Transcript:

MikeBerry: [00:00:00] Gemini screen, and you can see at the top, when you go to gems, you can see these are the gems that Google has created. A lot of these are pretty great. The storybook one is fun. And we’ve turned that into an educational tool in our district making some decodable text. For students that normally can’t find content that they’re interested in, things like that.

But these are all pretty good. These are gems that I’ve created or we’ve created in our district and use constantly now. So I’ll walk through what they are and you’ll get the gist. Obviously in curriculum land there’s a lot of different things that we can do with standards and scales and proficiency scales and rubrics.

All of those actions are things that. Curriculum directors dream about happening in a consistent way from team to team and teacher to teacher. So using this to build protocols or ways to unpack standards, to create proficiency scales is pretty great. I’ve also been working to create gems that [00:01:00] take AI frameworks, so like the UNESCO framework or North Carolina’s framework or any of those, the CSTA framework and take those and translate those into standards.

And then from standards into proficiency scales so that I can start talking to teachers using language about what students need to know and understand. So I’ve created a consistent way to do that so that from framework to framework, it doesn’t change based on how I enter a prompt or how I feeling that day or whatever.

This one I took from somebody on LinkedIn who had built a carbon footprint chatbot to, when you get in that conversation about the environmental impact of ai, it’s handy to give facts to level set with folks. So that’s what that does. This gem, the Danielson observation notes. We use Danielson for our teacher supervision and evaluation.

But one of the things that is difficult from principal to principal, from supervisor to supervisor how they [00:02:00] categorize and use the Danielson rubric is a little inconsistent. So we created a gem where people can dump in their observation notes, and it categorizes the notes by the subdomains of Danielson consistently.

Every time it doesn’t write the report for you, it doesn’t remove the human element. It helps you organize to provide better feedback, and that’s been fantastic. This one makes sense. It will make sense to everybody in the room. We dumped in our master agreements so that if we need to respond to something we can do it consistently, professionally and make sure that we’re adhering to the contract.

Everybody’s favorite topic, master schedule. We in our district feel as humans, we probably tapped out and. What we can figure out with our master schedule, since we spend three to four months every year reinventing the wheel and maybe changing a thing by 10 minutes. So these are two tools that we’re messing around with.

We’ve dumped in a bunch of research about master schedule. One of the tools builds it from the ground up. One takes [00:03:00] your existing and adjust it. So we keep iterating on those. And going back, these, we’re starting to get into some that might speak to you folks. This particular gem takes the isti standards and develops tech cards that are like warmup cards for teachers to use during morning meeting.

So it’s like a one to two minute discussion base with a photo on the front that creates a technology situation. In kindergarten it talks about how you carry your Chromebook and has a little rhyme with it, or what happens if there’s something uncomfortable on a computer. But really small daily practices and digital citizenship.

So we’ve been using that to align with our SEL standards. And a couple other things, and surprisingly I thought I would get roasted for it, but teachers have really latched onto that, so we’re gonna go with it. I wanna jump up to this one to show you the mechanics of a gem. So this is a gem that I created and we’ve sinced, [00:04:00] iterated and built upon.

That takes weekly exports from GoGuardian and generates a, an email summary for principles specifically to show them what’s going on in their buildings. Give them some, a look at some of the trends. And also I’ve combined this with, we use a tool called Go Teacher, so we’re able to create weekly screen time reports.

For principals to show which grade levels are spending a lot of time on screens, how much, what are they doing, all those things. All of which is relatively available in the dashboards for those tools, but not easily accessible for really busy principals and administrators. When you create a gem, you get to name it, you get to add a description, and then this is the prompt in the instructions.

I talk about a little bit more in the presentation, but the secret workflow [00:05:00] to generating a prompt for a gem is to start in Gemini. Tell it what you wanna do and that you wanna build a prompt for a gem. Have it generate the prompt. Dump it in here, give it a go. Go back to Gemini. Tell it what it did wrong, redo the prompts, try it again.

And usually after. Three to four iterations, you’re pretty dialed in. Down here at the bottom is where you could add research documents, specifics for your district. So in the case of the gem that we made for our master agreements, we obviously dumped in our master agreement documents. This becomes a reference point or a context queue for your gem.

And then I’m just gonna go back and show you some outputs from that.

Let’s see. This is a recent let’s see here.

So [00:06:00] here’s an output. This is the email that’s generated by this jam. So last week we had a lot of elementary students go into PBS kids and A B, C. Yeah. Continue to be on the Go Hubs science gives them some ideas of what’s going on, read and write, being so popular, even though I don’t like it. Just quantify some of the information that’s not easily accessible on that dashboard, full of smart alerts and problems. And then there’s a second part that adds in the minutes of screen time that we’ve built. So it’s a work in progress a constantly. But through our use of these gems, we’ve really started to accelerate and find huge efficiencies in our systems.

To be able to address things, build things. I have a, one of my tech support staff created a gem all around our response to, cybersecurity [00:07:00] situations. So we’ve dumped in all of our planning recommended plan templates, things like that, and we’ve been really cooking on that much faster than we have in the past.

Adding in our relevant information about systems and things like that. So it’s been our accelerator of our thinking in a lot of ways, and. Has really made a difference because even building the gem forces you to talk about your systems, your things, the realities, what what challenges you’re having, how to address them.

It’s a good conversation starter, for lack of a better term. So we’ve done a lot with gems and we have another AI tool in our district through Panorama called Solera. And we’ve built the equivalent of that in there as well, but that’s more student based. So that’s a place where teachers can specifically talk about students and groups and academic data and all of those things in a controlled environment.

And that’s built on Anthropics model versus Gemini. [00:08:00] I’ll stop for a minute there. Any immediate questions or arguments. Mike, are all of these gems shared with everybody in the schools or all the teachers? No, great question. No. Oh, some of them are, most of the standards ones the NGSS standards or things that are specific to teacher use are shared with teachers.

Usually it’s groups of teachers, so I’ll share it with the science teachers or things like that. I don’t want everyone’s gem board flooded with things that they don’t need. And a lot of the more administrative tools are just shared with the administrative team, but people are aware of them like it, there’s.

It’s completely logical that we have a master agreement gem that makes, helps us make sure we’re adhering to the contract. No one’s really gonna argue that. But yes, you can share it similar to a Google doc and, there are different settings that you can do. You can make people an editor or you can make, ha they have a copy that they can interact with.[00:09:00]

It sounds like you’ve got. People in, in your district settled on using Gemini as opposed to the other ones? Does it just sound that way or do you think it really is like that? It is that way. And Peter asked me that question when I logged on. It’s further in the slideshow, but I’m in a community that is very passionate and very aware, and two things that they’re passionate about when it comes to AI is morality.

And environmental concerns. So when Chat GPT released their adult content tool the same day as their school-based tool, I had no prayer of using chat GPT in this district. Interesting. Interesting. And to a degree, I think that was really poor marketing plan and also morally not a company that I want to back with public school funds.

And that’s just where I am. That’s my context. That [00:10:00] wasn’t a judgment of the tool, that wasn’t a judgment of any of that. Additionally Gemini, out of all of the AI tools that are out there, has really stepped forward to make commitments toward carbon neutral by 2030. I can point to the work that they’re doing with their data centers.

I can point to Google DeepMind and show them the tools that they’re using to solve environmental problems and scientific problems. At least that’s what they’re pumping out. And I’m not naive enough to think that everything’s roses. But with chat, GPT, Claude, those other ones, I don’t have that to lean on.

And then additionally, having Gemini already cooked into our systems. For better or worse, right there. The dashboard and the management of it is still wildly lacking, but it is cooked into our systems. So it’s one less additional system for me to manage or worry about or think about. So that’s kind how we’ve settled on Gemini.

It’s [00:11:00] like part, a big part of it as everyone in this room knows, do I wanna train teachers on a whole other tool and ecosystem, or do I wanna casually slide this one into the one that they’re somewhat comfortable with Google? That’s how we landed there. Yeah.

Thank you. Any other questions from folks from Mike on what he’s talked about so far? Just jump right in if you have something.

I’ll keep going. I dumped in some examples of prompts that we found have been particularly helpful in the different roles in the VE Club presentation. These were more oriented towards curriculum directors. These are more oriented to the tech side of my role. So when one is anytime you do a prompt, you wanna make sure you assign a role to the.

For the AI agent act as an expert, IT architect. Develop four rigorous point competency scale [00:12:00]with authentic project-based application scenarios. Give it parameters. Give it steps. This is one space in our entire world of having to tiptoe around feelings and everything where we can just be mean and harsh to this machine.

Tell it what you want. Don’t worry about your grammar. Make sure it knows what you need to do. So there’s some prompts in here that we’ve used to really help us try and figure out a few things. On the tech side of things, this is one of my favorites, is that it’s called a board of advisors prompt.

So you create a prompt and you can pick people. That are experts in the field and you could put their names in and these become your advisors for your leadership, for your IT team, whatever it might be to be able to get different opinions and different thinking into your work.

The other one that I really like is the technical brain dump organizers. So for folks that are still notebook people like to write in a physical notebook, [00:13:00] you just take a picture of that, of all of your brain dump. And add it in with this prompt and it helps you reorganize your thinking into actions in a really great way.

We’ve done that with our tech team when we’ve talked about, we’ve reviewed our tickets, so we look through our ticketing system and we start to look at the tags for the tickets and we start to say, is there a trend here? What’s going on? We go off and all over the place and it’s really pretty fantastic at getting us past, celebrating the problem and storytelling into really actionable things. So it’s a very great thing.

Let’s see. Notebook, lm. I’m assuming that a lot of folks have already dug into this. I like to think of Notebook LM as the en an easier entry point for folks into the world of AI and education because they feel like they have a little bit more control over what the AI is doing.

So just a really quick [00:14:00] level set notebook. LM is a lot like a Google Drive folder with ai. It only works with what you dump in. It still does connecting points and goes out to the world to make sense of what it’s seeing, but you are adding the sources that you want and then you have some opportunity to interact with it.

Within there. I’m gonna show you, these are some of my notebooks that we use. Here’s one that I think a lot of you will appreciate. Those of you that are helping to manage the NAP assessment this year you might have noticed that the communication is a little more frenetic. So we dump every ounce of communication.

We get about NAP into this notebook LM that is shared with the team that is supporting that work. And that’s how we know what we need to do instead of trying to search through the nap information. Certain people are getting certain emails, others are not. So that’s how we’ve centralized that work.

That’s a good example of what you can do with it. But I’m gonna show you this one. I don’t know if anyone in the room knows [00:15:00] or has ever heard about the Prospect School. It was a school in the 1970s in Bennington, Vermont that became famous for how they look at student work and talk about students.

And so I created a notebook lm, where I dumped in the sources over here to the left. And those are the only sources right now that this. AI tool is referencing and I can select or unselect certain sources. I can search the web for new sources and review them before I do anything. I can add new sources from an upload, a drive, a copy, text, websites, videos, podcasts.

I can do all of that. In the center is my interaction point. This is where I can chat with it and ask questions. Why was the prospect school. So popular and it will respond and give me information based on these sources. But the big [00:16:00] news with Notebook lm and in the last couple weeks these have improved quite a bit.

Are all of these things in the studio over to the right? And I know a lot of folks have already heard about the podcast. It also makes videos so I won’t spend too much time on that. But recently it’s added some upgrades that are pretty great. So it’s added slide decks, so it generates a slide deck from your sources, and these are pretty decent.

Initially when it came out, there were a lot of misspellings because AI doesn’t like making pictures of words, but these have gotten pretty darn good. If you’re trying to get away, get a source going. The mind map is exactly what it sounds like. It takes the information from the sources and creates a mind map so that you can unpack what’s going on.

We did this with our network system. We dumped in all our network information and we looked at how things connected or didn’t connect, and started to identify problems with our guest network and [00:17:00] our main network, and really started to understand the workflow and everything there. That was.

Surprisingly helpful. It does. Let me see what else we got here. The audio overview, you already know the it does infographics and again, this has gotten really pretty strong in a very short time. From the sources, and again, you could go back and unclick two sources. And redo this and have a whole different infographic based on the sources you select flashcards.

A briefing document. This is a new one that’s interesting. It can create a table of the content and organize it into fields or columns for you. So if you think about data and things that you might put into this is pretty helpful to be able to organize a lot of information pretty quickly.

The biggest tool that I’ve used notebook LM for is to win [00:18:00] arguments. So if somebody is pushing back on me about what we should be doing or a way that we should be doing it, I ask them to send me their selection of research, feted articles, whatever it is, they pick it, whatever they think is going to tell us what we should be doing.

I dump that into a notebook, lm, and then we ask it what we should be doing compared to what we are doing. Occasionally we all learn something, but most often what I find is that people are misinterpreting information or not really understanding what we’re trying to connect with. And it’s really a great way to trick them into welcoming the use of AI and understanding the ways that they can use it.

And also simultaneously, I feel good ’cause I want an argument. So there’s that. But we’ve been using Notebook LM in combination with Gemini and GEMS for quite a bit. There’s, you can do a workflow from both and that, that’s been really helpful. But for a lot of people, for teachers, for classroom teachers, for special educators, [00:19:00] interventionists, this is a fantastic tool.

It’s a really great tool and it does a lot of the things that we all have done in purchasing third party apps or extensions or things. It does it in a much better way in my opinion so far. So we’ve been starting to look at what are the trinkets that we’ve added in extensions or third party applications that we can start to move away from as we move more into to using Notebook lm.

Can you give an example of that, Mike one, one that you’ve targeted in that way? That’s a good piece. I like that. Yeah, so I think one of the things that we’ve looked at is a lot of text to speech apps and things like that. So particularly for students that are multilingual, for example, because you can translate.

The audio, the video, the presentations into all of the language that are available in Google Translate. So Pashto is one of our big languages here and a lot of translation supports don’t do the [00:20:00] Pashto. And so we’ve been able to, put a reading piece in here and make it accessible for ML students.

Translate. Briefing docs, flashcards, all of those things within there where we had probably five to 10 silly little chrome extensions or a third party app that I pay once a year and have to remind myself what it is like we had. We had quite a few of those. So it feels a little safer and cleaner having it in one spot and the teachers like it because then they can go back to that unit or that.

That thing that they need consistently. So they can create notebooks for units and content and just go back to it when the next student needs it. That’s great. That’s great. Thanks. Yeah, that’s great. Mike, I have a question for you about Sure. The paid versions of Yeah. Of this and what is your percentage in your district of people who have the paid versions and then, ’cause I’m struggling with that here.

That’s a great question. It’s an interesting story. So right now [00:21:00] there are, we started with the admin team. So the entire administrative team has the paid version, the pro version and then we have a AI leadership team that’s made up of teachers and a couple other folks. Those folks got it.

Next. Then we have a train educator training model here that’s a little bit unique. Where, so we don’t have substitutes. It’s hard to pull teachers for training. There, there was no time to do this. So we created a new model that we’re trying out, and so far it’s very successful. I take one teacher per building per week and do a full day, what we’re calling level one AI training with them.

I feed them lunch, I treat them real nice and they get a pro account at the end of the day. And so we started off with zero teachers trained. I’m currently up to 10 teachers trained. Next week I’ll be up to 16 teachers trained. [00:22:00] So it’s just this small change is still change kind of concept. And that’s the way we’re incrementally rolling out the pro accounts.

And what’s been really great is that I’m. Inadvertently combating the concept that we often pass out tech tools without providing the training. So this is like a very comfortable day for them to explore the use of the pro account, understand what it means, and then go back and feel like they’re, they can have some confidence in it.

And it’s also a measured way of me doling out licenses to people that are actually going to use it versus buying licenses for everybody. And the percentage of actual users that need a pro account. 40% less than what I do. There’s that much more value added in the pro, okay. For people that are gonna use it.

You have a limit on the number of notebook lms. You have a limit on the number of gems. You have a limit on the levels of Gemini that you can [00:23:00] access, the tools that you can access within a prompt. I think deep research is a little different. So like the people that are gonna use it.

A pro account is worth it. I don’t want to pay for a pro account for, a PE teacher who’s never, ever gonna log in, for example. A follow up to that. So did they approach you to want that training or you have selected people? How does that go? Right now it’s voluntary and I’m booked up through May.

Okay. Okay. So it was a big response. Yeah. I anticipate the school board and or community saying, why is it voluntary? Everybody should take this, which I agree. So I anticipate that being the move. But what we’ve created is and this is contextually us, like we don’t have the substitute coverage.

We don’t have in-service days. Like I needed a different way to do the training. So I’m not saying this is perfect for everybody, but it’s given us a really sustainable way to go slow to [00:24:00] go fast. And we’ve had a really positive response to it. That’s great. That’s great. That is good response.

That’s a good way to go at it. I’m just pinging on the, there’s something in chat and I think Gary might, we might have answered your question right there with that. And then Josh Bloomberg, you have something you want to, you wanna un unmute and just bring this point? Yeah. So if.

Pretty much every district is using Google. So that means you sign and Google signed on with a digital privacy agreement. They’re only covering some of the Google products in that privacy agreement. So Gmail, Google Docs, right? So if that’s covering, ensuring for book compliance, but they’re consumer facing products, they don’t do that with, so something like YouTube, right?

And Google Translate, they put on their consumer facing products. So it’s not covered by the educational. Privacy agreement. So if you were using, for instance, to translate content and you had student data in that content. You are not [00:25:00] preserving ferpa, whereas Google, Gemini or Notebook LLM are part of that DPA agreement and they’re part of the educational licensing.

It’s much safer because if teachers are, no matter what your district policy is, it’s easy for someone accidentally to put in student data or on purpose. But either way, they’re enforcing it. That makes it a safer product to use. Okay. Said. Yep. Thanks. Thanks for that. Thanks for that, Josh.

You probably noticed I turned on recording a little bit into this. I’m sorry. I should have told you that in the beginning. I did tell Mike and Walter ’cause they were really what I talked about, but I think we’re good. So thanks. I’ll keep going. Josh teed up a good conversation about turning data into actionable narratives.

Of course we are careful about the data and what we’re putting in there, but things like number of minutes of screen time what is the content that most of our grades are going to, that’s the data that I’m pulling. So I’m not pulling out individual student data to create those weekly tech reports or things like that.[00:26:00]

But what it has done. Is, so instead of receiving 17 tech tickets from my high school principal to ask me to block sites that I block, and then the teacher submits two more tech tickets to have me unblock it, the conversation has shifted to, Hey, what are kids doing on computers? We’re seeing an uptick in access requests to AP testing sites.

How can we lean in and support the classroom teachers at this level? At the elementary school Google Snake game was a big deal. Is this really a distraction that we want happening? It was pretty much centered in the first grade. How can we talk about that? So it’s turned my tech meetings and connecting points with school leaders from very dry, not moving us forward.

In terms of an ecosystem to really talking about what’s going on in the district. And so that’s been quite helpful for us. And the gems and the tools have made it possible for us to do [00:27:00] that with a very low lift. That weekly report that I make about Go Guardian and Go Teacher takes me a whopping 10 minutes.

Now I do the exports and Go Guardian. I dump it into the Gem, spits out the email. And it even includes a weekly tech Ja dad joke. You can get creative with it. So there’s really some good ways to start looking at your data in different ways. Here’s another one that we did.

So my high school principal is obsessed with the smart alerts and GoGuardian. And so what I did is we did an export from PowerSchool and we did an export from GoGuardian around the SMART alerts, and we created a report that shows the classrooms. Most of the smart alerts are coming from. So when kids are going to Spotify and there’s a fun album cover, I’m still curious why all these kids are in algebra two and going to Spotify.

So maybe the problem isn’t our firewall. Maybe the problem is an engagement question, or maybe that [00:28:00] teacher needs another training on GoGuardian and how to set up scenes. So now instead of talking about Mike, why aren’t you blocking Spotify consistently? We are talking about five teachers instead of the whole staff, and we’re figuring out ways to provide extra training to those teachers.

We’re talking about classroom engagement, like if you have kid, 15 kids consistently logging onto Spotify and US history. There’s something wrong. There’s, and it’s not the firewall. So that has really shifted our game and just thinking, and this was all data that was sitting there. It we’ve had it forever.

We’ve just never really made it accessible in a way to think about it differently. And if you think about all of your data sources, whether it’s Power School, infinite Campus, GoGuardian, Rand Star, whatever. If there are ways to combine all of those to get some different looks at data that are worth doing, and once you get it built, once you build that gem, you don’t have to build it again.

It’s really worth spending some time on it. [00:29:00] This is the other thing I would recommend for everybody. Google is getting there eventually. Google presentations are gonna be slick. I’m confident of that for now. The presentation that you’re seeing right now, I built on a tool called Gamma. And it is a game changer, especially for folks that spend a tremendous amount of time making presentations.

I spend a lot of time making presentations, and admittedly, I’ve spent 30 to 35 minutes trying to find the perfect gif or meme or image that I can put on a slide when really what’s important is the conversation and the topics. I wanna spend more time doing that. So I highly recommend checking out Gamma.

I do think Google Slides is getting there and they’ve got the beautify component, they’ve got all these things. When you have the pro account they will get there and once they get there I’ll probably dump Gamma, but for now I’m a Gamma guy. And for those of you that also spend a lot of time making presentations, [00:30:00] there’s a better way for you to spend your time.

This is where I’m gonna shift a little bit and talk about generally, where are we going with this? So it’s great. Josh is here. Vermont released some great guidance. People were really appreciative of that. The big takeaways from there, grades three through five, it’s really AI awareness.

Grades six through eight was really AI literacy, and then nine and on was AI fluency and really releasing the hounds on how we do this stuff. The big things to think about though are you need a lot of things in place ahead of moving into this. What we’ve seen, if you think about stories you’ve heard about at the college level even locally in, in different colleges and universities and some districts, we’ve jumped to putting a tool in kids’ hands, students’ hands before we talked to the educators.

And [00:31:00] that did not go well for an awful lot of people. It really did not. Slowing down and thinking about. What are we doing when we think about the infrastructure? How do we make the decisions that we make? How do we find those things? Is worth doing that right? And slowly and involving a lot of people because we’ve seen what has happened when other folks have just jumped to, partnering with Anthropic.

Every student has an account now and they absolutely hate it. That’s not the way to go. This was the question that came up before about, Google. So the big thing I tell folks and the scary part, and I’m sure all of you are dealing with this as well, everyone’s signing up for every free account that they can find.

If it’s free, the data’s probably the product. So that’s number one. Worry about that. Number two, we look for products that allow us some level of control about what we can do with the data and how it’s collected. So we’ve, that’s another reason Google worked for us. We [00:32:00] wanted some more transparency about what was going on.

And then obviously, like Josh had said, the FERPA compliance, how do we do those things? This was the big thing for me, and I talked about this a bit. My community is very passionate about the environmental impact with Google. I can go into the admin console and I can see our carbon footprint, and I can show the carbon output.

I can go and see how different tools, how much they use. I can see their commitment, I can see their changes in data centers. I can do all that. That was important to our community. So that’s why we stuck with Gemini. The corporate values alignment, that was the piece with chat GPT when Sam Altman announced that, that whole thing, that was a big old mess and I wasn’t gonna go near it.

I got enough problems. So we again settled in on Gemini. Then social good commitments. Google DeepMind has done some amazing things with alpha fold all of their scientific research. And so I’m able to [00:33:00] point to that and also learn from it in context with students, in context with teachers, in context with parents.

It’s a big thing so that, I think that’s an important part of what we do as well when we start rolling out these tools in our schools.

And then this is the way we’ve approached the work. So the numbers are backwards here. I apologize for that. But we’re starting at the base with infrastructure and IT systems, so it does no good to have teachers that know how to implement AI in the classroom if they can’t control it. With their students.

There’s no tool to do that. So we’re starting with a lot of infrastructure conversations. Our leadership team is focusing on that infrastructure right now. We’re spending this spring meeting with different vendors to consider a couple things. We want some sort of sandbox tool for our five through or six through eight students that are in that ai literacy.

Realm. So we’re looking at that. We’re looking at what do we need in terms [00:34:00] of support. So we’re meeting with securely tomorrow to understand more about their tools, and in particular, we wanna know about their student wellness checks. We have had two situations in our district where two students have formed a relationship with an AI bot.

That has not gone well. And so we’re really concerned about that. So we want those infrastructure pieces. And then simultaneously we’ve moved into the teacher professional development. So we’re taking a lot of time and some good energy to train our teachers to listen to them, to give them the tools they need.

And then we’re starting with the student facing experiences from those trained teachers. So we have teachers invested, they feel supported, and then we can start to talk about what this looks like. Those students. We’re also doing a lot of other student things. We have a MHS student AI club that’s working towards I have it on another slide, but.

We’re hosting a statewide symposium where high school age students can come and present a [00:35:00]solution to a societal problem using AI or a societal problem that’s caused by ai. So we have some student facing experiences that are very structured and we’re starting to delve into that. And then once we have all four of these components in place, that’s when we can focus on innovation and growth.

And I think that go slow to go fast has really been. Difficult because there’s this feeling of impending doom about how fast AI is moving and how fast we wanna be moving with it. But I can say I, it’s felt good to, to take it in stride and do it in that slow measured fashion. So we, when we started the school year, day one of the school, we sent out three guidelines to our teachers.

We said that tools needed to be approved. We need to know what’s going on, and there needs to be a choice in the use of ai, so both teachers and students can choose whether they use it or not. [00:36:00]But what we can’t choose and is not up for debate is whether or not we’re gonna talk about it.

Transparency is key. So if you’re using ai, we need to normalize the conversation around that and talk about how we’re using it and the ways that we’re using it, and that’s important for us to model that behavior. Then again, data privacy is essential. So we sent those three guidelines out. We said, this is just a start.

This is a minimum. And we’ve since worked to identify existing policies and create procedures and guidelines connected to those so we’re worried about deep fakes. So we started with hazing, harassment and bullying. Title ix academic integrity is a big one to discuss. So we went down that road.

But these three are our big ones and our teachers at the very least, know that. So that when they start thinking about trying something or doing something different, they have some guidelines about what they can and should do and how we can support them. And then this last slide, here’s some things that you can [00:37:00] do to think about.

I would, one of the things I encourage folks to do is to. Think about finding you, your information about what is happening with AI and education in different places than the New York Times. There are, and that’s not to say that those aren’t great articles, but they are going for the more click content, whereas these sources tend to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But in a very scientific and direct way so that you can see what’s happening within ai. So we have a couple of things that Peter mentioned as well. Renee and Sean Langevin and myself, we run a podcast called Explained, where we interview AI experts from all over the world Australia, England, Vermont.

Across the country and they’re very short episodes, but we ask them questions and we try to pull them into a Vermont context to give us some information. It’s been [00:38:00] really great. We are hosting an AI symposium in April for high school students. That’s another way to, to gain in there.

We also, we took a month off. One of my colleagues was a little sick, so we took a month off, but we host a monthly caregivers webinar where we have an open survey for caregivers to send in questions and then we talk about it. And we did that for the first couple months. Then one of us got sick and now we’re bringing that back and as a way to help support school districts in having something for caregivers that’s not gonna fall on them.

So that’s a lot. I’m gonna stop

seven minutes to spare. Wow, that was great. That was an hour well spent, Mike. Thank you. That was really, that’s amazing. I will be quiet though ’cause if there’s questions we have a few minutes. Why don’t we go ahead. If anybody’s got any questions on what Mike has talked about in the last half of his talk here, [00:39:00] just jump in if you got something to.

I have some work to do. Hey Peter, if I could jump in real quick, while we’ve got a relatively large captive audience as you guys know, tech Clinic is scheduled and coming up in a couple weeks, one of the thoughts that we’ve had about using that time together is to be able to give us some time to dig into things like what Mike was talking about.

Give you the gift of time, so to speak, to have your peers around you to maybe start building. Some of these notebook LMS that he did or other gems that may, that he showed that, but, bespoke to your district. I know I’ve been talking to the board and particularly Josh as our kind of local AI expert about some other things that, maybe even higher level.

I was just chatting with Gemini about the app scripts thing and its ability to do automations or create bots. To do automations. It was suggesting to me, put a name and an email on a spreadsheet and it could then be told to send out a new employee welcome [00:40:00] packet. And these kinds of, ’cause I know I’ve heard you guys talk about these things over the years.

Like how do you guys exit employees? How do you add employees? What are all the things? ’cause we gotta notify these 73 people, right? That kind of stuff. And maybe you won’t get it built during that time, but I think it’s an interesting time for us to get together to, to play with those things. And maybe it’s a lot of it’s just the ideating of what could we do?

And playing with it enough to have the confidence that I think we can make this work and then figure out, is this really worth it to us? Is this gonna help our jobs? So I’d love to hear back from folks, maybe not right now, if, as I, and I’ll send it out again via email to everybody, that part of our agenda for tech clinic has always been user generated.

So is that a good use of some of that time? ’cause again, if you’ve got other things you wanna do. Tell us what those things are. But if these are really interesting to you, then maybe even start feeding in. And again, I’ll send you the link to that form of, these are the kinds of things that we would like to explore.

And we can also then try and make sure we wrestle together. Some people maybe who’ve done some of these things, maybe we can get Mike to show up there, or some others [00:41:00] who’ve done some of these to help be a guide. And so I, I am curious to, know people’s interest levels in that ’cause we’d love to be able to leverage that time in those ways.

If we all think it’s gonna be helpful. I was thinking, and I, and maybe being bold here with you, Mike maybe we invite you back, I don’t know, in a couple months or something, and you focus on one particular thing. I think this audience would be really interested in, diving a little deeper on, one or two things or something like that.

So maybe that’s something we can think about. That’d be great. That’d be great. Any other questions? Any, anything else before we go here? That was Patricia, go ahead. Yeah. I would love to do a session on literacy, like how we use AI tools around literacy because 80% of my kids are reading below grade levels, so that would be very exciting.

Like to run through like how we can use AI to support both reading and writing beyond just adjusting readability of content. And that would be really helpful to me. Thank you. [00:42:00] That’s great. That’s great. Good suggestion, Patricia. I don’t know. You gonna send me, Jeff, did you say it? The tech clinic.

We have found a location for it now. I’m not sure you mentioned that Champlain Valley school district has volunteered up their library at the high school. So we are doing, that’s February 24th. We encourage you to register of course for that. And maybe there’s some sessions we can have that we can pull out of this work that we’ve done here today.

In thinking about that I’m sure there’s some folks here that like to dive into some of this a little deeper. I know it’s break week for some of us, but maybe all of us. I can’t remember how it works anymore, but anyways I, something without further, I’m gonna, I’m gonna buy you back two minutes in your day if you’d like.

This was really great. Mike Berry, thank you very much. That was really interesting. Gave me a lot to think about and very excited about it too. It’s really great. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Yeah, that’s really great. Anyways, folks the recording if there’s people that wanted to be in this and didn’t, had signed up or whatever, missed it, whatever, let ’em know.

I’ve got the recording, I can give it to ’em. And I don’t [00:43:00] know, have a great rest. Serve your day. Okay. Thank you all. Thanks, Peter. Thanks. Thanks folks.

Thanks again, Mike. That was great. Yeah, thank you. Have a good day. Yeah, you too. Sounds like we have our marching orders for the next six months. I was gonna say 10 years, but yeah. 10 years. Yeah. But yeah I have talked to a few folks about. Trying to make a whether they be interested in having a meeting of the minds at Vermont Fest in terms of a bunch of different kinds of people.