Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Enhanced Student Engagement featuring David Monson from SchoolAI

Jeff Bradbury (00:03)

Welcome to the TeacherCast Educational Network, coming to you from the TeacherCast studios since 2011. Join us each week as we bring you the latest educational news, ed tech updates and hottest interviews with today's most influential leaders in education. And now for your host, Jeff Bradbury.

Speaker 2 (00:43)

Hello everybody and welcome to TeacherCast Educational Network. My name is Jeff Bradbury. Thank you so much for joining us today and making TeacherCast your home for professional development. On this episode of Digital Learning today, I'm gonna be bringing you one of my favorite interviews from the recent ISTE and ASCD conference. We had such a fantastic time down in San Antonio. 15,000 educators all came together and the floor on the vendor side was.

Absolutely amazing. If you were down there and got a chance to check it out, I'd love to hear from you guys. Head on over to teachercast.net slash contact. Find me on Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, LinkedIn, all those great places. I would love to hear from you guys and get your thoughts on the conference. Of course, it was great having an opportunity to see so many people down there making an impact. Got a chance to share my new book, Impact Standards with So Many People, did a few presentations.

got a chance to hang out with our friends at Microsoft education, at Google education, at Canva education, and so many other booths. Today's podcast is all about what had to have been one of the bigger companies that were down there, school AI. Now we've been talking about artificial intelligence all year, and of course it's going to be the big topic going into the school year. And on today's episode, I had a chance to sit down with school AI for a one-to-one intimate session.

We talked about what the product is, there are new features coming out, what we can expect for a new school year. But we also started to dive into some of those difficult subjects, things like school privacy. How do you do professional development? How do you get buy-in from teachers, staff? Yes. And community and parents. This is a fantastic episode. And I want to say thank you to our friends at School AI for setting this up and for taking about 40 minutes with me on a very busy day at the conference. It was just me and the School AI team.

It was such a great time. And you know what? I can't wait to bring it to you. So here it is. Here's my interview live from ISTE with School AI.

We're here live from the ISTE and ASCD conference with David Monson, the head of design at School AI. Dave, how are you today? What are you finding about ISTE and ASCD today?

Jeff Bradbury (02:56)

Hey Jeff, thank you for having me here. ⁓ This has been a really exciting conference. This is personally my first time here at STASD ASCD. ⁓ Really loving it. The energy is high. think I'm hearing a lot of teachers are starving for what can we do with AI in our classroom? How can it help us? A lot of people are here. They're curious. They're also sometimes nervous, but they're looking to learn. They're looking to make a difference with their students.

Speaker 2 (03:25)

We're in a weird spot right now where there's school districts that have taken that step and gone AI. There's school districts that are trying to figure this out. And I want to know what is the message that school AI has for school districts that are trying to figure out is this for them? How do you get started? We have amazing tools such as school AI that you can opt to use. You've also now got companies that have the AI built into the products they've already got. So how is school AI trying to stand out from the crowd?

Jeff Bradbury (03:56)

Yeah, well first thing I like to remind people, we are free for teachers. We're always free for teachers. ⁓ And we try to focus on making it incredibly easy to start. So any teacher anywhere can sign up. Our free account is unbelievable, tons of value. And you can choose one of our easy to do spaces, like a bell ringer or an exit ticket. You do not have to be an expert to start to use it. ⁓ And so that's my biggest recommendation is like, give it a shot, see how it goes. ⁓

and go from there, experiment. The other thing I would say is our company is founded by ⁓ a school teacher. We have many, many school teachers at our company. I myself was an educator, little bit of alternative education, design program I built, ⁓ but we at our heart try to be always in the minds of educators. We go into the classrooms, we go sit with students. My four kids, I go into their classroom all the time, so this is very, very meaningful work to me. ⁓ And so we're trying to very deeply understand

What issues do teachers have? What do they need help with? And also what issues do students have? What can we help with? ⁓ AI gives us a chance to solve some problems that were never ever ever possible to solve before. ⁓ So we think we have something really special. ⁓ Addressing things around, you know, learning, student mastery. It's very hands-on. Our tool is going to get your students ⁓ deep into more hands-on learning than anything else out there you've used before. So I like to tell people

we kind of flipped the script. In a traditional classroom setting, a single student might speak 1 % of the time, many students not at all. ⁓ When you use a space in School AI, every single student is 50 % of the conversation. So the amount of retention that comes from that type of participation is through the roof. So I just say try it, it's free, give it a shot, you're gonna have a lot of fun and yeah reach out to me and I will help ⁓ you make any adjustments, any feedback you got.

Speaker 2 (05:57)

I'm sure a lot of school districts have questions about getting into an artificial intelligence program. Safety, policy, community. How is School AI addressing some of these concerns when they come up in conversation?

Jeff Bradbury (06:11)

Yeah, absolutely, great question. So first of all, big shout out to our engineering team. ⁓ They're unbelievable ⁓ talent. We shoot for and have the highest standards around security with SOC 2 and everything. ⁓ We go hard on accessibility. ⁓ For instance, we just released an easy read mode for dyslexia, releasing a high contrast mode for visual impairments and full custom theme ability for anybody. ⁓ Yeah, when it comes to privacy, we encrypt everything. ⁓ We strip out personal.

identifying information in all of our messages. with AI, you'll see a lot of startups out there and you'll hear the term like, it's just like a chat GPT wrapper, if you will, and they're just passing everything straight through. That is not the case with us. If you were to look under the hood, you would see that on every single message sent, there's probably 30 to 40 different things that we're doing to keep things on track, keep things safe, keep things private. ⁓ We actually have a challenge, anybody that uses our ⁓

our app for the first time in a space, say, break it. Try to break it.

throw a colorful word in there, see what happens. Try to take it off topic. ⁓ And our AI is built to be endlessly supportive, ⁓ empathetic, ⁓ and if you try to take it off topic, it'll be like, hey, that's great. Now let's get back to the topic at hand. ⁓ And so I think you'll be surprised if you've tried ChatGPT, you've tried Claude, you've tried a bunch of other AI tools, they're amazing, but they have the difficulty of trying to do everything for anybody at any time, which is really, really hard. We can very much constrain ourselves

down to the jobs to be done of teachers and the classroom. And so we can add quite a bit more guardrails and really, really focus in on those niche needs of what teachers are looking for.

Speaker 2 (07:57)

Many teachers are going to be using AI products for the first time this coming school year. What is a good entry point for this? And for people who are out there training their districts on AI, what recommendations would you have for first lessons?

Jeff Bradbury (08:10)

⁓ great idea. I would say one of our like quick start spaces like a bell ringer or an exit ticket, you can't go wrong there. A little bit of prompting and you can immediately use it. You know, lot of teachers I talked to, they're already doing those types of things in their classroom. So we're trying to show up exactly how teachers already teach in their classroom. So that would be one of the easiest ways to get started. I would also say ⁓ we have a handful of things around productivity. So if you don't want to give it a shot in the classroom, you could use

our tool to build out lesson plans, build out curriculum, rubrics, you name it. ⁓ One thing I will mention, we have some big massive updates coming. We have our showcase on July 16th. We have a webinar. People can go to our website, register. ⁓ And ⁓ we are unveiling some stuff that I personally have been designing for eight months. We have been in classrooms, working hard, interviewing teachers. It's been actually unbelievable. ⁓

We have some new changes coming to how space creation works. ⁓ And I think it's actually a very direct answer to your question. one thing we've learned in AI is ⁓ what you put in is what you get out, right? Garbage in, garbage out. Put golden diamonds in, you're going to get golden diamonds out. People that are brand new to AI, they're not prompting experts. Most people are not prompting experts. So we actually have a new pattern. When you create a space, instead of just an open prompt and like a form field that you fill out, and hope I did a good job.

⁓ our new AI assistant, Dot, we haven't talked about Dot yet. Dot actually has a conversation with you. Dot pulls your intent out. Dot asks you a couple questions. Who is this for? What do you want to teach? Any standards you want to add? And then from there Dot takes your intent and actually flushes it out, majorly up prompts it into a very, very, very sophisticated ⁓ space design. So it builds out a whole agenda. It pulls up power ups in and it will actually do a lot, a lot of heavy lifting to get you to

an unbelievable prompt. You still have the ability to customize it, full transparency, you can alter whatever you want, ⁓ but we try to take you from A to amazing space in literally like 30 seconds.

Speaker 2 (10:18)

Well Dave, I want to put you on the spot here because I am not a prompt engineering expert. Let's say that I'm going to be teaching the solar system to my sixth grade students today. How would I go about creating a prompt for that? What's the first thing that I need to do? How do I put this together so I can feel like a prompt expert?

Jeff Bradbury (10:37)

Well...

it would literally be just what you said. What are you teaching? Who is it for? And then Dot is actually going to maybe ask you, there a couple activities that you want to try in here? So we have something new called Power Ups, which allows our spaces to go beyond the chat. So we're bringing in deep, rich, and engaging experiences. So for instance, we have like an image generator. We have a music generator coming in, a podcast generator, document generator. We have a chess coach. ⁓

we have actually a space explorer where you get to fly around the solar system, orbit planets, answer questions, shoot asteroids, and have a bunch of fun. So ⁓ you would have this conversation with DOT. You'd explain you're wanting your students to learn about space. It would recommend, say, hey, maybe this is a great time to use our space explorer power up. And actually, I would love to show it to you ⁓ after we're done interviewing, because it actually is just as fun as playing a video game and you're learning at the same time.

Speaker 2 (11:36)

You mentioned fun, you mentioned learning. I'm curious when you're working with school districts, you've got the teachers, you've got the administrators. Who's actually pushing for AI? Do you find it's coming from bottom up or do you find it's coming from top down?

Jeff Bradbury (11:49)

I think it's both. I would say our entry point into most districts is bottoms up. ⁓ Teachers, so many innovative teachers are out there looking for resources on their own. I mean, there's a reason you have like teachers pay teachers in all the marketplaces. ⁓ Teachers are endlessly creative. They're endlessly ⁓ innovative. And so oftentimes when we go talk to a district,

we pull up a dashboard and we say, already 50 % of your teachers are actively using this on a daily, on a weekly basis. Here's the effect it's having on your students. So ⁓ the districts are very interested, principals, superintendents, you name it. We even talk to people at the state level all around the country and country level all around the world. So we do see that interest everywhere, but I would say it really, really does start with a grassroots level interest and adoption.

Speaker 2 (12:39)

I want to talk about those dashboards. I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of teachers on these AI topics. When a teacher puts a prompt in, does the principal see that? And how does all that dashboard work?

Jeff Bradbury (12:51)

Yeah, great question. So all of that data is transparent. So a district or school could see anything they want when they're on one of our plans. We have a couple different dashboards. So one dashboard is like our usage dashboard, right? So this is seeing how many teachers, how many student sessions, what are kind of the topics, things that are being used. So you can actually make some data driven decisions as an administrator of, you know, what to go put some resources on. The other dashboard, I don't know if you've seen our mission control dashboard. So this is a space level dashboard and this is

actually the most ⁓ impressive and magic moment ⁓ when anybody tries School AI. So in a space that I just mentioned, I create my space, I launch it to my class. Each individual student will experience that in the structured, guarded way that the teacher prompted, but it's a fully personalized experience for every student. So my student, Allie, who is just ⁓ an all-star, she aces everything, she moves very, very, very fast through the agenda. ⁓

getting four out of four mastery on every single objective. The AI is actually going to push her and move quickly through it. My student, Johnny, may be struggling with objective number two, maybe objective number three. ⁓ Our AI is going to sit and work with the student. It's going to measure their attitude, their approaching mastery. Let's try explaining this in a couple different ways, get a new measurement. Great, we hit mastery, let's move on. Now, while that is happening, all of that data is fed back to the teacher on a dashboard we call Mission Control.

So I have live real-time moment by moment a look at my entire class I see class level insights group level insights and individual level insights We tried to frame this in the in the same framework as like tier one tier two tier three type You know how teacher thinks about remediation? ⁓ And beyond just learning objectives which we measure on a scale of four We're also looking at things across all of SEL So this is actually maybe some of the most meaningful work ⁓ I I've had a chance to do

in my career, we surface insights on every student, we classify them and tier them in terms of critical alerts and things like that. So when I mention I tell people, try to break our space, yeah, go put some colorful words in, guess what? Instantly it flags, hey, little Johnny just said something, something, something.

it will notify me instantly and I can actually now ⁓ know what happened and go do something about it. ⁓ Another example, my son's class ⁓ earlier this year, they had just gotten back from the summer and they did a space and it was all about what did you do over the summer? Did you learn anything? Did you do anything hard? And one of the students just immediately said, my grandpa died over the summer. I was closer to him than anybody else in my life. I'm not doing well. And then just stopped engaging. The dashboard surfaced that.

⁓ gave a specific insight so the teacher knew exactly what was happening and the teacher was able to go get the counselor, parents involved, have a conversation and actually help that student. I personally don't think that conversation would have ever happened. I don't think that student would have said anything were it not for this tool. ⁓ So it's a really really interesting world we're heading down. I think there's a lot of benefits we can bring to students as whole people, not just grades and attendance. So anyway, those are our two different dashboards. I know we kind of went on a little wild goose chase, but

That was my answer.

Speaker 2 (16:12)

Well, I'm glad

that you mentioned that because I do see a lot of opportunities for students to have those conversations about their personal lives. What happens outside of the school day? Let's say it's 10 o'clock at night and somebody decides to turn on your application. The teacher's not sitting there. What happens then?

Jeff Bradbury (16:31)

Yeah, this is a great question. ⁓ So we actually take any of those critical alerts that pass a certain threshold and we email and send those directly to the teacher outside of the platform. So ⁓ we do want to make sure that, if it is late at night or something like that, that student is always going to be able to get the help and attention that they need. Because sometimes you want some immediate attention there. ⁓ we're going to continue to go hard in that area, ⁓ be on the lookout for even new developments there on what we're going to do. ⁓

⁓ We do think that learning, you know, on the positive side, think students will want to continue learning outside of the classroom. So we're leaning hard into fun, into engagement. We hope to bring curiosity back to students. Instead of them looking at school as like this game of like, how do I somehow finagle an A on a test or a quiz or whatever? It's like, I'm not worried about a grade. This is just awesome. And here's the things I'm passionate about and I want to learn. we do want to fully support a world where students want to learn at a self-pick.

they want to explore, they want to push their curiosities and so yeah when there are those sensitive things that come up we want to be endlessly supportive and there for the students when they need it.

Speaker 2 (17:40)

Let's talk a little bit about policy. A lot of school districts are trying to create those policies. They're trying to find people to turn to for those policies. What advice do you guys have for school districts that are looking to really hammer that down? A lot of school districts are trying to figure out, we create an AI policy? Is it part of our acceptable use? Where do we rely on that? How are you supporting school districts that are looking to really put a box around this?

Jeff Bradbury (18:03)

Yeah, so we actually have some very rich like professional development programs that we do. We actually will engage with your school, your district. We are here to help you. ⁓ We realize that maybe you're like, I don't know if I want school AI doing it. Maybe you're biased. Sure, understand that. But we do have very well-intentioned teachers here. And we actually fully recommend many other AI tools out there. So ⁓ we're not just trying to be selfish. At the end of the day, we really do want the best for students. ⁓ And yeah, I think a lot of teachers

district leaders, etc. are going to be in different moments of time in their decision making. Some haven't even looked at it, some haven't tried it, some are still afraid. ⁓ And what I would say is come try it. Again, we've got that free tier. Give it a shot, try it out, address your concerns. Like I said, come break our app. Come try to see if you can get it to do things that you don't want it to do. ⁓ One of the biggest things that I do here is the theme of cheating, right? ⁓ We hear that. I fully understand that. If we don't create the right experience for students,

AI could just be used as like, yeah, I can get through school no problem. I don't have to lift a finger, I don't have to do anything. I don't have to think critically. A great example I can give around this of how we've actually tried to solve that and treat that differently is ⁓ say like for writing an essay and writing feedback. So ⁓ we actually have a Chrome extension that is being released in the next couple weeks. And ⁓ in that Chrome extension, a teacher is actually able to upload

⁓ upload their rubric, upload the full assignment. And so as a student submits ⁓ a writing assignment... ⁓

they can actually in an instant with all of their preloaded context actually generate feedback and get it to the student. They obviously always have the ability to review it quickly before putting it in, but now what's gonna be coming in the future is imagine that a student could trigger that on their own. If in their own extension they're in the middle, they just finished writing their topic paragraph, and they say, actually give me feedback on my topic paragraph. Rubric pulls up, hey, you're getting a 14 out of 21 on the topic paragraph, here's a couple recommendations.

To me, as a student, I remember turning in an essay and it's like, crossed my fingers, I hope I did okay. Two weeks later, I finally get a grade and at that point, it's too late to kind of really come back and do anything about it. ⁓ If I had that instant level feedback and the AI, again, would be framed to like, don't write the essay for the student, don't give them answers, but you can actually nudge them. So anyway, we try to think deeply about all those levels of the experience. At the end of the day, how can we push students' curiosity?

Can we give them real-time immediate feedback and then also notify the teachers to give them instant immediate feedback in the moment with what they need?

Speaker 2 (20:47)

I want

to ask you about one last question and thank you so much for your time today. Something that you picked up on earlier, training, right? There's a lot of instructional coaches that are going to be listening to this podcast. People who are now getting tasked by, learn this application, figure it out, go put it together, and you are now responsible.

kind of. Rolling this entire platform or technology out that's never been done in the history of education where one group of people is like you know the printed word has been created but you've got all these instructional coaches that are sitting here going I I'm now responsible for bringing AI what kind of resources do you have available for them? ⁓

Jeff Bradbury (21:28)

Yeah, great question. So first of all, we have an amazing team of community coaches and learning coaches. ⁓ So these are our folks distributed out in your communities, in your districts, in your states, they can come and work with you. We have a handful of different packages where we can come in and actually train, do a lot of work, help get things set up for you. ⁓ Another thing that I'll mention is we do have an online community. So when you sign up for an account on our app, you also are included with an account into our community. We have thousands and thousands

and thousands of teachers in there. ⁓ All different roles, ⁓ whether it's coaches, it's admins, you name it, and people are posting in there very actively talking about the spaces they're creating or how they're approaching their district, how they're talking to parents or running their own community trainings and things like that, getting people familiar with it. So that's another great resource. The last thing that I'll mention, actually there's two things. Two things that I'll mention. One is ⁓ we have built our app in a marketplace fashion. So all these spaces that I mentioned,

There are 200,000 plus spaces that exist on our marketplace today, built by other teachers, admins, etc. all around the country, all around the world. Those are available. You can find them, you can use them, you can piggyback off of others' work. You can also remix any one of those. If you're like, wow, what a great space exploration space. But actually, instead of fifth graders, I teach ninth graders, I need to tune it up a little bit. In about 10 seconds, you can prompt with dot, it'll adjust it, it'll make it yours. ⁓

that can use it. That last piece I was gonna mention, we have a new feature called Organize that's coming. This is a new way to create collections, store them, share them, push them out. ⁓ This one is gonna be unbelievable for coaches and people rolling out across the district. You will now have the ability to create spaces, not just across student learning, but across teacher productivity, staff productivity, any role in a school, create collections, share them out. So imagine like a top-down district collection. I could create a district

handbook chat space. Any question you want to ask about our policies that happen in the district, boom, there's a single click space. ⁓ You you could fill that up. You could make collections specific to your schools. You could go all the way as granular as like, hey, PLC groups create your own collections for the curriculum you're working on. So we're going to fill those up with some starter packs, kind of like this recommendation of like, hey, ⁓ in a district that's really killing it, here's probably a handful of things that you want to get started with. Go wild.

from there, but at least like here's your first couple steps we'll help you take for you.

Speaker 2 (24:03)

You

know, one of the things that I noticed about your website at schoolai.com is you have a tremendous amount of resources, not only for teachers and administrators, but also for coaches. So on behalf of the coaching community, thank you guys for supporting everybody out there. Dave, one last time, where do we go to learn more information about school AI and make the most of it in our schools?

Jeff Bradbury (24:20)

Yeah, great. Thank you so much again for this interview. Go to schoolai.com. ⁓ There we just launched a new website. You can actually choose your role. Again, we're trying to show it exactly the way that you speak, you think, the needs that you have. So whether you're a teacher, you're an administrator, you're a student, you're a parent, you're going to see personalized content for you. And we're going to try to get the things most important to you in your hands as quickly as we can. And again, the last shout out I would say is for July 16th.

We have our showcase, a whole new platform. When I say we're getting an upgrade, this is not an understatement. This is so much work, and it's going to be so great. So if you're used to School AI already, watch out. We got Power Apps. We got agendas. We got a whole new library of content and resources for you. But yeah, thank you again.

Speaker 2 (25:10)

You know, want to say one more time, thank you so much to everybody on the school AI team. They gave me a sneak peek of what's to come in the new version. They walked me around the booth. They showed me all the great stuff that's happening. Check out everything over at school AI calm and check out the big announcement that's happening in just a few days here. It is so much great stuff is happening over at school AI. I highly would recommend you guys checking that out this summer. You can ⁓ sign up for a free trial and have some fun with that platform.

absolutely amazing things what the guys are doing there and congratulations to all the success that they had.

at the ISDN ASCD conference. And that wraps up this episode of Digital Learning today. Don't forget to hit that like and subscribe button. You can check out all the great stuff on our website. We have recently revamped our website. is now over at the web. It's still teacher cast and still teacher cast dot net. But you can now find all of our coaching stuff over at your digital learning coach dot com. And of course, you can subscribe to this Ask the Tech Coach and our Jeff Bradbury Show podcast all in one spot. There's been a lot of changes and I hope you guys have a chance to check it out this

summertime. So on behalf of everybody here on TeacherCast, my name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.

Jeff Bradbury (26:24)

You've been listening to the TeacherCast Educational Network hosted by Jeff Bradbury. Please reach out to the show with all of your questions on Twitter at TeacherCast or online at www.teachercast.net. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review in the App Store.