Each limited to eight minutes, their suggestions ran the gamut from AI training practices to makerspaces, design principles and effective social media use. But perhaps the most common refrain — the undercurrent for all these presenters who had assessed the terrain and tried to make useful statements about the future — was being open to change.
LEAVE ‘GOOD ENOUGH’ BEHIND
Personally, Holland said, she tried to dispense with the “good enough” mentality by getting a grant to help 10 facilities bring virtual reality headsets into their classrooms. She called it “a game-changer” for those students.
“Technology is very difficult to get into juvenile justice facilities, and we at BreakFree said, ‘We are going to drive meaningful change. We need virtual reality headsets, because they can do science experiments, they can take field trips, they can get on the Magic School Bus like Ms. Frizzle and really get outside their confined facility,’” she said.
AI USE CASES
According to its Head of Research and Innovation Jody Britten, the digital equity-focused nonprofit Team4Tech is listening to the needs and implementation stories of educators and creating a community of global ed-tech developers to build effective tools, such as an offline large language model that runs on a Raspberry Pi (minicomputer). She said they’re also developing AI training programs, prompt-writing guides, rubrics to help educators, and systems that prioritize data privacy and intellectual property.
Among the many free tools and training resources curated by Team4Tech were a tool called LUDIA for coaching, CoGrader and Benetech for collaborative problem-solving, RAG models and Searchie.io for building training libraries, and tools called Trackosaurus and EIDU for student support.
“Some of it is scary, some of it is exciting, but what we’re seeing overall is that when those tools really have an opportunity for global impact, they have what we’re referring to as the DNA of AI in education,” Britten said. “When these elements are present, when they’re connected, and when they’re visible in the AI products that we’re deploying globally, we see some great things happen.”
TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE MAKERSPACES
Scott Sieke, head of curriculum design for a science education program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, shared tricks he’s learned to foster effective group work in makerspaces. He named three core people problems that tend to arise in those situations: learners who work independently, those who struggle with ideation or coming up with ideas, and those who feel like they don’t belong. Therefore, he said, a successful makerspace lesson requires that everyone feel welcome and know what’s going on.
Sieke singled out four design principles for group work: universal design so it’s welcoming and approachable, empathetic design so it centers what skills the educator is trying to get across, having ideation as a goal, and being practical and flexible for students. Specifically, he recommended starting with an introduction to let students know there will be group work later, then explaining what it means to be a maker in a makerspace, then moving into circuits and hand tools, then a design session, and finally, group work in the afternoon in which students design something for a specific kind of client.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO FLIP THE SCRIPT
Shokry Eldaly, a faculty member at the Bank Street College of Education in New York, framed AI as a technology tool that could emancipate old-fashioned models of education from outdated thinking. He recommended using AI to obtain bespoke suggestions for personal questions, engaging in design thinking challenges, and most of all, to help create a system in which students get instructional materials outside of class and do most of their cognitive work during class, instead of the other way around. He said implementing this idea will require access to technology; policies that set aside time, training and support for teachers to do it well; and a shift in values to diminish people’s natural fear of change.
THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Claudine James, an award-winning English teacher from Malvern Middle School in Arkansas, has become something of a social media sensation since launching a TikTok account in 2020. She said she launched her career focusing on project-based learning before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the realities of remote learning, and the subsequent shift in student expectations, led her to explore other avenues of reaching students who weren't watching her educational videos. Within six weeks of her launch on TikTok, she had 100,000 followers.
“One of the things I learned through this whole experience is, as educators, we have to be ready to modify and adjust. On my new platform — and I call that my classroom without walls — out of my 5.7 million followers, 1.2 million of those followers are from the Philippines,” she said. “As educators, we have a huge platform, and I encourage you to be ready to modify and adjust, no matter what comes your way. Am I telling you to become social media creators and content creators? No. But what I am telling you to do is not to let circumstances that seem bleak dictate to you what you need to do in order to be successful in your classroom.”
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Jason Trinh, coordinator of STEM and IT competencies for the Toronto District School Board, said he partnered with Minecraft Education, an educational iteration of a popular video game, so his students could virtually explore the history of Toronto. He said they learned about past and present land uses, and considered how they might reimagine former school sites to serve human and animal communities now and into the future.
“The power of this project was not that we used Minecraft in this cool way,” he said. “The power of this project was that students, especially non-Indigenous students, engaged with Indigenous teachings, learning with the land, and were able to communicate their thinking.”
REIMAGINING SEAT TIME
Echoing proponents of competency-based education and the movement to throw out the old one-size-fits-all approach to public school, Sharon Matthews, instructional coordinator at the Northeastern Regional Information Center in New York, said modern education needs to be reimagined from the ground up. She derided what she called the “sit-and-get” model of education as dated and in need of a reboot. She mentioned infusing AI into lectures, discussions, activities and even the grading process. Perhaps most fervently, she emphasized the importance of teacher preparation as the beginning of a cascading effect: Well-prepared teachers create well-prepared students who can lead their eventual employers and society into the future.
RESPOND TO CHANGE, RATHER THAN REACT
Carly Ghantous, an educator and a representative of the ed-tech nonprofit Learn21, likened the necessary evolution of education to a dancer adjusting her rhythm and moves to the music. She boiled it down to what she called the “PIVOT method”: pause, invite, values, options, tweak.
“If we take a little bit of time to pause, to feel the music, invite others in to experience that ensemble collaboration, focus on our core values, jazz up our teaching with the options that we have available to us, and remember to always participate in that iterative process of tweaking and refining, I think we’ll be able to approach change in a healthy and positive way,” she said.
