Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Inspire AI, the podcast where we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping our world. I'm your host, jason McGinty. In today's episode of Inspire AI, we're diving into one of the most important frontiers of AI education Teachers today face mounting pressures lesson planning, data tracking, compliance and, above all, meeting the unique needs of every student. At the same time, school leaders are searching for ways to raise achievement, close gaps and ease the burden on their staff. That's where Teach comes in. Their mission is to integrate AI into classrooms and leadership practices in a way that reduces educator stress and boosts student performance, all while keeping humanity at the center of the work. Today, I'm joined by Keri Wright, founder of Teach, to talk about their journey, how they're helping districts and teachers adopt AI responsibly, and what the future of AI and education might look like. So if you're an educator, school leader or simply looking to be informed about how AI is transforming education, this conversation is for you. So let's jump in. Kerry, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 1:21

Thank you, Jason. All of those words were so inspirational. Man, I'm just getting goosebumps. That was fabulous. Hey, you're doing the work.

Speaker 1: 1:28

I'm just here to preach.

Speaker 2: 1:30

You're doing a great job, man. I love your show. I love all the guests you have on it. The organization you're a part of is so innovative. I'm happy to be a part of it and honored to be with you today.

Speaker 1: 1:40

Okay, awesome. Well then, why don't you start by telling our audience a little bit about yourself, your background and what does bring you to the show today?

Speaker 2: 1:49

Yeah, rock and roll. I am a founder of our organization. It is called TEACH and that's an acronym. It stands for Transforming Education Through AI, connections and Humanity. My other partner is Tyler Hunt, and we both currently work for Martinsville City Public Schools. We are longtime Virginia educators. This is my 30th year in the game. This is not a video episode, but my white hair is shining this evening. Tyler has been in a public education setting for a long time. As well as an elementary teacher, a middle school teacher, I taught high school English for years. Now we are both in central office positions, and so we know what Virginia educators are going through.

Speaker 2: 2:33

And we went to a conference in summer of 2023 when Chad GPT was just getting its legs underneath it, and we said you know what we're at this conference and we have to figure out this technology for education, and so we skipped the entire second day of classes. Sorry, whoever paid for that, I'm sorry, but you know we have brought some innovative practices back to Martinsville, and so back then, we were using Claude, because Claude AI is still one of the major players in the game. It had a paperclip on it. It allowed us to upload our own local, safe data, and so we saw from that day the power that could have, and on our drive home we said we have to start some way to get this message out to K-12 educators as far and wide as we can, because it's a totally transformative time. The last time, jason, I think that our public education system in the United States got such an overhaul was the Industrial Revolution, when so much I'm serious, man, I'm serious when the foundations were laid for it's not far off from the truth.

Speaker 2: 3:39

That's what we still have and this technology has the power to do and I don't know if you've ever watched the movie or read the book Ready Player One. It's really pretty cool, and so I think we're getting to that kind of place and we're here to keep the humans in the classroom. Both Tyler and I taught through COVID. We know how good and essential it is to have a human being in the classroom. We're not here to be all virtual and robots and everything else. This is going to be humans involved, guiding it, and we want to show teachers, just like you said in the introduction, how we can reduce their stress and improve student performance at the same time.

Speaker 1: 4:19

Yeah, all right. Well then, let's double click on that, kerry. What precise problem in education did you see that made you believe AI could be part of the solution?

Speaker 2: 4:29

The very first one that we were faced with was? It was? It was summertime and a very common task for principals and division leaders during a summertime is to come up with their plans for the next year. Plans for the next year Take all of the data that you've amassed over the past year. How did you land on state and federal indices and what are you going to do next year? That's a little bit different. That can be a very laborious process, time consuming, getting input from everybody, having to do data analysis, and we were able to take safe local downloads from our state SOL reports.

Speaker 2: 5:05

Take the template of the school improvement plans that we have to write, and we were done within 20 minutes and this is normally a process that takes weeks. So when we saw that, we said now let's really plug this into what we know is a major issue in the lives of teachers. One of those, jason is writing honest to goodness lesson plans. Lives of teachers One of those Jason is writing honest to goodness lesson plans. Now, in the state of Virginia, grades kindergarten through five have had to adopt a reading curriculum. Now, those lots of times curricula are written for Texas or California or Florida. They may say that they are adapted to our brand new Virginia standards. And, by the way, jason, the brand new English Virginia standards do have AI baked into them and we can talk about that at some point. But it's already saying that students in their research process must use artificial intelligence in their research process. It's in the standards, oh my.

Speaker 1: 5:58

And so what? What age group was that for?

Speaker 2: 6:00

That's for middle school and up.

Speaker 1: 6:02

Okay.

Speaker 2: 6:03

Middle school and up no that's smart.

Speaker 1: 6:05

It was our governor who pitched that.

Speaker 2: 6:08

Jason, I have a lot of respect for our governor and he's he's a very action oriented kind of innovative guy. But this was created by VDOE. A bunch of educators, including myself I got to sit around those round tables and help with my role in Martinsville, help to draft those standards, and so this was done by teachers. Oh, okay great From the ground up.

Speaker 1: 6:30

That's the way it should be.

Speaker 2: 6:31

Yeah, the way that process works is VDOE does this for every seven years for each different curricular area and says teachers, give us all of your input and they sit there and draft the best they can. Then it goes through a couple other steps of academic experts and everything else. So AI is in those standards. And so now when you take a normal classroom and, jason, if there are educators I know there are educators listening to this If they look out at their classroom and they see I have a class of 25 kids. Four of them have sped accommodations that can be serious. Three of them don't speak English like they should, Five of them are reading a grade level or two below and five of them are gifted and maybe one has a brain injury.

Speaker 2: 7:14

Okay, so take that curriculum that was written for someone in California that has maybe the state of Virginia standards glued onto it, and how are you going to truly differentiate that lesson offer? All of the scaffolds that need to be done. Jason, when I was a classroom teacher, honest to goodness, when I was in another district not even going to say it I would have to do my lesson plans and when it came to that line that said differentiation, every day I would go copy and paste, copy paste, copy paste, because I didn't have time to do all of that for that kind of a class. And, jason, let's say that I'm a middle school or high school teacher and have four of those classes, each with different parameters inside of each one of them. That's a perfect kind of a mashup for this technology to take your standards, your expectations, your building principal has some template. He wants the lesson plans done by and all of these learners out there in front of you. How are you really going to make sure that lesson is going to hit for each one of them?

Speaker 1: 8:12

100%. No, that's really great, I think, even if you're not an educator, that resonates because everyone wants some specific support for their child or loved one, exactly yeah. So tell me a little bit about the mission. It, of course, emphasizes both connections and humanity. So how do you keep AI human-centered in your approach?

Speaker 2: 8:38

Yeah, 100%. What we found in so many of our presentations is that it's the folks who are kind of like me, who have been in education the longest, who get the biggest benefit from this technology. And a lot of people would think, oh no, it's the hot young teachers who just came out of college and they know TikTok and everything else, but they don't know education, they don't know kids. And so when we have a seasoned educator who comes to us kind of angry at the beginning of the sessions, they're like I don't know kids. And so when we have a seasoned educator who comes to us kind of angry at the beginning of the sessions, they're like I don't want this, I hate it, it's cheating, I don't even want it. And when we can show them how it can give them a lesson plan exactly designed, and they make a couple of tweaks to say that's not going to work for my kids, that will. Oh wow, that's really good. So that's where the teacher is the driver. The building principal knows her statistics that she has to hit. She knows her building Central office leaders know their division.

Speaker 2: 9:38

It's never a copy and paste situation. I tell folks all the time if I'm in central office and a teacher sends me a question and I just go, hey, ChatGPT, what's the answer? And I go copy and paste that teacher's going to know it. And they're going to say why do I need to email Kerry, I'm not going to ask him any more questions. The same is true when a student asks a teacher a question. If a teacher goes, oh, here's the answer and I just got it off, chat, the kid's going to know. So we have to customize the first draft Now. The first draft may have 70, 80% done correctly and we have to tweak and refine the rest. But it's up to the human at the end, before the rubber hits the road, to truly implement it wisely.

Speaker 1: 10:20

Human feedback. Yeah, so you have two main delivery models one for district partnerships and one for direct-to-teacher coaching. How do you decide which model is best fit for a school or district?

Speaker 2: 10:36

We are long-term public educators. Jason, I'm speaking to you who is well-versed in the ways of business and capitalism and everything else, and we're trying to figure out how this is going to work. Our most familiar model is to do professional development sessions and so a lot of times we'll go to a conference and we'll put our processes on display for decision makers and then we'll try to follow up with them to book some three-hour sessions in their division. We'll try to follow up with them to book some three hour sessions in their division. That relies on an innovative decision maker to bring that back to a district. And you can imagine, jason, just like there are so many people in your regular daily life who are all over the place with AI and their emotions. And, jason, down here in Southern Virginia, I'm telling you there have to be some pastors in the pulpits who are saying it's the devil, I mean it's that kind of way all over the state. So we found that we can be very successful with some of our projects we've done with different divisions from the West to the East in the Commonwealth. But it's a shame when an educator does not get the benefit of our processes if that innovative leader does not bring us in.

Speaker 2: 11:46

And so we are just in the early stages of opening up AI coaching directly to teachers, where we're going to build a community, and this is something my co-founder, tyler, has been big on from the beginning. How do we form a community of educators who are willing to study AI, adopt it, try it? And we're going to be rolling out some things here very shortly. We're going to be doing a big event at the end of September. That's going to be a free three-hour session for educators and after that they're going to be invited into this community and we're going to be doing a session like that every nine weeks to show how that nine weeks of the school year is special. And then they're going to be doing a session like that every nine weeks to show how that nine weeks of the school year is special, and then they're going to be invited to join this community of an ongoing group of professional educators to really try this stuff out.

Speaker 1: 12:34

So okay, yeah, I was going to ask you how are you planning to roll that out? Sounds like you're going to do it incrementally introduce it to some, let the word spread how amazing it is, and continue that cycle every nine weeks or so. How are you going to measure your success?

Speaker 2: 12:53

One of our favorite ways is I don't know it's like on Amazon.

Speaker 2: 12:57

They'll say did you like this product? One through five stars. And there's so many different ways to collect data. Just the other week, jason, I was listening to a podcast where this company is deploying robots, and they're humanoid robots. The biggest goal of those robots in an industrial setting was to go collect data. Just go find data in any part of the factory, the process whatever. Go see what's there and collect it so we can have it to analyze. We are very big on surveys, both qualitative and quantitative, so we're going to stay in touch with those educators. Something else, jason, is at the very beginning we were worried about whether or not our sessions were going to be good. Would they like us? Would they understand it? But what we found is every single session we do is transformational with these educators, and so now we're just trying to leverage that information, the benefit to them, and build this community so they get the benefit as we learn.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Right, okay, makes perfect sense. So what are the most common ways teachers are using AI right now in lesson planning, differentiation or assessment?

Speaker 2: 14:12

Great question. They're all over the place. There are some teachers who still love their file cabinet and they say I even hate Google Classroom or Canvas I don't even want to adopt those things and so we get that. So it's all over the place. There are educators who can just refine one lesson. Our favorite way to do it and we haven't heard anyone else talk about this before, jason, it's kind of surprising, it still hasn't gotten out there is that we are a large language model platform agnostic company. We're going to show teachers how to use a large language model themselves, like Claude, like Grok, like ChatGPT. There's other wrapper programs like Magic School, ai and these other things that have ChatGPT at their core and a lot of folks don't know that, and so they may have done the prompting a little bit for them and you could click on a button and just get a lesson plan. Our favorite way to do it is to show educators for each class. They have build a thread in ChatGPT, and when we say thread, we mean one of those conversations that lines up on that left-hand side of your screen and we're going to right-click on it and with those three dots, we're going to rename it and we might say marketing, third block, then what you do is you plug in the class demographics for that class. I'm never going to put student names in there, I'm never going to put student identifiable information in there. And then I say here's my class, help me map out my year. And so I get my curriculum set. Then I start to get data from assessments and I don't care whether they are small or big.

Speaker 2: 15:53

In the education world, jason, they're called formative and summative. So formative assessments we're building, we're getting ideas on how the students are doing, kind of building up to summative assessments like a unit test, a semester exam, an SOL test. And so if I get it to build a lesson plan, like we were just talking about a minute ago, then whatever assessment data I got from that day, I plug that back in and I say here's how the kids did today, what do you think we should do tomorrow? And adapt it. What do we need to do next week? And so when you can build that thread over time, specific to that class, specific to your curriculum, specific to your state standards, and you get their formative assessments in there, we've seen that do amazing things with student performance numbers. So that's our favorite way that we try to get educators to use it.

Speaker 1: 16:44

So that's our favorite way that we try to get educators to use it. Okay, yeah, you. You mentioned having scraped the data before you put it in, so you don't have any personally identifiable information. So I guess that that addresses the safety question. What about bias and compliance while working with these large language models? How do you, how do you address that Great question?

Speaker 2: 17:06

Um, and we always say that we're not going to put student information in there. And when we talk to the educators and we talk about how a lot of these large language models were built, we'll say you know what? So many of them are built on everything that has been written on the Internet or published populations who have not published anything or put anything on the internet, and we give them a minute to think. We say that's not in there, and so right from the jump, we know that these results are going to be biased.

Speaker 2: 17:43

Now, sure, these AI models are only the worst that we're ever going to see them. They're only going to continue to get better. I mean when Sam Altman says they're only going to continue to get better. I mean when Sam Altman says, hey, it's free for spring 2025 for all the college kids in America. He's just gathering all of that data, so it's going to become more and more refined. But we tell educators there is an inherent bias in the way that these were trained and so you're going to have to watch the outputs to ensure that it's going to be safe for your students to use.

Speaker 1: 18:12

Watch the outputs to ensure that it's going to be safe for your students to use. Okay, any particular compliance concerns there as far as like things that are coming out or haven't quite caught up to the?

Speaker 2: 18:22

technology. Well, I do know in several of these platforms there are some CEOs and boards of these platforms that are more willing to keep things a secret, and some of them are more willing to say, no, we have safety guardrails put in place. And so, for example, a platform like Magic School, ai is really fantastic for student use and they have a lot of safety measures put in place. And so when I got the chance to do your AI ready RVA session this past summer, magic School was one of the presenters there and that's fantastic. They're great for student use.

Speaker 2: 19:02

But then it's just watching the fine print. I mean, a lot of times on even a chat GPT account, it'll say the user is 18, right Question mark. I'm not going to put a middle school on there, and so many times people gloss over just some basic things like that, and so we as educators have to watch the ethics of it. We have to find out how that data is being collected and used on the backend. There's lots of settings in chat GPT where you can say turn off my data, to where you're not training your models on what I'm saying, but it takes that kind of knowledge to go to the settings wheel and go to this page and that page and toggle that off, and so it's those kind of things that we're trying to battle test for educators to ensure that it's safe.

Speaker 2: 20:07

Yeah, that sounds good, all right. Well, how about share with our educator? Has put in a full day's work with second graders. Are you kidding me, jason? When I was a sub, I could sub down to third grade and it was like logical and I could deal with student attitudes. But when it gets down to like K1 and 2, it's like attitudes plus the physical labor of wiping noses and picking up kids and tying shoes. Anyhow, she rolled into this. I'm serious, jason. That's the nature of the game Sounds exhausting.

Speaker 2: 20:36

It is.

Speaker 1: 20:37

Bless all the teachers out there.

Speaker 2: 20:39

Agree, I don't know how those K-1-2 teachers do it I really don't and teach a kid to read and do math? I mean there's, I totally believe them. They're incredible people, highly underpaid, completely. It's tragic. So she comes in as a career veteran. She's got the little white hair going on like I do and she sits down at our session and she bangs her big cup of coffee down on the table and I said are you okay? She's like yeah. I said I bet you're getting ready to drink that coffee at four o'clock in the afternoon. This is like a Starbucks venti huge thing. She's like, yeah, as soon as I get done with this stupid session. I got to go home and do lesson plans. I said, oh my gosh, what subject? She said math. I hate math. I'm on a new team. I'm used to teaching first grade. I got to teach second grade. I hate math.

Speaker 2: 21:26

They're asking me to do the math plans and so I show her the process, exactly how we do things, and she just looks up. I mean she just has tears in her eyes, honestly. She says thank you so much, carrie. And she says but how do I put this into a PowerPoint? All these other teachers want a PowerPoint they can show the class tomorrow. I said put it into a set of PowerPoint slides for me. She did that and she did cry and she got up, she took that cup of coffee, dumped it out in the water fountain. I said what are you doing?

Speaker 2: 21:55

She said I'm going home and have a glass of wine because her work was done and so she's going to go home, have a beautiful evening and come into class the next day fully rested to handle all of those human issues. It's amazing to me, jason, when I'm in central office I get the chance to drive around to our different buildings and help out teachers, that kind of thing. I'm not in a classroom and as I'm driving across town I see a guy who has this big yard to cut. He has a lawnmower and a weed eater. All he has to do is make sure he has gas in the mower and that his engine is working and everything else. A classroom teacher looks out at the different 30 different universes of experiences in front of her and has to manage all of those human connections Other than teaching. It's hard for me, jason, to imagine another profession where there are so many various human interactions throughout the day. So that's my favorite story First coffee to wine.

Speaker 2: 22:53

That's the first one.

Speaker 2: 22:54

The next one is we've helped a couple of building principles capture data from their classroom observations and we'll use some audio capture tools, whether it's a Microsoft word document that's cloud-based and I just clicked the microphone or a program like Otter where it has some AI wrapped into it, but they'll go in.

Speaker 2: 23:14

They'll capture a little bit of audio and they will then go back to that teacher's SMART goal. They'll go back to what they've already worked on with a building coach on helping that teacher out, and the data that comes out and the analysis that comes out is not subjective. So many times a building principal having to go you know, supervise another adult is risking a subjective comment of I don't like what you're wearing this day or I hate you because I don't like you as a person. But how do I capture the data of that lesson? And so when we can capture the actual data from the class, plus the lesson plan, plus whatever the performance results were at the end, that has been mind blowing for our building leaders and they can send those emails out immediately as opposed to having to go back and try to analyze data, figure this out, send an email like next week. This is hot and fresh feedback to make the teaching better. So there's two of our favorite stories Amazing.

Speaker 1: 24:15

Yeah, there's still some manual labor and sending emails and such. Do you have any vision in setting it up so that they're workflow based for these teachers?

Speaker 2: 24:27

Oh, definitely the next thing on the horizon that I know about because I listened to your podcast. The next thing on the horizon that I know about because I listen to your podcast is the use of agentic AI and when we can set up agents, and this is something that is blowing the mind of even the major data collectors of school systems. So many school systems tie into a company like PowerSchool, where they will do all of the attendance, all of the discipline, all of the grades, where they will do all of the attendance, all of the discipline, all of the grades, and all I'm sitting there thinking is data. Please, Can I just have a daily download of all of that data? Plug it in so a lot of times. Jason, I won't go to a school building as a central office person until the next week. Can I please have a daily download of that data and then I just hit, analyze all of the data for me and present that report to me? Can I have emails sent to parents whenever certain triggers are hit with attendance, discipline, grades, even just send the emails to the building administrator to go and check in?

Speaker 2: 25:30

So the next era is going to be not only do we understand cute little wrapped tools. Not only do we understand large language models, but how do we set up agents? I read a great article this past spring that said this past spring, 2025, was the last spring that administrators in any business would be managing just employees. From here on out, it's which agents do you have operating in the background, plus the human involvement? And so agentic AI is the next wave of what's coming, and so that's going to school divisions. Right now, Jason are most of the time organized underneath either a Google district or a Microsoft district, and so when Gemini can reach across all of your different Google suite of products, Copilot can reach across all of the Microsoft suite, when it can integrate all of the data, documents, presentations like that, and we tap in some wise use of agents, that's going to be what's next.

Speaker 1: 26:28

And where do you see Teach supporting that mission?

Speaker 2: 26:32

going to be? What's next and where do you see Teach supporting that mission? Thank you so much, jason, for asking. Here we are, we know how to do this stuff and we will stay in touch with the most recent headlines. Even by the time we get off of this podcast, jason, this interview, tyler will have sent me three different texts and he'll say, oh my God, chatgpt just came out with this.

Speaker 2: 26:53

Oh my God, claw just released this. It's changing every day. Oh my God, our federal government just released a brand new program called AIgov, and the president you know love him or hate him he wants our country to be at the forefront of artificial intelligence and education. When our country is that way, we are ready to take any of those funding opportunities, and the only reason, jason, we need money is to put gas in the tank to get to the next division. We're going to try to make a little bit to spread this message, but we are serious believers in the United States of America, in our public education system and in our people, and so, when we can just help guide you with a couple of basic instructional steps to use this technology, we're here to be the leading edge of that transformational time.

Speaker 1: 27:43

Yeah, yeah, that leads to a good question. So what role does policy and funding play accelerating or slowing down the AI adoption in schools play? Accelerating or slowing down the AI adoption in?

Speaker 2: 27:53

schools. I think it's probably a age-old question of how does government funding assist public education. As long as we've had public education in this kind of a format and there's been some dollars available to be spent, they're going to try to do their best. A lot of times there are a couple of steps actually behind of where things really are. But hey, we've been out here on the front lines trying to persuade school division leaders to pull from this pot of money and that pot of money and something else. If, all of a sudden, the feds and the states loosen up some of these and directly tie this to it, it's like gas on the fire. We're ready to go, we have the solutions, there's the money. Plug and play, let's make it happen Nice.

Speaker 1: 28:42

You've mentioned this and platform agnostic and working directly with large language models. Why take that approach versus locking into a single platform and maybe like creating expertise around it?

Speaker 2: 28:55

Great question. Right now, we're really kind of, like you said earlier, double clicking on ChatGPT. If someone has a $20 a month subscription to that platform, we can do so much. That's where we've really figured it out. Also, like I've alluded to in the beginning, we first started off on Claude just because it had some features that allowed us to upload student data. I'm also going to be very transparent. We like to use AI in our regular lives and we may or may not like watching PGA events that are data rich events, and we may or may not like to wager a little bit of money on how the top 10 list is going to look from week to week. If we can feed all of that data in there and then we can test these different platforms and see which one does a better job with data analysis, we're going to then lean in on that model. So there's lots of these use cases that educators need. We know what they are, but that's also one of the reasons why we want educators to also use AI in their personal lives.

Speaker 2: 30:04

Take a picture of the refrigerator on ChatGPT on your phone and say what do I have left this week at the end of the month as a public school educator to make a recipe with this. You know, my dishwasher just broke. I take off the toe plate and snap a picture. What are the parts? Here? They are on Amazon. Here's your links. Here's a picture of my raised bed garden. It's fall in Virginia. What should I think about planting when we can tie in those tools of video capture on your phone, when you can have the conversational model?

Speaker 2: 30:47

Right now, Jason, I drive to work for 30 minutes and a lot of times I'll pull up ChatGPT on my phone and have, but I get to work and I have my documents all ready to go. Everything's laid out. So there's a lot moving on in moving pieces in different platforms. We're going to test them out. We know what educators need. We don't want to totally commit to one place, some Chrome extension or something else. We want to try them all out and find that stack that is truly going to be beneficial for K-12.

Speaker 1: 31:14

All right, okay, so I don't mind you talking to your chatbot honestly, as long as you don't build an inappropriate relationship with it. You can even call it, you know, by a nickname, for all I care All right so. Kerry, I think we want to know, since you are so forward thinking with these technologies, what do you think classrooms will look like in the next five years with AI?

Speaker 2: 31:38

Sure, great question Next five years? I'm going to even talk about the seniors who graduated last year, spring of 2025, high school seniors. High school seniors a lot of them went off to colleges and when you and I were in school, jason, we might get that textbook list. Oh my God, I got to go to the bookstore and spend these thousands of dollars on these stupid books. Now they're not stupid, I'm sure they're great. But now they're rolling into places like UNC and the professor is saying it's a requirement to have a $20 subscription to ChatGPT.

Speaker 2: 32:14

Imagine coming from a high school or a division where it was banned and you thought it was horrible, and now it's required, and it's required in your academic workflows. So in academics, it is 100% there now In the workplace. You know this perhaps better than I do, and the guests that you've had on your podcast have said that AI is already in so many workplaces out there. Oh my gosh. There was an amazing one you did on healthcare. I mean, there are workflows in every industry that are incorporating AI right now, and so students have to be ready for that. Even if there's a teacher who loves that file cabinet and doesn't want to adopt it for her own self. You owe it to the students to get them ready for what's coming.

Speaker 2: 33:02

And then so, jason, I'm from Southern Virginia. A lot of our guys and gals down here drive really big trucks and they're kind of expensive. Drive really big trucks and they're kind of expensive. And when I'm watching Elon again, love him or hate him, when Elon Musk is rolling off the line humanoid robots that are going to be cheaper than those trucks, if I can't even understand AI, how am I going to understand how to interact with that robot in my workplace? And so most of the time, what we're trying to do now, in an ideal state in the next five years, is to get robotics in as much as we can. The state of Virginia has a kind of funky way to get their computer science standards in. They just said, hey, please, everybody integrate them and please, hopefully, use them. And so we're trying to use AI in a normal workflow for as many different tasks that are academic as we can, making it real world and having the students use that as a part of their process.

Speaker 2: 34:04

And sorry, just another sidebar here, jason, as an English teacher for the past, god knows how many years English standards have been ignored when it comes to oral and listening comprehension, because it's not on a state test. We know that the kids got to do reading because they got a state test. We know they got to do writing because there's a state test every now and then Forget those listening and speaking things. But, jason, think of how much now is powered by good speaking. Think of how much now is powered by good speaking. If I don't have a brain that's firing fast enough to do some audio controls of my chat GPT bot on the way to work, whatever it is, I'm never going to be able to interact in a workplace, not only with my fellow colleagues, who are humans, but also these robots. So there's a lot going on and we got to get it done as fast as we can because it's here now.

Speaker 1: 34:55

Okay, you mentioned robotics. I'm curious what is one most interesting or primary example of a use case with robotics in education?

Speaker 2: 35:04

I don't know right now, jason, okay, no, it's a great question, but, like right now, in robotics a division like Martinsville is considered very forward thinking compared to the other divisions around them. When they'll offer a Lego challenge? When they'll do the, the robot challenge at the high school where all the kids get together and build robots and have different challenges and everything. In my opinion, in the past that was like a cute, fun thing to do, right, hey, let's go do a little Lego challenge, build this and do that. No, it's not cute any longer. We have to understand how those fit in with every aspect of our lives. Automation, robotics, I mean even look at the what happened at the Virginia ports. You know you're a lot closer to that Virginia port discussion than I am, just geographically, but that kind of thing is happening and if we're not preparing our students to work in that kind of environment, they're lost.

Speaker 1: 36:00

I agree so with those that are feeling lost. How would you help them balance the promise of AI with the fear that it could depersonalize teaching specifically?

Speaker 2: 36:14

Yeah, definitely, I think that that's out there. I think that if someone let me say this, jason my co-founder, tyler has a father who works in the home building industry. He's very good at building homes, and let's take, for example, a nail gun. If I just walked by your office today, jason and I dropped this fully loaded nail gun down, I said, hey, jason, plug that in and have fun. It could be very damaging, it could be very hurtful, so could scissors, but we still have scissors in our classroom. We just have to teach them how to use these tools safely and wisely, and so sometimes, when a teacher may see-.

Speaker 1: 36:54

No running with the scissors.

Speaker 2: 36:56

See, that's what I'm saying. When someone sees a fully loaded nail gun in their office, they may be scared and not even touch it. They may go and try it one time and it shoots a nail into the wall. Oh my gosh. So they're going to have to be using what a regular hammer to build a whole house. No, you're missing out on the power of that tool. There's going to be teachers and educators who don't use AI at all and they're hurting themselves and their kids or they might misuse it the first time and get a result that is trash, that is generic and it is horrible. And I also think on that vein. You've seen when you put something into ChatGPT and say write me a paragraph. You see how vapid and dull it is. When teachers get on there, they're going to see what that looks like. They're going to recognize it more with their student use and be able to coach them into how to use it wisely at certain points during that workflow, but hardly ever for a finished product that is cut and paste.

Speaker 1: 37:54

Got it Okay, 10 points during that workflow, but hardly ever for a finished product that is cut and paste. Got it, okay? All right, so tell me. I'd like to talk through a little bit about what the future of Teach looks like over the next few years. We know where the technology is heading. We know you and your group are visionaries in education and leveraging these technologies as tools, skill sets that every single teacher is going to need. What are you going to do with that and taking them to the next level?

Speaker 2: 38:20

Great question. Thank you, jason. Again. Tyler and I are long-term public educators. We hear the nightly news and they'll talk about the jobs report in this quarter and we're like, yeah, whatever, we have no idea what that means. We just decided we want to have all it's either 132 or 133 divisions in the state as partners. We're focusing on Virginia first and we said you know what, if we get our marketing right and start getting a lot of presentations, we're going to need someone to help us out. We recently hired a 1099 employee to just go out and do presentations in the Northern Virginia area. And so it's like here's two long-term public educators and we just created half a job.

Speaker 2: 39:02

Hey, and so we're ready to do this for the state of Virginia. We want all of the state to be our partners. We want to hire a bunch more presenters. We want to hire a full staff to not only run the presentation part of it but the business part of it. And then we're going to use this new model that we have of rolling it out directly to teachers, irregardless of where they are in the world. And hey, if we can find a couple of pockets of folks in Kentucky, we'll go start in Kentucky If we can find some folks in Massachusetts, we'll go to Massachusetts. We're figuring out Virginia first, trying to be intentional there. We know those challenges and once we've figured that out we're going to take it as far as we can.

Speaker 1: 39:48

Okay, awesome, all right. Well, how about for the teachers and school leaders listening right now that haven't taken that first step? What is one small step they can take tomorrow that will get them to start using AI responsibly and effectively?

Speaker 2: 39:58

Great question, jason. You can do this on a free chat GPT account, and so many of the lessons and instructions we give to first-time users are on a free account. Use your school email address. Go into chat GPT, make an account. It's totally free. You're going to see a little plus sign down there. You're going to find all we call this building a brain. Go find all of the stuff that you keep in your head your lesson plan template, your state standards, even right now, jason, if I just said state standards, go get your state standards into a downloaded folder on your computer. Go in there, hit that plus sign and say hi, my name is Kerry. I don't mind using my name in that thing. It's going to refer to me by my name as I keep on going. I'm a fourth grade teacher in Martinsville, virginia. The reason I say Martinsville is I can now customize all of my assignments to that region. The reason I say Virginia is it's going to start pulling all of the standards in for the state of Virginia. I'm a fourth grade teacher in Martinsville, virginia. Here are my state standards. I'm trying to get 100% of my class to pass this year.

Speaker 2: 41:03

What ideas do you have for me? And so sometimes, jason, we like to be very directive in telling this large language model exactly what we want. Sometimes we'll, in the process of it, open it up and say what ideas do you have? And so it's going to come up with maybe 10 ideas. I see that eight of those I already knew that. That ninth one that's new, I haven't thought of that before. And that 10th one I've already forgotten that one, but it's good, I'm going to try it again. So there's a specific set of steps that a brand new user can do. Just try that. After you see that first result, go to my website, email me. Say what do we do from here? Kerry, let's ramp this up.

Speaker 1: 41:44

That is a very practical example. All right, I think all educators can resonate with that one. And I was just about to ask you how do people connect with you and learn more about Teach that one. And I was just about to ask you how do people connect with you and learn more about TEACH?

Speaker 2: 41:55

I'm going to be very hopeful that we'll be able to, in the show notes or some way, put our email address in there and our website.

Speaker 1: 42:09

It's wwwteachaieducom.

Speaker 2: 42:10

It's a great landing spot All of the acronyms Just trying to get it all in there and so it's a great landing place for you. You can get on there, book a call with us. We're still working for a Virginia school division, so you can't book us during the day, but four to seven o'clock at night we are here to talk to you, figure things out. We're on TikTok. Oh my God, Jason, I'm trying to figure out TikTok. We're on Facebook, we're on LinkedIn, we're all over the place and so. But let's start with the website there and then we'll connect as much as we can.

Speaker 1: 42:38

Okay, all right. My final question for you, kerry. I like all of my interviewees to walk away with this one, and the audience to hear about you a little bit more personally. If you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?

Speaker 2: 42:53

and why, jason, my superpower would honestly be just to go old school. I mean, as much of this technology is here, I would love to be able to go off the grid with all of the suggestions. Well, I guess I'd have to be on the grid to power my chat GPT account. I guess I'd have to be on the grid to power my chat GPT account, but I want to be able to raise my own food, have a community of people where we walk together, we interact with each other, we worship with each other. I think if we can harness these technologies to bring communities back and that human interaction that has been so long gone since COVID social media, cell phones If we can find some way to manage a lot of these busy work tasks, to get them off of our plates, I can go outside and walk and meet my neighbors and become a healthier, happier human. That's my superpower.

Speaker 1: 43:50

Connect again. Yeah, just a side note, my son's school has rejected phones altogether. They used to say you can use them during lunch, yeah, but yesterday we got an email saying there is absolutely no phones. Here's your warning system, yada, yada, and. And I said to myself he's going to be very upset about that because he likes to be on his phone during lunch.

Speaker 1: 44:14

And I say to myself that is so awesome, because these kids don't know how to interact in face-to-face situations. It's been years since I saw any kid sitting around a table together and actually talking. Totally agree. They have no idea how to do it anymore. No idea, totally agree. So I think it anymore. No idea, totally agree. So I think it's a great thing. And you're, you know, whether you would call it utopian society there or not, it feels, it feels good. And you know, when we all get to the universal basic income and yeah, because AI and robots are doing everything for us then I think it's great. You know, let's, let's reconnect and let's hold hands and sing Kumbaya, it's all good, I'm with you and have a drink, yes, oh, yeah, definitely All right. So, carrie, thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 45:08

As the founder of teach, sharing how your work is helping schools and teachers harness AI safely, effectively and with purpose brings a lot of great value to our audience. So here's my big takeaway to everyone AI and education isn't about replacing teachers. It's about scaling their capacity, giving leaders sharper insights and, ultimately, helping students succeed. So if you want to learn more about TEACH, head on over to the wwwteachaieducom. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to subscribe to Inspire AI. Wherever you get your podcasts, share it with colleagues, friends, educators, students, anyone curious about how AI is shaping the future of learning, and until next time, reminding you to stay curious, keep innovating and always look for ways to future-proof your knowledge. Thanks again, kerry.

Speaker 2: 46:02

Thank you, jason, take care.