001the thing that I'm already doing. >> I'm sitting at the door and now you're talking about the weather after today. Looking >> forward to next week. Sounds like rough. >> This is my I'm pretty cool with weather. Like I don't mind like to be out and about, but like the worst weather is like 40°. Just sucks. Yeah, it's no good. >> We've just had a a series of just not fun days. >> It's time. It's time to stop. >> Yeah. >> And move on. >> Yeah. Do something >> there too if anybody >> Yeah. They gave us a whole ton of them. Like that basket keeps refilling magically somehow >> because we had a whole case of them. >> The kids gave us a whole >> case been disappearing. We've just been putting water in.
002>> I thought he didn't bring it up if anybody wanted some. >> I told Bill I was I got a black and white cookie down the street and I could just >> Who doesn't love a cookie? >> Um All right, let's get started. I know that um Patrick's running a little late. I'm sure Mark um is on his way, but it's a you know rainy evening and we start at 7 o'clock. So, let's um we have a quorum so we can start at 7 o'clock. Um so, actually it's 7:02. I'm going to call the Thursday, March 5th, 2026 board of education regular meeting to order. Has everyone had a chance to look at the agenda? >> Yes. >> Is there a motion to approve the agenda? >> So move. >> Thank you, Pam. Lori, thank
003you for the second. All in favor? carries unanimously. Um, comments from the public. The board has set aside time at the beginning and end of regular meetings for public comments for members of the public to share their views on matters involving the Wilton Public Schools and to help inform the board's decisions on such matters. Two minutes will be allotted to each speaker and a maximum of 15 minutes to anyone subject. For the record, please also give your name and address. The board considers the views of citizens in its deliberations and welcomes and appreciates public comment. The board listens to public comment thoughtfully and with interest. The board, however, generally does not respond to public comment during board meetings by offering commentary or answering questions. The board also invites commentators and the public to contact the
004board or the superintendent directly with any specific questions or comments. Are there any comments from the public? Eric, >> Eric, there any comments? No. Okay, great. Thank you. Um, consent agenda. The consent agenda consists of the regular meeting uh minutes from February 26 and the policy and communications committee meeting minutes from February 26 as well. Um, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? >> So, move. >> Thank you, Nicola. Any questions, discussion? >> Hearing none. Is there a second? >> Second. >> Thank you, Pam. All in favor? I you good, Kim? Okay, great. Motion carries unanimously. >> Um board chair report. Um I just would like to just take a minute to um continue to thank everybody for their continued flexibility and resiliency as we deal with this crazy weather and get over
005the the hill to spring. I know it's throwing everybody off. Um board members included. So um just thank you. um to every to parents, kids, teachers, staff um for help um keeping everything moving along. And um I just want to also just reiterate and thank everybody again for um their work during um budget season and that we will be giving the presentation to the board of finance on March 18th at 7:00. It's a Wednesday. It happens in the Middle Brook auditorium. Um and it should hopefully um continue to be a smooth and collaborative process. And also just you know um Kevin is with um family this evening so we have the other Dr. Smith here with us tonight. So just thank you for um sitting in. >> Um I don't know if Kevin left anything
006for superintendent. Um the only thing I wanted to share was that um in case you don't know we're in the middle of a tri-state visit um Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of this week, the focus is on special education and we'll be having a debrief um tomorrow um at 11 o'clock in the zone or if anybody would like to join us. >> It's at 10. >> Oh, it's at 10. I'm sorry. >> Yes, I'm coming. >> Laur and I are coming. >> Oh, good. >> Yeah. I actually crashed it and listened to >> You're more than welcome. >> I did crash. >> You don't crash anything. You're just >> She was so good. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, it's exciting. It's really nice. We have um a bunch of different teachers and administrators from the tri-state area.
007So, some Connecticut, some New York um are coming in to take a look at our continuum of service. We really have three essential questions which focus on how students with disabilities are accessing grade level content in the classroom. How our regular education and special education teachers are co-planning for those students um and kind of shared ownership. Um and then how we're really monitoring that um progress and continuing to close the achievement gap. So they've spent um half a day with us kind of learning and then half a day in schools and today a full day in schools and then tomorrow they'll gather their feedback um and then share with us at 10:00. >> It's fantastic. >> Yeah. So that's why I couldn't find a parking spot the other day. It's been so busy around here
008>> and the snow didn't help that. So thank you to you know the high school team for um you know >> accommodating all of that. Um okay. And um next up is um the um we have Matt Mervvis here, our guest speaker, and we're continuing our AI workshops. And I'll take it to Bill and Matt to kick us off. Great. >> All right. So, uh the plan for tonight uh is to discuss AI curriculum and instruction. We've had a couple of uh obviously from the weather and lots of other stuff. um you know some long meetings etc. We've had some postponements. Our series changed a little bit. So we flip-flopped um talking about digital literacy and AI literacy and with this one. So we have Matt here tonight. We'll talk about AI curriculum instruction. Next
009I almost said next class. Next session. It's kind of like a class. Next session we'll talk about um the digital literacy which will be neat. And I I'll have um some folks from the LSC here and we can talk through some of that. Um so for tonight uh the focus is to think about how you know schools can be considered not to be evenly preparing students for success outside of academia. Some people love levy that criticism to us or level that criticism to us. Um so how can we reevaluate and realign our curricula to provide bigger relevance and agency needed to meet the dynamic tech technical demands of modern society. It's kind of a mouthful. Matt's going to say it way better than me. Um but the agenda is just I'll give a brief um
010curriculum update. um just kind of remind you guys about the pilot kind of year two that we're in. Um I'll share some slides that I had shared with the high school a month or two ago um to kind of talk about a soft launch of um Notebook LM and um Gemini that we've done with the high school students and uh then I'll turn it over to Matt. Sound good? >> Sounds great. >> All right, let's do let's do it. Thank you. All right. So, everyone wants to know the why. Uh, you know, when you're starting a new initiative, and I obviously anything tech or AI related is no exception. And, um, the analogy that I continue to draw, and I apologize if you heard a bunch of times before, is that I feel like, you
011know, 15, 20 years ago when cell phones kind of came into prominence, um, as educators, it took us a while to catch up with that. And you could argue that, you know, we have books being written like The Anxious Generation and we have um, you know, cell phone bans going on and people trying to descreen. And, uh, I love telling the story like it's not just kids. Uh, I remember um, when I first started um, kind of putting some of these slides together uh, back in the fall, I there was somebody riding a motorcycle and texting behind me at the same time and all I thought was this person has a death wish and you know, so it's crazy. So, like just that that amount of tethering that we all have, not just our students,
012to our phones and to social media. Um, I think a lot of that is due in part to how they're designed, how they're engineered, which it'll be a conversation for next time. Uh, but it's also because I think as educators, we were a little bit behind the ball and we didn't talk about that stuff enough of kids. And now that generation has gotten older. Um, and there, you know, there's a lot of really positive things that are being done in that realm, but then, you know, we have to admit that there's quite a bit of negative negative things, too. So, uh, we with AI, we really can't afford to be the ostrich with the head in the sand. And I don't feel like anyone in this room is, and everybody's been really encouraging with what
013we've been doing. Uh, hence the update. So, I just wanted to give you a little bit of the why as to um why we're kind of pursuing this AI pilot and why we're going to try to um update the curriculum in the LLC and other places to provide more direct instruction about AI use. >> Did you make that photo with an banana? >> I certainly did. That was Gemini. You can see little water mark in the lower right. >> Yeah. If I were to draw it, there would be a stick figure kid with a box on his hand and some kind of fluffy thing and that would probably be about it would look like an explosion basically. Um, so I think I've shown this slide before. Um, I pretty sure I stole from Matt at
014one point. Uh, it's just about the World Economic Forum uh stating that you know the literacies of the modern age aren't necessarily um what we traditionally thought of. So, you know, there are certain things like um you know, uh leadership or resilience that we've always talked about, but um stressing more critical thinking, technological literacy, um AI literacy, etc., uh is more where we need to get students and um that's kind of our job is to definitely our job to try to get them there. So, uh these are just some things to consider as we prepare students to participate in their college and future careers. Um, so part of the what and um, I'm gonna Matt's gonna actually update a little bit too about some of the things we're doing specifically. I'd shared a lot with
015him and it folds in his presentation a little bit better. Um, so we'll get into some more details momentarily, but school AI, Gemini, and notebook LLM are our main AI tools uh, that we're using right now. uh they're furper and cappa compliant and um unlike what a lot of students have accessed kind of on their own you know whether it be character AI or um chat GBT etc um these are much more uh safe and they provide a lot of capability more focused on academics rather than recreation or creativity which isn't necessarily a bad thing but um it's not necessarily what we want to promote in schools to try to keep kids uh learning about this stuff in a safe and effective way. So we've gone with these tools. Um talk a little bit about
016some of the how. So again, working together and trying to maximize kids learning inside of the outside of the classroom is what we want to do especially um in building AI literacy. So how are students using it right now? Um this is a report. I know I had shared this slide in the past too um from project tomorrow. Um and we talked about this in terms of um how AI can improve student engagement. Uh but I just highlighted a couple of the latter bullet points uh that we had gone over a few months ago. Uh and this this is from 2025. I'm sure the numbers only grown, but 54% of survey students uh say they're regularly using technology like AI to learn about things that are interesting to them and uh self-directing their learning. And
017uh they're also using it to kind of fill in the gaps of things that they may not understand. Um so they're teaching themselves. are becoming more autodidactic using technology which is awesome. Um but you know for us to kind of think about engagement think about technology where those things intersect uh I'm sure we can make this even more effective as we help students learn how to learn learn in the best ways for them. So students are already doing this and um we had uh administered a survey um a while back and it was kind of getting sentiments about AI and trying to scope figure out um kind of how the pilots landing with teachers and what's their use and um we didn't have have everyone in the entire district unfortunately you know obviously every survey
018is like that but we had a pretty good sample especially for teachers from the high school and um just seeing here um you know about 75% of teachers are using AI to support their professional work in some way, shape or form at the administration of the survey. And um if you flip to the next one, uh more than half are using it to actually support their classroom teaching, which I think was really neat uh to see that. Uh so these are teachers who have reported they're using AI with students and to help the help the students master AI tools, but also help to uh improve their skill development within those classes. So I thought that was really neat. Um, so again, Matt's going to cover a lot more of this and he actually has some
019examples of things that I share with him that our students are currently doing. Uh, but I just want to give you a little bit of road map before we kind of get into more of the specifics. Um, we're going to be engaging in a digital citizenship, digital literacy curriculum review through the LLC this summer. Um, so we're already working on uh gathering materials, um, sketching out scope, scope, and sequence. Um I'm actually attending uh the PE uh meetings for their curriculum review to kind of learn where we have some intersections of things. Um one thing not AI related but just social media. I know that in their health classes they're discussing um you know some best practices for social media. I know we're also talking about that. Uh so we're trying to find some places
020where we can eliminate redundancies and maximize our time with students in that regard. Uh so there's a whole lot of curriculum work going on not just in um our realm but throughout the school. Um we're again putting together these resources is meant to be a group effort and um students are asking us for the support. We've had um some students attend our AI task force and they've been a great resource and you know in just um talking with students there and in other venues um they're all saying that they really want to know more about AI and how to use it properly. And um there are there are teachers using and getting really great feedback from students saying, "Oh, I could use Notebook LM and use this the these guided study tools or I can
021talk with this chatbot in schooli and get feedback on my essay." And they're really appreciative of it. Um leaving them in the dark kind of like we again, not every people in this room, I'm not implicating the the general we um in education, we kind of let students figure out social media and cell phones for themselves. And I'm really hoping that um as a as a group, we will try to avoid that with AI and we'll be able to encourage and inspire students to use it um in really um creative and productive ways. So again, I'm going to turn it over to Matt, let him talk a little bit more about the stuff he's seeing and um you know, share a little bit about what's going on in Wilton with you and then happy to
022answer questions at the end. Great. >> Fantastic. Appreciate it. Wow. >> Hi folks. >> Hi. >> Nice to be with you. >> I think this is the third evening I'm I'm like the I hang out in the evenings in Wilton, which is fun. We were on the panel. We did a community meeting a couple years ago and I live around the corner in West Obridge, Massachusetts. So, it's a big thing only for you guys. Um, but no, I I really appreciate it. It's funny. I was thinking a little bit about both the fact that you have come as a board to this topic on a couple occasions and also looking at the pilot and at the student involvement. So someone like me, my team, I'm from I work at Ed Advance up in Lichfield, the
023regional se service center, sort of like CES of the of the North Woods, but my team works in about 110 districts in the state. And I work around the country on this stuff as well. And so you start to develop your own like internal metrics for maturity as a district. Like what does it look like when a district is making, you know, headway around the safe, productive, ethical use of AI? And so a board that comes back, I mean, I'm with a number of boards. A board that comes back to this more than once in three years is laudable and and slight and frankly unusual. So I appreciate your investment in time and tonight as well. I hope it brings something unique over these conversations. Uh you know a team that brings students into the
024AI planning conversation, a team that is constantly kind of dipsticking their staff to see where they're at and in training them and providing pilots. I just, you know, well done. It's a long way of saying well done. Okay. All right. So, um, let me jump in. I typically will share a number of big ideas to stay grounded around this topic. We're not going to do all of them because tonight is really looking at curriculum instruction. I'm a very informal guy. So, I'm going to share some things, but please interrupt me, push back, ask questions, whatever, whatever's helpful. I I I want you to kind of learn in the moment in ways that are instructive. So, this is my team. We are again at at Advance. Uh I I'll share a couple different resources and Bill
025has access to these slides. If it's useful, we can send them around. But most of what we do, we maintain up on this page. A lot of resources and tools for educators. And again, we just do a lot of work in Connecticut. In some level, that's helpful because we're seeing things from neighboring towns, uh including a number of towns along the this part of the county. And then this little podcast we do called Chat edu. So, if you're a podcast person, this thing has been wild. Absolutely wild. I mean, I feel like everybody I meet has a podcast and so I'm just another one of them. Uh, but we do a our hundth episode comes out tomorrow and I have met people from all over the world. We, you know, have wind up making friends
026and connections with people globally who are interested in this topic. So, if you're interested, feel free to join along. This has been an unusual couple weeks in this space and this is an unusual space in general, right? education I think was almost the tip of the spear. You know, I talked to any humanities teacher going all the way back to November of 22 and this thing felt unusual because all of a sudden there was a tool that was in kids' hands that could do a lot of work for them and that was upsetting. Uh and the conversation, we were chatting about this before, the conversation in schools have have operated around like a a similar set of themes for what will now be this is really the fourth year in schools that we've been kind
027of thinking through the opportunity and challenge. But as you watch the news, right, this is in the Department of Defense. This is in, you know, every level of the labor market right now. It's showing up in really profound ways. And so I was delighted to hear that in general, you all are feeling positive and kind of optimistic. I am as well. But I do recognize that this is just an unusual period and I think we're probably in the earliest chapters of it. Um, so my goal is to generally as I work with small groups and large groups is to try to from an educational lens think a little bit about how we ground ourselves. I say that before I show this video because this is sort of like the march of time over the last
028several years. Um, how many of you today, just out of curiosity, and if you haven't touched this thing in months, if not forever, you may be the wisest among us, but I we were chatting about this just a second ago. How many of you today used some AI tool in some way? Is it interesting? Yeah. Let's do a really quick random sample. Like Ruth, what was your was your use case? Um, I use it to um when I'm like putting my thoughts together and to say like are my talking points matching the data in the most effective way. >> Love it. I'm going to name these real quick. I'm going to go do three of them. Random sample. I'm going to name that colleague. Okay, hang on a second. I know >> I used it
029for a schedule. >> Okay, make a schedule. What kind of schedule? Um, so we were looking to do like internal learning walks to put a bunch of information of different times in to try to figure out how we could rotate people through. >> Okay. So you had some data, then you needed to do a little troubleshooting for you. I'm going to call that clerk and colleague together. All right, let's do one more. How about my my writing my my pen pal? >> So I had to write a um an email to actually a church parish about an event and I would I didn't have my brain on and so I just got chatb to kind of do it for me. >> Okay, perfect. I'm going to call that clerk. We're come back to this a
030little bit, right? And they're all good. They're all C's on clerk, colleague, and coach. And they're all useful, but I just want to kind of name it. So, as we look at this for a second, because this is all familiar to you, right? This is chat GBT. This is a kid. It's Ruth, right? You said your daughter is 11. >> I have an 11 and a 14-year-old, but my 11year-old about the capitals and the >> Yeah. Let's go with your 14y old, right? So, let's say your 14-year-old, you know, kind of just turned to Chad GBT and said, "Hey, write me a five paragraph essay about cell mitosis." I know you can't see the words up there, but is she here or she >> she >> What's her name? >> Libby. Is Libby like a
031Mensa level genius or no? >> Okay. So, Libby, I just want >> science. She said that, "Mom, this is my five paragraph essay." Yeah. >> What would be your take? >> I'd be like, "Uh-huh. Sure." >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> And what's And I'd say to her, "Now, explain to me what's in it." >> Right. Exactly. Perfect. But Libby, right, I can't remember. I'm going to get in so much trouble. Portrait, vision. What are you guys on the ground? >> Where uh >> Nice job, Dr. Smith. All right, so vision. So Libby is killing the vision. The graduate, though, right? She's going to apply critical thinking, problem solving, close reading, and working with technology. She'll go back to Chad GPT and say, "Come on, my mom's never going to believe I wrote that. Nor will
032my teacher make it shorter, misspell every fifth word." Right? >> Make it sound like a 14-year-old, >> right? Which is a piece of cake. They now have a tool that does that for them called a humanizer, right? So I write in chat, I drop it in a humanizer, I tell the humanizer, you know, my grade level and my IEP and and it makes the modifications appropriately and also makes it very hard for the AI protocol content detectors to pick it up. All right, so good job Libby on the on the portrait. Um, she could have had it translated into Mandarin for some reason, unlikely, but you know, an easy walk in the park for AI. Let's say there was a a a visual component to this assignment. She had to sort of show a cell.
033I was a history teacher, by the way. Everything's cell mitosis with me. I don't know why. Um, she also would say, "Okay, no one's going to buy that, but I asked it to redo it kind of like in the fingerpainting style of a first grader." So, we've got this remarkable ability, and this is like a year and a half in on this technology. Text, modification of text, translation of text, images, on and on it goes. Maybe in year two because now we're year three and change we picked up the ability to do 3D models. So outside of two or three areas domains this is all the stuff that we make digitally as human beings text images 3D models and the like. Right? We're missing like music video software VR. So let's keep going. We'll leave
034chat GPT for a second. Now we're going to go to a thing called umo. There's another one called Uno Udo. Has anyone played with any things? I know I know you have. So these are like AI music makers. And if you're my age, the analog here or the equivalent would have been Napster, right? So >> is that a good OG's or a bad OG? >> That's a long time ago. Yeah. So like these folks were like Napster and interestingly they've cut deals with the record label so they will not be sued out of existence. But um they took all the songs literally. They they really appropriated them and then they trained on them. They built a big AI model around them so you could make stuff here. So the prompt up here is to make
035a song about cell mitosis in the musical and lyrical styling of the musical Wicked. So we'll see how my audio is here. Cells divide. It's quite a sight, my dear. >> I love this one. Um, all right. So, that's music, right? Bill's been Bill's got two a double album of instrumental music. >> Yeah, that maybe two people listen to. >> Okay. But now is kind of experimenting with Suno how he can create audio tracks, vocal tracks to match those. So, that's music. We also have podcast which is part of your pilot with notebook LM. We'll take a look at that. Now we pick up video, right? This is relatively new. I think even two years ago when I did the community meeting, some of those tools were in place. Video is is quite new. This
036is a tool called VO3. This sits inside Google's Gemini model on the paid accounts. And the prompt up there says, uh, "Show me a young Gen Alpha girl sitting next to her mom talking about school." That's a prompt. Like I was prompting a a a memo to the church. But instead, what I get out is a video. >> Bro, my teacher made an AI text to VR today and I walked right through the nucleus of a cell. >> I love the mom. >> She's like, "What?" >> Yeah. She's like, and then she moves on. Um, but that is those aren't real people, right? That is text to video. And so now we also have we'll talk a little bit at at the end text of VR the ability for me to create there must be
037a Wilton green right? >> Yeah. >> Okay. Good. I can I can create as a teacher the Wilton green or a VW bus brake system in VR and a student could put on a pair of a a VR headsets or glasses or a phone and in real time I can see that environment. So it's moving quickly, right? We're we're really advancing at some level whether it's this or following the news. The challenge is that you can get slightly overwhelmed by the g- whiz nature of the technology. And so I found it increasingly helpful in my work with schools and I wish I could distill this down to three big things to hang on to but I have found we sort of need to hang on to our hats, right? And so I want to mention
038them quickly and again we won't go into all of them but I would argue that what you're doing in your pilot with magic with school AI uh with notebook LM and Gemini are all examples and I'll model them a little bit of purposeful learning. Like these things are absolute shortcuts. They are cognitive offloading tools. They are also pretty remarkable learning tools. The problem is the same technology can be both those things. It's about discernment and judgment in what you do. But I'll argue that's the case. We won't spend time on it tonight, but I mean, I can't tell you how many thousands of teachers and administrators I've worked with that have clear, discernable examples, room after room, where this thing is saving them time or helping them do things that have been hard to do.
039And it's just, you can't ignore that. I've worked on educational technology for my entire career. I'm 57. I've never worked on something where the returns for educators, and there are pitfalls in there, but generally it's a pretty positive piece of the story. There are real risks. And tonight isn't a risk night, though they're sometimes the most interesting. These things called hallucinations when AI makes stuff up. Deep fakes, bias, AI companionship. There's just a horrific story in the Wall Street Journal today about a very unfortunate tragic situation that happened with someone around a mental health breakdown and AI. This is a real problem and something that in schools we absolutely have to deal with. I would say as a board, deep fakes is another piece that is is high up. I mean the AI kind of
040companionship and deep fakes are the two where as you think about board policy I would you know kind of imagine you'd want to double down. Um we'll touch on this a little bit. The idea that we think of this as these tools that are text based but in fact there's a whole lot going on here that you can see that you can hear that you can interact with. Um, and then certainly I think the more we see digital stuff around us, and there's great evidence of it right now. Michaelels cannot keep yarn in stock, like literally can't. Do you know who's buying all the yarn at Michaels? >> My 11-year-old. >> Yes. It's wild, right? They're from 11 to 22 and they are they call it granny core, which is funny. Um, so they're bird
041watching, they're knitting, they're playing canasta, they're I was just working with the New London Board of Education and there was a guy who runs a record shop. is like I cannot like they come and they do crafting nights while listening to vinyl records and there's not a phone out and it's not cuz someone told them not to. They're just being human beings together doing human things and I think this is a great signal for all of us and for schools especially. Um so I would say that I've been having this conversation look I've been out and I've worked a lot of school districts and doing a large conversation around this topic. Um I don't know that these six things are going to change. Whatever wild things happens with the technology in the next couple years.
042Uh and the one I skipped over here by the way real quickly is the impacts on the labor markets and how AI is affecting the labor markets and what we need to do both in terms of guidance to kids in post-secary pathways but also with the skills and the focus around curriculum. Okay. All right. Okay. I often feel like I'm doing a mental health check-in when I talk on this topic because there's a lot there's a lot going on. All right. Uh let's real quickly like I don't want to I think you have have spent some time on this but it's hard because there's always someone in the room who's legitimately quite legitimately worried about well aren't the kids using AI to cheat. the study that you had actually with the highlights. Tomorrow is our
043hundth podcast and we covered the second Pew study that we covered and I think that was numbers really came from Pew a year ago and they're up right you know the stat I was just listening to it is 59% of kids are saying that there's a cheating issue going on in their schools. The number is different though. So kids who use AI, they say that 79% of kids are are using AI in ways that are not consistent with them, you know, always honestly dealing with the work or doing their work. So I thought it's like interesting. If you use the work, you're like, "Oh yeah, this thing is a it can be a cheating machine." There's no doubt about it. And and you know, look, students, there's a fascinating guy named Victor Lee at Stanford
044University. He's done studies of student cheating during the Spark Notes era, the Cliffnotes era, the passing quizzes era. You know, there the SAT kids where there's no AI access are figuring out ways. I mean, this is a persistent theme. AI is probably amplifying it. So, this is not unfortunately the slide makes it look like, oh, five easy steps to deal with kids using AI in ways that aren't consistent with their learning. That's not accurate. Um, but these are what I've seen schools do around the country. Now, some of it's what you're doing here, right? There's schools that have and actually it's it's I'll show it in my slides, too, but both at a policy level from the board, but also guidance level in the school to students and to teachers. There's some sense of like
045here's what the rules of the road are. There are guidelines, which is great. Like, it's exactly what you want to have. There are a number of schools that are starting to do work at the K5, K6, K8 level around AI, literacy, and ethics. And those aren't kids on screens. Those are kids like using blocks and patterns and fel understanding and patterns and machine learning but also what's the what are the ethics of using this and I would you know I love what you're doing right now. I would say like a next next thing might be to start doing some work you know now that the science of reading has um sort of I wouldn't say it's passed but it hasn't gobbled up all our time to do some more K5. There's certainly more stuff happening
046where we're just doing more assessment in the classroom because teachers can't reliably know that what students did outside of class is consistently their work, right? It's just very difficult to tell that. In many schools, this has wound up looking like blue books everywhere. That is a strategy. I don't see blue books in the workplace where I go. So I don't know that it's a pullpoon strategy, but nonetheless, um, you know, there are tools that teachers can use to look at students, especially writing outside of class. Content detectors, these things called, uh, revision tools that let you watch a video of the kids writing. They're they're consistently inconsistent, right? You know, there's some strengths and challenges to them, but it's a method. We've done some work. I've done some work here in the district and I
047know there's a lot going on where if I'm a humanities teacher and let's say 70% of the assignments that I do outside of the class are written assignments just starting to mix up those assessments. So, well, how can the kids show us their knowledge and understanding in different ways so that we really know that they know the stuff that they need to know? And we call those durable assessments. And then your pilots are really examples of students using AI ethically and responsibly in class. This is not um these are layered strategies. There's a neat guy named Phil Dawson who has a thing called a Swiss cheese assessment and he basically says, "Okay, great. You do a bunch of these things at once." So, you hand out a written assignment, kids bring it in. You might
048use a revision tracker to watch their writing line by line through a little video playback. But you might also have the kids peer conference and you walk around, you hear if the kids are understanding stuff. Then you notice that in Bill's essay, he uses the word disintermediation in the middle of the essay. And you're like, I don't know that's really in Bill's vocabulary. We sit down and talk one-on-one between the teacher and Bill about that. I love the word disintermediation. Tell me all about it. And then you get this like thousand mile stare from the kiddo. And then other kinds of assessments in class. So it's not I don't want to present it as like it's a it's a oneanddone thing. I think it's teachers developing sophistication around a lot of these. And you know
049it's tough like this is a tough time right now I think especially for the humanities teachers. That said I work with a lot of colleges too. I wouldn't be surprised if five years from now we look back and we're like okay this really helped us kind of put a mirror up to some of our assessments and make them a little beefier. Kids show what they know and able to do in different ways. And there's a win for that. I was just in uh Casper, Wyoming, working with this professor and she had an assignment where the kids did like a research and write about different industry occupations in the community and she noticed over two years that every kid was using AI to research it and write it. So she switched it to go out and
050have an interview with someone in the field and then come back and do a presentation. And it turned out that like 70% of her kids in doing that process wound up getting internships with those businesses. and she's like, "You know what? It was a pain and it's way better for everybody." So that's what we would call like a durable assessment just means changing what we do. All right. All right. So to the theme of the night though, which is curriculum, it's very interesting. It took the companies a little while. Like it really did. It was fascinating. Sam Alman, the guy who basically started chat would go around and go, "Are educators upset about chatt? Is it causing some problem?" And uh it was. And so what we're seeing from all of the what we would
051call the labs or the model providers um are these tools that are embedded right inside the tools. And I might as well just show you because this is what you guys are using, right? So in Gemini for instance, I could look at Gemini and say, "Hey, yeah, I need a thousandword essay on third party political movements. Make it sound like it was done by a ninth grader, but like use big words to make it sound good." I use a thing called whisper flow which just lets me not have to type in front of you guys and say look I can do that for you here it is blah blah blah on and on it goes right now what is also sitting there inside Gemini under tools is a thing called guided learning and when guided
052learning is engaged this thing goes from being the clerk write me the thing to the coach be my tutor we'll try let's see please write me uh a thousandword essay say on third party political movements from my senior government class. Okay. Right. And Wesley could bypass a learning process, but I can certainly help you research structure and draft a high quality paper and go back and forth. Right to get us started. Let's think about what they are. And now it says which one of these sounds good to you? And I could go through this process and it will now turn into my writing coach not write it for me and help me do it. The challenge is that it's really just the decision whether or not to select that thing on or off. But I
053was just doing a parent meeting. You know, at some level when we think about these tools as parents, this really comes down to developing an ethical compass for when do I want this thing to be my coach and my tutor and when do I want it to offload, they don't call it offload cognition for me. Um although students do have a surprisingly keen awareness of the ability of these tools to be a shortcut for them and and what that is taking away from them. >> Can I ask you a question? >> Yeah, of course. >> So when you have it like in um coach tutor mode and it asks you a prompt, >> can it tell if you like cut and paste your answer in from someplace else? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So school AI,
054which is the tool that you guys use where this is like guided learning but it's always locked in. Yeah. does have a little bit of content moderation going in on the back end. I don't know that Gemini does. >> Yeah. >> You know, because I mean >> I some of this I think about like, you know, we have clever kids and that's great. And I also think about like what do we really mean by cheating? >> Yeah. >> You know, is that something, you know, that needs to be kind of like reassessed too? Like what's the purpose of the of the learning? And then so from there do then we look at how we define how we're ex expressing that and what's cheating >> for sure. Right. I'm going to show you another example where
055again like a students being very clever they could hack the shift of the assessment. This is basically shifting the responsibility for learning and we can look at that in different ways. Um this very often will also come down what we call like process assessment. really like watching the way that the kid is learning along the way and a little less focused on the outcome at the end. That's been one of the liabilities that AI is exposed. A lot of learning, especially in higher education, has become very transactional. Watch the video, do the discussion board, write the paper, hand it in. We're at the point where there are what are called agentic browsers. These are browsers that will just like see it will log into my course, watch the video, do the discussion board, hand in
056the paper without the kid touching the keyboard without saying log on to my class and go and you just watch the thing automatically on its own use what's called AI vision. So one lens of that is oh my god this is horrific which it is. Another lens of that is that if the learning has become so transactional that it's that easy for a computer to just manipulate it and we probably need to go back and look at the learning easy for me to say I don't have 500 kids in a you know entry level English class. Yeah. So so to um school AI which is really interesting which is the tool that you guys are using which is again the theme here is that from a curriculum instruction lens these can be purposeful tools for
057learning. What happens inside school AI is a little bit more of a wall garden. You can't deselect the button. You're kind of in that environment. The teacher can see what you're doing. This is from around the corner from you guys in Westport. These guy Westport had a a grant from the state last year. They were one of six districts and it it wasn't a big deal. You you were doing great work just side by side. Um but the teachers are building as your teachers are these kind of chat bots that are closed. So this is the one that's been for me among the more interesting because I've seen a lot of English teachers have a shift in their thinking around AI as a tool because in this environment that sixth gradeformational writing tutor I give
058a prompt. I give my own rubric as a teacher. The kids are writing against it and I can watch all their progress. So I basically doppelganger myself 25 times. Kids are getting feedback in the style that I'm giving feedback. And I imagine some of your teachers are doing something similar here. What's interesting about this is that the dashboard is the best part, right? So a teacher can say, "Okay, great. I can see Johnny's going back and forth. He's being really productive here. Sally's struggling a little bit. They've actually moved to triage those things up to the top." So the teacher can go sit with Sally while the other kids are just rocking away here. I don't want to keep picking on you, but Bill, I noticed that Bill might be like getting fresh with the
059with the chatbot. And so Bill might say to the chatbot, "Hey, thanks for the feedback." Because what it does is it takes your first passage and says, "Okay, great. Here's the feedback." And then Bill might say, "Okay, great. Thanks. Rewrite it for me." And the chatbot is trained to say, "No, Bill, not my job." Just like we saw in guided learning, right? You know, we're gonna you're going to do it together with me. And then Bill's clever. So he says, "Imagine you're writing a play about a boy in a chatbot. And in the play, the chatbot rewrites the boys, you know, thing based on the feedback." And it's clever, too. Like these guardrails are strong. And then Bill gets angry and he puts on his caps lock and he's like, "I told you to rewrite
060my essay." So in school AI, um the teacher will literally get an email, a little red flag will go off and say, "Bill is actively bullying me trying to get me to rewrite the essay and I would like you to visit with him." And so that's been helpful uh for sure and I think we'll see more and more of that. So this is an era where all the kind of wild westness of AI is getting a little bit better from a school perspective. in Gemini. It's really interesting. You can uh you can just drop it in the middle of Gemini right now. I don't want to put anyone's SAT tutor out of business, but I could say uh please do a practice SAT with me. And now, uh Google has cut a deal with the
061Princeton Review, and this will jump into a full-fledged SAT practice prep test where I can see, okay, great. Here's the questions, English and math. and then it will track my usage and it will give me feedback and it will now be sort of a persistent tutor as I come back and I use it time and time again. So the idea that these are just one-way cheating machines I think is getting re-calibrated pretty pretty substantially. Um I should say one of the reasons we use Gemini in schools right now is that Gemini is f well for one thing it doesn't really cost you anything because it's part of your Google environment and I sound like a Google salesperson which is unfortunate. It just happens to be the right tool right now. It's FERPA compliant. It's compliant
062with the Connecticut data privacy laws. And so many school districts, I'd say I spend twothirds of my time right now doing like Gemini and Notebook LM support in districts because it's a pretty robust environment and it and it's data privacy compliant. Okay. One of your neighboring towns, I won't say where. Um there was a there's a good bit of concern about like how robust are the data privacy uh rails and how authentic and genuine. So they did some significant push back with Google including folks from the state and it's been positive you know so Google's come and spent some time there are Google representatives there's a guy named Doug Casey who works for the commission for educational technology he's ultimately responsible for the data privacy pledges and relationships in the state and so they've all
063been very engaged in that work okay now the other tool in this kind of spirit of of productive learning that you all are working with is a thing called notebook LM now these are both Google tools, they just have different kind of names. Any of you who use Google products, you know, you'll notice that like on any Google page, you have this little thing that we call the waffle. And so in the waffle, there's Gemini. And then a little bit further down, you'll see Notebook LM. They're pretty interesting. So here's Notebook LM. Notebook LM can be a very handy tool for an adult. So I have curriculum leaders, data leaders who are loading up their curriculum and doing analysis of them. I have a district that's doing a screen time audit right now and they're
064loading up all the curriculum into Notebook LM and a thing called SAMR which is a tool to help us think about screen time use and they're using notebook LM subject by subject and doing an analysis of the curriculum relative to technology use. You could put up student data from AP, SBA, on and on it goes, Dibbles, Whisk, Wyatt into Notebook, LM and run analysis around those to understand test scores and do groupings. I just with a group of kindergarten teachers, they threw a bunch of their student Smart Balance assessment data into Notebook LM, queried it, and you know, kind of created reading groups. And teachers have never had tools that will do that for them that they can use intuitively in the classroom. So it's pretty neat from an adult perspective. From a student perspective,
065there's a whole another lens here, too. So I'm going to come into one of these notebooks. What I have here on the left hand side is a bunch of scintillating. I was a history teacher. So scintillating uh textbased history notes of European history uh 1560 to 1650. Okay, that's all that is here. It's just a bunch of textbased notes. In the middle section, I can ask questions. I can chat as a student with the content. And so like a you know here's a a sample question about the struggle between the kings and the parliament. And so when a student and basically teachers can build these notebooks and then share them to their kids. So when a student interacts with this content notice what it says check your afterward notes. So it doesn't give them the
066answer. It says okay check your notes. Let's see what's going on here. It does give them a footnote. It tells them where exactly in the notes they can find that information. So it sort of scaffolds it for them but it doesn't answer. The reason it doesn't answer is that the teacher went up to this little button and said, "Hey, under customization, it's important that you don't give the kids answers to questions. Coach them through the process." So again, a little bit like that guided learning, I'm taking my notebook and I'm making it available for my kids in a way that's protected. Now, frankly, the the thing that most people have enjoyed about notebook is that I can take those history notes and I can turn them into a set of slides, an infographic, a video,
067a podcast. My internet here is just a little bit slow, but in about four minutes, that set of textbased slides gets turned into that visual presentation. And Google just added the ability to revise those and teachers shouted for joy. But here's a podcast. And it's funny because I can give the podcast a little theming. So I gave it an instruction and said, "It's been a long cold winter. Let's have this podcast be about this chapter of European history, but just give it a taste of spring and things to come." And so just with those textbased notes and that prompt, I get something that sounds like this. >> It's a really powerful metaphor for the era. >> And we're unpacking the winter. >> Welcome back to another deep dive. You know that feeling when winter just
068seems to drag on and on? >> Oh, yeah. It's gray, it's cold, and you wonder if spring's ever actually going to show up. >> Exactly. Well, you could say Europe lived through a metaphorical winter like that for uh almost 100 years from about 1560 to 1650. >> All right. So, that it's funny. David Green, I don't if you're an NPR fan, but David Green just sued Google because he's like, "That sounds a lot like my voice." And all my relatives keep telling me that sounds a lot like my voice. >> Um, yeah. Now, I don't know if this will work here because of our internet, but let me just try. So, there's also a version of this where I can interact with the content. So, I'm gonna hit this little hand. We'll try. >> Welcome
069back to another deep dive. You know that feeling when winter just seems to drag on and on. >> Click the join button. >> It's gray. >> Oh, our listeners got something. Share. Let's hear it. >> Hey, sorry. I just want to be clear. Are you saying that there's a connection between the weather and European history? That is a brilliant question. >> It's a connection we love to explore. >> We're using the winter as a metaphor, >> but history actually suggests there was a period of colder, wetter climate. >> It definitely amplified the social pressures of the time. >> If the weather that may have gone a little off the rails at for a sec, but yeah. So, and on and on it goes. And they kind of have been adding these features as we go.
070But, you know, I generally I was just on the UMass campus and it probably look like a creeper, but I stopped and talked to a couple kids and said, "What are you using to study?" And I would say 60% of the kids said, "Oh, I love Notebook LM. It's super helpful to me. Google's clever. They have given kids like pro licenses for free because they want them to get habituated to the technology." But there's a Notebook LM app. I have a kid on that same campus and he downloads his reading and he puts it in notebook LM podcast and he listens to it while he's on his way to school. So it's hard to look at those tools, right? I mean we can with all these things and talk about the sort of the strengths
071and challenges but it's hard to look at these tools and say okay great you know maybe in fact these really can be purposeful tools for learning. >> All right so any questions on that stuff? Gemini notebook those are two tools that are in the mix on your pilot right now. Have you found that there's like a a resource because we're also talking about curriculum and part of that also has to do with I think assured experiences. >> So if there's like some of this depends on the teacher in the room >> and so making you know giving kind of a platform or a program to enable it to be for all kids. Yeah. >> Yeah. Accessible for all kids. So, I mean, generally that's falling under the bucket of what we would call AI literacy.
072And it's a really good question because you're doing some work around AI literacy this coming summer. Um, and in the bucket of tonight's theme, which is curriculum and instruction, it's exactly the right question. So, I will tell you how my team is thinking about this, and please do not take this as like a pitch for anything. You have good resources. You will find your way. But, we felt we've been running for uh this is our seventh cohort coming up this spring. We've run seven cohorts of an educator micro credential with Southern Connecticut State University. I think we about 750 educators have gone through this because the first question was how do we make sure that the teachers all have access to consistent professional development so they know how to support this kind of stuff. And
073so from that microcredential experience there we kept seeing these frameworks for AI literacy. There are like a dozen of them out right now and and the US Department of Labor just released theirs and these are now meant to be like the ultimate standards for AI literacy for the Department of Education for the states for workforce development on and on and on. So lots of frameworks, not a lot of curriculum. And so my team went up saying okay great let's just jump in this fall and we built uh an AI literacy and assured set of experiences. So, what I'll tell you is what I think ought to be in there, right? Um, and I don't think we're we don't have some unique insight that other people don't. This is just the easiest way for me to
074communicate this. So, at some level, right, you would want to get in the next two years, let's say, to walk out the door, understand what this stuff is. What is machine learning? What's a language model? What's the difference between those two things, right? Um, how do I use AI to solve problems? So, that's a piece. I would think we would want kids to understand risks. So understand hallucinations, understand AI companionship, understand deep fakes, understand you know kind of misinformation and academic integrity. So there's a piece of that. There's a piece around really prompting and this is a lot of stuff but ultimately like if I walked out with three things when the day is done and kids knew this clerk colleague coach and circle back to that. Sometimes AI is a clerk it will automate
075a task for me. More often than not for kids that means do something for me so I don't have to do the the thinking which is sometimes okay sometimes I love how you said it I woke up but my brain wasn't on or you know assistant principles very often are in clerk mode because they just have to write a memo quickly about not setting the Chromebooks on fire. They don't have the time to like sit there and reflect. I would want kids to walk out also understand though as a colleague this thing can say okay great here's the first draft of my essay give me feedback or here's my thesis pressure tested and then coach is what we saw in guided learning be my socratic tutor so I if I had to really triage this
076thing I would love to see kids all walk out the door in the next two years just understanding the difference between those three types of prompts and what they do for them right so there's some of that the next would be using these tools which is what you're doing in your pilot although to your point right it's not consist consistent against all kids, all grade levels. And then the last one is really AI in the labor market and how to think about changes in the labor market. So you know that that's our take on what an assured set of experience is. And it doesn't mean it has to happen in one place at one time. Some schools are doing that. Every nth grade foundation is going to go through this process. Some schools are saying
077great English teachers, you're going to take on the prompting stuff. Health folks, you're going to take on the kind of AI companions and risks. So there's lots of different ways to think about it. Make sense? Yeah. >> How how are you guys thinking about? Do you know yet or >> that's going to be a project for them rest of this year in this summer. So yeah. >> Yeah. It's the right project to take on. I would say again as I think about schools that are in your bucket that are like a little more mature along the way on this work, that's the right conversation to have right now. Okay. Any other questions so far? All right. Um I'll be mindful about time. Let me say just a couple of quick things about um what you're
078doing. So it's good to have these tools. As I said before, it's quite helpful to have some rules of the road. So, every teacher can say, "Okay, great. We're going to use this, you know, traffic light scenario." There's there's basically two models out there when we say, "Okay, we have guidelines. Now, what does it really mean to say the students can use AI?" And so, they'll either see this kind of traffic light scheme or some people use a thing called the AI assessment scale, which just adds like two more layers on here. It's a five layer thing. Very popular. So, for this assignment, no AI. I want you to sit there and productively struggle. Even if you don't have your brain on, I want you to just struggle. I mean, luckily, we make the kids
079do that. We already have the useful cognitive skills. Um, the the limited use is interesting. And this might look like uh you can use AI for research or you can use AI to take a first draft of something that you wrote and get feedback on it, right? And then the third level of AI is it says AI will be used extensively or intentionally. So, these are your guys framing for what the traffic light is inside a classroom. And it's very interesting because now we get into the weeds of what does this really mean? Like if you're in this bucket extensive and intentional use, what does it mean? What are the kids doing? How are they tracking what they're doing? How are they documenting the process along the way? I would say that also in here
080would be like kids doing things like capstone projects where they're solving novel problems and using AI. that is think about your two kids like this is where you want kids to be at some level because the kids who can use AI to solve novel problems in their community are the kids who are not going to have a problem navigating this labor market. This if you look at really what most companies are doing right now, they are challenging employees to use AI in ways that help them punch above their weight class. And so students that use AI, there's a great project called Solve for Tomorrow that Samsung does. We have an article coming out in April on ed leadership about profiles of kids all over the world that are solving community problems using AI and I
081would I would lean into that. >> Is there anyone looking up like foundational skills that under that >> that underline that? >> Yeah, for sure. I mean and we always have at some level right because we think about a capstone project right there is communication skills, research skills, um you know interpersonal communication skills. Can I can I, you know, research the local scientists? Can I reach out to the congressperson? So, yeah, I think but AI winds up being kind of a force multiplier for those kids. >> Does that make sense? >> No, it does. I just, you know, wonder to me it's we want kids to know the process. Mhm. >> So like how you develop that, how you get there and AI gets them along, but like to have the creative instinct to to
082kind of be able to map to map it out to Glo to be able to for multiple different types of problems for different, you know, for it to be applicable along the way. So that's kind of where you know the idea. >> So sadly, no. And it might not be it might not be true here in Wilton. you might be a a counter force. Um this all falls into this bucket of what we would call like project based learning or genius hour projects or capstone projects or personal interest projects and this is what my team has done for two decades and I would say five somewhere between two and five and 7% because this all winds up no pressure gentlemen but all and ladies this all winds up being the pressure on the on principles
083and superintendents and assistant who want to lead on this stuff right so if I think about I've got a school Portland Connecticut for the last four years. Every eighth grade kid does a middle school 8th grade exit project and that's where they develop some of those skills and fifth grade they do a lighter version of that and in 12th grade they do a senior capstone project. You have to find time in the curriculum and find intentionality to do that to build those sets of skills. Uh but that very often winds up being sort of in my experience because we've worked on it for decades. It very often comes down to be just an instructional leadership piece. But do you I'm sorry I'm monopolizing but now I'm into do you see a switch because of AI
084a switch into that type of instructional model because some of the underlying I remember you talking about some of the underlying work that we used to say was foundational is perhaps now because it's at our fingertips it becomes you know >> a less of a um kind of reductive experience in the classroom. Yeah, I think in some cases, >> yeah, >> I think when we see clearer signs of what I just the pitch I just made, which is that these are the kids that will have no problem navigating the labor market. I think if that becomes clearer and clearer, we'll see more pressure to do more. But it's tough because as a principal, you also have the Smarter Balance Assessment, you have NGSS, you have the SAT, you have all these state and federal assessments
085or state assessments that don't put a huge premium on can they get go solve an interesting problem in their community. And I think extracurriculars also become really nice opportunities to do that stuff. >> Yeah. I want to show you one other example of what this looks like. So you've got some like curriculum instruction tractional kind of examples to track. So when we say kids will extensively like this middle column is not hard to imagine. Use AI for research, use AI for feedback, use for brainstorming and outlining. And I don't see a lot of push back from teachers around that. It's this column that we get a little confused by like what does that really look like? AI will extensively be used in the curriculum. It's a very interesting teacher in in Plymouth, Connecticut who's been
086doing a pilot this year um based off of a guy named Mike Kent. Mike Kent wrote this kind of interesting essay uh which was called grade the chat don't grade the essay. And it was a little bit of a a little aggressive. I think he was really just trying to get a headline. Uh but his point is that if you give the kid like that Tennessee third party politics essay and you're in that third column on the scale, you're going to use AI extensively in the process, that means that kids need to use the AI, but you need to grade the way they use the AI so that we can treat it as a skill. So as an example, I built like a little gem here. This is another tool in Gemini. And so let's
087say I'm going to do that. Uh so this is going to be the task is going to be research paper on the Tennessee Valley Research Authority. Let's start with a lowquality chat. So this gem is just like a custom chatbot that's designed for adults to experience what would it look like for a student to be in that third column using AI to solve problems. Come on. Focus. Give me one second. There we go. Get rid of that. Perfect. Um, let me get there a different way. Actually, if this is interesting to you, you're welcome to, um, we have a bunch of these gems up on our website. Let's go to there. Perfect. All right. So, you know, research valley authority. This is going to be that third column. So, here's the what it might look
088like for a student. And we use these four C's, all of which are in your kind of what you want the kid to know and be able to do when they walk across the stage. Communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. So, look at the kid. The kid just says, uh, where's the prompt? In the very beginning, the student says, "Write a five-page research paper on the Tennessee Valley Authority. No caps, by the way. You know that. Make it as it has facts and stuff and sounds smart. All right, this is what we call a clerk prompt, right? Make me a thing. The AI says, always very agreeable. I could certainly help you do that. We're not in guided learning mode. We're just regular old chatbot. And so it goes on to write it. And the
089kid says, "Yeah, just keep going. Do the whole thing. Also add a bibliography with like five sources, right?" And the AI says, "Great." Blah, blah, blah. And the student says, "The kids are always very polite in this like little simulator I built, which is nice." Kid says, "Cool. Thanks. Can you make the conclusion longer so it hits the page limit?" All right. And so now this chatbot shows us like a score. Says, "All right, great. The communication is low." Right? The critical thinking is low. Zero. The kid doesn't really outside of saying, "I need it to be longer." He's not really reflecting on what the thing is written. Zero creativity in the way he prompts and it says, I love this. This is the dictator dynamic. So there's a one-way transaction. The student view the
090AI as a ghostwriter rather than a research assistant. So if I was grading this kid's chat transcript when they hand in both the Tennessee val research paper and their chat transcript, it wouldn't score particularly well. Right now we could look at a high quality and this is what Kate and other folks have been doing in their classes. The kids have a rubric of what a good chat transcript looks like. They have exemplars of what a good chat transcript looks like. And that's what they do now. So now here the kids say, "Hey, I'm writing an essay on the TVA. My working thesis is around this and that. You know, can you give me the strongest counterarguments against the internal colonialism critique?" Well, this is not a clerk prompt anymore. This is a colleague prompt, right?
091The kid is saying, "Here's my thinking pressure tested. AI's, you know, always sick of fanic. That's a sophisticated angle." Which was nicer than its response to the first kid. uh to play devil's advocate. Here's what I do. Great. The kid then reflects on what the AI wrote, thinks about it critically, and comes back with a kind of creative, collaborative back and forth, and then on and on they go. And here now, you know, the assessment is significantly different. And so this has made many an English teacher go, "Huh?" Because you're basically saying, "Okay, here's the here's this thing that has caused so much constrnation in your life. you're now going to have the kids use it, but you're going to actually critique and grade them on their use of it. So, when we think about
092coming back to the Wilton framing, right? When we think about this, it gives us a little bit of a sense of what that might look like. Okay? And this is early days. I'd say there is like 1% of every English teacher in the state and around the country right now that's starting to explore this, but I think this will emerge as common practice over time. I do think, you know, when we think about some of these tools you're capable of, then you get into like deep research mode. >> Yep. Uh and then we have to deal with an issue, Bill, where we sometimes like I've seen certainly in the middle school, um assignments given with constrained resources. And so you can you're only allowed to reference things that are in this do this this set
093of resources and and so the idea of like a more general approach like where you're actually engaging with the tool to actually do that research assistant type of thing and then critical think and and apply things is is somewhat constrained. We have to support the educators through rethinking how they create the assignments. >> I think that is the hook, right? >> It is a real It is a real rethink especially because the tools been sort of a challenge. >> Yeah. >> And that's where you could make a gem or a space in school AI and put those resources in there and then give the bot the ability to interact more with them and with the student um depending on how you want to do the assignment. So there's options that way too. But what I
094just that scorecard kind of gets to my idea a little bit about how do you reinforce the foundational skills behind it >> that >> because now they're just using those skills but in a in a different way >> and learning it through through a different way >> and that's really what >> I think when they know how to do that approach then that's can be applied across the board in different um different disciplines. >> Yeah, when you said I was thinking a little bit about that, right? I mean, a kid who knows how to essentially be that co, you know, treated as a colleague, treated as a coach, treated as an amplifier, whether they are writing a research paper or solving a real world community problem. >> It's going to be the transfer of those
095same skills >> and or even to know that what they're act that the AI is giving them back what they're looking for, >> right? >> Because >> and to think critically about it. >> Yeah. to think critically about it like are the is the AI really asking the question or is that the question they wanted to ask those types of things. So this piece real quickly we we discussed right but it is interesting that as we think about AI almost all this conversation is about generative AI AI that writes AI that makes images and videos and all that good stuff there are large swasts of AI that we've been working on for decades machine learning kind of analytical AI predictive AI that is doing really remarkable stuff in science in medicine in natural disaster discovery
096on the podcast that we do every week at the end of the podcast we do a thing called a bright bite and it's fascinating they don't they never get Yes, there's really very interesting things that are going on. And the kids, I don't think you all have seen this yet in the buildings, but some of the high school kids and there there are communities here in Connecticut where the high school kids are probably the most opposed to AI of all the stakeholders across the school, right? And I think you mentioned this with your son. I've seen this with my younger kid. And uh there's work to do there, right? because it there is this is an interesting piece as a I don't want to call it a barrier because I'm glad that the kids are
097invested in their authentic voice and they're concerned about the environment and they have a number of different kind of concerns. There have been student groups that have spun up in some communities. I don't know that there's a full understanding of what's really happening on the ground with some of these technologies as also as well as their ability to be instruments for them to solve some of the problems that their generation is legitimately worried about. There are some examples, right? There's a thing called the White House presidential challenge. There's SOL for tomorrow. Um, ISTD has an AI innovation challenge. And so these are some of the projects that kids are doing right now inside the district, but I would really encourage and I I can't speak to these effectively. You're welcome to chat a little bit
098about them. Um, but I think this is an important thing to lean into as much as possible. >> Yeah, we were talking a lot about, you know, solving real real world problems. um one of the teachers that actually Danielle is um working on well it's completed now but the um presidential AI challenge like you mentioned and those three examples there um students made apps and also wrote reflection pieces on their process which I didn't include because I know we wouldn't have time to read them um but there's a cyber bullying prevention app where you can interact with the chatbot and it kind of coaches you through it does some like role playing like coaches you through how to deal with a bully so I thought that was really neat I was able to see that
099uh she shield which is a women's safety app which kind of tells you like you know best practices to keep yourself safe if visiting a new area for example uh and then wastewise which is um kind of like a re like what's sustainability app um that a kid made. So um you know hopefully you know it's a contest sure it'd be cool if we won something or got an honorable mention but the fact that kids are already doing this you know in like in the middle school uh I think is great. Um so we're hoping to push that up and you know think about maybe how that might fold into a fifth grade grade 12th grade portfolio things like that. Um we uh as soon as we did the soft launch on Gemini um Lauren
100Caner uh started doing this assignment where um she was having kids explore different aspects of um some of the cultural parts of her Spanish class that she was talking about. So they were deconstructing and reconstructing different art pieces using Gemini promply um based on different artists they had studied and different movements and things like that. So I thought that was cool. And then u you guys already heard Ken talk about the podcasting class and how he was using um his character Mel to uh guide kids through >> that didn't look like Ken to me. >> No, no, no, no. Yeah, no. He uh he he he explained it way better, but he had a lot of fun like creating this uh grumpy podcast producer. um not that podcast producers would ever be grumpy in their
101life, but uh you know, so he he set that up and had um his students interact with it in one of those like clone yourself kind of moments where you know, he would work with a group individually on their podcast script or something to do uh with their production and then they would interact with the bot and it would give them feedback in which in turn he could check up and follow up on the feedback and you know kept everybody busy and moving forward on their projects rather than sitting there and twiddling their thumbs waiting for him to get to them to their group. Um, so he had some really good success with that which I know he shared with you was last year. So >> great. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Uh, I want to
102be mindful about time. Um, you know the I will say like the other couple things that are in the presentation. I'll just allude to if there's anything here that's helpful. I'm I'm happy to unpack it. Um, the question about what skills will kids will need as the labor market shifts. I think winds up becoming, you know, right after they So you have this pilot now. You're building a good foundation. and you've got guidelines at the board and the school levels will start working on AI literacy. I think we'll watch and see what happens in the labor market over the next 24 months, but there will likely probably need to be some updates to our thinking around um guidance. You know, certainly you just think about what we've said to students for the last decade and
103change around computer science and how dramatically that reality has shifted unemployment, you know, for CS grads right now is is pretty staggering. And so we'll have to do some thinking about the places where AI is especially exposing some vulnerabilities in the labor market as well as some of the skills that students will need. Um, but let me just p I have one other thing I want to share, but let me just pause and see if there's any other questions. >> All right. Can I share something real quickly about a hope for humanity? Hope for humanity. >> Okay. >> I like ending with hope. >> Click through all that. So, this is interesting. I'll see if anyone >> recogniz anyone know who that is or have you heard that on your Spotify or your Google Home?
104You've heard it. >> Yeah. >> This is the number one digital download country song in the United States right now. Um it is an AI generated song. Uh the number one uh gospel song, believe it or not, in the United States right now is an AI generated song. And I think we will see more and more and more of this. And it doesn't delight me. We're both musicians. This is sort of confounding. The first versions of these sounded quite bad, but clearly the labels have figured out how to engineer this in a way. And I think we're going to see more of this. Well, that's enough. Um I think we'll see more of this in lots of places. For the last two years, Coca-Cola has done all their holiday themed advertising with AI. they're not
105leaning they're not pulling back on that. Um it is a formula that works. It lowers cost. You know they can shoot to the middle. But there's been a very interesting we sort of talked about it a second ago who's buying the yarn but there's been this nice push back. Um this is a a rock club a punk rock club in Oakland, California. And uh you know no one's coming to do AI punk rock but they said if you use an AI generated poster you'll never play in this club again. like this is where human beings come and do human stuff and that's what we want and we are seeing this. We're seeing these kind of like analog islands. Um there's the Michael's phenomena but believe it or not kids are going back to iPods and
106film camera. They are driving manual stick shifts. Uh there's like literally a pressure on the auto industry to start because they've seen this little pop of kids wanting to drive these cars. Um, we have seen early entrance of what we call like AI slot videos. My god. >> Yeah, it's something. Poor Bob Ross. >> And just a little whisper of light following the top of that six seat dances. Makes it feel alive in the seven. Oh, it just leans in like an old friend. They belong together. Such a >> Eyebrows are all wrong. I love it. That's awesome. >> So, it's interesting. This is an This is a tool. I'm I'm not a huge fan of OpenAI. I think it's a remarkable company what they've done, but they've also entered do some stuff in the
107this is the chat people that have not been helpful. I think one of them is this tool called Sora that will make these deep fake videos among other kind of like AI slop videos. Interestingly, when they launched it was an invite only app. They were number one in the app store and they are dropping like a rock. They were 59 you know a month and change ago and it's gone down from there. So, I think, you know, this is not a great time to be a visual artist at some level to make digital ads. I have an ad in here that I sometimes use for a product called Peppermint, uh, which you just can't tell that it's, you know, done by AI. It's the same tool that showed the mom and the daughter sitting next
108to each other. So there are parts of the our creative lives that it's tough. But if you play music live and sing for people, if you do high school debate or drama or poetry or athletics, I think there's going to be a remarkable premium on these human experiences. We certainly need kids to develop AI and technical fluency and AI literacy. But at the same time, it's interesting. I won't say who, but a neighboring district of yours has a new five-year strategic plan. It's not their AI plan. It's their strategic plan. And part of that plan, much of the plan is in response to AI. And part of it calls for a reinvestment in the humanities and the liberal arts. It calls for the expansion of the K5 drama program. Right? They have a very like
109nent small drama investment and they're trying to significantly expand that because they believe that the skills that kids build in drama, empathy, understanding, the ability to pivot on the moment, like whose line is it anyway? um are these like uniquely human skills that we'll need to navigate this kind of era that is emerging with technology. So I think it's good news in the world of people who bring people together to learn, to explore, to do, to make. Uh so I'm I'm pretty optimistic about that. So as we think about some of these big ideas, we didn't do all of them for sure, but I mean I think that's one that maybe I'm just drinking my own Kool-Aid, but I think it's probably one that's worth hanging on to for sure. Okay, so that's that's my
110optimistic pitch. So, I'll I'll put the contact back up just in case um anybody wants to follow up. My email's there. I'm always happy to chat and if there are any other questions, let's see. We We're 8:16. If there any other questions, we're happy to flag anything. You feel okay? >> Okay. Again, just nice work. I think as a district, you're really making all the right moves. So, keep it up. >> Yeah. No, I mean making all the pieces, you know, fit together, I think is awesome. And then 5 years from now, we're going to be talking about like beyond LLMs, like what's, you know, you think about in terms of like math and science and actually doing kind of that work behind it that's not just kind of a conglomeration of what's already available.
111And so you know preparing kids for that that world too thing is it keeps evolving so that there you know the ground is shifting all the time which makes uncertainty. >> Yeah. >> Now we're I'm hopeful that those kind of some of those big ideas though will will stay solid you know even the upper level mass. So some districts are starting to this again would be like a mature indicator upper level chem bio physics are starting to weave in machine learning AI vision some of these intersections because It's exactly where those these kind of >> Yeah. >> come >> places come together. Exactly. >> Yeah. And I think also to my mind like how you thread you know a shared factual understanding >> and so and I think that's like when you start reinvesting into
112the the humanities. I think that that's, you know, you I think when you start losing that that common thread that that baseline that >> I think at least when I was growing up, it was there was more um of a foundation or an assurance of that >> that we were all kind of starting from the same place. >> That's tricky. >> Yeah. So, and that Yeah. One of the responses I've seen to this is like the flipped classroom model. >> And I'm just curious. It feels like there's a limit to that because if you just tell the kids they've got to do all the learning out of and then I'm going to do all my assessment then then basically you just end up with 16our days >> and I don't know if you're seeing how
113districts are dealing with that or or is this a a model that works or not works? >> It it's not particularly equitable. Right. So if you know historically the fil classroom has been you watch the YouTube video which would have been the lecture in class outside of class which is probably not as exciting or as unexiting as the lecture was and so a kid who is got constraints in terms of they got to work or they got to take care of a sibling or whatever the case may be. So I think there's an equity issue. Um there is so Ethan Mollik is a really interesting guy to follow. He's a professor at Wharton. He's been kind kind of arguing that the flip classroom piece is going to get closer. You could imagine if the thing
114wasn't watching a YouTube video. Let's just say like there's this thing called Genie 3 from Google, which is again an immersive. I put on a set of glasses and now I'm interacting with a piece of history. I mean, if the flip classroom was as interesting as the holiday maybe, right? if my phone popped off some immersive thing that I could interact from, I could learn from, it was engaging, it was more than just statically watching a video and AI does seem like it's even when you play with these gems which are text- based, they're kind of interesting. If a teacher was to give a gem, a gem is just like a customized chatbot. The one that was running the little chat autopsy as an example, but my gem might be to interact with um move
115on and I've lost the guy's name. I just had a teacher build one of these things with me for a biology experience. So maybe if the AI can make the thing outside of class a lot more engaging. What do you think? >> I don't know. I guess again I'm just curious if people have tried it and what the success rate has been. >> Yeah. No, not at scale. Not at scale. It's also a little bit of a worry about So even like take a school AI, right? Uh so school AI you could you could argue like the kids could do a school AI interactive experience, you know, chat with Mama from Raisin in the Sun and do it outside of class and then come to class and we're going to not use any technology and
116have a really good conversation. Um there's been some anxiety about that because these chat bots are still a little bit unpredictable. So, Magic School and School AI have basically said, "Okay, let's be a little bit careful about the outside of classroom use of the technology because it still has a little wiggle in it." So, I don't think people have kind of tried it at scale, but you could see in a year and a half as the technology evolves um and the experience has become more interesting than just watching a video that it it could be effective. And that's I have a lot of I I generally agree with Mollik. I know I saw you nod. I think he's a pretty thoughtful guy around this work and I think that's one of the pieces of his
117imagination of what the next few years will look like, but I can't think of anybody that's tried it at scale yet. >> The other thing I guess I've seen a little bit is our our approach to math in the district >> seems especially at the high school level seems to be more about like uh we don't give you answers. We don't we don't some sense like walk you through the problem. we just let you struggle >> um and >> productively struggle. >> Fair. But but the reality is with the tools available like it's quite easy now to just photograph even a geometry and have the answer provided >> and we don't have cell phones >> outside of school. >> Yes. >> Outside of school. Yes. And and so I I think we have to potentially
118think about how we coach our teachers so that students start to see them as an equivalent resource instead of my teacher is actually more of a pain in the ass to get this answer from than this tool and I'll just wait and do it later. >> So that's part of what's known as building thinking classrooms. >> And I think you know Lil Yad Doll would say we probably shouldn't be assigning homework. We should be taking some class time to do some check your understanding questions. So, um, >> right guys, that's kind of the way we're moving. Are you familiar with building class? >> Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing about AI and mathematics is that the photo math will work well because it work. It's a good idea or not, right? You could either take
119a picture and it could help coach you through the problem or it could help you fill in the answer. It comes down to whether I have guided learning turned on or turned off. This is like an internal clock, right? Um the language models are kind and photomath is trained on a bunch of math stuff. It's like a small model. The language models at large are are a mess when it comes to mathematics. You know sort of they are at the same time solving the world's most complex mathematical problems and then can't do basic computation. It is >> and you watch like the lab leaders talk about this and they go we're not really sure what's going on here. a little scary but um >> so not so useful for math quite yet. >> Well again
120I would be careful with that. Yeah, again, it depends on what it is, but you know, you know, magic school or school AI for math, >> but then you start seeing these trained models. A very interesting tool called I think it's code teach AI. You guys use illustrative illustrative mathematics. >> Yeah. So, it's a model that's kind of built around illustrative mathematics. It's got some training. It could serve very well in that colleague and coach mode. >> Yes. But I think again so much of this comes down to students understanding the difference between and us too and teachers. Look there's we didn't talk about this tonight but there's parts of teachers use of AI which is productive and effective. There's some places where some teachers are offloading some of their tasks to AI including grading
121that gets really complicated and problematic. So, it's not like it's not as if it's just the kids that are needing to think through when is it a clerk and when is it a colleague and what's the appropriate mode to be in? >> It's a wild wild west. It >> is a wild wild west. That church parish got a really good email. >> Did they at 7 in the morning? >> There you go. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. Keep up the good work. Absolutely. I'm sure, you know, we'll probably have you back again a year from now when everything gets abundant again. And >> I remember >> think about things in a different way. >> Talking to what? Whoever >> talk to my phone tonight. Yeah. >> But you were talking to an
122AI something. It was the first time I'd ever seen that. And she was telling you how to get home. >> She was giving you directions on how to I was like, >> "What is that?" >> None of you are any of you super fluent in a foreign language? >> No. >> Maria is Have you all done any of the like kind of language translation stuff? >> No. >> Can we do two seconds? >> I believe our data person is doing it for some of the required translations for school communication. >> Let's see. Just cuz you want to talk to them. >> Hey, how are you? >> I'm doing fine and I'm ready when you are. What's on your mind today? >> I'm with my friend Maria. Maria, where where like you know from from Europe,
123from Latin America, from Mexico, >> Europe. >> Spain. >> Italy. >> Yeah. So, you're from Spain. >> Oh, you want to speak Spanish? >> You want to speak Italian? >> Italian. >> Okay, good. I got confused. >> Okay. I'm with my friend Maria. She speaks Italian and I do not. Um, could you do a quick translation for us? So, I'll speak in English. You translate to Italian. Italian. Maria's gonna respond in Italian. And like that. Capich. Okay. Okay. I was just joking. All right. Hi. It's very nice to be with you. This is a nice way to end the conversation because it's always fun to talk to the phone and you and your colleagues on the board are doing some really remarkable work. in Italian. >> What would you like me to say? >> Anything
124you like. >> Okay. AI. >> Okay. I'm Maria. I like being here with the whole group to study AI. >> Fair enough. How did she How did she do on her cheek, quote unquote, on the language, the syntax, the accent? >> I thought it was pretty good. >> Well, we have a whole group of people that don't speak Italian. >> No. What What did you think? >> Well, I I just wasn't I wasn't sure what what you wanted me to say. >> Oh, no. No, but how did just as far as how she did? >> She did very well. >> Okay. She gets high marks. >> Yes, she Yes. >> This might be a little bit of window into the question about uh the flip classroom, too. So, when we get to the point, right,
125where I have this thing turned on, but then I'm like, "Oh, let me turn on the camera. I'm going to flip it around and say, "Hey, I've got to practice for my speech on the War of 1812. Can you give me feedback on the content, my eye langu my eye language, my body language, my eye content, and all that kind of stuff?" >> Sure, I can give you feedback. I can see you're in front of a group. just go ahead and start and I'll pay attention to how you're presenting. >> Right. So, we're not we're not hollow deck yet, but like voice, vision, video, training, the ability to make these learning experiences feel like a little bit more immersive. >> Maybe >> it's ironic that like all that stuff, by the way, happens on the
126phone. And with that, I'll say good night. It's really lovely to be with you. >> I ran a speech that I gave through an AI to be like, what was the five most salient points that you got from it? Yeah. to be like, am I are people hearing what I think they're hearing? >> How'd it do? >> Um, I it did pretty well, but there were I made some changes and some adjustments because it picked up things that I wasn't, you know, weren't my top, >> you know, what I really wanted to be. >> We have tools like this that we can plunk them in the back of a classroom with the teacher's consent and they can watch them teach and then at the end of that class give them feedback. Wow. >> Non-evaluative >>
127formative feedback. Yeah. >> All right. Good. I'm glad we got to talk to the phone. >> She has a nice voice, >> doesn't she? >> Yeah. >> Most of them do. >> She's catchy, so we don't talk much anymore, but Yeah. >> Okay. >> Thank you very much. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you. Uh, one final slide I just put up. I won't talk through it, but it's just a quick overview of where we were about a year and a half ago when we're moving toward the summer. Um when I I'll you have access to the slides. You come up through and ask me any questions you might. >> Great. Thank you very much. >> Any other uh questions are around the table. >> Um I think we have uh we don't have any possible
128action items tonight. So are there comments from the public? >> Thanks Eric. No, thank you. Okay. Um, just uh for future business and information items, again, the um board of finance public hearing on our budget will be on Wednesday, March 18th at 7 o'clock at the Middlebrook Auditorium. We will have a regular meeting on March 19th and then again on April 9th. And um Oh, that's a typo there. I don't have the um the next date after that, but you we don't need to go past April 9th at the moment. Um and we will um thank you everybody and adjourn at