit on to celebrate our 10th

Anniversary. And lo and behold, they surprised me with my good

friends and my daughter, who sing with me in a barbershop

quartet, and we had a little cameo moment on the stage. So

that was definitely a pretty cool way to kick things off.

So it's not that we're not doing that. It's

because we didn't have the shoes. We didn't have the red

shoes.

That's true, you didn't have the right shoes

on. And I am not wearing my sparkly suit today, but I'm

equally excited, though, because what we're going to do is we're

going to relive the opening general session and keynotes

from day one of our conference back on April 28 when we were in

Atlanta and we had two incredible speakers, kind of

carrying the general session slot our keynotes. It was

interesting because I think that we have found that having many

voices speak to issues in the independent school technology

space is something that our members and our attendees really

love. So as I said, I'm really proud that we're bringing that

to you this two part keynote address. The first part is Felix

giacomino, good friend of ours. He's been on the pod. Go back

and listen to his episode. It's fantastic. And he started out by

exploring how sort of our past technology trends and the things

that we've lived through in the past pertaining to technology

can really give us a roadmap in terms of being proactive and

planning for future innovations at our schools. And so that was

a really cool kind of walk down memory lane. And after Felix was

done, then Claire Goldsmith came to the stage, and she's the

principal of lamplight education, and she kind of came

into our space to talk about how K 12 leaders can kind of harness

future and emerging trends. So she looked at AI, she looked at

web three, and the idea here was that she really wanted us

thinking about how to build resilient, Future Ready schools.

So it was a really, really inspiring way to kick off the

conference. I'm excited to go through that again.

Can't wait. Let's do it.

Good morning. There was a disclaimer slide

basically saying that what I say Atlas is not responsible for.

And I was going to ask you to read it, but I wanted you to

read it in your best TV disclaimer. Voice, you know, the

one that ends with Viewer discretion is advised, because

it's kind of important for later on, I'm going to have you use

voices in your head in a good way. So don't be scared about

that. So most of us here know how it goes, and we've been here

several times a new technology enters the room, and what

happens? You have the enthusiasts, right? And these

are the ones saying this is going to change everything, and

they're excited about it. Change everything for the better.

Finally, a turning point in education. Or there's those who

are like, we have got to go one to one with this, right? Then

there's the opposite end of the spectrum. And I realized that

there's a better word for I originally used the words

skeptics, but I had a conversation yesterday. I was

speaking with Maggie Rankin, and she said something real nice,

which she says, I could work with skeptics. It's the cynics

that are the real challenge, right? The naysayers, the

negative Nellies, right? Right? They're the ones who are this is

going to ruin everything, and that'll just help students

cheat, and we're going to hear that again and again. We didn't

have that when I was in school. Why do we need it now and then,

of course, this doesn't happen at our school, but maybe it

happens in yours. Just wait long enough, and this trend will just

go away like the others. Okay, see some people been there. Then

there's what I like to call the IT content filter, firewall.

Whack a Mole. Game that starts to happen when the people who

are in charge of those, the firewalls, start to get the

directives to block this block that as soon as they block one,

another one pops up, and it's just that whack a mole, right?

Eventually, though, if this tech is, in fact, helpful for our

schools, and it has a place in education, we start to learn

from others who have had success, the ones that have

gotten past the scary very rarely are we the very, very

first ones who have done it. So we start to learn from others,

and we at least start with a certain department, or even if

it's just for a certain program, and we start to leverage its

power. I see some of you nodding in you. That's how you see

things evolve at your school as well. And some others are

asking, Who is this guy? So two truths and a lie. My name is

Felix giacomino. I work at St Stephen's Episcopal Day School

in Miami, Florida, more specifically, if you know, Miami

Coconut Grove, our little school by the bay and three, let's see

that picture was not touched by AI. A few months ago, I got a

call from Dr Ashley Cross. Ashley, where you at now that

I'm mentioning Ashley? Hi, Ashley and we are at Atlas, 10

year anniversary. Guess what? Our professional relationship

is, 10 years old. Like Happy anniversary. It was 10 years ago

that Ashley and I worked side by side at St Stephen's. So there

you have it. So a few months ago, you called me and asked if

I would do this talk, and I was beyond flattered. I hung up the

phone after graciously accepting, and I immediately

thought, Why me? What was her requirement for such an honor?

And then it hit me, my age? Get the old guy. Get the one that's

been around the block a few times, right? As a matter of

fact, I don't know if you said this or I read it somewhere.

Felix has been around since before the internet. So what did

I do next? I googled and Okay, ARPANET started in 1969 and I

was born in the 70s. So there you have it, not older than the

internet, but I have been in educational technology and

leadership for about 25 years. So I have seen things repeat

themselves. Sometimes they're trajectories, sometimes they're

cycles, and sometimes they just go in a zig zag all over the

place. Lessons from the past is kind of the title of this talk.

It's not Felix's lesson from the past. So rather than tell you a

few more stories about me, I want to tap into the 1000s. Make

space for the 1000s that are in this room. Now I know there's

about 640, times the many stories that you have that's

1000s, if not 10s of 1000s. What I'm going to do next is show a

few slides of technologies that were disruptive at the time,

nothing new. I'm not showing anything upcoming. This is

again, lessons from the past. As I put each one up, I want you to

rewind your memory tape. I said, rewind tape. I am old. Okay, let

me, let me modernize that. Okay, rewind your DVD. You don't

rewind DVDs, so scroll back through your feeds timeline.

Okay, got everybody with me. Now, I do want you to go back to

the past and think of what the conversations were when these

technologies came about. If you're young enough you can't

remember what a life without some of these technologies, or

you might have been in school, okay, but I want you to go back

and in your head with that narrator voice, think of the

voices that were saying, what at the time, the teacher down the

hallway, maybe one of your administrators, when that popped

up. Okay, here's the first one, Google search. Just think back.

All of these came with fear as well as acceptance. So fear

might have been students will now have all the answers. They

won't be able to think. Now they're memorizing everything,

but they have this can you think of anybody saying anything? Can

you hear that person saying it back then acceptance. Now we

teach to ask better questions. Now we could assess using un

Google able questions. Next, Wikipedia. Can you remember what

a common thing was? I. Yeah, that was said about Wikipedia.

Remember when they were saying, well, it's not a reliable

source. You can't use that to cite anything. So the fear was,

anybody could edit that's chaos. Anybody could say anything and

acceptance. It's what collaborative, constantly

evolving knowledge. And up to date encyclopedias are outdated

the minute that they're printed right next. This has been around

for a while, but we haven't landed here yet, right? If I

took a survey of everybody in this room, or at least of your

schools and the policies around mobile phones, it would be as

varied as there are people in this room, and this is one

that's constantly coming and going, coming and going, they're

distractions, right? That's the fear. It'll help students cheat.

What is it about teachers and worried about cheating? Right?

Acceptance, their access tools, their response systems, their

research portals. In this picture, you see the student

documenting the learning, or, I don't know, maybe she is zooming

somebody in to have collaboration with a school

across the world. How about Google Docs? Does anybody

remember seeing this for the first time, like real time, like

Google Docs? Like two I was sitting in a computer lab, and

the computers were right next to each other, and I remember

thinking, I type here and it shows there, and I could sit

here and it shows there, on the same dock, and it was like so

life changing. But there were fears around that, over sharing,

it'll help students cheat, okay? Acceptance, there's more

transparency now, co editing, feedback, peer support. Few more

one to one devices. This one is another one that keeps on coming

up, keeps on coming and going. What's the fear digital baby

sitters? If it has access to the internet, we know students could

use that too. Cheat acceptance. There's equity right now. Let me

say one thing about one to one. We know that if we're going to

use devices, we have to have infrastructure. That's a given.

If we're going to drive a car, we need roads. So the number one

failure, because I've worked with a lot of schools that have

gone to one to one initiatives, the number one failure is the

Tech is a given, right? But it's not a tech issue. The number one

failure is a vision issue, strategic planning issue, a PD

issue, and more specifically, an ongoing professional development

issue. Schools might purchase the equipment, put it in the

hands of teachers and students, bring somebody to say one or two

things at the beginning and hope for the best. And that's

unfortunately, where things go wrong. How about this one?

Remote learning and virtual meetings? As we rewind the tape?

Fine. I'll say it. We could remember what it was like to be

on Zoom meetings all the time. The fear was, this is just a

stop gap, but now it's part of how we operate. Raise your hand

if you've been on the zoom in the last month, wow. Take a look

around. All right, how about in the last week, same number of

hands? Wait, how can there have been more hands in the first

question? Okay, all right, how many of you think you'll be on a

and I'm saying zoom instead of some generic one, because Zoom

is one of our sponsors. So there you have it. How many will be on

a zoom, or, you know, the other ones during your time here at

Atlas over the next few days. Look at that. See. So we've seen

that impact. Think back to Grammarly. What were the

conversations? And there could be two conversations, right?

We're getting Grammarly for all the faculty and staff,

you know what? We're also including the students. Ooh,

that's going to help them cheat. How many of you who control the

MDM or the individual devices have been asked to, I'm not

making this up. Can you turn off auto correct and spell check on

the students devices so they could turn their spelling tests

in via Google Docs. Yeah, yeah. Turn them off because, well, you

know, they're helping them. They're cheating. Let me go back

to when I was asked to do this. I figured I've got to do

something that I'm think I'm good at, definitely something

I'm very passionate about, and that's making connections, not

only myself with others, but others with others. So a lesson

from the past, which I hope helps shape your future, is

this, yes, Google can get you answers, Chat. GPT can help you

with your next policy, help your neck write your next email, and

even explain VLANs to a sixth grader, but something for which

technology has no substitute is your professional network, and

here we are at at Atlas. What better way to expand that than

here over the next three days? So we're going to do something a

little bit different now. I'm going to put up some slides with

job roles and job titles. If it describes you. I'd like you to

stand up. Once you're standing, I want you to look around, check

out who the people on your team are, the people you have in

common. If you're seated, that's not it's like, oh, well, he

didn't call me. Let me tune out right now. No pay attention to

who those people are, because, well, you work with those people

at your school in one way or another, right? So pay attention

there. Then what I want you to do is, throughout the

conference, look for those people who are in your teams as

you grab your lunch plate, looking for a place to sit and

be like Gordon, I remember that you stood up during that slide.

I'm that you mind if I sit with you, because I've got some

questions, right? And grow that network, which, by the way, on

your name badge, you've got a QR code. That's your information.

You do have to use the engage fully app to scan it, so go

ahead scan it, and it kind of aggregates all the business

cards or the contact information of the people that you meet. So

as you're walking around, how about as you're waiting for the

next session to start, instead of scrolling through your phone

and checking up on email, let your out of office. Responder,

do the job it's designed to do, and scan and take a look. Who's

standing up. Who's in my team. All right, here we go. Let's

grow the money. People, CFOs, business managers, directors of

finance, please stand up if you're here. Any CFOs? Any money

people? One any others? All right, two, okay, wow, I thought

it was gonna be a few more. Guys. Bring your CFOs. You have

to understand what we're doing here, right? Okay, this group

might be bigger. Directors of technologies, CTOs, CIOs. It,

leadership director is in your title, have a look around. Don't

look at me. You know what I look like by now. Take a look around.

A lot of you will know each other, okay, but you're gonna

see a face you haven't seen before. Next. It, infrastructure

security teams, network admin, system admin. Stand up. I want

to talk to you about VLANs. I want to like, how do you

configure this on your Wi Fi? How do you what do you do about

guest networks? Do you isolate IoT devices? Let's talk about

that. So to have a look around, look at each other, and find

somebody that you might interact with later on. Thank you. Have a

seat, directors of education now this one's remember, this is the

more academic side of things, by the way. You can stand it for as

many slides as apply to you. Okay, I would stand for many of

them, not the CFO one, but I would stand for a lot of them,

and especially the smaller your school, right? The smaller your

school, the more hats you might wear. So if you're a Director of

Educational Technology, you're in the academic side innovation

and integration, go ahead and stand up, please, and have a

look around, make those connections. See, there's some

people who I know, and I thought they were strictly it, but I see

them on the academic side. That's great. That's great

conversation I'll be having later on. Wonderful teachers.

Faculty, the ones that get it happening in the schools in

front of students. Teachers. Faculty, focused on Ed Tech,

stem steam, computer science, educational technologists,

integrators, or anything. Okay, awesome. Wow. Have a look

around. You got to do a little turning to see all the way

around. Okay, great, awesome. How about these database admins,

student information systems. We need you, the people that come

to you. Can you please give me a CSV, because I have to update

the what's a CBS? You hear that all the time, right? So I'd be

standing up for this one, kind of too. All right, help desk,

technical support teams. I'm still standing for this one too.

My printer is not working. Yeah, you're first to show up, Alex.

I'm thinking about you like you're standing for more of

these than I thought you would. And, man, we gotta talk a little

more cool. All right. Look around. Look for those people.

Okay, only a couple more. I was beat to this one this morning.

They all stood up one by one. But one more time, please. Atlas

team members, board of directors, I'm gonna invite

founders and co founders to stand up as well. Let's have a

look at the people who are the glue of this association and

make this happen. Look at the audience so they can see your

faces and get to know who does what. Right? It's like, yeah,

you're with at least. But what exactly do you do? PD, is it

membership? What is their role? Make sure you reach out to them.

Wow. Are there any heads of schools here? All right, heads

of schools, principals, division heads, anybody else? That's it,

guys, drag those people too with you. We need them. We need them.

Great. Now, heads, you're going to want to pay attention to this

next group, okay, but I'm going to have a little reminder for

you, if you identify with this next slide, and I'm standing for

this one too, I'm a technology leader, confident in skills and

doggone it, my head of school likes me. It's okay. It's not a

brag. It's like, you know what? I have a good, trusting

relationship with my head of school. Stand up, heads of

school. This is an opportunity for networking, not poaching.

Okay, so but, but go ahead, turn around. Look at each other,

because, seriously, heads, these are the people you want to

approach and say, Tell me, what is it that works so well between

you and your head of school? Now for this one, stay seated. If

you identify with this, I've been tasked with creating our

school's AI policy, and I could really use some help. Okay, I

don't need to see who you are. You know who you are, but this

next group is going to stand up. Those who have successfully

created an AI policy have been through the job. Thank you. Go

ahead and stand up. Turn around so you can see who each other

are, but also the ones quietly sitting down who have been

tasked with this, who are kind of nervous about it, they might

want to approach you and ask for some help. Who did I miss?

Please stand up if you did not stand up for another slide just

because it didn't fit your role or your job title. Anybody?

Okay, great, great. Stand up face that way so everybody can

see you. If you're a vendor, you're welcome. Actually, if

you're a vendor, thank you very much. Actually stay standing up

if I didn't call your name. Because what I'm going to task

everybody with doing the challenge for the room is to

solve the mystery of who these people are. Like, seriously,

what's your role? What brings you to Atlas, do you have a name

badge, stuff like that? So it brings me back to the lesson

from the past, which I hope helps shape your future. Yes,

Google can give you a lot of answers. Chat, GPT can help with

your next policy, write your email or explain VLANs to a

sixth grader, but something for which there is no technology

substitute is your professional network. And what better place

to grow that than the Association for technology

leaders in independent schools? Please add me as your very first

network expansion person. Okay? And I look forward to meeting

all 600 and some of you. Thank you very much.

And now that we have wrapped up Felix's part

of the keynote, we're going to turn our attention to Claire

Goldsmith for the second part. Here we go.

Hi everyone. Thank you so much. So this talk

is called shaping the schools of tomorrow, and I promise I'm

going to give you a lot of my thoughts on the future, but I

want to start by giving you a story from the past about a

school of tomorrow. It was 2011 and I was Director of Student

Life at Stanford Online High School, a job that many of my

friends outside of work thought was actually a joke. After all,

I had just spent four years teaching at Harvard Westlake in

LA. I had won a teaching award from the seniors and gotten a

graduate degree from Stanford, and all of a sudden, I was

working in online learning, which, at the time was unfairly

associated with low quality and predatory institutions, and to

boot, I was running student life. No one got it. So one day,

I left work and I went to the gym, and part way through the

workout, I was doing one of those cool TRX activities.

Anyone remember the TRX very popular at the time. I got a

call from my boss asking whether I would join the virtual parent

association meeting. It was a video conference of parents from

all around the world, and I was free to join from home using one

of those video conferencing systems that was about 17

generations before zoom. So the little Palo Alto gym said that I

could just pop up and use their office. So I wiped off the

sweat, threw on a work shirt, grab my laptop, ran up into that

office, opened it up, and joined this virtual room of parents

across the world to present. And then I noticed my background. A

trainer from the gym had walked in behind me, and he was getting

undressed. Laugh. You. So this was long before we all obsessed

about our backgrounds. You couldn't blur them. You couldn't

put up a lovely wall of fancy books or nice diplomas or those

Hawaiian trees waving in the wind and turning around and

explaining video conferencing to the gentleman behind me in that

moment was just not an option. So what did I do? I picked up my

laptop, engaging those core muscles, rotated around

completely, the other way, facing backwards, and began my

presentation, which was actually about the physical education

program at Stanford Online High School. We've learned so much

and come such a long way, haven't we? So this is a talk

about some of what I've learned since that era. I've helped to

develop an online learning consortium, trained 1000s of

teachers in online learning during the pandemic, and started

a consulting practice. I've advised non profits and schools.

I've spearheaded and led a merger that will envision the

future of assessment and worked with tech companies on the

cutting edge of new technology. But this isn't a talk about the

flashiest new technology. It's about something deeper, how we

can shape a future where technology serves human

development and not the other way around. If we're going to

build the schools of tomorrow, we have to get clear on what's

worth preserving and what's worth changing. So today, I want

to offer three guiding principles I believe should

shape the schools of tomorrow, curiosity, collaboration and

ethical courage. And these aren't buzz words, they're human

capabilities that AI cannot replicate, and they will define

how our students thrive in a tech driven world. So let's

start with curiosity. First, let's get intentional about what

we should actually be teaching. Recently, a parent walked into

the office of a friend of mine, a head of the Upper School, and

asked, Why does my son even need to learn anything here? AI is

going to do it all one day. Wow. So now a word about that kind of

prediction. We have a long history of not being very good

at them. When it comes to tech, sometimes we overestimate the

impact of technology. In 1922 Thomas Edison wrote, I believe

that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our

educational system, and that in a few years, it will supplant

largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. Well, we

certainly still have textbooks, and sometimes we underestimate

the role of technology in 1998 Nobel Prize winner and New York

Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, by 2005 or so, it will

become clear that the internet's impact on the economy has been

no greater than The fax machines. So let's talk about

what we do know about what school in the age of AI could

look like, and I'm going to bring it down to the classroom

level for you, because I was an English teacher. So we know that

generative AI writes a pretty good paper, and you all know

that AI detectors do not work. So what would I do? Let's say I

was teaching the Great Gatsby, and I was teaching ninth grade,

and I wanted to assign a sort of basic paper on it, so I would

not be able to tell whether Chat, GPT or Claude or any other

tool wrote the paper. I would not panic bulk order blue books

on Amazon or wherever they still sell those things. Instead, I

would change the assignment. One way to change the assignment

would be to have higher standards. I sometimes talk

about AI as raising the floor and the ceiling in learning AI

can write a decent paper on Gatsby. So I might ask it to do

that, and then I'd have students critique that paper or write the

opposing argument, or write it from the perspective of a

character in the novel. I might have students write in class,

and then peer conference or present live. Remember how math

teachers used to always tell us to show our work? Well, I would

find all kinds of creative ways for students to show their work.

Sometimes I might tell them to use AI to write the paper

document how they used it, and maybe connect the way Chat GPT

wrote the paper to a. Particular method of literary theory,

literary theory in ninth grade with AI involved, why not raise

that bar? Or I might decide that I didn't want any AI use at all

in the assignment. And I would be explicit about that, pointing

to a graphic like this one that I had, showing that this was a

red or no AI assignment compared to others that might permit its

use, and if I suspected that students used AI when they

weren't supposed to, well, guess what? We've been dealing with

academic dishonesty, as Felix said, since the beginning of

time, and our schools are actually really good at it.

Okay? So one way a school of the future, or even honestly, a

school of the present, might use AI in the classroom would be

that. But now I want to go further. When that parent walks

in asking why school even matters. Now we have to get

clear in our answer and talk about what AI cannot do. So

first, there's empathy and the parts of our existence that are

the most human. AI will not be able to replace a nurse holding

a hand at a sick bed. It won't be that amazing relational

teacher. We need to be preparing students for those jobs just as

much as we're preparing them to use AI and more on that later.

AI is excellent at solving problems one millisecond of

predicting the next word after the next it will help us cure

diseases. I believe it will make our roads safer and much more

but how will it know what problems to solve? What we need

to be teaching our students is curiosity, the capacity to

wonder about something. Why is something the way it is? How

could we make change in the world? We need to be teaching

students that essential element of design thinking, I'm sure

familiar to many of you, understanding real problems

among our fellow humans. There's no reason that young people

can't be advancing new knowledge at younger and younger ages,

just as the calculator let younger and younger students do

more complex computation, but they have to be taught to wonder

and to want to know and do more.

When I talk to tech CEOs, it's actually not knowledge of AI

that they seek in potential hires, it's curiosity, and

schools are going to have to foster, continue fostering that

curiosity. We can't make predictions, but we can teach

children essential skills like curiosity that will serve them

well no matter what. So let's change the assignment, raise the

bar and cultivate that wonder. Second, we have to center

collaboration and use technology to enhance it, the research on

the power of relationships in learning is long and deep, but

we also have to be collaborating more as adults and collaborating

more as schools and as places we might not even call schools, but

that are developing young people. Many of you have

probably heard by now how fast micro schools and home schools

are growing. There are currently 95,000 micro schools serving 1.5

million students in the United States and 3.7 million home

schooled students. By comparison, there are 4.7

million students in private schools, including independent

schools. When I worked at Stanford online high school, we

were just starting to see a new type of homeschooler emerge. We

no longer have the image of a mom, and yes, it was usually a

mom at the kitchen table with a child teaching course content,

rather that child may now be spending the day moving between

an online course, a field trip, a lesson as part of a micro

school community and work with a parent at home. We have seen

this blurring of school type more and more traditional, brick

and mortar schools embracing online and hybrid for certain

subjects, and let's not forget that a learner is also now

someone who can find information online with how to videos

getting hundreds of millions of views. I believe that this kind

of blending the educational experience has real power for

our independent schools. A recent report from the

Enrollment Management Association found that the

number one driver for parents choosing independent schools is

access to high quality academic programs that mattered so much

in fact in the data that most families would not even choose

a. Free School if it meant compromising on quality, and

yet, no school can offer every student the perfect academic

fit. When I ran the Malone schools online network, we

helped schools expand their curricula by pooling resources

so that each school could offer advanced or niche courses like

linear algebra Arabic or the literature of James Joyce. But

beyond expanding course offerings, there's another

benefit to this kind of collaboration, giving students

meaningful academic and social experiences with peers from

other schools. I remember one student who was seen as the math

person at her school, but in an online class, she got to shine

in the humanities, effectively trying on a new identity. That

kind of cross campus collaborative learning can open

up real growth. Let's work together to give students the

best experiences academic and social in the schools of

tomorrow, let's connect our students less through social

media and more through intentional work in our schools,

to reach outside of silos. Third, we have to have ethical

courage. These wonderful futures can only happen if we take tech

ethics seriously and teach it intentionally. So I'm going to

give you two recent tech ethics scenarios and let you decide

whether they're Kosher or not. The first is a true story of a

friend during the pandemic, like so many of us, he would sit

through hours and hours and hours of zoom meetings,

occasionally sipping some water or munching on an apple. Except

he wasn't really doing that, sipping or biting apples. He had

recorded a video of himself sitting at his desk doing those

things, and he was playing it on a loop as a zoom background. So

if you think this is ethical, raise your hand. Ok, I guess I

know the answer to this one. If you think it's unethical, raise

your hand. So now what if I told you that while the meeting was

going, he sat right by his computer and listened in to the

audio. When it was a board meeting, say, and there was a

vote called, he would scurry back to his desk and he would

vote. And what was he doing? Just off camera, eating a lovely

dinner with his girlfriend. He was dining on beautiful roast

chicken, wooing the woman who would eventually become his

wife, and listening in to the board call without anyone

knowing he wasn't really on camera. So Let's vote again. If

you think this is ethical, raise your hand and still unethical. A

lot of you. Okay, okay, fascinating. All right, so what

if I told you now that only five years later, AI avatars are

doing exactly that for people, but what they're also doing is

impersonating people without their permission. In January of

2024 an employee of a major multinational corporation

transferred $25 million to scammers after deep fakes posing

as company employees on Zoom asked him to

so now we're in new territory, a harmless, but maybe slightly

questionable choice by my friend, made Maybe less

questionable by the circumstances, but now taking on

new meaning when lots of people can fake it and maybe for really

pernicious purposes, we've come a long way from having to worry

about the buff trainer in the background taking his shirt off,

but this is the world that our children are living in. So

here's another scenario for you, a friend's 10th grade daughter

recently used Chat GPT to help prepare her notes to take into

an open book Physics exam. Now I can't really ask you whether

this is ethical or not, because I would say that it depends, it

depends in part, on what the teacher's expectations have

been, is it okay to use generative AI at her school in

the science department in that physics class for that physics

test? We have got to get clear on our expectations with

students, as you can imagine, I am in favor of many types of AI

use among high school students. But just as math teachers tell

students when they can and cannot use the calculator, we

have to be in dialog with them about what is permitted, when

it's permitted and why. So now back to my friend's 10th grade

daughter. I found myself a bit uncomfortable listen. Saying to

her parents, I wondered what learning she was offloading by

calling in the Chat GPT reinforcements to prepare those

study notes. And then her mom told me the kicker, she went to

bed an hour earlier than she would have. Wow, we have a

wellness crisis among adolescents. I would trade a

little cognitive offloading for a little more sleep any day. So

how are we talking about these trade offs? If we're not, we

should be and with our students now, layer into all of this the

most troubling aspects of AI, misinformation and

disinformation, the kind of bias that makes generative AI spit

out different answers for different genders, or facial

recognition technology that can't recognize black faces, or

the melanoma spotters that don't work on dark skin. What about

the environmental impact of AI? I used to be a debate coach, and

I wish I could be in that debate room right now, sinking into

these topics with students in those formats. Our students need

to grapple with these issues while in our care, so that they

can go out to work and lead with a well honed ethical compass and

armed with ethical courage, ready to collaborate and

curious, they can solve many problems. Okay, so what does the

school of tomorrow actually look like? Years ago, someone asked

me whether one day, all schools would be online, and I said, No.

Now I get asked whether schools will all be run by AI robots, or

whether we will even need school because AI can do it all, like

that mom that walked into my friend's office. Remember her? I

believe that in the age of AI, school might look different in

ways we can't anticipate, but we will actually need it more.

That's for one main reason, school is the place where we do

the things that are the most human. And despite what many

think, I believe, we have been on a journey to make school time

more and more human through technology. In my Stanford

online high school days, it was about the flipped classroom,

letting students absorb a lecture at home, so that when

they came to class, it could be all about debate and discussion

and getting help from the teacher and relationships and

empathy, and if AI can help us with administrative tasks, so

that we can spend more time with those human things. I am all for

it. We bat around this word human a lot in this context. So

I'm going to tell you what it means to me. In my last year of

brick and mortar teaching, a student in our middle school

died. I wasn't her teacher, but I was teaching many of her close

friends, so I sat with them in her childhood bedroom the day

she died. For weeks I would sit on the floor of the middle

school hallways with those girls talking about books or their

favorite foods or their weekends. There were many

aspects of my early teaching career that I did just fine, but

that I would do differently now, like that Gatsby assignment, I

would raise the bar, and I would find efficiencies too, but I

would do that in order to spend more time sitting in hallways

with kids. I would not change that part of my job. I started

this talk with a story about my video conferencing background

and in the pandemic, one of the small silver linings was that we

had insight into the home lives of our students, we could

literally see into their homes. And now there were equity

concerns with that, with students feeling they had to

reveal more than they maybe wanted to, but it was a reminder

that the background matters when we are effective as educators,

we see our students in three dimensions. I'm sure that

everybody here has a story like mine about losing a student or

moment where we're called to support people in a profound way

with our students. We don't want to blur the backgrounds children

growing up today need caring adults like you who know them in

three dimensions, they need adults who can help them

understand the role of technology in their lives. And

that message, by the way, should be empowering. Look at this

astonishing technology we have. Guess what? It was created by a

human just like you. What are you going to go out and build.

And they need guidance in wrestling with ethical

questions. They need to learn collaboration and to see us

collaborate, to give them broad and rich experiences. They need

curiosity so they can determine which problems in the world they

want to use AI to help them solve. So. You, our tech leaders

are the ones who can make all of that happen, no pressure, not by

chasing every shiny new tool, but by asking what really

matters for kids, you can lead the charge in shaping not just

the tech of tomorrow, but the schools of tomorrow, where

empathy, wisdom and wonder guide how we use it. Thank you.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent Schools. For more information about Atlas and

Atlas membership, please visit theatlas.org if you enjoyed this

discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this

podcast with your colleagues in the independent school

community. Thank you for listening. You.