Navigating AI in Education with Dr. Bryan Drost

Speaker 1 (00:12.364)

Hi and welcome to the TeacherCast Educational Network. My name is Jeff Bradbury.

Thank you so much for joining us today and making TeacherCast your home for professional development. This is Digital Learning Today, a podcast for digital learning leaders and instructional coaches looking to create amazing lessons in the classroom and do it through standards-based instructions. If you're here for the first time, head on over to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you guys check out your podcasts. Hit that like and subscribe button, and we appreciate you guys making TeacherCast your home for PD. On today's episode, we're gonna be talking to an administrator from the great state of Ohio all about what he's doing.

these days, not only around artificial intelligence, professional development, but some of the things that he found interesting at our recent ASCD and ISTE conference had a chance to meet him down there in San Antonio and check out some of the great stuff that he's doing. This is an amazing episode. If you guys are going into the school district trying to figure out how do you bring artificial intelligence in, how do you set up a scope and sequence for your teachers and for your students to make sure that there is a consistent learning objective from K through

12. Today's episode of course is going to be sponsored by my brand new book Impact Standards. You can head on over to teachercast.net slash standards today. If you're going to be creating a amazing roadmap for digital integration using both the ISTE standards and your curricular standards, check out my new book today Impact Standards over at teachercast.net slash standards. My guest today is an executive director for instruction and innovation in Northeast Ohio. He's also a faculty member of many Ohio colleges. He's a published author. He's

the co-chair of the NCME Classroom Assessment Committee. And I had a chance to get to know him a lot when we were at the ISTE and ASCD conference this summer. I am so excited to bring on Dr. Brian Drost. Brian, how are you today? Welcome to TeacherCast.

Speaker 2 (01:59.096)

Thank you so much, for having me. Welcome to everybody, all of our listeners. Jeff, I'm doing fantastic today because it's a summer day in Northeast Ohio. It's about, you know, 85 degrees outside and you know what? I'm off today. So it's great. How are you?

I am doing fantastic as we're recording this here in late July. Somebody just asked me like my summer is officially starting today. Actually my extended school year has now ended for the triplets and we can just kind of do what we want to and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of getting together. We had a chance to catch up at the SDNASCD conference. Let's just start off with what was your thoughts? What was your experiences? What did you see at the conference?

Yeah. So I mean, I thought it was overall an outstanding conference, especially with ASCD and ISTE trying to merge all that. I don't know the logistics that went behind that, but I know it had to be incredible people, incredible time to get that to come together. So I thought that was super cool to see like 8,000 plus people walking through halls with 20 minute, you know, time session intervals to get from place A to place B. I thought that was super, super cool.

Of course, everybody who was attending knew that it was, you know, going to be heavily AI focused. And I think that definitely delivered. then from my own kind of perspective, kind of the instructional side, I felt that there were some spots that, you know, could have been improved upon and that there could have been some more sessions addressing that or bridging the two of them together. So that was, that was really what I experienced. San Antonio was a great city, loved walking down the riverfront there. That was super awesome. Had some great food and things like that. But how about you? What was your experience like? What did you enjoy?

I think this was my second, maybe my third San Antonio ISTE. It's always a great city, great place to be. The walk to get to the convention center is nice. I like the layout. The sessions that I had were fantastic. And I loved seeing the, you know, I don't know if this is the fair way to put it, but I love seeing the ISTE centered people put more pedagogy and things and the ASCD centered people putting more.

Speaker 1 (04:01.826)

technology education and things. I don't know if that's the right way of putting that, yet the idea, like there was a certainly a lot of, there's a mixed audience. So let's kind of change the way that we do presentations. And I thought that was great. You know, so many people, as you mentioned, are talking all about AI and how it could work, but I was more interested in seeing, okay, how do you actually start to implement this? How do you start to put the policies together? How do you start to...

train your staff? How do come up with rules? know, myself being a middle school technology integration teacher for sixth, seventh and eighth grade, I feel that it falls on me in the district to start to teach those digital citizenships, those AI skills. And whenever the district that I'm in right now is ready to move, like what are those beginning lessons? Now, as a director for instructional innovation, what exactly does that mean for you?

And how does the whole pedagogy AI thing weigh on your desk these days?

Yeah, so it is definitely been at the forefront of my desk for the last two years, if anything. And I guess I'm really interested in your point about the fact that you've got to blend the two of these. It's got to be almost a pedagogy, pedagogy first approach. And then the AI comes in because we still have to teach kids and we are training teachers. We are not training AI experts, at least not right now. And so.

When I think about that, we really have to think about that pedagogy piece. And so one of the things that you kind of hit upon there, which I think is so crucial and it ties to the research that I've done in the past is that you have to have a specific framework for what that is, essentially a scope and a sequence. What is it that you want to accomplish at every grade level for those AI components? And then what does that look like? And so what does it sound like? What does it look like? What does the teacher do? What does the student do? What are those both moves? And I think that's really the first kind of venue.

Speaker 2 (05:55.81)

that you need in order to kind of get that ready to go for people, not only for your teachers, but also for your parents and community members so that they know where you're headed so that their expectations are reasonable. And then from there, I think that's when you start to really bring in the policy because it isn't gonna be until you know what you're doing instructionally, can you figure out what your policy is going to do. You can go ahead and write a policy right now. Absolutely, encourage it.

have a base one, but know you're going to have to change it if you don't have those pedagogy things first. And it's no different than what we experienced with like calculators when calculators first came in. You know, we all of a sudden we were like, let's ban calculators or let's use calculators, whichever side of that fence you were on. It wasn't until we actually started to know what it was that we were trying to do instructionally that we could articulate those types of things. So my perspective has always been let's invert the equation. How about we start with what we're trying to accomplish educationally first?

And then we'll go ahead and start to work on some of those policies and things of that nature.

It was nice being down there around educators that didn't first say the word cheating, right? When we get back into our own districts, the atmosphere is this is cheating, this is this, this is that, because they go into that calculator mentality. And I was thinking a lot about the work that we've done in the last year, and I've had the opportunity to help out other school districts, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

What point in AI is it a policy and at what point in AI does it revert back to your acceptable use policy and is one more forward thinking and one more defensive? What's been your examples and in your experience trying to put together something in writing? think anything that has to do with cheating and let's just use that as a that's your acceptable use policy. That's thou shalt not use technology poorly or wrong.

Speaker 2 (07:49.355)

Bye!

there, but your policy really, I think needs to have a different feel to it. Your policy just can't be, you know, wag the finger. This is bad because what's your thoughts on, you know, new AI policy versus it's already been covered under acceptable use. AI is just shoved in there.

Sure. And then I think you can also add in there the idea that that probably every district has a plagiarism policy and where does it fit into that as well too? And so I think I've taken this approach that kind of meshes all those two. I'm trying to use a red, yellow, green approach, which basically says green, you're free to use AI in whatever capacity you can. And then this is where we bridge from that, keeping in mind student data privacy things. And that to me is more in your acceptable use type things.

And so the policy part is the green in my case. These are the types of situations we're going to have green usage where we can do it whatever way we need to in order to accomplish things. Then the opposite spectrum is red. We are not going to use generative AI tools in that particular situation for whatever the reason might be. It might just be that, you know what, we need kids to write an essay with their own words to make sure that that is something that they can do. I don't know. That goes back to the pedagogy goal. But then there's this middle goal area that I'm calling the yellow area where we have to be cautious.

And this is where we have AI that we're gonna use it in some capacity, but we might limit the ways we use AI in those cases. And that's where I think you start to write policy as around that yellow area of what are the good things that you want kids to do in those types of situations? And what are the areas where you wanna caution them or that you want them to limit them? And that's where I think your policy pieces start to come in. And so I think when you start to think about those general policy pieces,

Speaker 2 (09:35.884)

You've got areas like the cheating as we've talked about, but you also have areas related to what is an ethical use of AI. How should the citation look like those types of areas? I think need to be explicit. And I mean, I can tell you what ours is going to be is it's very specific is the fact that if you're using generative AI, whether you're in green, yellow or red, you're going to need to cite that you're using that. That's no different than what we would do if we were going ahead and writing a paper pre generative AI, we would cite our sources. And that to me is just good academic practice because it goes back to

pedagogy ultimately. That's kind of my thoughts. What are your thoughts on that, Jeff? Where do you see the differentials existing right now?

One of the things that I'm trying to focus on again in my district, but in general, even on teacher cast here, how do we define what AI actually is? And again, coming from this as a middle school teacher, I want my students to be able to open up Canva, open up Google slides, open up whatever that presentation tool is as an example, and use artificial intelligence to make a nice looking slide deck. Now I know that when we say AI,

We automatically go to chat GPT, co-pilot, Gemini, et cetera. And even when a school district says we're not ready for that yet, AI is not for students, I'm kind of feeling like I'm the guy waving my hand going, then I need to teach the kids how to make a nice looking slide deck. need to teach the kids how to, you know, I'm the bridge between fifth grade and ninth grade, my only job.

is to get them ready for high school. That means presentations, that means public speaking, that means making digital posters and webs, like all of those things. So where I think a lot of school districts, rightfully so, are focused on LLMs and how all of that technology can be used for good or not, I'm trying to bring it in and say, look, I want a picture that can do this. I want a slide that can do this. I want to be able to...

Speaker 1 (11:37.326)

create something using it to again, the Canva AI is a great example. Make a website that has these different things. Okay, now make it green. Now make it blue. Now make it this. And for my eighth graders last year, we did a whole unit on creating a restaurant. And then finally, at the end of the semester, that's when Canva came out with the AI stuff and the Canva AI and I said, we spent all year making this really nice looking Google site.

look at your project, describe it to me. Now stick it into Canva AI and see what that comes up with in 15 seconds. What we've done in the last four months. And that was a transformative lesson for the kids are like, I could do this. And I can do this. And we'll see because what I wanted to get them to understand is, yes, AI is there. Yes, AI is available. But the hard work that I put in over the last couple months,

that's actually a better product. How can AI assist in me having a better product through the hard work that I'm doing? So I'm trying to tackle it from the coaching point of view, from an admin point of view of everything you just said. But as the teacher, I'm going, if you wanted to make a cheeseburger with legs smiling at you because you need a graphic for a presentation, that's also artificial intelligence.

And that's no different than taking away pencils because we don't want people drawing pictures of body parts and things like that. So we can talk about the calculator. We can talk about the pencil. It's here. How do we define it? How do we create that? And you had mentioned earlier the scope and sequence. One of the first things I mentioned you because I was excited at ISTE was my book just came out Impact Standards. In there is an entire section of how do you build out a scope and sequence for curricular

but also that merges the digital learning. And that's something that I do for my class. In sixth grade, they're gonna know these 10 things. And seventh grade, they're gonna know these same 10 things, but it's gonna be 10 things plus. And then in eighth grade, it's gonna be those same 10 things plus plus plus. And how do you bridge that gap to everything? When you're looking at working with staff and staff development, what plans do you have this year or what's your thought process in helping your staff

Speaker 1 (14:02.754)

get their toes wet. I know a lot of school districts are looking at, they'll do a 10 minute demo of Magic School or it'll happen on an October PD, but that does not create appropriate technology integration skills and staff members.

No, not at all. And you kind of hit on it is the idea of you have to know where you're going. And so like you gave the example of your restaurant project and then Canva came out with the restaurant skills. So we're looking at it through the lens of we have to teach kids as well as teachers to be a collaborative partner with any of those tools, whether it's Canva, whether it's chat, GPT, whichever it is.

they still have to be the expert at the end of the day. And to get to that point, we're really starting to have conversations about what it is that we want kids to aspire to. And I'll give you one really great example going to your picture piece there. So do I want the kid to be able to manually create the picture or is it okay for them to go ahead and just insert a Canva created image? Well, that goes back to our purpose. In art class, that's a very different answer.

than if it's in, I'm in my English class trying to do an oral presentation. So that's actually where we're really starting is where do those things live? So we're starting with that piece there and we're working that into all of our courses of study, K through 12, every single content area to figure that piece out first. And then as we're doing it, we're not doing the one drop PD, we're actually modeling those things as we're going through those PD workshops to figure them out because that's where they get the insight. An example with like language arts department, okay.

We sat there and we took forever to score these essays that kids wrote. Is there perhaps a way we can use the model here, not necessarily for scoring purposes, I want the teacher to ultimately make that decision, but to go ahead and say, okay, how about the kid loads that in in some capacity that maintains student data privacy and all that, so that they can get feedback to improve their writing, why they're going through the writing process.

Speaker 2 (16:06.09)

That was a huge aha for our English teachers and that's how we started coming up with this idea of, know what, we've got to slow and steady do this so that why we're teaching kids to do it, they're actually learning. So we're kind of doing it more as like an on-demand approach in the fact that pop-up time. You need a half hour with Brian today, here, let's go and do a half hour with Brian today and figure out what are some things we can do.

to make not only our lives easier as educators, but as well as our students' lives easier. And that ultimately goes back to our mapping process and ultimately having what I call a pedagogical goal that is clear. And I guess I go back to the pandemic and some of the things that happened. Some of my best teachers struggled all of a sudden because, this is what I heard coming out of my, I have to use Padlet or I have to use Zoom or I have to use this tech tool versus how about we invert it? I need kids to review, so therefore I'm going to do this.

I need to expose kids to new topic. Therefore, I'm going to use this app. And once I think we start getting in that mentality, and that's the work that I've been doing with teachers across our state, we seem to be moving that needle forward and forward every day because then they start coming up with more creative things than I'll ever come up with.

As an instructional coach, I always look at this concept of how can I save you time? And it does seem and I'm going to generalize and I can already hear the people talking to me in the comment section. Those who stay at school until 530 and six are those who are the ones that are resistance to bringing in instructional technology to support them going home at four o'clock or 330 or 230. Right. And I had a conversation the other day with one of my English teachers and I said, you know,

I don't believe that AI should do your job for you. But if you stuck a term paper or something, whatever you want to call it, into an AI application, and if it does a first or second pass and it finds grammar and spelling and the basic stuff, that's less time that you need. So maybe we have a situation where you're the final boss, but it is going, AI, whatever.

Speaker 1 (18:11.124)

is going to be grading that rough draft or that first couple things where you don't have time to be looking at every spelling mistake and killing red pens and felt markers and stuff like that. Let the technology do what you need and you as the teacher do what you need. And she still set back and said, no, fundamentally as an English teacher, I just can't do that. And I'm like, okay, six o'clock, you're still there.

Like how do we support those teachers that are saying, I don't have time to learn this stuff yet. They're there till six o'clock.

Yeah, I think they you have to get them where they can try one little tiny gift. I think that's the key with any change. You just got to try one little thing. And I think the other part of that conversation is this is that I feel that people right now are feel that they're going to become de skilled. And I guess I'll concrete operationalize that. So I'm teaching a graduate level class right now, and it is the most fulfilling graduate level class that I teach, but it is also the class that requires me to have the most amount of work.

that I have to do. It's just a labor intensive course. And what I noticed this semester, and thank God today's the last class, we are, what I've been noticing is that I've been trying to use more of the technology to kind of support myself in that regard. But in the same regard, I felt that I was losing my mental capacity as doing with that. And so it came exactly to that point where I said, okay, I have to basically make a T chart for myself. Or what are the things that I believe that I as the instructor are the best things for me, not only

for teaching the class, but to make instructional adjustments, to, you know, find new activities for students, to help them, to make sure I understand what's going on in the class, those types of things. So I put those on one column. And then I went to the right column and I started listing all the things that ultimately do they matter if I'm the person that's actually specifically doing those things. Some of the things you mentioned, like the grammar. Does that really matter if I'm doing this? Is it a graduate program? They're in their last class of the program. Am I the guy who's going to solve that problem for them at this point in time? No.

Speaker 2 (20:14.99)

So that was one of the things I put in that column and then that was one of the ways where I was talking about that yellow green right before I made that a yellow purge. You have to create your own thinking, but guys, put that in chat GPT and have it check your grammar, have it check your tone, have it check all of those types of things first. And then that gave me the ability to feel that I was still being skilled. It didn't reduce my workload from say 10 hours a week to eight. Yes, but am I from eight to four yet? No, I'm not there yet. And that one little piece has given me the courage

to go a little step further and try something else for the next graduate class. So I got some other things that I'm gonna start to explore. And that would be the same advice I would give for that teacher is really make a list first of what do you value? If you're an English teacher, what is it that you value that you believe you contribute to the profession on? List those things. And then what are the things that are absolutely 100 % don't matter if you're the one doing them. And that's often a hard conversation for people to have with themselves.

but I've never met a teacher who says, I don't want something taken off of my plate. And I think if you phrase it from that perspective, you can have one little thing come up. That's where you get your insight to go ahead and let's try one thing with whatever that is. Chat, GPT, Canva, AI, Gemini, Notebook, whatever it is. Now we've got one. And then they're encouraged to try something else and something else. So then eventually they'll get there. Instead of being there at six o'clock at night, they'll eventually move to four o'clock or maybe even two 30 if they choose to go that entire route.

One of the things that I like to push on teach pushes the wrong word. But one of the things I like to bring up it with teachers is can it help you create a rubric and that this is how I put my toe in the water last year going into magic school going into other places and just here's the lesson. Here's what I'm looking for. Can you make the rubric because we all know students are not reading those things. You know, here's the here's the you know.

On the left side, you have what you're grading. On the right side, you have, you know, good, better, best, but the little boxes, most students are probably not deep diving into all of those. So for me, using that as a springboard for how do I learn? How do I interact with it? How do I create it? I still made the grading thing, but it created it. And then I had it create the graphic. Then I had it created in a way that I could import that same rubric into Google Classroom. And then

Speaker 1 (22:37.878)

I sort of started to morph from I was doing most of that to no, if it's going to tell me that on this project, here's the five things that I should be grading and here's what. So I started to unload a little bit of that. I'm curious of your thoughts on using AI for assessments, specifically in areas and subjects where there's more than one teacher teaching it. I'm a teacher.

I go to my AI app of choice and I say, give me a multiple choice assessment or an essay, whatever it is on said topic. But the teacher in the next room doing the same exact thing is going to have a completely different assessment. Possibly, which means their students are going to be graded on a completely different things. Possibly. How do you suggest school districts try to standardize things such as assessments when

As soon as you go the AI route, my class now has something that your class doesn't.

Sure. And so I think it comes down to what does the school district ultimately value? In my case, in 2025, I can't have four different teachers that are teaching the same course give completely different educational opportunities for kids. That's just not what we value. That's not what I value. I don't think that's what my teachers value. And so that's our first framework is we have to have that conversation. If we're all in agreement with that, or at least the majority of us are in agreement with that, now we have a different conversation. And so from that perspective,

Absolutely AI can help you, especially if you are trained in assessment literacy. And that's where I caution people because a lot of times it'll be, hey, create a multiple choice question on X topic related to this learning target, whatever, and have ChatGPT split that out. While ChatGPT is good to create the content, but it isn't necessarily an assessment writer. Now you can get ChatGPT to do that. You just have to know what to ask it specifically in terms of your prompting. So one of the things that is super important, whether you're doing

Speaker 2 (24:37.71)

you know, an open ended type question or whether you're doing a, you know, a discrete multiple choice question is you have to make sure that the question itself is going to be instructionally useful. And so here's kind of the example to illustrate that. Let's say I have a rectangle. My rectangle is three by five and I want chat GPT to create that question to find the area. So it's going to say, what is the area of the rectangle? And the choices are going to be probably like 15, cause that's the correct answer. And then it'll give me some other random numbers. The question is, do those other

distractors that exist, do they give me insight into student thinking? So if I have a kid that chooses eight, that because they're adding the size, that's something that I need to tell chat GBT where I want those choices to be instructionally useful. And that's where you have to give the chat GBT a little bit more guidance than just saying create the multiple choice. The same thing exists in terms of the rubric as well, too. It is fabulous for creating rubrics.

It is not necessarily fabulous for creating instructionally useful rubrics until you get it to the point where you start giving it all those details. And that's where I give the idea of, and I think I said this earlier, about generative AI, whatever the tool is, is a collaborative partner. The fact that I still have to be trained as an educator to be really good at the pedagogy that I need and to support my students, but then I can use that tool to speed up my time. Writing good multiple choice questions, any psychometrician will tell you is challenging. It just is.

but I can have ChatGP2 do it in a more efficient and effective way as long as I'm the one guiding the process. And that's where I kind of come into those situations every time is that let's get it to do our work more efficiently for us, but we still have to be in charge of the process because we've been trained and we know what that needs to look like for our classroom. And then going back to the original part that you said there is as well, what happens if...

People don't believe that. Well, that's an administrative conversation you really have to think about is that, it okay in 2025 if you have four teachers that are all teaching the same course that are having different expectations for students? I don't know that answer. I know what my answer is, but in the same regard, that goes back to your mapping and scope and sequence that we started this conversation with. If I have that in place, then it should be abundantly clear whether Jeff, you're teaching my class, I'm teaching the class or Susie next door is teaching the class.

Speaker 2 (26:54.882)

we should all know what that expectation looks like. So that comes from time and common conversation where I tend to see things fall apart. And I think the research would back me up on this in any school district and any classroom across the country is when we don't understand what the expectation is, I don't know how you get people there. It's the old conversation that we used to have. If you're driving somewhere and you don't know where your destination is at, how do you know if you've gotten there?

And that to me is really the thing. And that's not something that chat GPT can do for you. That's not something that Canva can do for you. That's like us actually having to have a human conversation. That's my two cents. What is your take and what do you guys value in your district, Jeff?

can't speak for my district and I won't speak for my district. I've always been, I've always been fortunate going from being a music teacher, orchestra teacher, I've always, and now that I'm doing the technology side, I've always been in a position where nobody else, excuse me, nobody else was teaching what I'm teaching. And so you kind of have that. I don't want say it doesn't matter, but it doesn't matter where I'm going with things.

because I don't have to stop for somebody else. When you're looking at all of this, one of the questions that I brought up to a couple of people during the conference was, should AI as a pedagogy, as an assessment tool, should that be thought of at the teacher level, at the building administrator level, or at the district level? Because as you mentioned, if you're gonna have every...

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 (28:27.924)

ninth grade biology teacher having the same assessment, then shouldn't that be something that's given to the teachers by the district rather than having the teacher level create that biology course so that way everybody's ahead? I'm not saying you can't put all the teachers in a room with the district curriculum leader. Like that's how you get there, right? Sure. But in order to make it, shouldn't we have everybody in the district agreeing that this is the application?

One of the questions that I've asked a few people is if your teachers are out there finding curriculum on AI, finding lessons on AI, let's just let's use that term, finding assessments, finding activities, finding what is the director of curriculum and whatever that title is, what are they actually directing if your teachers are out there going rogue on all of these various products coming up with various lessons and various ways of teaching things?

How is that top of the system communicating with the bottom when I can come up with an activity and I can run it tomorrow, I can run it next week, and central office doesn't always know exactly what's going on. So what are they actually directing?

Yeah, so that's a good question. And that comes down to the philosophy of your district. Having been a director of curriculum, some directors of curriculum, their sole function out of their superintendents or their board or whoever the power may be is that just buy them resources. And then you have other people that are in the trenches actually working with teams of teachers on exactly what you have. So in my case and wherever I've been in my career, I've always been in those rooms.

having those conversations with teachers because then it also helps me articulate what's going on, not only horizontally, but vertically up and down and then across grade levels and across content areas. I mean, I go back to this project that I did earlier on in my career and it's kind of the same idea is that there was a big push in our state. I don't know, this was maybe 10, 14, 15 years ago at this point where everybody was concerned about how we were having kids do citations like MLA, APA, that type of thing.

Speaker 2 (30:32.864)

And so I just started having the conversations with team. And then I learned really quickly like what the eighth grade team was expecting was higher than what the high school was expecting, but was lower than what the intermediate building was expecting. And I that's crazy talk. We have to get everybody in the same room, have this conversation so we know what the flow looks like. And so that to me is what the director of curriculum needs to be doing. That's my own perspective. That's what the work that I've always done to make sure that those pieces and parts are there to support people. And then in my current role,

That's where I get to blend it. So I get to bring in the technology as we're doing those things to make ourselves more efficient, more effective as we're doing that.

It's an interesting conversation here and I appreciate you being open with all of this. And know, even when I was an orchestra teacher, it was okay. If I'm sitting at the high school level, I need to make sure that my ninth graders are coming in knowing this. Same thing. There's your scope and sequence. And even right now being in the middle school area, okay, I need to know what the fourth and fifth graders are knowing so I know what the expectations of. And I've had some great conversations with our high school social studies people and our science people and

what is the middle school tech guy doing with it? Because I want to know what the expectations for projects are. And I want to know what the expectations for public speaking and what's the, you know, what, what, what are they using up there? So that way I can be that bridge and, I can be the one that's kind of setting the stage, if you will. And I love the idea of putting together, uh, you know, an orchestra, we call it the feeder program, right? Like I am the feeder program, but it's not just for technology. I'm the feeder program for

every single class that goes on in the high school. And I don't get a chance to see every single one of the middle school kids, but I see probably about 90 % of them by the time they reach three years. And how can I set up? I look at that and I go, there's my challenge. The success of the high school program is 100 % on the curriculum that I create. So that's where that's when I started to create, okay, we're going to do 10 apps, Doc Sheets, slides, the

Speaker 2 (32:13.326)

Thank

Speaker 1 (32:39.032)

But then how do you scaffold that? So that way, by the time ninth grade comes around, they are comfortable speaking out loud. They are comfortable reading off of the board. They are comfortable creating a video. They are comfortable telling them about themselves. then I think the next step, and I think this is where the district comes in, is awareness. Did you know that your ninth graders can now do these skills?

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, we have a website that has all of that and it's internal. We don't share it out to the public, but it's internal where we can tell you exactly where things are at. Because I go back. This was 10 years ago and that was like my one of my aha moments. And there were two parts of this aha moment. The first was I learned is that our third grade teachers wanted kids to do something with Google Sheets. Well,

The tech integration teacher wasn't teaching that until fifth grade. So already we had a problem there. So we had to get that conversation flipped around. But in the same regard, I remember it like this is that I wanted to ultimately plan for the apocalypse. If for example, Jeff Bradbury tomorrow, you decide to leave your district because this podcast goes beyond viral and you get the opportunity to become a millionaire doing this on a full time basis. I want the Jeff Bradbury lessons and the Jeff Bradbury curriculum immortalized so the next person who comes into your shoes knows where to pick off.

And so that's how I've always looked at it. It's planning for that apocalypse. And so I try to make sure we have documents that show all of that. And what makes that super easy is that now we have our documents for language arts, studies, math, you pick the content area. Now I can go in and throw the generative AI in here. Okay, you guys said here that you wanted to teach them how to do an annotated bibliography. Okay.

What are the components of generative AI that we can use to build that in with that so that we're teaching the generative AI pieces employing in those ISTE standards that we need to address? And our state is a little bit different in the fact that we just literally adopted the ISTE standards for usage next year in classrooms. We had our own technology standards for forever that, quite honest, sorry ODE, never really made a lot of sense. And so as a result.

Speaker 2 (34:40.525)

Now we've got to infuse those in. So we are able to do that because we've got it there. It's immortalized and we know where to pull those things in. And then I don't have to have the re-conversation 74 times about pulling the tech person and figuring out third, fifth. I know it's there. They know it's there. And what's even better, and this is where I get on my instructional soapboxes, what if you're the intervention specialist who doesn't get to go to a lot of those conversations?

because you're too busy writing IEPs and doing other, you can go right to the website and see exactly where the transition is at. You know exactly where we're taking kids. So you can write more appropriate goals for kids. What if you're a tutor? It's the same thing, it's there. And then I always like it that this way is that, know, if there's a parent who's really struggling with their kid, here, here's where we're headed. Here's the document you go figure out, or we'll help you provide you with resources to get your kid there if you don't think we're doing enough, good enough job with it.

So Brian, we've come through half of the summer. We are looking at getting ready for next school year. And I know for anybody listening to this, that's a scary thing to hear, right? From your point of view, and I know many instructional coaches, new digital learning administrators, these are the things that are on their minds right now. Could you give us the 30 second answer to what's your 30, 60, 90? How do you

Yes it is.

Speaker 1 (35:59.608)

How are you planning to enter the school year? How are you planning to get into the school year and get through that first couple of weeks where people are like, I need it, but get away from me, but I need it, but get away from me. And then getting into the, know, the really the meat of that first marking period. What do you see as the first 30, 60 days looking like with your staff?

Sure, and so I guess I did some pre-work on that as I kind of, I'll use the word survey, I don't know that it was exactly a survey. I tried to figure out where all of my teams of teachers were at at the end of last year. So we kind of built a goal for every team and then based on the team's need and where they're at in the process, that's how I'm figuring out my 30, 60, 90. So for some teams, it's we don't know anything and we just need the basics. Okay, we're gonna have a little bit more of a sit and get PD just to get the basics.

Some teams are off and running. They just need pop-in time. So I'm gonna go in and support them with pop-in time. Other people are like, hey, we've got this, just leave us alone and let us figure it out and then we'll come to you with questions. That's okay too. But in the process of all this, one of the things that I knew became super, super important was this, and it goes back to consistency. I can't necessarily have the math department doing it completely different than the language department at the high school that is different than the middle school. So the other thing that we did was over the summer we've been...

taking time to kind of share out what we think our general expectations is. So that's gonna be really the first thing that's gonna happen in September. I took all those things, I've compiled them, I've shot them to the high school principals, and they're gonna take some time in their first couple of weeks with teacher meetings and things like that to go through these to see what is common, what is uncommon, what can we agree on, what can't we agree on that ultimately will help drive our philosophy knowing that it's a working document. And that'll get us through probably.

first 30 days, the next 60 days, and now we gotta communicate that out to people. And when I mean to communicate that, we gotta do an internal communication to make sure what we come up with, we're all on the same page with. And then we gotta get it out to our stakeholders. That's our family members, our students, those parts. And then by the time we're hitting that 90 day mark, we're really fully running with it. And that's where I truly believe the innovation happens in those 90 days is where you start to see the creativity come in. And that's also the time where you have to be okay with yourself as administrator to say, you know what, look.

Speaker 2 (38:17.506)

We didn't think about this, so we need to fix it or we need to adjust it or, my God, that was the best thing we've created. How can we grow that or how can we capitalize on that a little bit more? So I believe in having an overarching map, but can I tell you exactly what it's going to look like day to day? No, because I want that flexibility based on where every team's at.

I think that's a good advice for anybody out there. Brian, if anybody is looking to reach out to you this year, get some advice, talk to you a little bit about some of these great topics. How could? How do they find you?

Yeah, absolutely. They can totally find me. They can directly email me at D as in David, R as in Romeo, O as in Octopus, S as in Sam, T as in Tom, B as in Boy, R as in Romeo at gmail.com. They can do that. They can hit me up on X at Dr. B. Drost, or you can just search me and I'll come right up in Google and you can click on any of those ways to get in contact with me.

We're going to make sure that we have all those links over on our show notes. This is of course, Digital Learning Today, episode number 73. And of course you can find everything over at teachercast.net slash podcast. If you'd like to come on the show and share how you guys are being innovative in your classrooms, we would love to have you guys headed over to teachercast.net slash contact, fill out a little form and we would love to have you guys featured on the next episode. Brian, thank you so much. It was great to see you at ISTE and I hope to see you next year in Orlando.

my pleasure. We'll defin

Speaker 1 (39:38.776)

And that wraps up this episode of Digital Learning today on behalf of Brian and 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.