Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Week in Edtech 6/25/25: MIT Study on AI Sparks Brain-Rot Fears, Cheating Scandal in Debate Nationals, Teachers Sound the Alarm on LLMs, and More! Feat. Sara DeWitt of PBS KIDS & José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez of Academia del Océano
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Join hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell for a thought-provoking summer edition of Week in Edtech, featuring headline debates on AI in education, a rare look into PBS KIDS’ funding crisis, and grassroots innovation in ocean learning from Ecuador.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:16] MIT study raises alarms about AI's impact on student thinking
[00:07:42] AI cheating scandal hits national debate championships
[00:12:33] Teachers vent frustration as AI disrupts classroom dynamics
[00:14:45] Educators face a crossroads: ban AI or embrace it as a teaching tool
Plus, special guests:
[00:19:09] Sara DeWitt, SVP & General Manager of PBS KIDS, on funding cuts, educational media, and AI experiments in public broadcasting
[00:41:38] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez, Co-founder of Academia del Oceano, on democratizing ocean education through hybrid EdTech in Latin America
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[00:00:00] Ben Kornell: The key tenet is that the cognitive friction that you have on your own when you're not using AI as a crutch. Allows you to retain and develop skill and competency such that at the posts test your retention of knowledge and your competency is higher versus if you're using it as a crutch or a fill in the gap kind of solution.
You don't have any of the intellectual growth.
[00:00:29] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry funding rounds to impact to ai developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find
[00:00:43] Ben Kornell: it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar, and to go deeper.
Check out. EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
Hello, EdTech Insider listeners. It's Ben and Alex back with a special summer edition. We've got some great guests on the pot and we're diving into all things ai. Hey Alex, how's everything going out in South Carolina? It's hot
[00:01:22] Alex Sarlin: as it is in much of the country. It is 99 degrees outside here. We're all just trying to stay cool.
It was too hot today to even have my son's preschool outdoor water day that they usually do. He couldn't even do it 'cause it was too hot to be outside. Even in a sprinkler, that's not great, but things are exciting. We have two great guests on the podcast today. We have Sara DeWitt from PBS kids talking about everything in public radio and public broadcasting happening in the us and then Jose Francisco Ochoa Ordonez, who runs an Ecuadorian startup, all about oceanography and is doing some really interesting things in ed tech there.
So those will be cool. But I'd like to talk. The last week has seen so many. Headline grabbing articles about how AI and education, the tensions that are launching there, and I'm getting a little nervous, frankly, that there's the backlash. The techno moral panic is beginning in earnest and people are starting to get really afraid of AI and education.
I'm curious what you're thinking about this last week of headlines.
[00:02:21] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, I think the tip of the spear is the MIT study on T use and basically showing like the cognitive. Students who are using chat GBT to support their learning, and I think the alarmists out there are sounding the alarm. Yes, the AI defenders are attacking the study and defending ai, but it is clear that we're in a period where the big studies and the big use cases were around, are people using AI or are they not?
That was really a year ago, that was kind of the studying and the dialectic. Today it's. What are the implications of using it? And I will say I've had a personal experience that's making me see a little bit of the dark side. I was at the National Speech and Debate Championships in Iowa with my son Nico, and two of the teams were disqualified for using Chachi BT in their opening statements.
And I don't know how it was detected, but rumor has it among the teams that they were screening the wifi access at the. Site and figuring out who was accessing chat, GPT or other AI solutions for these, it's like impromptu debate. So you have an hour to prep, but man is cheating with AI wreaking havoc in the academic competition world.
And so when you have this combined, which I think the key tenets, and we should just talk about the study itself, but the is. The cognitive friction that you have on your own when you're not using AI as a crutch. Allows you to retain and develop skill and competency such that at the posts test your retention of knowledge and your competency is higher versus if you're using it as a crutch or a fill in the gap kind of solution.
You don't have any of the intellectual growth. I don't know. When you read that study, what were your thoughts?
[00:04:22] Alex Sarlin: So I agree with you that I feel like there's been two fronts that are relatively new. I think, I mean they're not entirely new, but two fronts on which this sort of AI. Debate has really ramped up.
One is the MIT paper, and there's been a couple of other papers as well where they're basically trying to figure out what are the ramifications of quote unquote cognitive offloading or outsourcing. The idea of, hey, if you have this. Intelligence that you're working with and it's doing some of the writing for you, it's doing some of the drafting for you, using it to answer questions.
What does that do to your brain as you're learning? Brain rot? Yeah, brain rot, and that is a great question to ask, and I'm very in favor of us learning about that. At the same time, putting out papers like this, MIT paper got a huge amount of attention and all the headlines about it were. Chacha. BT erodes your critical thinking, and there's a lot, I mean, I don't know.
My instinct, as you can imagine, is to jump to the defense of AI here and be like, hold on, hold on, hold on. The study was 50 something people, they were all over 18. There were no teenagers in the study. It's a pre-release. It's not even a peer reviewed article yet. It was released early by the author specifically because she wanted to sound the alarm about what she thought LLMs are doing to our brain.
So like there's just, there's a lot of funny situations there. But I also want to check myself and check that instinct and say, hold on though. There really might be some there, there. And we do want to know as a society of this new tool that is being used. Increasingly and almost ubiquitously among many, many, many, many students.
We wanna know what it does. So I'm trying to have a balanced perspective here. There've been a couple of other papers recently that have had other similar types of conclusions. They're all, you know, it's research, so they're all trying to sort of take little bites of the apple and try to understand it as a whole.
As you know, we just. Did a partnership with Stanford Scale Accelerator for learning, where they have hundreds of papers about AI in education and they are definitely on top of all of these papers. So I definitely recommend looking at that because it's this body of research is gonna continue to grow.
But there've been lots of positive papers about AI as well, and they've gotten almost no attention. So I think there's a little bit of, like, there's a media catnip about the idea that ai, which everybody's been talking about to sort of. Grab onto the fall of it and say, oh no, it's actually bad. It's actually hurting us.
It's actually bad for your brain. That scares me because I don't think we have the full picture yet, even though there may be it there. There. We'll have to figure it out. The other lens that I've seen a lot of over the last week, there was an article in 4 0 4 media called Teachers Are Not Okay. Basically consisting of a huge set of quotes from professors and teachers about how much they hate LLMs hate AI are banning it in the classroom, how it's destroyed their entire classroom environment.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago and this pod about how there's been these great articles in the New York Times by Natasha Singer about AI being used in the classroom, and all the comments in there are these miserable comments from instructors and professors saying, this thing is destroying my life. I mean, that's actually very different than brain rod, right?
There's overlap, but that's like the cheating problem, which you, you just mentioned in relationship to your debate competition, and what I'm afraid of there is that increasingly, I think the concept of AI in the classroom, people are starting to refer to that meaning I. Cheating. They're literally thinking, oh, what do you think about ai?
What I mean by AI is that students are using AI to write their papers for them. That's literally what I mean by it, and that scares the bejesus out me because ai, we've chronicled 500 plus companies using AI in ed tech. It's used in so many different ways and that's scratching the surface of what it could be used for.
And if we societally, especially if teachers start to say, oh, ai, that means cheating. That's all it means to me is cheating. That just frightens me so much. I'm curious what you make of that part of things.
[00:08:06] Ben Kornell: Well, it frightens me because. It will lead to a ban or don't ban. Yeah, exactly. Debate. And what we know is the real world will soldier on and increasingly integrate AI into things.
And so our educational system will become even more irrelevant to the real world. And. Yeah, I mean there's, we've had of course in our feeds, we're seeing people say, yeah, AI means that there's a need to transform how we teach and learn, and that's a good thing. 'cause we've been needing to do that for a long, long time.
Well, there's another corpus of social media posts and sentiment, which is things were fine before and now we're going to have to change. Let's just get rid of this change agent, which is. And I think the reason why I continue to push back on that status quo is because all the data shows us that the status quo has not been very effective.
If the status. Proven to be effective, then I think you would have a great case for saying no cell phones in the classroom, no internet, no technology whatsoever. Let's create a Luddite K 12 experience and then unleash AI and and the technology world later. But the case is. We basically have great evidence to show that current status quo is not working.
I think coming back to your point about how this was released, when was the last time that educational research pierced the veil of public perception? Right. It's very, very rare. I mean, I would say yes. For example, the kind of Columbia Teachers College and like there's around learning to read and. Sold a
[00:09:54] Alex Sarlin: story.
Yeah,
[00:09:55] Ben Kornell: yeah. Sold a story. That would be an example. Maybe there's a couple other examples where some of the work around grit or so on has pierced the veil, but what we see now is that researchers. Are losing trust in their universities and in their colleagues to implement the research into practice. And so politically, there's an advantageous move to fast release and get Click Beatty headlines because that shapes the field more than your actual research itself does.
And so that makes me wonder, how do we trust research? And this is why I'm so glad we have the. Partnership with Stanford because the meta analysis is gotta be where the insights come from, where you take all of these data points and then you look at them all collectively. I mean, we covered the, I believe it was in Nigeria, it was, it was like East Africa where they basically had an AI tutor for the treatment group and for the other group, no, nothing was offered.
And of course people were like, well, of course AI is gonna be better than nothing. My point of view was a lot of kids have nothing, right? So I saw glass half full. They saw glass half empty, and so I just think this is a tricky spot to be a school leader or a institutional leader or a university president because you have these click beatty things, kind of igniting fires for different, you know, groups on pro and con.
And what you really don't know underneath it is. How is this affecting kids' learning and how is this going to change the game for the future, and how do we prepare kids for the future?
[00:11:31] Alex Sarlin: Such great points there. I really agree with everything you're saying and I think the other education research that sometimes pierces the veil is like when the NAP results come out and they say everybody has gone backwards or you know, we've had flat results for years and even negative since the pandemic and all of this learning loss and all of this stuff.
And it's like sometimes I really wrestle with these perspectives where we know that there are. Serious problems with, with the way the education system works right now. We know there are, when we talked to Rebecca Coler at Magpie Literacy, who is, you know, the chief academics officer in Louisiana, which is one of the only places that has gone up, and she's like, it is so difficult to put the pieces together to teach kids to read.
And we've had, you know, decades of the balanced literacy approach and all this, and it's like. The status quo is so strong in education, and it takes so much work to change it, but then when some technology like this comes along and really does change it, because it's just absolutely, it's impossible to ignore for, for, for educators and students, instead of being like, okay, this is an opportunity, something is actually moving the ship, let's figure out what to do with it.
Which is, I think, our perspective for the most part on this podcast. Like, okay, well what is the, what is the potential? There's this feeling of, oh, like you said, like I. Trust in.
And meta and, and OpenAI now are doing things. People aren't just like, oh, then it must be great. They're like, well, then it's probably some, some sneaky thing because of the last 10 years, they've seen this incredible loss of trust in, in various tech initiatives. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.
It's a really wacky moment. There's a great article written by 16-year-old in the In the Times Learning Network, which is a great public, it is part of the New York Times. Basically a student essay competition. 16-year-old wrote an essay called We Need to Chat GPT, you know, one of the winners of their open letter contest.
Basically trying, it's like a breakup letter with chat, GBT saying, I need to go back to messy drafts and originality is hard, you know, and trying to be like, Hey, you know, I, I'm stepping away from you. I'm breaking up with you, Chad g Bt, and I. I get that and I get why that is such like sucker, like I get, I get why educators and people over a certain age are probably like, oh, this is great.
You have young people realizing that this is not gonna help them. But we are so early in the AI story. I really think this is a, a huge mistake to start trying to have this like sophisticated viewpoint, which has that this technology is not actually good for you. It is not the. I
[00:14:02] Ben Kornell: mean, it's such a black, white viewpoint, and you brought up our, you know, use case map.
You know, basically these blanket statements that are all pro or.
The AI is not the thing, right? It's the learning or it's the teaching. And you need to look at each element itself and say, how does AI interplay with this?
[00:14:26] Alex Sarlin: Yes.
[00:14:27] Ben Kornell: But when you, you know, you mentioned all these like forum boards where teachers are like, I hate my life because of this. It's also like, have you tried the use cases that are gonna make your life better?
And this is where I'm just, I feel like it's almost hard to trust any individual. Data point of research right now.
[00:14:45] Alex Sarlin: There was a quote from this 4 0 4 article that just got my like hair on fire. It's exactly what you're saying, right? From a high school English teacher. Here's the quote. I personally haven't incorporated AI into my teaching yet.
It has, however, added some stress to my workload as an English teacher. How do I remain ethical at creating policies? How do I teach students to use it ethically? How do I even use it myself? I understand that I have absolutely have to come to terms with using it in order to remain sane in my profession at that point.
So I think that's a pretty sophisticated viewpoint. Yeah. Except the haven't incorporated AI into my teaching. This is the thing that I, it's like this is the moment we're in. We're in a moment where the students are like. Heck yeah, I'm gonna use this. It has obvious benefits for me. It's really exciting to use.
I'm gonna do it. And teachers are hesitant. We have 25 of the 50 states that have any kind of AI policy, you know, at the state level. And I think, you know, the older generations are slower to move into technology. And I think we're at this moment where the. This gives everybody superpowers. So the kids have superpowers now.
The teachers have not yet embraced their superpowers. And I don't necessarily mean the superpowers of detecting ai, although that is one way to look at it. But the superpowers of teaching in new ways, transforming your material into formats that you've never even imagined before into languages. Having new kinds of assignments that are just ask students to do totally different kinds of thinking, like they have superpowers now, and I don't think they realize it, and I think they're spending all this time looking at.
How to stay ahead of the students, you know, cheating because they're defining AI as cheating. It feels like a scary moment, and I feel like it's on us as ed tech professionals to actually address this. Right. And we can't just ignore that. Teachers and professors are going crazy and hate, hate this. Like that's That's a big deal.
Yeah. But we also can't give into them and be like, okay, we're gonna pivot our whole company to being an AI detection company, which I think a lot of people probably.
[00:16:33] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, the question I have on the stakeholder front, you and I are both parents, is what do the parents think? Yeah. Because the student has the most near term interest to just get the answer right.
And the school has the most interest to kind of keep everybody in lockstep and do population management education, but the parent is the one player who has the biggest and most interest in the long term growth and gains of the student. And I just find that. Parents are more nuanced. For the younger kids, they're, they're trending towards less tech in their life.
For the middle school and high school, they're trending towards find some good tools. But as a parent, I have a middle schooler and I have an elementary school student for the middle school. It's like, use this as a tool. Don't use this to replace your learning. And I think parents can get to. Nuance point of view, but it's this kind of clickbait media that is in danger of changing the parent perspective around AI and co-piloting and brain rot and so on.
Right? And meanwhile, all the people I know in the Bay who are in tech, their kids are coding. Amazing things with AI as a copilot, and it's unleashing a new era of creativity for middle school and high school students. That is awesome. And they're so engaged in the learning. So I mean, this is, I know we have to go to our guest, but I.
I feel like we are at like a two door moment door. One is go like ban all ai, it's cheating, it's bad. And door two is let's find nuanced ways to superpower kids, educators, and families, and. You know, I think we've got a bias towards door number two because we've been trying door number one for the last 40 years and it hasn't
[00:18:18] Alex Sarlin: been working.
Right, exactly. And just last comment for me is that the great article in the Atlantic about computer science majors leveling off over the last couple years? Yes, for exactly the reason you just said because people who understand engineering are like, this is changing the game. We don't necessarily need com computer science majors anymore.
It went up, you know, the number of computer science majors quadrupled in in the 15 years prior and then completely flattened.
[00:18:42] Ben Kornell: Computer science is no longer a vertical, it's a horizontal. Everybody needs to have one or two courses in computer science and few need a vertical course of study in computer science.
That's a great thing. That's like literacy. That's like, you know, basic math, like everybody
[00:19:01] Alex Sarlin: needs a foundation now. Yeah, that is a good thing. I agree. Alright, well let's go to our guest. Our first guest is gonna be Sara DeWitt from PBS Kids. Thanks Ben. This has been a blast.
[00:19:09] Ben Kornell: Yeah, thank you.
[00:19:12] Alex Sarlin: For our deep dive and week in EdTech this week, we are here with Sara DeWitt, senior Vice President and general manager PBS kids.
Sara's responsible for the strategic direction of the dynamic PBS Kids Media Service that supports children ages two to eight and their parents, teachers and caregivers, as well as local communities. She leads across disciplinary team at PBS Kids, which is the number one educational media brand for kids sparking children's curiosity across streaming video.
Broadcast games and other platforms through content development, multi-platform asset distribution, educational product creation, creative production, and marketing, and brand engagement. It's quite a lot. Sara DeWitt. Welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:19:51] Sara DeWitt: Thank you. It's good to be here.
[00:19:52] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So first off, we just named a whole bunch of things, video broadcast games.
We have a lot to talk about, but give us a little bit of an overview. I think people might think of PBS kids as television, right? Because it's public broadcasting. They think of the TV side. There's a whole lot of different channels by which PBS kids reaches kids, caregivers, parents, teachers. Give us a little overview of what PBS kids actually looks like in 2025.
[00:20:13] Sara DeWitt: Sure. I mean, if you think about the mission of PBS when it started was to take this new media type television and really think about how could you create something really educational and enriching and meaningful. For kids using this new technology. And really that mission has continued even as new technologies developed.
So I came on to start working on the PBS kids website and the games business in the late nineties, and we have continued to kind of expand. So today you can watch PBS. Kids on broadcast. There are still a lot of children in the United States who don't have access to broadband, so that is a critical continued way that we're delivering content with our member stations across the country.
But you can also stream PBS kids content on the PBS Kids video app on connected TVs. You can watch it on YouTube tv, and then you can also watch it on mobile devices, and you can play games on the PBS kids website. You can play games on the PBS kids, the free PBS Kids Games app that's available. We really have content.
Across the board, we have podcasts that are available in all of the places you would listen, and our member stations do even more than in local communities. So you find PBS kids content in libraries, you find it in community centers, in boys and girls clubs. We really are thinking about how do we really make sure we're in the places that kids are with this educational free.
Enriching engaging content. However we can help support kids and their families.
[00:21:41] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. And tell us a little bit about some of the big properties that are out there right now that kids are really engaging with. I know there's been so many over the last decade or two decades in PBS kids, but what are some of the hottest ones right now?
[00:21:54] Sara DeWitt: Yeah, almost anyone, if you ask like a PBS memory, they'll have something they can name. Right? Right now in Daniel Tiger's neighborhood, a spinoff of Mr. Rogers neighborhood is an incredibly popular show, and one that we just hear from parents all the time about how meaningful that show is in their daily lives.
If you've ever been potty training a preschooler, I know I use Daniel Tiger Daily. We get thank you notes from parents about that support, and Fred Rogers Productions does an amazing job with that show. Another big series for us is Wild Ratts. I. Yes, so Chris and Martin Kratt really going into the wild and helping kids understand different animals and how they interact with their ecosystems, what characteristics they need to be able to really thrive in those spaces.
And then there are really long running shows that it continue to be incredibly popular, like Arthur.
[00:22:45] Alex Sarlin: Yep.
[00:22:46] Sara DeWitt: I mean, that is one that. We hear from parents how excited they are to be watching it with their kids and then certainly the things that are kind of like math and literacy, that really basics shows like Odd Squad that really help teach those math skills.
There's just a lot going on in PBS kids.
[00:23:02] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we love Daniel Tiger in this. Household as well. I could start singing many songs, but I i's,
[00:23:10] Sara DeWitt: yes.
[00:23:12] Alex Sarlin: One of the things that obviously is integral to what you're saying with all of these properties, with all these channels and all these properties that PBS and PBS kids is thinks very carefully about what children's media should look like.
It's not just going for whatever works. It's really being careful and thoughtful about things that actually help. To kids and families, you know, learn what they need to know on a daily basis. Arthur is like one of the gentlest, most lovely shows, I think in the history of television, as is Mr. Rogers and Daniel Tiger.
We are at a crazy moment as, as you know, better than anybody in the government right now. You have this educational technology powerhouse, the PBS kids has all of these games, all these channels, and you've had your funding basically. Put almost entirely at threat. You've already seen some cuts. Tell us about what is happening in the political environment when it comes to PBS kids.
[00:23:58] Sara DeWitt: Yes. So there's a lot going on and rather than reeling off everything, I'll just name some of the things that have already most affected PBS kids, please. There was the administration put in an executive order to stop funding to PBS and NPR. On May 1st and on May 2nd, the US Department of Education terminated the Ready to Learn grant, which is a grant program that has been in the public media space for over 30 years.
I. I think right at 30 years. Excuse me. And it's one that has funded a lot of shows that I've already mentioned. So back in the day, it funded Arthur, it helped us launch the show, super y. It has funded Sesame Street, it's funded Clifford More recently, it's funded Lila in the Loop, which is the show that focuses on computational thinking.
It's doing really well. Work it out Wombat. Molly of Denali. These are all shows that were funded by this grant program, and the termination of the grant meant an immediate stop meant a cancellation of $23 million that we had in production for shows, for games, for staff, but also for our member stations.
So our member stations across the country take this content and bring it to the communities that need it the most. So ready to learn that grant program through the Department of Bed was really focused on kids in predominantly Title one communities. So kids who qualify for free or reduced lunch. And so.
Our station's mandate was then to take this content and help identify the kids who don't have access to high quality preschool, whose parents could benefit from this free resource that has an educational impact. And a lot of our stations had to cancel camps for the summer that they had in place with partners like Boys and Girls Clubs, United Way Housing Authority.
A lot of them had to stop. That they were bringing to local libraries and community centers. I mean, it's already hit us pretty hard. We've had to lay off 25% of the PBS kids staff at the national level, and I know that that's also, we're feeling those reverberations across the station communities as well.
The next thing that's up is rescission. So the House of Representatives has already voted and approved a Rescissions package that would claw back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And so those cuts would be just really devastating. I think that. Puts a lot more of production into jeopardy across the board.
It also really means that some of our stations that are in more rural and remote areas that are often the only locally owned and operated television station still available. Some of those may no longer be able to stay operational if these federal cuts were to go through. So the next step is really the Senate, but who will be voting on that?
Sometime in the next few weeks, most likely
[00:26:53] Alex Sarlin: 25% layoffs at the national level. That's huge. And that's more than I would've expected to hear. So I am curious, how would you respond to a moment like this? You know, obviously there's business, you know, moves you have to do around the funding and canceling things and moving things.
But how do you sort of respond from a values perspective or a public perspective to remind the country and parents and caregivers and teachers about the value of public media at a moment when it's under threat like this?
[00:27:18] Sara DeWitt: Well, I think for us right now, it's really thinking about like what makes us different?
What are we bringing to this market that's different than everything else that's out there? And I really think it's what we started talking about kind of at the top. It's the thoughtful approach. It's the research backing. It's making sure that this has a real. Impact and then pivoting when we discover something isn't working and also trying to then educate the field.
So you know, if you have been in the ed tech space, you very likely have come across studies, research studies, A ERA, or different big conferences that talk about PBS kids content, some of it games, some video. But really talking about the measurable impact that can come from it so that we can be sharing best practices.
With the community at large, and I think when you are in a situation where a lot of content that's being created for kids today is really being created to drive algorithms or to drive revenue, we are creating content that is really focused on driving educational impact for kids. Helping kids. Yes.
Really benefit. From media and it makes us stand out. It makes us really different. So we have to think about what is the core of our service? How do we make sure we keep this service really viable for the American public? And I think we are seeing an outpouring of support. So that's good. Many people sending us letters, but also writing to their local stations, writing to their members of Congress.
We know a lot of people are calling senators right now to say, no, this has a real impact. Oh yeah, on my life. We've always gotten a lot of letters. This year we got like a stack of graduation announcements, like invitations to graduations along with handwritten notes saying, I am gonna be an elementary school teacher and I wanna thank you for the ways that you taught me or inspired me.
Or, I am the first kid in my family to go to college and I attribute it to PBS kids. I mean, these are the kinds of stories that. We probably all have friends and neighbors who have that kind of story about a PBS kids show or something that they experienced with media and just to hear all those stories.
That's also something that just keeps us going, you know, we know that we can make an impact and that we do stand out.
[00:29:40] Alex Sarlin: It's heartbreaking, but also inspiring. I mean, the fact that the impact has been so distinct over so many generations at this point. You have people who grew up on PBS kids and who are now doing all sorts of things in the world without learning, putting it into action.
I wanna double down on what you're talking about with the algorithms and streaming. Years ago, I remember there was a moment where I was like. Nickelodeon came out and Nickelodeon was owned by Viacom. It was the more commercial profit driven kids network, and it would felt like, oh, it was directly competitive with PBS and with everything happening there, zoom forward to today and there's thousands of kids shows out there in so many ways.
Apps and streaming services. Netflix has a huge series of different shows, including I, they just made a partnership with Sesame, which is was nice to see, but they have so many of their own properties. Disney Plus is out there. I mean, it is such a. Competitive, profit driven, algorithm driven landscape with more options than ever before for parents and for young kids.
But that drives often sort of a race to the bottom. How do you make the most flashy, the fastest moving, the most colorful? You know, I think of things like baby shark or coco melon and I, and nothing, I'm not trying to insult any, anybody, but it's just, you can feel that. The feeling of shows that are really just going for, like, we want the kids to not be able to turn away from us no matter what.
And that is such a different set of values than PBS works in. Tell me a little bit about like how you hope to, you know, hold the line against that. Flood. It just, it's such a weird environment in educational technology right now. We, especially for very young children, where everywhere they turn there's a hundred options.
Mm-hmm. How do you break through and continue to have, you know, Daniel Tiger, which is like so thoughtful, is filled with positive values, is. Compete with all of this crazy stuff that's out there.
[00:31:27] Sara DeWitt: Yeah, it's increasingly complicated. Yeah. But I will say, like come back to, is that we are like the number one trusted educational media brand by parents.
[00:31:36] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. The trust.
[00:31:37] Sara DeWitt: And that trust is something that we don't take lightly. You know? That's. Part of why we remain so focused on making sure that we're never letting anybody down in terms of that, you know, that really we can stand by everything we make, but I think that trust really in these moments where parents are so overwhelmed, I'm also a parent trying to navigate the space with my kids, and it's so complicated.
There is something that parents know they can go to and they can let the kids watch and not worry about it. Yeah, and I think that is who we are and we can give parents that sense of relief. We also know that schools and libraries like educators, librarians, we hear often from homeschool parents, like we are a resource for them who really can, they can trust that what they're getting.
It's gonna support the kids and that they're gonna be in a safe environment where they're not gonna end up in a crazy place. And what we hope is then we can give kids and parents the skills through that content to then be able to navigate. So. Like I think about, you know, we talked about Arthur Molly of Denali.
Those are shows that are helping kids also think about like, how do you navigate the internet? How do you ask a good question of technology today? How do you decide what to do next? How do you be a critical thinker? Of media. I mean, there's so many Arthur episodes where the kids are like, wait a second, what is this?
What is this trying to teach me? And so really trying to model that for kids so that they are better prepared to be in this, yes, in this kind of crazy environment.
[00:33:13] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it makes sense. So this may be feel like a strange question to ask at this time of, of threat and cuts, but. You have been at the forefront of technology for a long time.
You mentioned the sort of, you know, vast library of educational games that PBS kids has developed over the years in relationship to many of its most popular properties. If you go on the PBS kids site, there are so many games. They're all designed with education in mind. We are now in this modern era of tech.
We talk on this podcast all the time about ai, about interactive storytelling. Even about just the ability to create content very quickly in all these different formats, create songs, create video. I'm curious what gets you most excited right now? Hopefully, you know, at the moment when the funding kicks back in, what would you like to pursue in terms of technology and, and moving uh, PBS kids even further into the technological forefront?
[00:34:03] Sara DeWitt: I mean, we always love experimenting and thinking like, I love to look at something that's taking off in the commercial space and thinking like, okay, how could we co-opt that for learning? Right? Like, what, what can we do that could make that educational? And so we've been doing some really interesting experiments.
I think we may have talked before about the AI project that we've been doing with conversational episodes where, you know, we know from years of research of PBS kids shows that if. A child has a conversation about what they watch. Like if a, a co-viewing, like if a parent is talking to the kid about what they watch, the learning gains are greater.
And we know that over time we've seen in research that even if that conversation is asynchronous, that the learning gains are greater. And so we're doing research now with uc, Irvine, and Harvard, where we are taking some of our shows and taking a moment where the character then. Stops. Breaks the fourth wall and has a conversation with the kid, and AI is being used to parse the kid's language and help find the best answers.
We're not using generative AI for the characters. We wanna make sure we're really like holding to the educational standards. And then our writers are the ones writing the responses, but the early results are really promising that this is. We're doing it right now with science content for Eleanor Wonders Why, and Computational thinking, Lila in the Loop, really helping kids kind of explore those science concepts and helping kind of solidify it through conversation.
So I'm really excited to see how we can continue to do that kind of work. Another thing that we've been really proud of is our work and accessibility. And thinking about how do we make sure that all kids can access and use content? And that really falls into two categories. One is kids who are on lower end devices who maybe don't have the latest tablet.
How do we make sure that our content can really degrade gracefully so they can still interact with it and still have a really powerful experience? If they don't have wifi at home, how can they download content and use it? And then refresh it when they come back. Like our games app allows you to download games and take them away.
So that's one whole aspect of technological accessibility, like how do we make sure kids can use it, but then also thinking about kids who you know are visually or hearing impaired who. Have sensory issues, like we really have spent a lot of time thinking about how we can make our content more accessible.
One of the things that we had to put pencils down on with this grant termination was our work with American Sign Language interpretation of episodes. Mm-hmm. We've been working with our producers, Fred Rogers Productions and uh, GBH in Boston and bridge multimedia to build in interpretations that aren't just that.
Box in the corner, but someone who is trying to better represent the characters on screen, thinking about pre-reads, preschoolers, how they could interpret this content through a SL. Thankfully, we've had a donor step up and help us get the money to finish that project, so we'll be able to roll out the rest of that a SL library.
But that's the kind of work that I think PBS. Takes on that others don't, and then also, again, kind of helps move the industry forward. What's the best way to do this kind of work for kids?
[00:37:18] Alex Sarlin: That's fascinating. The accessibility piece is always so important, especially when you have a mission like PBS. PBS kids do.
And then the conversational AI is always really, really interesting. And I, you know, if we had more time, I'd love to dig down into the nuance of making sure that the characters are safeguarded, whereas the AI can be conversational and, but the fact that it's, uh, it's based on, you know, solid research is already shows the sort of values that you all bring to
[00:37:44] Sara DeWitt: the PBS approach.
Yeah, yeah,
[00:37:45] Alex Sarlin: exactly. It's like, let's do it. That we know teaches rather than in a way that is just, just for the flash of it. It's really interesting. There are some interesting AI innovations also happening with, with a SL and some accessibility stuff. I, I wonder if there's some interesting overlap there, but I'm happy to hear that that project continued to get its funding all.
[00:38:04] Sara DeWitt: Yeah, and I think there's also just so much more, and again, this get to be like another whole conversation just about gaming. Yes. There's so much happening in gaming space and that's a place where we've done a lot of experimentation, a lot of research work with universities, and I think there's just so much more potential for kids learning through games.
[00:38:22] Alex Sarlin: We did a whole webinar about game development in the AI era and there's incredible stuff happening there. I could easily imagine a world very soon, if not almost now, where like every episode of PBS Kids show has its own game automatically created. You could just accelerate your game development enormously.
Mm-hmm. Because there's so much out there that's starting to get, you know, come together. It's really, really exciting. Last question. I know this is a loaded one, but I'm so curious about it. You know, we are clearly in this moment where. Of PBS kids are just under attack. I mean, there's no other way to put it.
You know, it's under attack by a government, federal government administration that just sort of doesn't believe in, in the basic. Premises of it. You know, we've had corporation, public broadcasting has been working for decades, and suddenly it's like, well, you know what? We don't who needs it? This feeling right now, for whatever reason, we can get into that.
You know, zoom forward five years from now, let's say, I'm presuming hopefully that things will be somewhat different in the political landscape. Do you feel like PBS kids is going to be successful at sort of hunkering down, making the cuts it needs, and then surviving this moment and then coming back and reestablishing a, a foothold and getting growing big again or, or do you feel like what's happening now is actually going to really.
Create permanent damage to the PBS and public broadcasting world.
[00:39:40] Sara DeWitt: It's definitely gonna be a challenging time right now. I think the thing that I keep thinking about is like, first of all, we, we need to move through this fight and we have a lot of bipartisan support. I know that 82% of voters and that 72% of Trump voters believe that.
The funding for children's programming and educational programming is important and believe it should be there, you know, so there is like definitely a lot of public support. So continue to be like optimistic about the fight through this moment, but I think what we are thinking about right now is how do we really stay true to that mission and that.
Core service. How do we make sure that kids can continue to access the huge library we have right now?
[00:40:21] Alex Sarlin: Yes.
[00:40:21] Sara DeWitt: Games that we have right now, the platforms that we have out there. How do we make sure that they are stable and viable through this time so that we can remain. A really important part of kids and families lives with the hope that we have an opportunity in the future to continue to ramp up to again, ramp up some of these services that we're having to scale back on right now, that we will get that federal support, we'll get that public support and that we'll continue to really be a differentiated service in this very.
So many options out there. You know, we wanna rely on that parent trust and like continue to really support it and then also be able to break through. Yeah, with really great content. So if people are supporters of public media and want to help in this fight, you can go to protect my public media.org.
That is the site that will help you get in touch with your senators and give them a call and let them know what public media means to you.
[00:41:19] Alex Sarlin: It sounds, uh, like a very promising strategy. I'm really excited to see the bounce back because PBS is so important. PBS Kids has done such incredible work for so long.
Thank you so much for being here with us. This is, uh, Sara DWwitt, senior Vice President and General Manager. Of PBS kids really appreciate you being here with us on Weekended Tech.
[00:41:37] Sara DeWitt: It.
[00:41:38] Alex Sarlin: We have a special guest on week in EdTech this week. This is Jose Francisco Ochoa. He's a biologist, educator, and EdTech entrepreneur, and an ocean advocate from Ecuador.
He's the co-founder of Academia del Oceano, the country's first ocean education center through a hybrid EdTech model that blends online learning with certified in-person training Empowers.
His work has been recognized by institutions such as IOC UNESCO and the UNDP and Samsung Generation 17 program where he was selected as a young leader advancing the sustainable development goals. Welcome to the podcast,
[00:42:21] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: Jose. For having me. It's a pleasure to be here and to have the opportunity to talk about my work.
[00:42:27] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So tell us about your work. You founded academia, Deano Digital Learning Education. What inspired this model and.
[00:42:37] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: Yeah, I would like to start to talk about that. A huge barrier in ocean conservation is accessibility, not just the physical access to the ocean, but access to tools, to knowledge, to opportunities to protect it.
So this gap, it's what inspired me to co-funded academia. De Losano the first ocean education center in my country. And our mission is to democratize access to marine education, marine science, and also to empower this new generation or the next generation of marine leaders across my country and Latin America, especially young people from historically underrepresented communities.
I want to emphasize that the effects of climate change and ocean pollution are widespread. And everybody could see that in their own communities. The effects are in every ecosystem. So growing up I watched that, but most of the resources to understand and act on these issues were not available in my mother tongue in Spanish or made with our communities in mind.
So to tackle these gaps, all these issues, we develop this hybrid model. This educational model. So we combine like this best of both worlds in person and technology education, in person programs in our center, in the Ecuador and coast, in a community called San Jacinto. It's very beautiful, but we do also digital learning to engage students from several countries, from Latin America.
So why we develop discovery model? I think that traditional education does not reach everyone. And discovery model is inclusive, accessible, and also we are able to replicate in other areas. And also these are the main values of our mission in academia. And we started at the end of 2022. If I put you in, in context of what we do, it was right after the pandemic.
Yeah. And we started with a series of webinars on marine science and climate education. That was like our MVP and the response was really great. It was amazing. So we saw the reach, the interest, and the potential that we have with our idea. So that's when we knew that we had something in our head that we could maybe change.
Have people have the perspective on Ocean T and climate education. And also it's economically accessible in my country and in Latin America in general. I think cost and economic is one of the biggest barriers to access to quality education. So affordability is also a key part of our mission because our main audience are university students and young professionals.
So sometimes they don't have the budget to spend a lot of money on, uh, very expensive like courses or things like that. So when they complete our courses, they receive, uh, certificates endorsed by our partnerships because we work closely with institutions and with allies because partnerships are everything in this kind of projects.
When you are an entrepreneur or you're working on a new ventures, you need to. Work closely with allies and with relatives, if you understand my idea. So we work, like for instance, with the Catholic University of Ecuador, that is one of the country's top institutions. Mm-hmm. As well as with international organizations.
So these partnerships help us. To scale, also to build trust with our students and also that our students kind of feel valid with what they're learning through our curriculum. And also, uh, at the end of the day, I think this model works not just because it's digital, it work because we will listen to our community first.
What I mean by that is that we just don't deliver content. We also co-create the experiences with our students.
[00:46:51] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm.
[00:46:51] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: Based on their needs on challenges and also we adapt what we teach them to local knowledge. So it's not just a translation of, of scientific knowledge, but it's like we're just truly contextualized.
So yes, the digital part allow us to scale, but I think the listening part is what make it meaningful.
[00:47:14] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so I'm hearing that you're taking topics of interest to a lot of young people. You know, marine science, climate change, sustainability, but actually allowing them to break down barriers, linguistic barriers, affordability, barriers, national barriers, geographic barriers, and creating a community of people who all care.
I topics but may not have other options to learn about them or to find like-minded community of people who are also studying and trying to make change together. I'd love to hear some examples of a couple of the students you've worked with and what their reaction has been to this hybrid model, to this ed tech move that you've made where you've expanded from webinars to a full curriculum and program with partners.
What types of change and transformation does it offer to your learners? I
[00:48:00] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: think the reaction has been great because we don't only teach them how to, for instance, how to analyze ecosystem or analyze the impacts of plastic, uh, pollution. For instance, we teach them how to design solutions, so we are a grassroots initiative.
And also our central core is community-based learning. So these allow our students to bring these ideas to life. So also our students are engaged through online learning, but also sometimes they have the very first experience in the coast. Most of them, they go there and it's like they're experiencing biology for the first time.
Conservation efforts or even they go to see a mangrove for the first time. So yeah, for many of them it's their very first time doing field work in conservation in our education center. And also the connection is, is critical
[00:49:00] Alex Sarlin: and the combination of being able to bring people to the ocean literally, and they can study and do field work.
On the coast of Ecuador, even if they're not originally from there, I think adds a lot of value to the in-person part of the experience. But as you mentioned, the EdTech digital learning is allows you to scale and grow quickly and expand way beyond your local, which has been really exciting. You've received recognition for this work from UNESCO and Samsung Generation seven, tell us.
Recognition from these great international organizations around the sustainable development goals?
[00:49:40] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: That's a good question because being part of this program like Generation 17 has been life changing experience because Generation 17 is a partnership between Samsung and the United Nation Development Program.
That support change makers around the world who are working for the sustainable Development goals. That's the name. Generation 17 comes from because of the 17 SDGs. What is most important is that local action can have a global reach, and I think that thanks for this recognition, I have the opportunity to join important platforms like the United Nations.
And also receive visibility that is hard to get, especially when you are working on education and, and conservation in, in, in Latin America. And visibility is important. And also when you get, like even on the website of. UNESCO that help us build trust, like I said on the beginning of the podcast, also grab our network, and most importantly, to amplify the, the voices of young people from the region of Latin America, of my country, that sometimes they're not on the table of global conversations.
So for me, it means a lot to bring our stories to the world and everybody knows what we are doing in, in my country. Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the, the UN OCEAN Conference in France to my work with Generation 17. And it was an event about the Ocean TI think seeing the name of Academy Losano in my country, um, this state was, was really powerful and it reminded me.
But I am doing this because if you want to, to do this, that sometimes it's so hard and, and so challeng, it's, you need to, to do it with passion, right? If you are doing this in, in a small country of like Ecuador and you are bringing something meaningful to the world, it's amazing. Yeah. And even though we receive, like responding to your question.
We receive this recognition from programs like UCON and all of that. We need to focus on the, on the work with the communities and also, yeah, it's a platform to grow, to reach more students. Sometimes we need to prove what we do at the, at the community level, at the local level. So I need to make sure that our programs stay in, in to our mission.
I. To bring the voices of, and the stories of, of what we do into these global spaces.
[00:52:21] Alex Sarlin: I hadn't heard about this Generation 17 program. It looks absolutely amazing. I'm looking at some of the leaders on this program. That's incredible. So a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs themselves.
They have founded their own ed tech companies, or they're aspiring to found one, and we've seen the age of founders go down partially because of AI and partial impact. At Young Age Young, I'm curious if you have any advice for other young entrepreneurs who might have a passion like you have had for ocean conservation and wanna turn it into a real idea, especially if it's something like, uh, you mentioned the webinars that you use to sort of test out the program.
That's a really interesting approach. What advice would you give somebody who wants to turn their passion and what they wanna do in life into their own company?
[00:53:12] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: I think, like Iran mentioned before, is that you need to do something with passion. Yeah, to continue because to be an entrepreneur is a hard road.
I could say that. And start with where you are. Use what you have and build something that speak to your community that matters to you. Because if you are doing something with no passion, it's not going to work to the long term. And also I understand, uh, with all my experience during these years, that small action.
With a base in purpose can have a, an amazing effect. And you go, sometimes you are not going to change the world and, and all of that because that's very traumatic that people mentioned that. But if you start with a small action but with purpose and you continue, you can have an an amazing effect on, on your community.
And, and like I said, maybe you could inspire other people to connect with you and also to be a change maker. And also I have seen firsthand that how access to knowledge can have a powerful change. And with the right tools and opportunities, I think young people or, or even all the community can live the way.
Not only to protect the ocean or all of that, have a good effect in society.
[00:54:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think education is, has such a domino effect, right? You could do something, you do a webinar, do a start, a company, do a class, and the people who you reach.
And appreciate. Hi today. This is Jose Francisco Ochoa. He's a biologist, educator, EdTech entrepreneur who's making his own EdTech content and ocean advocate and co-founder of the First Ocean Education Center in Ecuador. Thanks so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:55:15] José Francisco Ochoa Ordóñez: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
[00:55:17] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider. Subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on Substack.
