AI in Education: Golden Ticket or Pandora’s Box?

Is AI the golden ticket for education—or a fast track to unintended consequences? In this episode of The Purple Zone, Alexis Morgan sits down with Dr. Jeff Carlson, Head of National Education Partnership for Clever, who spends his days at the center of national and state conversations on AI and edtech. Together, they unpack the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in classrooms: from personalized learning and teacher support to hard questions about what kids must still learn on their own to develop critical thinking.

Drawing on research, student voices, and Idaho’s own evolving approach, Alexis and Jeff wrestle with the big questions facing parents, educators, neighbors, and lawmakers alike:

• What must change in how we educate students in the age of AI?
• What must never change?
• And how do we protect both opportunity and accountability when the tools are moving faster than policy?

If you’ve ever wondered whether AI is education’s golden ticket—or just another distraction—you won’t want to miss this deep, timely conversation.

Links to Articles:

What Do Kids Actually Think About AI?

What's Really Going on in AI in Schools? A High School Student's POV. (Forbes)

Parents, Your Job Has Changed in the A.I. Era

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Send Alexis an email with guest requests, ideas, or potential collaboration.
email@thealexismorgan.com

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https://www.thealexismorgan.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hey friends, welcome to the Purple Zone, where public policy, practice, and people meet. Because policy isn't abstract, it's personal. So let's talk about it. Hey friends, welcome to the Purple Zone. I'm Alexis, your host, and I am joined today. I said it wrong, I think, but I'm joined today. No, I didn't. I said it right. It's been like months since I've been in the studio with someone recording. So look how clumsy I am and Jeff's like laughing at me already. This is perfect. It's the greatest start to a show. I love it. My friend sitting across the table from me is Dr. Jeff Carlson, and he is, I'm going to get this right, the head of National Education Partnership at Clever. And I got it right because I wrote it down on my iPad, so I get it.

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

That's

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

it. Welcome, Jeff, to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

Thank you, thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 0:42

And I know you've been here already because you've been on Matt's show. Look, that's me talking about Matt's show already. It's

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

good to give him credit.

SPEAKER_01: 0:48

Yeah, the Ranch podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 0:50

It's good for him.

SPEAKER_01: 0:51

Yeah. But like to start, what is Clever? Because I said that's where you worked. But what does Clever do again?

SPEAKER_00: 0:56

Yeah, Clever provides kind of data services for about 75% of U.S. K-12 schools and then login capability. So instead of asking kids and parents and teachers to remember passwords for all those things, you go in and do a single sign-on through Clever And that way you can get into all the learning applications that a kid may need to get into. It also helps that way the kid's password isn't their birth date or their favorite color that all the other kids know and they're getting in. So it's a security protection, but then also schools don't have to send companies data. They just put it into our, what's called an API. And that means it's protected both on the school side and on the company side so that all the data just doesn't get, it's not sitting on somebody's cloud that could get taken or something like that. So it's a data protection service and a login service. for about 75% of US schools.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43

That's awesome. And I think almost every single school in Idaho.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47

About 80% of Idaho schools that use one of the services are on Clever. Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 1:51

Yeah. And you were on Matt's show and I will spare everyone the details of like the long story of how we met, but you travel around the nation and like attend a lot of ed tech conferences and stuff and all the things that that entails. And when you were on Matt's show in the springtime- Matt was like, Alexis, you got to meet this guy. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my husband listened to the show. And he's like, Alexis, you really got to meet this guy. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it just like left my brain entirely. And I went to San Antonio. I've talked about that. I went to San Antonio, attended like the National EdTech Conference. And you were there. And that's where we met.

SPEAKER_00: 2:31

That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:32

And so it was crazy

SPEAKER_00: 2:32

to me. Completely unplanned. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 2:34

And it was like these two people from like the Boise, Idaho area. Like, I mean, you hadn't been told that you needed to meet me, but like I had been told that I needed to meet you. And then here we meet in San Antonio. I mean, that's pretty like wild. It felt very like divine.

SPEAKER_00: 2:49

And then we flew back to Boise from San Antonio and imagine had we not met in San Antonio and we would have been on the same planes coming back from the same conference.

SPEAKER_01: 2:58

It was incredible.

SPEAKER_00: 2:58

So it was supposed to happen. It was kismet as it were. Yes, it

SPEAKER_01: 3:01

was. Yeah. Well, which is so exciting because there's so many things happening right now in education when it comes to technology, specifically AI and education. It's like one of the hottest phrases I think right now happening. Like, would you agree?

SPEAKER_00: 3:14

Yeah, there was a report that just came out from a group we work with called the State Ed Tech Directors Association. And they ask kind of state ed tech teams across the country what the number one thing is. And the last couple years have been cybersecurity, because there's been, you know, hacks of student data, things like that. But AI for the first time ever was the number one thing in that report. So more state leaders are thinking about AI when it comes to education than kind of any other subject that the report asked about, at least.

SPEAKER_01: 3:38

Yeah, yeah. So So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about AI and education. I'm really excited because you and I are involved in some things in the state. And I'm really hoping that this conversation between you and I today will help people in their local communities, like whether, you know, like it gets them thinking about something or they can find a resource or they can reach out to me and, you know, whatever those things. So I'm excited about it. So I think the first like first thing is first, let's define what AI means so that kind of people understand like exactly what we're talking about. Would you want to like you can do that?

SPEAKER_00: 4:11

Sure. Yeah. based on already studied patterns. And so that's been around in lots of different things. A lot of the algorithms in our social media or applications that are built are using a lot of that, taking existing information and just kind of putting it back in front of us in patterns that they've seen before. Then there's generative AI, which is kind of the thing that people are talking about more, calling it AI for shorthand, that started with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT. November will be what, three years, maybe two years? I don't know. time what is time but those large language models the difference with generative AI is that they've been trained on so much data and some new technologies that they are able to produce new generate new content that hasn't been there before so AI could find a every you know poem written by an author before and kind of put that in front of you and then say if you like that author you probably like these other authors that did this type of poetry generative AI says we can can take all of that poetry and we can create a new poem that hasn't existed before that has the characteristics sounds like a kind of what that that same author would have done even though that poem itself hadn't existed until until the large language model created it

SPEAKER_01: 5:56

i'm telling you right now that's a way better definition than ai gave me when i was like looking at it

SPEAKER_00: 6:03

it's hard to define yourself so i'm not surprised it had it had trouble

SPEAKER_01: 6:06

yeah yeah yeah so i'm so glad that you took that because you did way better than ai you did way better than We

SPEAKER_00: 6:11

have another couple months where we're still ahead of the computers. Great. Good to know.

SPEAKER_01: 6:16

So I think that's great because one, I think one of the things that you're pointing to is that AI, just like if we're using just the, you know, generic term has been around for a really long time and it's integrated. I mean, I don't know. I actually don't know a person that doesn't use some type of like Netflix or Amazon, like some type of like app that's generating that stuff. So, you know, it's like it's in our homes.

SPEAKER_00: 6:36

Yep. If you've bought something online, you have in, you know, you've interacted with some kind of AI model.

SPEAKER_01: 6:41

Yeah. And then when you're talking about generative AI, which is really kind of more what I think people are talking about today when they talk about that in education, I think that's really what we're going to be talking about today. And so one of the things that just in laying the groundwork in this conversation so that you and I and everyone that's listening, all my friends that are listening, can kind of understand where we're going with the conversation, we're going to be talking about a and like what that means for kids and kind of like lay this groundwork and then just kind of work our way through to the point of what's happening specifically in Idaho. Sounds good. Which I'm excited about. So initially like laying this groundwork. So Dr. Rebecca Winthrop was on my show earlier this week and she and I had a conversation about some of the things that it's really important for kids to know how to do. Like AI cannot do these things for kids or it will deeply impact their, what did she say? Neuropathways. Like, so she said, kids have to go through learning, thinking, and reasoning because they must develop healthy neuropathways. And if they don't do that, we actually don't know the impact of that on kids. So that I think is like foundational. Are there any like other foundational things like that you can think of, like when we're talking about like kids just in general?

SPEAKER_00: 8:04

No, when you think about kind of the purpose of education, you know, those are kind of, those are not the those are the outcomes we want that we can't see via an assessment necessarily at least kind of a tangible written or digital assessment but it's the things that we think about when we talk about wanting to send our kids you know into schools and what we want as a society for our society to be right to be able to think and reason on our own not just spit out you know we actually want to be generating new content based on the things we know so we want to be generative and not just kind of the old version of AI that just took what somebody else said and thought And just replicate it out, spit it back out. You want to be able to do stuff on your own. So I totally agree with her. One thing that she said too, because I was listening to our conversation with you is that part of the challenge we're going to have is that the traditional models of education that we've had were designed specifically to try to get those things out of kids without a world that had technology that could do some of those things too. So it wasn't like a competition between a person and this thing that's sitting on on all of our phones. That was the only way to be able to generate new content was to be able to figure out and learn enough things and get that background knowledge to do it. That's part of the issue I think we're having in schools is we have decades and now centuries of trying to help people learn those things. But there's this new tool sitting right there that in every workplace, in every kid's pocket, in every news story is sitting right there tempting us to just use that instead of trying to build those neural pathways ourselves.

SPEAKER_01: 9:40

Yeah. Well, and I think, I mean, really in this moment, what I feel like you've done is foreshadowed to like what we're getting to at the end when it talks about what's happening in Idaho. Cause like, that is the question. I mean, that really is the question is like, how do we make it? So, you know, like, is there a pre and post, you know, generative AI and like, what does that, how do we help kids in education? What does that look like? So a couple of articles that you actually shared with me that I will make sure to like link in the show notes, just in case anyone's curious to go look at them specifically, because I think they're actually really great articles and get people thinking and talking about, you know, content that's relevant today that's happening like in real time right now. So the first one is was on like wired.com. And it's an article about what kids think about AI. And so you know, they're just like asking kids questions about, you know, what do you think AI and clearly adults are fretting over things like chatty G and just whatever, you know, like things that are going to solve these problems for kids. And I'm not saying it's not I'm just saying that's like that is what is happening. And then teachers specifically are struggling to deal with this in the classroom because it is an added layer of for them and, you know, trying to make sure they get all the assessments. And basically, you know, the article starts that way. And then it just like hops right into how do kids view AI? Like, what do they think it is and stuff? And it was I thought it was like really cool because these kids are talking about, you know, like one kid's like, well, it helps me study or I really mostly just use it for recipes I you know ask it questions one person was like it finds resources for me and another kid was like it's not very good at writing essays because it doesn't sound like me

SPEAKER_00: 11:20

yeah

SPEAKER_01: 11:20

you know and so I was like hey that's really cool that um you know the kids are I mean I think kids are like really cognizant of that they know which is why you know an article later is going to talk about the workaround

SPEAKER_00: 11:31

yeah um and I what the thing I liked about that article in particular is if you didn't know that it was kids saying it and it was just you here's what people are saying about AI. I could have read that and think it was a range of different adults at a different set of, you know, life circumstances that we're all encountering in AI and just saying, here's what it is. And so for me, when we think about, is there, I don't know that there's that big a difference between how adults are experiencing AI and the flood of information that's overwashing us and the differences we have about how we're either engaging with it or not and kids, right? And so it's exciting for me that we can remember to treat kids with, with the ability to know that some of them are seeing it as super helpful. Some of them are scared of it. Some of them have very specific uses for it, which is, I think, what we would get if we asked, you know, a random sampling of adults too. And so we should treat kids with the respect and autonomy and range of opinions that they have, which is more difficult, but actually exciting to not think of it as just, oh, you know, they don't know yet. They're not making their own opinions. We have to do this all for them. They're experiencing it too.

SPEAKER_01: 12:37

Yeah, I love that. That's like such a good insight. Wow, look at you Jeff, that was really good. That was really good. The example within the article that I thought actually was really cool was almost like, this is what I think people, when they say yes to AI in education are specifically hoping for when it's like kids and AI and products or projects that they're participating in. So there was the article, I mean, excuse me, there was the experience where the kid was like, hey, in our area, we have like a lot of wildlife accidents on the road with cars. And so he created this program that integrated AI that like watched the like heat movement or something of like animals in specific areas. And then they put it in the car and that device helped them avoid accidents with animals. And I was like, whoa, like that's what people are talking about when they're like, hey, look at all these amazing things that we could create with AI. I felt like that was a really cool example of it.

SPEAKER_00: 13:34

Yeah, no. And I think that was in Colorado. And it's not that that set of ideas couldn't have been put in motion prior to an AI model supporting. But the rapid development of ideas and prototyping and different things like that, they're saying that with healthcare too, right? That some of these cures and some of the research that they're able to do, it would have been possible without some of these models. But instead of having to ask people to do it for years and years and years to get there, you can just run the model and have it try to do that as well. You have to check it and everything like that, obviously. But yeah. And I've heard another, there's a friend I have who's a teacher in the Midwest and he's trying to figure out how to integrate ai into his classroom and he's going around talking around the country a little bit and he said there's no reason if we do this right that every fourth grader shouldn't be able to write something that's the quality of a new york times bestseller and be able to tell the story of their life as a new york times bestseller now what that means is that that kid is central to the experience because nobody else can tell their story but like an author that gets on the new york times bestseller list that writes a memoir there's very those are very few and far between and so the power to be able to help kids tell their story at that level of quality, it would take years and decades. And most of us are never going to have that opportunity, or at least historically haven't. And so that's aspirational, obviously. But when I think people talk about what that would look like, the key is to remember that the person is still at the center of that experience. The kid in the article had noticed that there was a problem with animal crossings, that there was a lot of roadkill in that area, that something needed to be fixed. Nobody brought that idea to him. He had that and then used the tools available to him to create something that wasn't there before.

SPEAKER_01: 15:13

Well, and this idea that it actually, I mean, to your point, it helps speed up the process and also of the creation of the thing. And then I like a part of me kind of thinks like, could he really have like, yeah, they could have done it without AI, but did the school actually have the tools to be able to do that? Like maybe AI was the thing that allowed them to do that at the school.

SPEAKER_00: 15:36

Yeah, no, that's fair. And I, cause I think, you know, with the tools available to schools, I, I Yeah, I agree. if we do this right, speed up some of that work, because we're already seeing that in the workplace. People are not sitting drafting 12 different versions of an email. They're drafting a version of an email, asking AI to do this and this and this to it. And if they're smart, editing it before they put it back into an email thread, because a lot of times I get now emails that have copied and pasted. Here's the prompt I wrote for you to help Jeff better understand. So there is still a large part of this that is the human element. But hopefully people are having to spend less time on what I think all of us would agree. We should not have to spend so much time in writing emails back to people. So I think there's examples like that where stuff that may not have been able to happen in schools may be able to happen for kids because of that rapid prototyping that's available when you have a model that can do some of that for you.

SPEAKER_01: 16:59

Yeah. I will say that, like, I mean, I use Chatti G a lot to do different things, like to speed myself up or my, you know, process and stuff. And I recently, just because I'm I'm using it more. Chatty G makes a lot of mistakes, like a lot of mistakes, meaning there's a difference between saying, here's the thing that I want to write. Like, here's the thing that I want to get across in this email or in this text thread, you know, or in this text. And I, I need to remove bias from it. And so chatty G like generates an option, right?

SPEAKER_00: 17:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 17:30

But when I go and ask like chatty G, like, Hey, who are the, like, what are the schools and you know, in Idaho or like something, something, something, and then it generates, but because I know the answer, it making up some of that stuff

SPEAKER_00: 17:42

yeah and it's not a pull from other places that you know sound like it or if there's an idaho city in wisconsin that will somehow end up in your data set or something like that yeah

SPEAKER_01: 17:51

and so i have gone in then and i'm like no you're wrong this thing actually isn't please give me the accurate you know stuff and it's like oh you're right good catch you know like it makes me think like i'm so smart um but those things are happening too and because it's you know learning and you know all that kind of stuff but which points to this something later about like, gosh, it's learning from us and people don't want it to learn from kids and, you know, how do we protect kids and that kind of stuff. But this then leads into, okay, well, if this is how kids like view AI, like this is what they understand. And to your point, I really liked, it was like, if you hadn't known that kids were sharing those experiences, one could think that those are a wide array of like how adults feel about AI, which I like feel is really accurate. Like, you know, it was like, whoa, yeah, actually there's a lot of adults that use for recipes or that, you know, for doing these kinds of things. So The next one then is an article from Forbes that you were telling me like just kind of was going around your circle of ed tech people. And it's about like what's really going on in AI in schools with AI in schools. And it was from a high schoolers perspective. What was your take on this article?

SPEAKER_00: 18:57

I think my takeaway was that for those folks who are trying to determine what level of AI engagement is appropriate or when we should allow students to be able to engage with it or not we're kind of missing the mark that you know once you teach a kid to swim they can go swim wherever they want and you can't necessarily control how long they're going to be in the water and uh and we have to just know that that's part of their lives now and and the point that he made in the article was if you give me particularly homework but if you give me coursework that this tool sitting right here beside me can do you know as accurately as i would do to your point there's going to be mistakes kids make mistakes too but like if it can create content that is what i would create i can either spend six hours doing this tonight myself or i can use this tool and frankly the amount of feedback i'm going to get you from you my educators is going to be the exact same amount i will still turn in the product if the what you want from me is the product i'm going to use the tool that's been developed in the world to get you that product what i want from you is to figure out how to use Use this thing and me to potentially create something that I wouldn't have been able to do without this. Not assume that I'm going to put it away and not use it. So if you say, write a five paragraph essay, I'm going to return in an AI generated essay. If you say, use three different large language models, give them three different prompts, and then decide which one of those three best reflects your voice. Tell me the seven prompts you gave it to try to fix some of those things. And then show me and track changes. the version that you wrote based on those three models, that's your final version and why you like it better than those three. Not only then have I turned in the product, I've actually interacted with three models that are as engaging as the nothing I would have had before if I was doing this in my house at 10 o'clock at night on my computer, but giving me feedback, making me think about things differently. And then I'm not just showing you that final product. I'm showing you a bunch of the thinking I did to get to a version that hopefully is better but at least is more thought through than the five paragraph essay I would have turned in if that was just the only assignment. And again, obviously there was a reason why that article was written up with that kid. That is not every kid's experience. And we have to make sure that we're designing a classroom and designing training for teachers that are going to be engaging with kids across the spectrum of experience. But it is possible that kids already know that that exists and they can see the flaws in taking a system that was designed for education without those tools and acting as though they don't exist and like asking kids to throw that toolbox out of the truck as they go down high school knowing that if any of us had this tool available and we knew how to use it that is a practically impossible but at least it's not a smart ass to ask of high schoolers you know like we we have to treat people with the dignity and respect to say we get that that exists in the world and we obviously need to change as well because you're going to go into a world where you have to figure out how to engage And if the assignments are so simple that this tool can do it, then we're actually not getting back to Dr. Winthrop's point, which is like being able to generate and replicate something on your own. But I don't know that schools have been able to catch up there. And that was the point, that schools are still catching up to this tool that's taking over not just schools, but a lot of us more quickly than we expected and definitely that we're having a little bit of trouble with. And high school kids, at least, probably all kids, have figured out that there's a little bit of a gap. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:41

Well, to me, this article links back in with the article, like what what kids think about within AI, just in terms of, OK, well, if we're talking about if we understand what kids already know. And to your point, something you said earlier, which was we need to remember as adults that kids know how to use this. Teenagers know how to use this. They're not stupid. Yeah. And so I loved what this kid said in here where he was like, adults are playing checkers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:39

point that the kid made in the article was you can call this cheating or you can call it like operating and how we're going to operate and figuring out how to help us create content in that world because if educators are just going to talk about whether it's cheating or not they're just going to move on like kids have decided it's not cheating you know there's more investment in these companies than any other thing in the world which means that investors and business and everybody else has decided it's not cheating it's the way that we're going to function and and so we probably should go ahead with where kids kids are instead of trying to hold them back and say, no, no, no, no, we're going to do it this way. Put that thing aside and we're going to do it only this way from now on.

SPEAKER_01: 24:17

Well, I like that when he was asked what policy would you integrate into a school to address what his experience is, that he said, I think that we should mandate that teachers are not allowed to send home homework that can be generated through strategy. And the thing that they pointed out was that the kid didn't say no more homework

SPEAKER_00: 24:42

that's right yeah

SPEAKER_01: 24:43

he said give me something that is either going to like not be used with chat GPT or you know or generative AI or give me something that to your point earlier walks me through all these different things so that I'm using my brain and I'm using this tool

SPEAKER_00: 25:00

yeah do you think that if generative AI had been around when you were in school and your teacher said go do this assignment and you knew that that tool would have done it for you like would you have listened to the teacher and turn the thing in without using it

SPEAKER_01: 25:18

that's such a good question because that actually happened with my daughter in high school like she was in an AP class and I won't say which one it was because then people give it away give it away but she was in this AP class and she knew that all these kids were cheating like she's like they're these kids are just going home and they're using this AI and then they're also cheating during class class because they have access to their phones and they're just doing it all that kind of stuff and my daughter was like she actually was kind of struggling in the class like everyone was doing a really good job because they were cheating right and she

SPEAKER_00: 25:51

they were getting great outcomes not necessarily yes yes they were

SPEAKER_01: 25:54

getting great outcomes but they were not learning the content and here she was trying to learn the content and the teacher was really great and she ended up with a fantastic grade like she was very happy with the grade but it was a entire year long class and so after the first semester she went to the teacher who she felt was not actually doing a great job teaching the content and because she's like she's a learner she invests time you know she knows how to do all those things and organize herself well and here she is like just extremely struggling and she's interested in the content so to me that's a problem right like with what's going on in the classroom yeah but she went to the teacher like she had come to me earlier and she was like mom i gotta drop this class like are you okay with that and i was like it's your high school experience like i'm you know i'm supportive of that so she went to the teacher and like she didn't say a word about her classmates like she wasn't I mean, you know, high schoolers are very specific of I'm not going to throw my buddy under the bus. So she just said to the teacher, she was like, you know, this class isn't for me. I'm going to drop it. And the teacher was super supportive and was like, yeah, I can tell this definitely isn't for you. And I thought that's so funny that that was the teacher's takeaway, because because to me, the teacher wasn't seeing what was happening in the class. Now, to your question, I would have totally used chat GPT to write an essay because I know actually this was so funny. I don't even know that I should share this on air, but the teacher, the administrator, he's an administrator now, but he's a teacher. He was like my, one of my teachers in high school. And it was so funny because, oh my gosh, that screen turned green and it always freaks me out when that screen turns green. We're like recording. I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the computer.

SPEAKER_00: 27:29

Oh yeah, we've gone into the ozone layer or

SPEAKER_01: 27:30

something. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I hope this, if this doesn't like, if this doesn't capture right, like you're going to have to come back. I'm sorry. We'll do it again. Okay. So he assigns an essay, like this thing or whatever. And this is like when the Internet's really coming into play. Like we're using we're definitely using the computer more. We're finding sources online. And I had not managed my time well. And so I kind of I had this topic and I had to write this essay. And then you had to cite your sources. But we weren't like actually doing citations. We were just like copy pasting was just a copy, paste, copy, paste, because anyways. And so I did a lot of copy, when it came to that thing that was on the screen and my essay. And, you know, switching some words, creating some like transitions and stuff and throwing in some of my own things, but definitely too much copy paste. And, you know, from like, you know, and I knew it at the time, like as a teenager, I knew what I was doing. Now my friend did the exact same thing. She did the exact same thing for her assignment. And we both submitted assignments. I mean, we, everyone turned it in and then we got our papers back. And my friend got a see me after class, like written across her paper. And I got an A. This is incredible. Loved it. Little note at the bottom. I tried. I tried to get to those websites. None of them would work. And I was like, he didn't catch on that. I intentionally put in like I put in like wrong stuff. So anyways, yeah, teenagers do it like I mean, come on. Yeah, but it was I actually just saw him recently and I was like, hey, I wanted to tell you something I did in high school. Like I'm going to and he he just kind of like got these big eyes like I think he was just so disappointed you know like 25 years later and I was like you know what man like I was a teenager and we all did like crazy things but to your point yeah I would have used it

SPEAKER_00: 29:19

yeah and I think that's the hard part that we have to step back and as a former classroom teacher is what's the actual thing that you would be proud of a kid being able to figure out and there is a world where we can say a kid who figures out a way to solve the tasks that we have put in front of them that does it efficiently and effectively to where if we read it without some kind of weird tool that can figure out where it was copied and pasted from, we thought it was high enough quality. Either we should allow that to be the assignment that's turned in because they've passed the test that we had given them for that, or we need to figure out a different assignment. When Wikipedia came out, that was like, I think I was in, I don't know, I think I was in college when Wikipedia became a thing that was out there and we were not supposed to use Wikipedia. I remember that. And it was all wrong. I mean, it's a similar thing to what we see with our language models that there was like because everybody could edit yeah there was stuff that was in there and and not only was wrong but it was in there one day and then it wasn't in the next so you we had to learn that then and instead we started saying okay you have to cite it and then when people went back to try to find that information it would be different so then you have to cite not just the web page but then you have to cite accessed on this date at this time and we had to design a world that said that integrity looked different when it came to completing assignments than it did before wikipedia existed and it actually if people followed those procedures there's actually potentially more integrity being shown in the production of the work than if you didn't ask for any of those things and somebody just went and paid somebody else to write the essay and it still looked completely new but you just handed it in with your name on it even though you know joe down the street wrote it for you for 50 bucks and so we have to figure out what the point of the assignment is in order to figure out whether or not we're going to blame kids for using the tools of the world around them to be able to complete them

SPEAKER_01: 31:10

i mean did you use like what was that called wikipedia when you weren't supposed to i bet you followed all the rules chef

SPEAKER_00: 31:16

i think it was i i ended up probably using it on some things but i think i got to a place where the assignments that i had at the time that i was in school when wikipedia came out that like wikipedia was maybe helpful in like some base knowledge creation but it wasn't like it wasn't able to do what we have now which is like take this information and generate new content with your opinion comparing these three wars or something like that right and so I may have been able to go get the content more quickly than searching the stacks in the library but I still had to create something new and so I think you know I also may just be like you know whitewashing my fibbing in academic but I like it definitely wasn't a place where I could have just said hey Wikipedia create this for me and then I would have been able to turn it in but yeah I mean citations were a huge thing that like for Right. Yeah. Well, and I

SPEAKER_01: 32:21

really like this idea that this young man is saying in this article that it's a I felt like he kind of offered like a reframe of are we lazy because we're using this or are we actually using a tool that's going to allow us to do this? thing because this kind of is a wash anyways like is this really doing the thing is this assignment really going to be extracting the thing that you're really trying to get from me like to get me to generate

SPEAKER_00: 32:50

I've seen a couple articles of folks who are worried about AI taking over cognitive cognitive skills for kids who are saying something like everybody has to be able to read and write on paper everybody has to be able to do handwriting and these different things it goes back to kind of what you were saying that Dr. Winthrop said like if we can create ways for this skills of reasoning for the skills of critical thinking for the skills of taking in new information and comparing those things you know yes you have to learn and what the the the analogy they'll use like before you learn how to drive a car you have to learn how to walk to get there so you have to take these like bits and pieces to get to the final product so that's the analogy you hear all the time it's like we have to start with like the first thing in order to get to the before we allow them to get to this other tool but we don't make kids learn how to drive a horse and buggy we don't ask them to go drive a model t around before they're allowed to be in a different vehicle like when i was growing up there were still a lot more manual trucks and my parents made me drive a stick shift before and i had to learn on a dirt road in a truck going uphill because that's what they wanted me to do but there are very few manual trucks out there anymore and most kids are not learning that before we allow them the opportunity to move over to an automatic and so i think there is something to be said to making sure that those skills are being accrued by kids but I don't think it has to look exactly like we did when we were in school in order for us to check the box and say that they've learned it

SPEAKER_01: 34:16

yeah well I want to put a pin in that because that there's stuff happening in Idaho that's making that stuff hard like making what you're talking about hard okay yeah right so but what I took as I was reading that article about like you know how kids how it's important for you know educators to adjust the way that they're doing things and I want to point out too that it's not It's not just educators. It's parents, too. Like, it's not just an educator responsibility, because like just today, like just today, like 12 hours ago, Dr. Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, who wrote the book, The Disengaged Teen, and who basically are saying we need to get kids to the explorer mode. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to the episode and definitely listen to The Disengaged Teen, because there is this crossover of if we can get kids to the explorer mode. Right. And like they're curious about stuff. Then how can AI be this complementary thing in the process of learning? Like it doesn't you know, it's not mutually exclusive, but how can it help? Like how can it be that tool?

SPEAKER_00: 35:21

Yeah. Yeah. Because I think, too, you know, she talked about trying to learn Minecraft with her kids and and that, you know, what are the ways you can show that you're a learner? And it made me think about some of the families that have had they've lost kids now to suicide. And they're you know, they're talking about how they found the chat that they had with an AI. companion bot that led to that and so the idea that she's saying that like figuring out this AI stuff with your kid is a parent's job now and we've got to figure it out together is you hear from those parents that they didn't know that that's what the kid was doing or they didn't know that that was possible for the kid to have that kind of conversation and there is a big part of me that wishes for a world where parents didn't have to figure that out and I hope we all agree that we wish for a world where that result wasn't happening with kids but we can't wish ourselves a world that doesn't exist and figuring out how to take the tools that exist and move down a Minecraft more like pattern even though I know a lot of folks are like oh my god more Minecraft I've never played I have no idea like how to do any of this stuff but there are more productive ways to take the tools that exist and help kids set up on a good path instead of being agnostic or not knowing what's going on and letting kids stumble into paths that we wish they wouldn't take.

SPEAKER_01: 36:38

Yeah. Yeah. I what she expresses and what I feel like you're sharing, too, is that like as parents, we cannot afford to wait for someone else to help us with this issue. Parents are the first line of defense. Like we as parents need to figure out these things for our kids. And this is where this is where I feel like Dr. Megan Smith from Boise State with her communities for youth and upstream prevention is such a good model and something that she's working to like spread around Idaho to communities and to parents and to educators is that okay like open AI like chat GPT is the new thing that's popped up that we're like trying to whack a mole like how can we be this expert in 10 different things when it comes to I mean to your point like okay they're they're you know having like these relationships with chatbots they're on social media and they're seeing all these crazy things they're on YouTube and they're watching this stuff and it's like I think that people who are out there advocating to keep kids safer on that and to protect kids' privacy are so needed. I am grateful for the people who are out there leading the charge to make sure that these things are safe for kids full stop. I support the work that they're doing because there are so many companies who are not doing enough yet. But when I was walking around the EdTech place, so first of all, I was in San Antonio where we met, I was ignoring every booth that was a game experience i was like no i'm not doing you at all like because data shows that like the gamified experience like isn't actually like helping kids in general like okay um at least those are studies that i'm hearing maybe you're hearing something different but the other thing is that like there are actually services that are similar to chat gpt that do not generate input like they don't improve based on what kids are putting in there like they're far more monitored than google and microsoft and chatty g but i think the reason that we're accessing those is because like specifically for Google, it's free.

SPEAKER_00: 38:42

Yeah, no, that's right. And that's, that's one thing that I think we have to, as, as community members, as family members, as parents, you know, I was talking to somebody today who's designing a website and created an email address and wants everybody to access all of this, like their finance, like they're going to put a bank account information on so that you can make a donation to the website. And, but it's all through the free Google service. And, and so we talked to, you know there's a couple other people of us on there that have created websites using something like Squarespace or different where it's still a company you still you're still giving your data to a company but part of the contract when you choose to pay them an annual fee is that they don't they don't take that information and put it into their large model right so like when you've got a personal Gmail account Google has the right to use all of those emails and like then you start seeing the sponsored emails that come to your inbox because they start seeing what you bought on Amazon and what you like what causes you donate to and get the receipts for and they try to get you to go click on those other things or it starts going into your searches when you're on Google right or if you have an Android phone it starts suggesting what other applications you might want to have because you've opted in sometimes without knowing to that system where your data is the product you are the product that's being monetized there are ways but they're expensive where you can still work with even some of the same companies but you put up a little bit of a wall where like you know if I have you can still get a Gmail address, but you can pay an annual fee. And then Google says, we will not learn from the interactions. We will not sell the data in that email inbox to companies. It's the same thing with AI. There are versions of the models that have been built for education or for healthcare companies where you don't want, you know, personal healthcare information coming out where they're still using the tool. It's just not taking that data to make the overall model smarter, but the companies make you pay for that because you are no, your data is no longer what's being monetized. They're actually just charging you a fee to have access to the tool. And one thing we have to be careful with, sometimes with schools, we give schools the free thing or the basic model of things, particularly for younger kids. And then by the time they're in high school or by the time they're in college, it needs to be the more sophisticated model. With this, we need to have those sophisticated, walled off, not where the data is the product type of relationships with these companies, especially when it comes to school because we can't let our youngest kids be the most taken advantage of when it comes to that model of you are the product, right? It should be the inverse of that where we are being so much more protective and keeping a smaller garden around them that they can play in before we open it up and say everything is everybody's. And it's also hard for me when we say that we should put all these restrictions on how schools do it when we have decided as a society that we're going to let Google take all of our data I'd like to see us focus on helping those companies learn how to be a little bit more restrictive in all elements of how we interact with them and not just schools, but we definitely have to get it right with schools and kids.

SPEAKER_01: 41:49

Yeah, I totally agree. And there are, I mean, to your point, there are, well, I think we've just been talking about it, this idea that like there are products out there that are protective for kids. Yeah. And one of like my favorite are, and they becoming, they become more popular are this smartphone alternatives. And I have one for my youngest kid and she is like an eighth grader and she has a Trumi phone. And the reason I chose Trumi was because Trumi does have like an AI chat bot for her to be able, but like the, I just like the way that like parents have to approve all the apps and some of this stuff. But it's interesting because this thing that they have generates for, takes what the kid is searching and generates like a word cloud and that word cloud word cloud reads through the like text messages and what the kid is searching and like having a conversation with so it can help clue the parents in to maybe things that they aren't aware of and the reason I like it is because it's a proactive product versus me having to go and make sure as a parent I check one more thing because like as a parent I can tell you that I get tired of checking things there's just so many things to keep track of which is why I'm really glad my school district allows me to like keep my daughter You know, school issued computer at the school, like one

SPEAKER_00: 43:12

less thing to worry about. It is like one

SPEAKER_01: 43:13

less thing to worry about, you know. So I I think that's there. And then one of the things that I was thinking about, too, like you were talking about was and it may well something you said made me think of it, which is OK. Well, like schools get all the free stuff like we you know, we're giving them the free stuff. But and and we're not funding. I'm going to go here. We're not going to go here. We're not funding schools in a way that allows schools to keep our kids safe, maybe in some of these aspects in which these are the only tools that school has when it comes to doing this, that or whatever. And I'm not saying that as an excuse. And I do think that like I am someone who sits in the camp of I think we need to protect kids as much as possible on these devices. Like I have said a million times, I would never issue a computer to a sixth grader. They don't need one. But when we moved into the West Ada School District, and this is not a secret, my kid was issued a computer in third grade, and I had to bring it home. And to me, that's way too young. And one of the things that I think that we could do as a state to improve education are to look at other countries that are doing a good job and getting great outcomes. And to me, Finland is one of those. And their society is different from ours and the way that they integrate the whole, you know, like it's different. They have a different, you know, government style and all that stuff. But one of the things that they do, because anyways, one of the things that they do is they make learning fun when the kids are little. In those elementary years, they're not testing the heck out of those kids. They're making learning fun so that as those kids get older, they've already experienced that learning is fun. So they want to engage with the content. And so when I think about AI in the classroom, I personally am not thinking about the elementary kids. I think that there is a place at a certain specific time with a computer cart that goes around the school, like not a personal issue device that they've got access to all the time. And that's where I think like when Dr. Winthrop is talking about, listen, kids need to learn to like reason, think and learn on their own. Those elementary years particularly are extremely formative. Not that teenage years are not, because those are too. I don't think about enabling it. I think about learning and understanding it and then making sure that as a like as adults at the table that we are protecting our kids in a way that they deserve us to help them and walk them through this process. And we can learn from them, too, in a way that we did not do with social media.

SPEAKER_00: 46:28

Yeah. Yeah. So so I think there may be some areas where we disagree, which is actually great because it's fun to talk about those things. I think for me, I see. a demand that we need to have both from parents and families and probably education systems on we don't need the smartest device but I would argue that we should still probably have a device I think that the idea that text should be available to a kid via a screen fairly early on not all day long but there are if we do that like when I was a teacher I had kids reading from kindergarten to sixth grade level in my fourth grade special education classroom and it was on me as the teacher to find the just right books that had just enough new words for each kid to move them up to the next level and I had to go and figure that out every single day we can use technology to enable instead of a teacher having to sit and find the books we can say today they should be reading at this level and instead of me having to do a running record at the end of it to see what their fluency was, to see what letters were tripping them up, to see where they went back and repeated things. Which, by the way, if a kid was being nice to me that day, I may have been a little bit nicer on their running record. If I was having a difficult time with a kid, I may have been a little bit biased and given them a tougher grade, right? So when we talk about bias and all these models, we have to remember that there's bias in the society that created the models and in the people that are doing the work right now, too. There are ways that we can take that tech and instead of paying for all Yeah, absolutely. would say that saying we've we've done it so long without having a screen in there and we don't need to have kids on screens i think i think we have to push on that a little bit and what i would like us to see us do back to your funding point is we decided as a society at one point to fund research and development to develop things like plastics that we use for everything that weren't designed to actually can like to put different wrappings on the food that we all eat that makes them last longer that wasn't not the initial intent the internet was not supposed to lead to any of the things that we use it for right we invested a certain percentage of our overall wealth into designing things for the future and trusted that there's going to be some hits and misses there it's okay when there's some failure we've turned a lot of that over to private companies now and so those private companies are still bringing us those services not necessarily charging us for them we've also not invested in how we help our institutions learn how to use those tools we are not creating new funding streams to help schools figure out how they can use these ai tools we haven't invested in research to figure out exactly when we see improvements versus disadvantages for kids when they're on the screen right now so much of it is qualitative so much of it is based on individual experience and if we want to use this societally and across the public school system at least i would hope that we start asking for researchers and for funding to ask Right. And you heard Dr. Winthrop say we haven't had AI around long enough to see what the impacts of some of those things are. We could do that. to develop Sesame, like the thing that you learn in every kind of graduate school for education is that Sesame Street actually did improve outcomes for kids, particularly low-income kids and kids that didn't have access to a lot of other stuff because they didn't have tons of books at home when they went home. But if they were watching Sesame Street versus something else, they actually did have improvement. And I think what could we develop for kids? What could we develop for families and parents that takes the tools and does it the right way in a way that helps them? Because there's absolutely going to be a ton that is not effective, not good for kids. Right. So how do we together decide that we're going to demand that either from the private sector or from our policymakers and our leaders to say, if we're going to have these tools, then help us find things that are going to be good for our kids that is also going to protect them. And we should be able to know as families, what is the right time to put in front of a screen? Right now, it's up to every individual person. And when they go to grandma's, it's a different set of rules. And when they go to a neighbor's, it's a different set of rules. We don't know together. We haven't been able to figure out what those rules are, which makes it even harder for parents to be able to navigate all this.

SPEAKER_01: 51:40

Yeah. Yeah. I, I actually don't think we disagree that much. Like I was listening to you and I was like, what is it that he's like picking out here that I don't

SPEAKER_00: 51:49

agree with? I'm okay with a kid having a Chromebook in their backpack instead of the seven textbooks that I carried around or the books that I had.

SPEAKER_01: 51:55

But are you talking about like in third grade? I

SPEAKER_00: 51:58

think we need to figure out what the right balance is. I do think we, you know, I hear folks say there's, there's some schools that are moving away from having Chromebooks for kids and if you're going to just have a worksheet, don't put the worksheet on the computer and call it a day. My argument would be there's a better thing than the worksheet. Stop just giving the worksheet. Don't go back to putting a times table piece of paper in front of kids. Figure out how to use technology and balance things so that they're doing not a worksheet. They're actually doing active things that teach them about multiplication, moving blocks around, doing some of that, and then proving their knowledge on a device that actually helps a teacher see the assessment right away. When I was a teacher and I handed It was days before I could get through them all and actually use that to inform my instruction later. There are ways that we could do some of that work. It doesn't have to be all the time. It shouldn't be all day. And we shouldn't have a device that can do everything in third grade. But there are ways that we can take advantage of some of the data analysis, some of the inputs. And I would argue that kids need to figure out how to interact with those screens in a healthy way. And the sooner we do that, for most kids who are going through society where they're just encountering screens randomly all the time, That actually is part of the literacy instruction we need to do, is what are the right ways to do this? How do we put it away? By taking it away and acting like it doesn't exist in schools, that's not the experience the kids are having in their life. And we need to take advantage of the opportunity schools have, not just to teach some of the things that we've always done, but there's these new things out there. And how do we help kids know, oh, I can shut these notifications off. Oh, I don't have to install every single app. And if I see myself What's the self-agency and regulatory function to just put it away myself? That's so much more important to teach a kid than to take it away and act like it doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_01: 53:46

Right. Well, a couple of things. One, Dr. Jonathan Haidt talked about how children, like teenagers even, don't have a very good capacity to put something away because what's in front of them is so addictive. Yeah. But I think, I mean, a couple of things. One, I do think that learning, like, I mean, I've got to tell you, I really do love a good worksheet with multiple people. tables Matt like that was something I just really enjoyed like in middle school probably because I was really good at it but like those time tests like going through come on you totally did those those are a good moment that's a good memory

SPEAKER_00: 54:19

yeah fair

SPEAKER_01: 54:21

uh

SPEAKER_00: 54:21

it's a core memory of school in the 90s yes

SPEAKER_01: 54:23

like a core it's a core memory and now because I said that I forgot what I

SPEAKER_00: 54:28

was gonna say you're stuck on your time tables oh my

SPEAKER_01: 54:30

gosh like the time table is so good um yeah it's totally gone it's gone like it's gone gone like

SPEAKER_00: 54:35

it's okay that's why you have an outline we'll just go to the

SPEAKER_01: 54:37

next thing well so one of the things I was going to say was that like in this article that like was just released this within the last like 12 hours is that one of the things that they have like new research so this is what it says I'm going to read exactly the quote they say when AI helps students shortcut this process like in terms of like learning and doing all these things on their own critical thinking skills may fail to develop other Other research not yet peer reviewed. So if you want to know what that is, go look that up. But that's like, you know, academic world where people are like checking the stuff and all the things suggest that frequent cognitive offloading to digital devices may account for the recent decline in student IQ levels. And so clearly this is something that like is brand new. They're acknowledging that it hasn't been peer reviewed. But what is interesting to me is that I don't I don't think that it's necessary necessarily that like people don't like the use of computers in school, I think about a couple of different things. One, the decline of the play-based childhood and the rise of the phone-based childhood. So at the same time that we're grappling with how can AI help us be better educators and help our kids learn, we're grappling with a generation of kids who don't know how to have a good conversation and who are stuck on screens. And so That then I think is playing into this. I don't want my kid on a computer anymore because they've got this phone that they're looking at all the time. So when you were talking, I think I've got back to my point now. Yeah, I found it. Hit me with it. more traditional model of being in a classroom where we're not going to be distracted by like all the notifications and things that are coming up, right? We're not distracted by that. But now we have this tool that's in front of us that like can help us. And one of the things that I think about is elementary school. I'm going to say like elementary school with my kids in Lewiston, my kids did not have cell phones at that time. This was like really before that. And kids did not have one-to-one devices. And so it was like, it was often the PTA that was raising money for a computer cart. And what I saw teachers do with those computers was use it as a tool to enhance a student's learning. And so I am curious what it will look like now to not have cell phones in classrooms all day long, and then the use of computers and AI. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00: 57:31

Yeah. So I will give a little bit of a spicy take at you, which I mean both a A little bit facetiously, but also realistically, I will be ready for taxpayers and families to support cell phone bans in schools and to not let kids have smartwatches or phones or anything like that. When we ask everyone at their job to not have their cell phone or their smartwatch the entire time they're on the clock. The number of places that we are, we are trained now for better for worse to, I don't know the last Last time I went into a place that was a little bit less busy and folks who are working there didn't have the phone out looking at it. Now, a whole bunch of people would say they're less productive and the companies would say they're less productive, but we are not ready to tell adults to put their phones away while they're on the clock. And I see taking phones away from kids, taking devices away from kids while their teachers are still going to have them and are looking at them. Well, we have adapted to have smartwatches that maybe grandma is sick and And we have gotten used to as a society being able to tell our kid right away when something happens. I think that's going to be a bigger challenge than folks are ready for, number one. Number two, we can't keep asking schools to solve society's biggest problems and not take on those problems ourselves. It didn't work to put kids of different races on buses and move them around cities and pretend that that was going to fix all the segregation and redlining and housing discriminatory policies that we did. We also didn't keep computers out of school and society at the same time and say, nobody gets to use this. No, we told adults that they could go do it. There's plenty of times where we have asked schools to take on a challenge by doing something that we don't ask the rest of society to do. And we put that on teachers. And so even if it is the district policy, that I hope it's a district-wide policy, the policies that say it's individual teachers get to decide what to do, that's awful for teachers to have to figure out. But if you're a kid, you're still going to blame the teacher, not the policy or the lawmaker or the administrator that did it you're gonna be mad at the teacher when that happens to you and so i think if we're ready as a society to put our devices away anytime we're being paid for work and we think we're going to be as productive and we think we're going to be able to communicate in the same way that we could without it then let's try it in schools if we're not ready to do that then we have to teach kids how to do that agency and yes jonathan height wrote one book i also taught balanced literacy in new york city under lucy hawkins like we did the whole And it took decades for us to take a step back and say, maybe we shouldn't have all jumped onto this bandwagon because one person had an idea and got it into graduate schools of education across the country. We taught kids how to read the incorrect way for decades because we all went down that road. And so I'm not here saying they should be on their phone all day. I'm not saying they should actually have even that device. I'm saying we should be a little bit more careful asking a 15-year-old to do something that we're not ready to do ourselves.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:35

Absolutely. I mean, I just really love the take, Jeff. That is like, I mean, I would call it a hot take, but I can get on board with your spicy. That definitely is a spicy take over there. And one of the things that I think about, though, because I think it's fair. I think your point is well taken, which is like, well, we're asking kids to do this. Would an adult be willing to do this? And I have seen studies that talk about how if I, as an adult, put away my cell phone and like literally move it out of the room, I am far more focused and productive than if it's sitting right next to me. And as an adult, when I go out places, I am actually very intentional to try to not grab my phone. Like if I'm at a date with my husband, I have it in my purse the entire time. And I like, there are on a very few occasions where like, I'll look at like Clinton and I'll be like, hey, would you look this thing up? Because we're having this conversation and we like, clearly I want to know right now. But when he pulls like and he kind of like learned because initially he'd start pulling out his phone and I was like, yo, what you doing? Like I'm sitting right here. Like I am, you know, the delight of the evening. Like,

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:47

right, right. I'm the only thing that needs to be paid attention to right now. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:50

Yeah, your cell phone. But I think that like and even in my home, there are times where like I'll go into my teenager's room, my older teenager. He's a senior and he knows exactly what he needs to do.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:02

But that cell phone is in his room with him.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:05

And And then I go in there and I'm like, hey, have you gotten to the things? And he just looks at me and with like total disappointment in himself, he's like, no, I have been distracted for too long for this. And so I look at him and I'm not angry as the mom and I'm like, do yourself a favor and just give that to me. And I'm gonna go like turn it in for a while and you're gonna get a lot more stuff done. And he's like, yeah. And he happily hands it to me because he knows he's far more productive. So to your point, It's like, yeah, no, I hear your point, but we also know that people are far more productive.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:40

Yeah, no, the productive struggle, and you hear a lot, and I don't discount at all.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:44

And focus. I'll say productive and focus.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:46

Kids are saying, like, you hear a lot of kids who are liking what they have actually gotten. They hated it at the beginning, and then it turns over, right? And I don't discount at all. I think that's actually probably true. I guess the thing that I wrestle with is if we take it away from kids and make them not go, like, it should be okay for your kid to fail every one once in a while and not get the chores done if it's a persistent problem then you start an intervention plan you say okay I'm going to take the phone for three hours a night and we're going to do that but what you want for your kid is for to eventually with productive struggle that you have helped create for them to be able to do it on their own

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:23

well because you want I mean to your point in high school and this was something that I was like very cognizant of like as my oldest was going was I need I heard someone say they were like do not give your kid any type of personal device until they become 18 and I remember like until they leave the home and I so like my kid was around 13 14 when I heard that for the first time from someone it was a church leader I heard it and so a lot of people a lot of people in the congregation were like oh my gosh I gotta listen to this like this is a leader who's talking you know who's telling us stuff and I remember looking at my husband and I was like whoa whoa whoa we're gonna like it's gonna be clumsy and also like not and my high schooler like my oldest didn't get a smartphone until he was like 15 you know so like we were very thoughtful about when we gave it to him but one of the things that I think parents what we want is we want our kids to launch we want our kids to be prepared so that when they go off to college it's not a total or wherever they go like off to work they're doing this thing that that thing it's not a total free for all so it's also about which I feel like is you know part of this is how can we as adults educators parents community members? How can we do better in modeling behavior and our curiosity to show kids that we can lead out on this? And that to your point, we're not just putting all of the burden on public education because in some measure we are. I

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:56

agree with you. And to the article that came out in the Times today that Rebecca wrote about how it's a parent's responsibility, I would argue that it's not the Yeah. Yeah. technology to figure out and age verification gets crazy because the second you put age verification on, we're going to go down this road here. Tons of states, including Idaho, have passed laws that in order to reach pornographic sites, you have to do age verification. And we are celebrating now and the Supreme Court is upheld and everybody's super excited that we have that now. So in Texas and Idaho, you can't get onto a porn site without doing age verification. I've worked at telecommunications companies. The second that those laws go into effect, the downloads of VPN blockers or apps that get you onto a VPN from anywhere in the world or anywhere else, the downloads of those applications go up in the places that have that policy. So just shutting it off and saying, oh, we've fixed it. Now we have this policy. You can't even get on here. Every 16-year-old that wants to go find that material and everybody of any age that wants to go find that material, even though it's blocked, you know, in your state because of the policy, the goes and downloads a VPN app and then just puts the VPN on their device and can get to any internet site they want to in the entire world. Folks on the dark web have been doing that to do financial transactions forever. It just has moved over onto people's personal devices in the places where policies have been put in like that. So putting a hard line down like that without having a productive struggle, like, do you really want to spend two hours of your day doing that? What does it mean for you as a dad, as a brother as a member of society like we didn't decide to have that conversation we decided to make a policy that said nope you're just not going to access it and watch everyone go around and find a different way to get there and so we we have to figure out do we just take the phone away from a kid from from bell to bell and not challenge the actual algorithm that is causing the problem the social media algorithms and some of the the negative applications are the things that are actually talked about in the book it's not the piece of hardware itself there are things we could do to the hardware there are things we could do to the things that go on to the hardware that could fix that problem not just when a kid's in school but could fix the problem over over the long term as well and and you know and again if we're ready to do it when we're 35 then I'm ready for us to tell 15 year olds that they should do the same thing and to your point so how do we how do we help families and everybody take on this problem and not just dump it on school so try to figure out

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:58

yeah I think that's where communities for youth comes into play for me right where we're talking about like upstream prevention and what does that look like and how do we connect with kids because I do like the I mean I do agree with the premise that like well there's been a decline in play the play based childhood but I also know that like parents in the 80s weren't like hey so how are you feeling today I mean maybe there definitely were some you know but that wasn't necessarily a thing and we have learned that that's so valuable for kids and so there have been a lot more movement towards like how can kids I mean, there were things that we did in the 80s and 90s that helped us in our development that we don't have to stop doing today, which is allowing kids to go out and have some freedom and like, you know, go

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:46

participate. down

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:05

wait you do know why you do you do have you heard the counter to that

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:10

no

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:10

okay because i have heard people talk about that on shows yep they're like hey look at all these things they're down and they're like yeah what do you think are they replacing us and not being social

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:20

well so that's so that so okay well because that's that's my point then too is that like there are different ills that have come up instead and so so when we started you know as a society saying no the kid's not gonna be able to bike down to the neighbor's house anymore on their own and led to less interaction with the neighbors, the kids being in, guess what the market did? They developed all these fun tools that kids can do without having to leave their house, right? And so we've kind of asked for this in some way. And we shouldn't be surprised when different ill, like that there are problems that exist with anything. And we have to figure out just like we have to figure out what the device is, how to use it productively and how to get rid of the risks. It's the same thing when you think about when do you let your kid go to the school bus by themselves? Mm-hmm. But I think we also need to think about it as society, as what we're asking our policymakers. Don't go for the simple answer and pretend like people aren't just going to go around. And if you close the front door and you don't lock the back door, people are going to go in that way. And if you lock both doors, but you don't stop people like the folks who build the algorithm from allowing it to just be in another house right next door, kids are going to go figure it out there too. You have to have the larger conversation. And I worry that we're seeking some simple answers because we don't have Yeah, I love

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:15

all the things that you're saying. And it made me like, like a little anecdotal story is that in that community where I heard that religious leader say you should not give your kids any type of smart device until they're out of high school. I know for sure that that individual's child went and got on his friend's phone and said, Hey, I'm going to give you a smart device. And created an Instagram account. And it was like, yo, dude, like, if you think that you're just going, I mean, to your point, like, if you're just going to shut this down, kids are going to go, you know, somewhere else, which is why some of these younger families, excuse me, not younger families, but families with younger

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:49

children, kids,

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:49

right, are saying, gosh, let's, let's create a group of people. And like, let's delay giving kids smartphones, right? Yeah. And I think that there's like power in that, like, that to me is like, really profound in that I think there's value in saying, hey, let's not, you know, do these things, because I do know that if we teach kids along the way, that they can be better users of the tools. And I will say that from firsthand experience that I, as a parent, was clumsy with my first kid. Like if I know now, no, if I know now what I know, no, if I knew then what I know now, that's the way it goes. There you go. Yep. Yep. Got it. I would have, it would have been a very different experience for my oldest kid. Full stop. No doubt about it. And what's interesting is that like, as I've had conversations, like, I really had to adjust the way that I was a parent. Like it was a full kind of like, whoa, let me wake up here and see this worked before. But now because of the, you know, all these different things, how can I connect with this kid? How can I do this? You know, this type of stuff. One of the things, you know, he's now 20. And so he and I have a lot of conversations. And one of the things that he'll kind of joke sometimes is he's like, oh, you know, I really made it easy for easier for all the other ones. Like I was the problem child, you know? And I look at him and I'm like, no, actually, because you were the kid that challenged me the most and really pushed on these different things, I had to take a good hard look in the mirror as a parent. And I had to figure out like, do I want to connect with this kid? Do I want to help this kid be successful? And if I do, what do I need to do to, like, what do I need to adjust

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:22

to get there? Yeah, that was your time of productive struggle, right? And without that, you wouldn't have had those experiences to be able to learn from to go with your other kids. And that's the hard part is that you don't want to get it wrong ever, right? And so I don't blame folks for saying, let's keep the screens away. And like, you know, we're hoping to have kids. And I don't know. I couldn't tell you right now the age I think is appropriate. And I think that's something you have to figure out. And it changes and it may change on the kid. It may change on other experiences you've had. And so I totally get that that's where every family has to make those decisions. And it's super hard and you don't want to get it wrong. And so probably you're going to be overly cautious. But there's also tons of people who aren't being cautious at all because they may not know better or they may think it's all great. And so if you're thinking about it from like a system level, Mm-hmm. There's still going to be people who want to be younger than that. Great. There's going to be people who want older than that. Great. But we have to try to figure this out together. It's too much of a burden that we're putting on either individual parents or that we're putting on schools to try to figure out without anybody else talking about it, about what's it actually like outside of the classroom. Because it's the same set of problems, whether or not, you know, kids are inside a school building or not.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:57

Yeah. Yeah. I think that to your point, I love the idea of, I mean, I love the idea because I like bringing people to the table and like grappling with these topics and having these conversations i love the idea of bringing people to the table and saying these are things that we're actually facing like what are things that we can really do to make the adjustments to like grow and improve together yeah and that's where i think it's not just like parents who are doing these things it's like as community members what am i doing as a you know 60 year old neighbor like i know i know that one of our neighbors like they just are such incredible people and they have two dogs and they have mike kids like they give my kids the responsibility of watching their dogs and what is so like it's like darling and it's so darling because my older ones would watch and it was like easier because they were like 16 17 18 you know but now like my 13 year old is and she just like love this child but she's like not that organized when it comes to certain structural things and you know she's learning and like I can't I can't it's like incredible how much she's learned how to work to be organized to do these different things like as parents as we engage our kids in this stuff It really helps them and the struggle to improve. Anyways, these neighbors of ours, they created a sheet for her and they do this now where they're like, okay, we want you to go over at these times and signature this and put your times in. And they have that sheet at our house and they have it at their house when she goes over there. And their house is almost half a mile away from ours. And I love it because, I mean, she's totally inappropriate. She's been running around the neighborhood for a while, but like she'll ride her bike or scooter over there. Like she pays attention to the time. I don't pay attention to the time for her. And she goes over there and then she is responsible to text them when she's completed that hour of the check-in, right? So then she's accountable to them. And if she doesn't, because we're on a text thread with like them, myself, my husband and my daughter, like we all have this adult text thread with the daughter on it. Then they'll like, he's like so darling. Cause he's just like, hey, I haven't heard Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:34

kids these days are only on their phones or kids these days fill in the blank. If instead of either thinking or saying that, you said, how can I help kids these days do this other thing? It's really easy to fall into the trap of either kids these days have it too easy. Kids these days don't know what it was like. You're the one who doesn't remember what it's like to be a kid. They haven't had the experience that you've had. Frankly, I can imagine being a kid over the last decade or so with what we had to deal with around 2020 and people being sick and not knowing what that was all about. the amount of change in technology that world leaders and heads of companies don't know what to do and you see the most expensive companies in the world by market cap spending hundreds of billions of dollars in something they don't even know if it'll work and we're asking a 15 year old to navigate that I think we could do a little bit better by giving ourselves and the kids a little bit of grace and instead of blaming them we're asking And then at best right now, just trying to take the problem away by taking it out of their hands. What if we talked about it with them? What if we went through that productive struggle too and said together we're not going to be on our phones for four hours a night? That's going to be hard for me too. And we're going to talk about it at the end of that. What was that like? What did we miss? What were some of the things we might have done? Which of those would have been good for us and which of those probably good that we didn't do? But to ask a 15-year-old to do that on their own, I'm not sure that that's fair. And I think we actually still have the opportunity like we didn't do with social media. We have the opportunity both individually within family structures, within communities, and hopefully at the at the, you know, state or national level, through some regulatory work and getting people together and figuring out imperfect answers, but better than no answer, what we can do to help kids because we didn't get it right with social media. And we're living through the consequences of that right now.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:49

Yeah. Wow. Like I just had this like very sad experience. somber feeling come over me as you were like saying all those things like whoa way to bring us back to the table Jeff like that's really good like that's really good and and I was thinking about I mean one of the things I thought about was something that my my daughter just turned 19 like she's in her last year as a teenager that was today um and happy birthday yes thank you she's not gonna listen to this and

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:15

maybe she will now because we've talked about her and making it relevant the rest of it has she'll be like I don't want to listen to the rest of she'll listen to the clip just Just put the clip out

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:22

there. I'll send it to her for sure. I'll send it to her. Actually, like when she went off to college, I was like, hey, so like when you're walking around, you if you are missing me, you can just like listen.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:32

You did not tell her that that's what she should do.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:35

No, no, I really did. I was like, I was joking, you know, but I was like, you could listen to me. And she looked at me and she's like, I'm not listening to your show.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:41

Like it was good for her.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:44

It was so funny. It's so funny. But one of the things that she told me, like, I mean, because she's thought a lot about she's thinking about her future and things that she wants to do and family And one of the things that she said to me was she was like, I'm not going to give my kids cell phones until like way later into their teenage years. And it's interesting because that's coming from someone who has observed a lot of things, you know, who went through that. And so I do think that like as a as this generation is coming up, they're going to make different choices than, you know, the millennials, the Gen Xers and the boomers, especially. And I mean, I can't even tell you how many boomer jokes I've heard from like Gen Z and like this kind of to your point. almost like a finger pointing. And I'll tell you right now, our society is really good at finger pointing. And one of the things that I have seen actually from a lot of Gen Zers is this reflection of what they have experienced and how they want to improve as they get older. And so that's something that's just like, that's really profound. And you kind of circled back to AI. And I mean, I really, it's so fun to talk to you. Like I could go on. It's like so fun. But so right back at you. Yeah. Oh, thanks, Jeff.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:57

You can tell your daughter that I enjoyed listening to you, at least if she's not going to.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:01

Oh, thank you. I'm going to tell her that. So but so in Idaho, specifically what's happening in AI and education, because I think it's important for people to understand what's going on right now. So will you share? Because we're kind of involved in this together. And I feel very proud that I got a seat at the table for you and for me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:21

That's right. Claim it on air still.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:32

Hopefully we're

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:37

on air. when it's okay to use AI. Yellow when you need to talk about it and red when we don't use it, right? That's like a very basic one. Lots of states have done something like that. 44 state departments of education have signed on to a group called Teach AI that is like trying to figure some of this stuff out. And in Idaho, we've taken a little bit of a pause and there's nothing official that the state at least has taken on in those ways. And so there's a couple of folks who asked some of us to sit down around a table a couple of times and start thinking about that. And what's cool about it is we actually have to look at that are already there to pick from. There's not going to be anything out there that probably is exactly what we need here in the gem state. And we, of course, are super special and unique and not like anybody else. And so we're going to need our own thing. Yes. But we can take the best of what we see other folks trying to figure out and bring it so that educators, so that school districts, so that individual families aren't trying to figure this out on their own. And not that we're going to say this is what you must do. I don't think that's going to work. That's really not the Idaho way. But except in some things that we could What do you do now that if you're a Google district, you have to make intentional decisions to limit the amount of AI that staff and students are going to be engaging with? And so how do we think about that? And so that's what's exciting for me is that we've taken on, you know, it's always nice to be first in things, but there is something to watching what other folks have done and taking a step back and say, what's going to work here? How do we see what didn't work with some of those first folks, right? Like, you know, we are not working with our first kid. We are like, we're the first kid. We're now on the third kid. We've seen other people try that. So how do we figure out what's going to work and how do we give some guidance and some things to think about to school districts, to families, hopefully, too, who I think are struggling with this as much as any kind of government agency is figuring it out to say, hey, here's some tools, here's some resources, here's some questions to ask yourself and decide to have a conversation with your community. You can think about school boards or school administrators doing this in their own community. It may not look exactly the same. Same in Lewiston as it does in Boise, as it does in Twin, as it does in Council where I grew up. But we want to be able to give something because we know that we have asked school districts and families to do so many other things in order to try to get things right, that they shouldn't be out on their own trying to figure this out. And whether that means there's any legislation, who knows? Whether there means that the State Department will put out anything official, who knows? But we at least agree that we need something and that it's an important subject that we need to be able to let folks know that there's something going on and here are some resources to learn more and there probably are some things if not this year at least in the next couple of years where there are some guidelines at least at the state level that we should be able to say here's where we think we're going to like here's where most kids should be here's what most schools should be thinking about here's what the state department might be thinking about that they weren't that we shouldn't have expected them to do before the introduction of large language models but we should now you know we developed an FAA when planes were a thing we didn't need one before then but we do need to start thinking about what are the what are the models what are the resources we need what are the maybe staff members we need who are thinking about this that didn't need to exist before potentially but but definitely do now in order to support schools to support educators and support families

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:41

so I feel like this is such a sensitive area for people because they're either very much a I'm totally in

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:48

all the way in right and

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:50

then like all the way out and There's people in the middle. And so this, you know, this work group is trying to engage in a way that is like, how, what can, what is the best thing that we can do for our Idaho kids in education? And to your point, actually, like examples show that the people who are often the first one out don't have the best outcomes. It's often those who hang back a little bit and watch, which makes me feel very hopeful for Idaho because it's like, we don't like actually to our benefit we can see all these different moving parts and we can see what's going to be best for us and integrate it in a way that's going to be best for our kids but one of the things that I mean people have been hearing are that educators want some type of a framework or what's the what's the other word that's called standards or something some type of boundary to help them move forward yeah because kind of like the example of the kid that lived in the area who developed the thing in the car with the The

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:51

wildlife detection in Colorado. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27:54

Thank you for having all the words.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:56

Hey, you put it there and I was just able to, you know, you set it all up. So it was perfect.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:00

There are incredible things that we can use for kids to help kids. And like I heard one, I heard like, you know, someone, an administrator said to me like, well, maybe initially we start where like in order to be able to access the AI and to do a project like, you know, the wildlife prevention thing, maybe kids need to under, maybe they need to be content experts first. Like whatever that looks like in terms of understanding how these things work, right? Understanding, I mean, I don't even know like how you go in to make a wildlife prevention thing. Like I read it and I was like, it doesn't make any sense to me. But, you know, and then like there's a special place for that just in terms of maybe some of those types of things. And I was like, you know, I think that it's important for us to come to the table and throw out ideas because I am someone that like deeply believes that you, Jeff, or me, Alexis, I'm like the first thing that gets me thrown out is not going to be the best idea necessarily. It's going to be the intentional collaboration with people as different things are being shared in this pool of understanding. And then something really cool is created. And then it's a we need to continue to monitor it, just like we monitor kids learning and where are they and how is this working? We have to do that with the integration of AI in schools.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:17

Yeah. I think what I'm excited about is, for me, it's kind of like We have, we've like right now we are letting kids as though it's like the first day of football being invented. And there's like this ball and some grass, and maybe there's some white spray paint cans and all these pads, but nobody knows the best way to put that all together to have a productive game. And what we need, we don't have to figure out everything. And we're not trying to build a super bowl champion in day one. But the first thing you do is use layout, the rules of the game, right? You need this many players. five-yard penalty for a false start. That stuff we had to all agree to for different teams to figure out different approaches to win the game. We're not going to tell everybody the exact approach they have to take at the very granular level of what they're going to do, but we do need some rules for people to figure out how they're going to play this. And unless we do some of that work, everybody's going to be trying to figure it out on their own. And if we want this to be the productive side of how this can work and not the chaotic and frankly scary side of how this could work I would argue that it's the obligation of folks at the state level because that's where a lot of education decisions are made to create the rules of the game and then we look to school districts and individual educators in their classrooms in combination with family members to figure out like the best way to actually win the game right we're not going to be able to figure that out at the state level but we can say is here's some things to think about here's what we've seen go super wrong don't don't you know don't make the football field 200 yards everyone will get exhausted and it will not be fun let's stick it you know keep it to 100 what are some of those things we can say right now and then how do we create a structure that checks in every once in a while and make sure that the game actually is going well that it's effect that lots of people are playing and not getting hurt that you know that it's it that everybody has the opportunity to play and not just some people how do we need to change things over time to do that but you got to start somewhere and so that's what we're looking to do and and to your point I think you know we went back we started at the top with with dr winthrop and talking about how we haven't always done this where we sometimes we've waited too long we've waited too long and we thought that you know companies might figure things out that there would be some all-star that figured it out and we'd all just do exactly what they did social media is the example that she uses in the disengaged teen that's also what most of jonathan height's um work is on on his book that that's led to a lot of the cell phone policies across schools is that um we did not do enough to help educators enough to help kids enough to help families and there's still some hopefully there's hope there to fix some of those things with social media but we definitely owe it to families to kids to educators to try to lay out some rules to the game so that we can be safe so that we can hopefully take advantage of the good stuff that's there and most of all not pretend like this stuff doesn't exist and just act as if we don't pay attention it's going to go away

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:17

right I love the question that you asked and and I'm gonna say it again to like, I mean, you were the one that I was like, hey, what questions should I ask? And you were like, here's the one I'm curious about. And so this is the question. You said, which specific things need to change in how we educate students due to the presence of AI versus how we educated them in the past? Meaning, and by educate, I mean, what is your best idea of what it means to educate a student pre and post AI? What must we change? What must not change? What should we stop doing that we did before? And I like, so what did it like? So, so tell me first, like, what's your takeaway, like on what her response was to that?

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:01

Yeah, I really liked what she said, which is that we, we don't know yet. We haven't engaged with this thing called generative AI enough yet to know what actually kids still need when it comes to kind of the content piece specifically. And I think we're seeing that in the workforce too, right? you're seeing folks coming out of high school and college not be able to get that first job because companies don't know what to do with someone who hasn't been there for a while. The weird thing is we all know companies where there are people who have been there for 20 years who haven't done anything differently and they're still there, but companies are afraid to, they don't know what to do with people who have not yet had that experience. We don't know how to engage in content on the AI side. So I think we need a lot of focus on figuring out what that looks like, right? And And that means we're going to need to design different types of assessment. It means that we need to design different types of lessons that agree that a generative AI is a thing in the world. And how do we help kids use it productively, hopefully in like small models, especially when kids are younger, where they're not taking the whole kit and caboodle, but a kind of protected amount and then building up from there. And on the content side, that's why I'm glad that I have stepped out of the classroom and will hopefully and want to empower people who are thinking about, you know, pedagogy and the different ways that we do that we need to actually probably put some time and research and funding into figuring that out but my favorite part about what she said is that if we can get some of that content stuff right and it should look different than what it did before the stuff that most people like about school and remember about school are the things that weren't when you were doing a worksheet and if we can help kids get the content that they need some they're not going to have to hold in their brain as much some teachers Teachers aren't going to have to hold in their brain as much, but we use the tools that are available to help us have that content when and how we need it and to use our reasoning, our critical thinking, our debate skills to talk about that content. It should allow schools to put a lot more time and investment into the social skills, the learning to relate to people, to not just write your essay, but to sit down with somebody and talk about what you liked about theirs and what you didn't know, like ask questions about somebody else. this thing when I when I wrote something the best I got was feedback a week later from my English teacher and my English teacher was amazing she just passed away this last summer and I found my essays from her when we moved back to Idaho a couple years ago and my mom had been storing them and gave them to me because now I was close enough that she could give me all the stuff from high school that she had hung on to and it was an it was incredible I don't remember reading that at the time and because when I was a kid it was a week later we were on to the next assignment but if we can do things where we allow kids to talk to each other we allow educators to talk with kids more to spend productive time in that challenge of I didn't like that one thing you said but what if you said it this way to disagree on some different things instead of just pulsing out a product so that we can go on and get through the next homework assignment I am super excited about what schools could look like to what your point in the Nordic countries where there is productive play what does productive play look like not just for younger kids but for everybody the older you're the older you are in k-12 schooling the more disengaged you are the less you say you enjoy school so for all kids how can we figure out how to get the content knowledge that we need with the tools we have available but then use that to help kids re-engage frankly in society a little bit more and that we have I think we have gone a little bit much in a too corrective from the 80s and 90s there were risks that we had I'm glad we have seatbelts now right but some of the things we did that we thought were protecting kids and what I'm worried about some in the expansion of models where it's just our kids. I know how to educate my kids and I don't necessarily need them to be around other folks because I'm worried about some of the influences that these other folks might give to them. We got to learn how to live in a world where we're going to experience things that are uncomfortable, how we hold on to what we think is right, but be able to engage in somebody else who thinks differently than us. I didn't get that from writing essays over and over again in high school English, but I could get some of that by learning what all the other kids were talking about when they turned in essays to Mrs. Ainsley I could have gotten to know them a lot better I could have probably made my writing better and what I thought better if I was engaging in more of that we've had to do a lot the factory model of schooling for a long time has made kids kind of fall into the line of everybody do the same thing so that we can move on to the next thing the next day and we could hopefully break some of that factory apart but it's going to have to be intentional and we still have to have some rules of the game in order to make sure that we we don't just all run around and not know what we're doing so it's exciting to me I think think it's going to be hard. And that means we have to pay attention to it and put the work in to do it. But I'm actually less worried about the content stuff than I used to be when I was in the classroom. And I'd be more excited about the opportunities I can have with kids to do that productive attention, to learn from each other, instead of learning from whatever the textbook said we were going to learn that day.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:12

Yeah, I mean, I listened to everything you said, and I loved it. I thought it was so good. And I'm sitting here and like, while we're having this conversation, I'm like, is Jeff curious about what I think about what was said. Anyways.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:22

Yeah, well, because you had the whole conversation with her and you were excited about it, but then I don't think you had enough time to actually get into it with her.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:30

I'm giving you a hard time,

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:31

Jeff. I know, but you didn't, but she had to go on to her next thing. Yeah, yeah, she totally did. And you've had, what, a couple weeks to think about that. Yeah, yeah. Is there anything you're thinking about now when it comes to AI and education that that conversation with her changed your mind about?

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:48

I love how how she, I think as I was talking with her and in the prep for that, her book, The Disengaged Teen, I talk about it a lot with people way more than The Anxious Generation actually, because I think that The Disengaged Teen is a far more view of upstream prevention than the way that The Anxious Generation book looks at like childhood. And I think The Anxious Generation book is great. Like, I mean, there's things in there, I think some standards he sets out that I think are super fantastic. But one of the things that I was thinking about post that conversation and then with you as you've been sitting here is that one, when we talk about going to school in the 80s and 90s, there were great things about it. And like, let's not like fairy tale those moments. There were crappy things about it, too. And school was disengaging for a lot of people back in the 80s and 90s. Like we're what we're experiencing today. It's almost sometimes I feel like people remember their youth, specifically their teenagers with rose colored glasses. And we don't want to admit as parents that like, oh, maybe we drank in high school. I mean, I didn't. But like, you know, parents don't want their kids to know those things. And there's fine boundaries for that. Right. But like, I mean, I, I acknowledge that, like, yeah, I cheated in high school, you know, like I did that thing. And I'm not going to say that I didn't. And like when my kid was old enough and had I said yes. And I'll tell you why I wished I'd done it differently. Learn from my experience in that moment, right? It's not a free card to just like, oh, mom was dumb, so I can be too. But so I think about that. And then I think about, okay, so ultimately what I'm getting to is AI is not the golden ticket. It's not the golden ticket. And there are things that we have done as a society from my take on making education crappy, like more, even more disengaging for kids. I think things have been done post COVID that have made them disengaging. And in a way that's like, I view one of my kids when she went to school, like I remember when she was in elementary school, like she loved it. There was so much engagement there. And then they go through COVID and it felt like there was far less engagement for her to the point where she was like, oh my gosh, it's such a drag to go through some of these classes. Yeah. And so from my perspective, I look at AI and I think, yes, there are endless opportunities, but AI is not going to fix the problems that we have with disengagement that we have in our homes, that we have in our communities. If we want to use AI as a tool to improve that engagement experience, to improve the classroom experience, great. I totally think that we can do that. But maybe right now could be an opportunity where we say, this is where we are with education. What do we need to change with how we engage kids, with how we integrate information into the classroom that makes it far more engaging? And also, AI can be a tool for that. But it's not the

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:05

golden ticket. It's got to be that order of operations. I love that because you're saying, what is the actual thing that we want to have happen? And then from there, we decide when the Chromebook needs to come out of the cart or out of the backpack to depending on how much autonomy we give. When do we use a large language model? When do we let kids into a smaller model that maybe only has a certain, like maybe it's just the content from the single book that we're asking them to read, but instead of having to go through the whole book, they actually have it available to them and they can ask a question of that, like a notebook LM that Google has. You can put very specific information in and it only knows that information, but it can still create a podcast. It can still answer questions when you ask, hey, what did the character do do on tuesday right there are some of those things we have to do but we can do all of that and still end up with a ton of kids who think that school isn't fun and families who are still frustrated and the other part that you said that i that i super resonate with is i think you know there's a reason why all like the 90s sitcoms are coming back and because the the target demographic is folks in their 30s 40s and 50s that's always like who everybody's trying to sell to right so we have fuller house coming out and all those types of things And I think that parents who are in their 30s and 40s are expecting some things out of school. I just saw something that like St. Elmo's Fire is coming out with its like 40th anniversary thing and they're re-releasing it in theaters and stuff. And I have tons of like older family members who that's like a super core experience for them. We have not ever had an education system that did the best for all our kids. And the thing that gives me hope with that is that we've continued to try to make it better for more kids over time. And part of what I get frustrated when folks hate on the American system, because in most other countries, there's a subgroup of kids that are even taking the test that we compare ourselves against. Kids with special needs are often totally looked at as having to go through a completely different system. And as a former special education teacher, it's super hard and more expensive to treat all kids with the dignity that they should be able to have the same kind of opportunities. But we've have the opportunity to continue. We have to do some rethinking. And I like the idea of saying what didn't work in the past and what tools do we have available. But before both of those things, we have to figure out what we actually want for kids now going forward and then take and then learning the lessons of the past and using the tools of right now to create that and not just going back to what we think it should be and not just like letting the tools determine what education looks like.

SPEAKER_01: 1:44:49

Yeah, I to me, this is like a moment where as I've like been listening to you and having my own thoughts, it's like, okay, well, if as a society, we say that we value our kids, and we want them to be successful as they move into the future, because guess what, they're going to be taking care of us, right? So we want them to know how to do that. What types of choices are we making as a society to show that we value them? Yeah. And are we making choices that show that we value the school system in which they're in. And right now for me, and I'm gonna go there, is that right now, on the state and national level, there are lawmakers who were a part of creating a public education system with tons of regulations with tons of rules with all sorts of reporting things. And now those same lawmakers say, I don't really like that anymore. There's this shiny new thing over here. And it's called a value a tax credit, like a grant offering entity. And I want to put my money towards that thing. And it's like, no, no, no. I'm not going to swear. Remember,

SPEAKER_00: 1:46:04

your daughter may be listening as she walks around her college campus.

SPEAKER_01: 1:46:08

No, no, no, lawmaker, you who created this system that we're living in. Instead of looking at that shiny new thing that you think is going to be the golden ticket, I'm here to tell you it's not. And in 10, 15, 20 years, if that thing that you think that was going to be so fantastic ruins this thing over here, for in Idaho, 94% of our kids who attend public schools, then full stop, shame on you. Because you could have looked at the thing that really would have addressed the problem. And one of the things that I hear from someone, and I heard from someone like online once, was you've had 50 years to address public education. You've lost your opportunity. And I was like, dude, I'm not even 50 years old. Like that's not even true. Right. Like, OK, you know, spout off your one liners. But it's like, no, here we are a new generation of people looking at public education and we value public education in Idaho, in Idaho and in the United States because we want an educated public. We need that for our republic to keep moving forward. We need them to be educated. And so it's like and we need them to fill those jobs and we need them to know how to have, you know, to be able to live. in the future that we don't even know what looks like yet yeah so it's like i think to your point which was made a really long time ago as i look at the clock right now bless you if you made it all the way to the end i know there's a couple people that i will um is that what are we as adults willing to grapple with and change our behaviors to show that we value education curiosity like um you know critical thinking as an adult so that we can model that behavior for our kids and that also looks like us showing up to the polls us funding things in a level that like shows our kids that they matter not like hey you gotta walk across this highway to go to the bathroom because we don't value the fact that we think you should have a bathroom in this school what are we doing as adults and if adults think that kids are not paying attention you're dumb they are paying attention they are watching and I just had a teacher in a high school at the end of the school year ask his students in a very rural area what they are he he like walked in and he was like you know what today we're just going to talk about what's on your mind what are you thinking about for the future and his entire whiteboard was filled with all the things that teenagers are worried about for the future and guess what it's the economy it's jobs it's housing it's you know education it's all these different things and it's like we can't let our generation jeff because you and i are the same generation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48:50

Take it, own it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:52

Yes. We can't let an opportunity pass us by to do what is best for our kids. And that's what I feel like at the wrap up of this conversation. And it's so important for us as adults to come to the table to grapple with these tough questions and work together because our kids deserve all of that from us.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:14

Yeah. And we can't just ask a few policymakers to do it. We can't just ask teachers to do it. When you find yourself saying, oh, I can't believe the kids are doing X. What have you done today to help make the thing that you think would be better happen? And you may not agree with the parents of the kid that are doing that, right? But if you just sit back and say, oh, it was better when I was there, or if only I was in charge, or, oh, I can't believe kids are just sitting in their basement and they can't figure out how to buy a house. What could you do today to help make the thing that you think would be better happen? to help that kid that's struggling with that to be able to have a little bit better tomorrow. Yes, we should expect things of our policymakers. Yes, we should expect things of our schools and have high expectations and standards for both of them. But we also need to have that standard for ourself and try to figure out what are some of the things we can be able to do to help out, which is why I'm super excited to be able to be here because you've shown that both to the podcast and your work across the state that you're giving people an example of what it looks like to not just expect other people to do it, but to do it yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 1:50:16

Oh, wow. That's very kind of you. Thanks, Jeff. I... You can

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:20

give me the$5

SPEAKER_01: 1:50:28

after the show. things for me and i want to come back and give that to my community and i think that's so beautiful and i truly believe that if i just feel like i wish i saw that more and i feel like there has to be something in the hearts of adults i really feel like it's there where they're like you know what i care about my kids i care about my community and i'm going to do something about that like whether that's like going and donating blood or like giving an hour at school or even being kind to your neighbor and like being thoughtful about like what's going on in their life right like there's just so many things that can be done and i think as a as a community as like an idaho community i really just feel like i mean our kids deserve it but like we all deserve it so um i will tell you thanks so much for coming on the show this was like such a pleasure to have you um and i know that i will ask you to come back on the show because it's like fun to have a conversation with someone so um you were my first like in person for the season so thanks for being here

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:45

absolutely thanks for having me

SPEAKER_01: 1:51:47

and let me be clumsy all along the way It's super fantastic. And I want people to know that if you have questions or if you have insights or thoughts, I want you to, you know, email me, give me your thoughts because we are in this like real-time work group and this is unfolding in real time. So we need your thoughts and questions like in real time. The

SPEAKER_00: 1:52:03

more the merrier. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52:04

Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Purple Zone. Thanks for being here. If you liked what you heard, leave a review on your fave podcast app or on YouTube. And from me to you, the heart of The Purple Zone says community is where policy comes to to life.