This episode is a replay of Season 4, Episode 79

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.

1. Lamplight Education
2. St. Stephen's Episcopal Day School
3. Stanford Online High School
4. Malone Schools Online Network
5. Enrollment Management Association
6. Zoom
7. Grammarly
8. ChatGPT
9. Claude

Chris, 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, Christina Lewellen,

Welcome back to Talking technology with

ATLIS. I'm Christina Lewellen, the President and CEO of the

Association of technology leaders in independent schools.

As we gear up for this year's annual conference, we're taking

a moment to revisit a few of our standout keynotes from last

year's event, these sessions sparked big ideas, challenged

our thinking, and continued to shape how technology leaders are

showing up and leading their schools. If you're joining us

this year, we'll be together from April 26 through 29 in

Columbus, and it's shaping up to be an incredible few days of

connection, insight and forward looking conversations.

Registration is filling up fast, so if you haven't secured your

spot yet, now is the time. We'll be back soon with all new

episodes, and there are some really good ones coming up that

we cannot wait to share with you. In the meantime, let's dive

into one of those powerful keynotes from last year's

conference. 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 ATLIS 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 nay sayers, the

negative Nellies, 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, and 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 jacobino. 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 ATLIS, 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 like, 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 their trajectories, sometimes they're cycles, and

sometimes they just go in a zigzag 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 DVDs. 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 questions next Wikipedia. Can you remember

what a common thing was that was said about Wikipedia? Remember

when they were saying, Well, you know, 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, they 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. 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 babysitters? If it has access to

the internet, we know students could use that to 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 I 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 ATLIS 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 next 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 ATLIS. 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 going to be a few

more guys. Bring your CFOs. They 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 educating 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 applied 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. They 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 got to 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. ATLIS team members,

board of directors, I'm going to 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 ATLIS, but what

exactly do you do? PD, is it membership? What is their role?

Make sure you reach out to them. Are there any heads of schools

here? All right, heads of schools, principals, division

heads, anybody else? That's it. Guys, drag those people to 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 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 schools 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 send 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.

Send 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 ATLIS? 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 West Lake 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, grabbed 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. 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

train. Signed 1000s of teachers in online learning during the

pandemic, and started a consulting practice. I've

advised nonprofits 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 home schooler 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

collaboration. 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.

Okay, 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 into 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 into 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. Okay, 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 had 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 listening 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 ATLIS,

produced by the Association of technology leaders in

independent schools. For more information about Atlas and

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