How AI Will Change Personalized Learning

Keisha Ray and Susan Gentz, co-founders of k20 connects, tackle two of the most popular, but sometimes confusing, topics in the world of education and technology.

The computer-generated transcript is below:

Kevin HoganOK. Hello and welcome to another episode of Innovations and Education. The podcast where we dive deep into the intersection of education and technology. I'm your host, Kevin Hogan. I'm the content director for East School News, and I'm glad you found us. In this episode I am joined by two longtime advisers to both me and to dozens of school districts throughout throughout the country. Keisha Ray and Susan Gentz Co, founders of K20 connects, are a group whose mission is to guide K20 leaders with vetted, research based information, knowledge and expertise, which ultimately improves the outcomes for all students no matter the topic. I'm always able to gather insights and ideas from this pair. Today we're diving into two big buzzwords that are flying around the Ed tech world. Personalized learning and of course, AI. One of these terms, personalized learning, has been around for a while. The other AI is obviously the hot new topic that's infiltrating every conversation, from curriculum development to classroom management and beyond. You can't escape it. I think you'll find their conversation on how AI can affect the actual use of personalized learning techniques, both in the classroom and scale, to districts illuminating. Have a listen. OK, Keisha. Susan, great to see you. Although not in person. We're on our uh zoom platform here the the the new conversational platform for the ages, right. But great to see your faces.

Dr. Kecia Ray Founder-CEO K20 ConnectsGood to be here and see you too, my friend.

Kevin HoganI guess I always enjoy seeing you guys in person more than than just on zoom, but when we were at our usual Fe etc. Or is he gatherings? I'm always relying on both of you to kind of take the temperature. Basically, take your insights to make me sound smart throughout the rest of the year for E school news. And the the you know, putting together our editorial calendars and the topics that we're doing. So I always appreciate those insights and wanted to tap you this month. It's it's been a few months since we've had you on Keisha and Susan, I think. This is your first. One to help me take the temperature of kind of two of the phrases that I'm finding. Being thrown around in the Edtech sphere, that one which has been always there for for over a decade and one that's brand new, that we can't escape for more than 5 minutes. Personalized learning and AI through a lot of the work and the conversations I've been having, of course. You can't talk about anything without AI being somehow attached to it, whether it's developing curriculum, when, whether you're talking about classroom behaviors, whether you're talking about things on the back office side in terms of administration and the use of AI to kind of help put things together. But one I I keep hearing more and more. Is how AI can affect personalized learning and more specifically. Account AI can be a great tool to help enable teachers to actually put together effective personalized learning strategies, so I'll put you both on the hot seat. Keisha. I'll. I'll. I'll hit you first, though. Talk a little bit about the work within your context. 820 and you know the the districts that you've been talking to and the superintendents of the leadership, what do their conversations sound like when it comes to AI and and personalized learning?

Dr. Kecia RayThat is a quasi loaded question because I think that districts are challenged right now to kind of figure out how like what the proper use of AI is in their district, recognizing that they've been using AI for at least a decade. Without having any kind of policy change or any kind of. You know, let's call a consultant in and have a big, you know, meeting about it. But I do think that especially with the generative component, I think districts are struggling to find the line. Of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable with instruction from the teacher's perspective, what a teacher should and shouldn't be able to do in a classroom. With regard to her instruction or his instruction, and then with the student perspective. And I think when we think of personalization, we think of helping find a way to meet the student where they are with their deepest, greatest passions, so that they can have the most success. And feel the most empowered about their own learning and that, I mean, obviously to me, that's what every piece of learning should be like. It shouldn't just be personalized. But we've had to put A tag on it and we've caught it personalized and. I think the generative component of AI has less of an impact on that than the AI that preceded that, if that makes sense.

Kevin HoganIs that resonating with you, Susan?

Susan Gentz Associate Partner-COO K20 ConnectsYeah, that's interesting. And I see, you know, you say we help make you sound smart. Our clients are the ones who are sometimes doing cutting edge things where we're really seeing some new things come. And I would say I have one client that keeps telling me about these AI bots that are going to be here in three years and they're going to be doing all of these things and how right now, there's still a great deal of people that are scared of what's happening, right. And so we're seeing a lot of, especially, policies react to that by we're banning everything. That's the swing that we're starting to see with that which is not going to serve students in a future where they're, you know, their career is going to touch on it and have it. And so to me, the question. That is, how do we yes, personalize and use AI? While also bringing people along who just want. To shut it. Down. Because I think we are definitely seeing a large portion of the population that is no cell phones in the classroom. No, we're starting to see that swing back with some of the policies that have been introduced.

Kevin HoganYeah. I mean, I've kind of recognized that the you know, of course there was the initial fear cycle, right? That AI is going to replace all the teachers that you know, there's not going to be teachers anymore. There's no need for them, which is absurd on its face. And then there's kind of the hype cycle where it's going to solve everything. Right.

Susan GentzRight.

Kevin HoganAnd then now when you start to see Microsoft and Khan Academy start to bake in, copilot and some of these AI tools into just every day, the teachers are already using now it's kind of maybe more of a of a reality cycle, which I think is is is is productive, but they're still kind of just. Layers of of confusion about where. These new techniques and these new strategies are going to come from and I kind of wonder is like. It's like a lot of stuff in the tech. Is it top down? Is it the director of technology and the Superintendent who's going to say, OK, here's our new policy. Use it or lose it, or is it, is it going to be more coming from the bottoms up where it's just you have innovative teachers who? Our listeners and our readers who are already passionate about this stuff, they're already invested in this stuff. They're figuring out the way, as you said, Susan, that they just start doing it. They ask for forgiveness instead of permission when it comes to using these tools in school. But again, ultimately to this, this idea. Of 35 kids in your classroom. How are you going to be able to manage that and have some sort of effective personalized learning strategy? Enter in every kid has their own bot. Maybe you can.

Dr. Kecia RayWell, I mean, there's plenty of tools out there that teachers use that have AI incorporated into them that we use to personalize instruction anyway. I mean, there's a lot of software applications that have AI embedded in them that have been used for a very long time and we. We adopt those to incorporate a kind of a personalized approach for our instruction, I think, where the generative AI can really accelerate that, if you will, is looking at a teacher putting in design a lesson into Gemini or copilot. For example, design a lesson for a fifth grade boy with a reading learning disability who is interested in sports. Now you get. At least it's not going to be a complete lesson, but you'll get a spike. You know you'll get a template for a lesson that you can then take, and it'll give you some ideas of where you can go with teaching a lesson to a kid who has a disability, a learning disability, you've got to teach him. Reading. He's interested in sports. Here's where I can get started. So I think for that kind of teaching, you can use the generative to help you develop lessons that can be a little bit more tailored to student interest, but I don't think that. You can separate the two. Pool of those softwares that have the AI embedded from that lesson planning, you're going to have to have both of those things because the tool offers that really unique personalized pathway that a teacher can't do as easily in their in their individual lesson. They can design them, but they'll still have to, otherwise they can't design 35 individual lessons. That's a little bit challenging. I mean, we would all love to as teachers, but it's super challenging. But I can create, you know, a series of lessons that are for this type of kid, like 10 types like pick your, you know, we used to call him. Secure a pathway or, you know, design your own mystery kind of thing and let the kid kind of come to the type of lesson that they're most interested in and follow that. And I can do that with AI's generation.

Susan GentzYeah, I think a lot of that is just kind of the scalability of it, right and how we're able to scale, which is always been the argument with technology, right? That's how we can we can use online things to scale and reach more students. But even going back to the reauthorization of the every Student Succeeds Act Succeeds Act. The whole point was that we could use adaptive. Assessments we could use different ways of accountability, and you can do more of that through the use of these AI tools because you can then differentiate better through these tools. I think the whole idea of the flexibility within ESO was to really promote these pathways and these options and these different ways of assessing and teaching using tools that can help you do that. And that law was signed in 2014. So we're coming up on 10 years ago already.

Dr. Kecia RayI do think something you you asked does it need to be. Top down or bottom up. I think the bottom teachers always need to challenge administration in doing the right thing for kids because they're the closest to the kid they have everyday contact with a student and the further away you sit from that classroom desk, the less you really relate to what a teacher. Is encountering every single day, but the teacher doesn't see the policy implications and the legal implications that happen. From the district perspective, so I think the tension is we need this. We're you know, we need this in the classroom to make things awesome. And the Superintendent or district level people saying we would love to do that for you, but it would create a tremendous amount of legal liability that we just we can't take on. And helping everyone understand what that looks like. And with AI that can be around data and privacy, it can also be around bias. We know that since we have introduced systems, software systems that have had assessment embedded that we might have an over identification of special Ed students. We might have an over identification of students with disabilities that are in a particular demographic, so there is inherent bias in anything that is AI generated simply because of the algorithm and the way that it is developed. Looked I'm working on a National Science Foundation grant and related to AI and one of the things one of the researchers said this morning is when we design AI algorithms. We design them for a particular population in mind and what happens is you put it out there in the ecosystem and then it gets translated. To every population. And then there's bias. Well, of course they're biased. There's bias because it was never intended to be used for that group of kids or that type of. Person so you can't, you know, in his speaking, creating an AI algorithm has to be. If you've ever done coding, you know how discrete it is to. A population to to, you know, a sentence to what it is actually trying the task it's trying to complete and to say apply to all isn't like practically nothing you would ever see in code so. We take things that are developed for a population, apply them to many populations. Bias comes in, and then we have kids that are over identified because we've used a tool that has AI. So the district people have to be engaged and they have to look out for that because of their role in the whole system of education. But the teachers need to say, here's something that we know can engage a kid, and we believe it will enlighten them, and it will. Spark their interest and you know, get them excited about math or reading or whatever. And so we want to bring this to you to consider for approval. So there has there, that natural tension has to exist for really good learning to be taking place in a classroom.

Kevin HoganSo probably much in the same way that I would assume the teachers would have to advocate for going to a particular website, say, or a particular YouTube channel, or to use the use to use YouTube at all, right? I mean in terms of. Like getting permission to use tools that might be going if not against, but just you need to get exceptions from overall district policies.

Dr. Kecia RayI think we can get in the habit of developing policies based on technologies or events. But if you have really good policies, they will stand the test of time independent of the event and event or technology. And right now people are getting caught up. In my humble and personal opinion, in the frenzy of the what ifs. But your policy, if it's written well, which it probably is. Should stand this test. I mean, we've had these exact same conversations when we talked about bringing Internet into schools. Students having e-mail addresses. Having software assessments. These are not new conversations at all. It's just a new technology.SpeakerYeah.

Dr. Kecia RayThat we're introducing.

Susan GentzYeah. And I mean, I've been doing a lot of work with deep fakes lately, which is, you know, even kind of this newer version.SpeakerAnd uh.

Susan GentzI can see the plus if someone can deep fake George Washington and bring him to life for a lesson and have really cool history conversations with people through that and it feels real and we know that the retention, when things feel real is much better than when we don't find them as real or in context or meaningful. But then again, you know there's a lot of other negative sides that could come from the deep fakes and. Seen where that will go? We've already seen a few examples in administration and everything, but I think there's this really cool opportunity of like there. There are great learning tools that can happen with AI, but then not always being so sure of how far the unintended consequences will go and what you do need to be prepared for as. AI even keeps advancing within itself.

Kevin HoganRight. And I guess we we also just need to consider the student as well, right? I mean while these are all brand new technologies and techniques for us, they're kind of. Old hats for. The average third grader, they've just always kind of been there, right? And so once again, we're kind of at this disconnect with the adults. Are dealing with these new technologies that that these students themselves and. See is a status quo. Any suggestions for the faculty out there who are trying to take those first steps Susan and and to kind of use these tools in the in the classroom when it comes to managing, managing the the students when it either comes to, you know, ethical ways to use it. You know you know what? What is cheating.

Dr. Kecia RayYeah.

Kevin HoganIn in AI and what it means to write a hundred word essay as well as just kind of the bigger the bigger picture ramifications.

Susan GentzYeah. Yeah. Well, I do think that a lot of it is going to come back to how your district is guard railing, right, like that's where it's going to have the biggest effect. And I know Keith just said a lot of the policies that are good and will stand the test of time, but also it's still a little bit the wild Wild West. I mean, especially it. And if you go above the district level at the state level and. Federal level. It's a lot of task forces right now, so people are still trying to decide exactly how they want to put those guardrails in and what it looks like. And putting guardrails in and not limiting is the hardest conversation you're going to have around it, right, like. How do we make sure they're safe, but not limit what we? Can do with it. And I think that's really where the biggest opportunity for districts is right now as students come in and they ask for these tools or they use it somewhere else and they don't understand why. They can't use it at school. Or different scenarios like that. I think those policies are really going to set the tone for future use in whichever district.

Kevin HoganThat resonate kasha.

Dr. Kecia RayIt does. I think that we, you know, we've seen a lot around. The AI frenzy, as I like to call it. But I do think it is causing people to to look very carefully at their policies at their practices and think about. How do we need to to susans phrase put guardrails so that we can protect our kids, protect our data, protect our system and also you know guard rails are meant to protect the person in the car and the car. But the guardrail like takes the brunt of it, right? So how can we put a structure in place where the guardrail takes the brunt of it, but the kids are still safe? The system is still safe. We're still able to kind of move ahead and. I. Think not hitting any of the potholes, which would be the bias that could potentially be present. And any kind of data usage that could potentially happen that's not approved. I know some districts are like, well, should we bring our data back on Prem or you know can should we get rid of the cell phones? I mean it's creating. It's creating conversations and discussions that we thought we had already had, and now we're second guessing them, which may or may not be a bad thing. It's just, let's not second guess them in in a vacuum. And let's not second guess them in a state of frenzy. Right, you never make good decisions when you're in a state of frenzy. You make them when you're calm, collected, soaking in all the information, really thinking deeply about it. And then. And reacting accordingly. There are some really great resources out there, some phenomenal districts doing great stuff. I'm doing a series of interviews across the country just specific to AI. They'll be housed in their system, but I will also have them accessible through the K20 Connect website. And I think it's super telling because I'm just asking them. Are you using that? What's your approach? What are you doing? What are you thinking?

Kevin HoganSo when you when you're talking to these districts, you said there's some really innovative stuff going on out there and then you have districts who are, say, two or three. Here's kind of behind. I mean, maybe they're still just kind of recovering from COVID any particular, if not pieces of advice. It's just kind of a heads up of what might be coming their way over the next two to three years when it comes to further advances with personalized learning via these AI tools.

Dr. Kecia RayMy personal opinion is in the next 5 to 10 years, education is going to have to look very, very different than it does today or you will have a massive amount of people not choosing. Public education. And AI is attributing that if I can enroll my kid in a program that gives access to all of these things versus a school district that shut it all down, in my opinion is it's a good thing. And I want her to be. I mean, it's not going away. I'd rather her learn how to use it. What's appropriate? What's not appropriate? How to? Incorporated into her daily life rather than, you know, I'm going to put all the elect stuff in my house. It's literally never going to happen. I I'm waiting for the Alexa that's going to deliver a peanut butter sandwich to her when I want to come.

Kevin HoganBut your 3D printer for.

Dr. Kecia RayThat I do need that you're right. But you know, I as a parent, I might choose a different path. And I think you're going to see more and more parents.SpeakerOK.

Dr. Kecia RayAdvocate for I want a personalized experience for my kids. It's not even personalized. It's just I want an experience for my head that's tailored to what their needs are and what their interests are. And yes, that's personalized. But that's more than what 1 teacher can do. That's really what a whole school and a whole system needs to embrace.

Kevin HoganExcellent, Susan. Well, we'll leave you with the last word on this.

Susan GentzOhh boy. Yeah, it's true. I mean, wouldn't we think especially to with S or funds dropping off now, districts are going to have to be making some hard decisions on the tools to keep and the ones that are helping the students the most and the ones that are attracting students to their district. When you look at? A couple of years ago, economics put out before atypical shocks coming to the education market, declining enrollment, a shortage for labor recession. All of these things. This is what districts are fighting against, and if you can attract both students and teachers to your district, you're going to be in the best place because everybody is fighting those issues to some extent. And if it is because you allow students to truly have a personalized learning experience that gets them into a career path. That they're passionate about and they want to be in and they have awesome opportunities to get into there and meet the people that are doing it in their community. I'm here in Iowa, we have a brain drain problem. If we can get students excited about the communities they live in, that is a win for everybody all around. And I think if you're open to using transformative learning. Models and transformative tools. It's going to put you in a way better place for drawing people in and keeping people there.

Kevin HoganYeah, well, I need the toughest part of my job here would be to end the conversation. We could go on for a while. That the topic is so important and so many different layers and so many different aspects of it. But I appreciate your time for this little aspect of it and look forward to talking to you both again soon.

Susan GentzThanks.

Kevin HoganAnd that about wraps it up for this episode of Innovations and Education, be sure to go up to eschoolnews.com and click on to the podcast and subscribe. I think if you like this conversation and you made it this far, you probably find enjoyment in our other episodes. Also, be sure to bookmark E school news.com for a variety of resources to do your job when it comes to exploring the latest and greatest trends in education and technology once again. I'm Kevin Hogan, and thanks for listening.