Sep 30, 2020

In today's Episode we are joined by innovative educators  Brett Salakis and Rob McTaggart. 

Both are involved in education and part of global online communities (#aussieED,  #TheWalkingED & @WorldSTEMedu ) as well as multiple Professional Learning Networks supporting and innovating with technology, curriculum and pedagogy.

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TRANSCRIPT For this episode of The AI in Education Podcast
Series: 3
Episode: 10

This transcript was auto-generated. If you spot any important errors, do feel free to email the podcast hosts for corrections.

Hi, welcome to the AI education podcast. How are you, Lee?
I'm good, Dan. I'm good, Dan. Good to be back again talking AI, although we must be running out of things that you and I can talk about now.
Yeah. Are we just Well, you know, in I think it was in series two when we interviewed you. Um, maybe we should go around and start to try to find people from industry again from our different lenses uh and try to bring them into the conversation. What do you think?
I look I think it's an excellent idea and you know what if you I've always loved the word pedigogy. I love it when you say it to me as a non-teer. I find it to be one of those just amusing words. But you know what if if you want to go talk about some uh some students and we're all about education. That was our core. Let's go find some people to talk about what AI is going on in education.
Okay, let's go. Welcome to the AI and education podcast. I'm Dan and I'm super excited today to introduce some really special guests, Brett Salakas and Robert McTaggart. . You guys have been an integral part of my PLN for years and years and years and you have such great impact with um all the teachers uh educators, vendors, all kinds of uh you know and obviously the students across Australia and globally where you guys touch through your local networks and through the global networks and speaking at conferences and things. So, It's great to have you on the on this podcast today and I know we've been kind of talking before this about kind of your experiences and I think just for the just for the listeners maybe start with you Brett can you just give us a bit of a overview on on where you are at the minute and your kind of thoughts on this kind of area.
Yeah, if I could insert a quick funny line about where I am right now sitting sitting at home in my study. If I was able to say something a little bit wittier about that then I'd insert a joke there. If you can if you can just go back in post-prouction and just insert like a really witty line uh for me there. I'd really appreciate it. But look, I'm I'm I'm super excited to be able to to join you uh tonight, Dan. Like, I'm as you said, we've known each other for quite some years. Uh and just really starting to play within the AI pool at the moment, and you've done me a a great favor because what you've allowed me to do is speak with you tonight with my very best friend in the world, Robert Tag. So, a lot of people don't know that that Robert obviously do a lot of tech stuff. Uh but uh Rob actually is my my very best friend in the world. We've become very very close friends. You don't often get to make a new best friend when you're an adult, but probably now seven, eight, nine years ago, Rob and I met. And I was going to say fell in love, but it's a kind of love, a manly love. Um and you know what? I get to have sleepovers. I get Rob coming to visit me uh once or twice a week. We stay at my house. We I cook him some lasagna sometimes, don't I, brother? We have a We have a beautiful friendship.
That's all true, but with a bit of cont.
Everything there is true. I swear the worst part about Corona is I don't get to have visits with my best friend anymore. He stays home with his wife and his children. It's not fair. Uh I want my friend. I like it when Rob comes back. So for those people who don't know, Rob and I live in different cities on the east coast of Australia. So I'm based in Sydney and I am fortunate enough um that Rob's work uh brings him down to Sydney every now and then. And that means that Uh, I get to I get to talk with him and we get to hang out and tonight we get to hang out with you, Dan, and everyone else who's listening and we get to talk some AI, which is really cool.
Yeah. So, Robert, so tell us about yourself.
Oh, Dan, talk about introductions, man. Um,
I know that's the best.
Yeah. Look. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And look, we are besties and it is great. We do spend an inordinate amount of time together, which um really really helps us think up crazy ideas and sometimes put them into action. But, uh, I I'm a K to6 teacher. Left the classroom a few years ago and uh have my own little company which makes just about no money, but um you know do a bit of contract work here and there with the department of education and uh my little company is called SLAM and we we focus on professional learning and things like that. Um so yeah, thanks for inviting us on tonight.
Well, I I I got a I got a tweet from Megan about Megan Towns from one of the Microsoft kind of learning delivery specialists and she said you got to speak with these guys. I've just had a conversation with them. They've blown my mind about what they're doing with AI assistants and the way they're taking things. And I think for me like work of working in education for a while obviously and you know speaking to kind of lots of teachers and and and students and you know other other people in in the education sphere and system leaders and things there's a kind of missing link almost with with the curriculum side of it and obviously the way things are moving. You know you take a tech company like Microsoft for examp whoever or Apple or Google or whatever, you know, lots of these technologies they're making like kind of now um and we've got a big issue with skilling. So, we can't get people skilled enough, you know, adults or young adults in the workforce who are interested in some of those technologies because they're new. You know, you can't go to university and study how to develop an AI assistant because it's kind of new and it's on the you know, it's in the shops already and and there's people not not kind of understanding some of this technology. So I'm really interested to see because I feel there's a a a big gap that we could explore today where you know you've got the technology which kind of matters but it kind of doesn't as well because it's about that pedagogy and that that kind of curriculum connection. So when you when you think of the projects you've been doing recently what kind of things spring to mind that have been uh interesting in that AI field?
Well I'm coming to this as a primary school teacher or ex- primary school teacher you might say but also as someone who I call call myself now a learning experience developer because I'm always focused on developing some kind of experience for a learner be it um you know sometimes it's a magazine sometimes it's a bit of software or an app um sometimes a little conference or something but uh what I'm most interested in as far as what's happening in our what do we call this isn't the naughties this is the onesies is it
onesies
where are we oh no we're into the next one aren't we into the 20s
2020 m I think there's a lot of I think there's a lot of beautiful names that people are using to describe 2020. I'm not sure what sort of rating this
now we're into the 20s. Um there is some some crazy interesting technology that's happening around us.
Yes.
What the problem is for us is that the the regular person and so we can put in teacher student but the regular citizen isn't fully a breast of exactly what's going on around them. We have we have data moving everywhere. We have organic data which is you know things like the temperature and all that sort of thing around us. But then we have all of this wireless data that's happening around us. Internet of things is taking off with smart cities and smart spaces. And so my interest around that has been uh partly in location based experiences be it for students or just the general public
and um and and how we can augment those experiences like with augmented reality or uh plugging in uh that location to maybe APIs like Google Maps and location and and and all sorts of other things like a wolf from alpha
so that that that location is is really turned into a even better experience and from my point of view can we actually put some learning in that for the person and and can we have them learn more about the location that they're in now I say location because because we're three-dimensional humans and and we live in a a real space and so I'm interested in how we can take the virtual spaces and the real spaces and combine them together to create something even better for the learner.
And um AI is only just coming into that for me. I'm really starting to understand what's possible and and build that in. But um I think there's there's a lot of interesting things anyway happening when we start to connect narrow AIs and augmented reality, maybe virtual reality and all different locations
because you get Yeah. that and that's really I suppose a a mixture of all those technologies. together, right? And then and then
and if I'm going off the deep end right now, think of location that could be the classroom for instance,
of course. Yeah.
But it could also be in instead of I mean we we're always talking be talking for 10 years at least about breaking down the classroom walls. I'm talking about well why can't we have the classroom go for a walk to a part of our city and have our classroom there.
We don't have to take all of our our tools with us because hopefully there's something there for us to engage with.
Yeah. And I love the way you're talking about it in terms of like a an experience like we you know like like the learning experience that the the fact that we we live in something and we you know this like an organic experience for us to to kind of drive that's really interesting.
You know what so I was going to say so pivoting off that though
there's there's actually a strong current of concern I think within educators and and educators are there just mirroring a concern that's happening in society.
So I think everyone is aware that AI is becoming more and more relevant and more and more common in society. And a lot of the times the AI that we we use every day is so subtle that we might not even be aware that we're using it. We know we have AI. We know computers and machine learning and and these things sort of happen around us, but we don't actually cognitively recognize that we are that we're actually using these sorts of things. And it creates some concern. And there are some sometimes some some genuine concerns, some some genuine discussions about privacy and about even the the ethical and moral uh ethical moral um impact of having AI making decisions and taking humans out of the loop for for various things. I I saw a debate just last year that was all about having AI politicians and that AI politicians would be um very unbiased because they could make they could they could make things without without um you know the the bias of their upbringing and they they could crunch metadata and make decisions that were just based on numbers. But but then I think anybody still saying
AI that's crazy.
Yeah. Exactly right. Because you can't take B because the bias exists in whoever actually programmed the AI in the first place and if you actually humanity out of it and if it's just pure numbers then suddenly things that are just cold decisions about numbers actually removes the essence of humanity in the first place. It's it's it's actually humanity for that. that one person or that one small group that might be suffering and our desire to help those that in many ways actually is what being human is all about having empathy for those without. So,
so that there's big moral and ethical questions and
educators are part of society and that brings it in there and I know you're about to ask a question Dan because I can hear it on the tip of your tongue. That's okay.
But but what I what I am going to say is we actually know that AI is not going anywhere. AI is part of our lives. Now it's going to be a larger part of our lives in the future and we know it will take it will play a part of the classrooms of tomorrow more and more commonly. It's very very important that teachers now today are having the sorts of discussions that we're having right now and the and actually ask the questions and challenge the ideas so that we as educators are actually the people who drive the decision making about how how AI then is integrated into our classrooms and it's not AI devices and we're not sort of uh sleepwalking into big tech making decisions for us and just saying here's a product you use it bang it's it's then integrated into your school and you have to adapt to it rather than it adapts to the needs of of education.
Yeah. And I think I think what jumped out to me then is like like we've always been when you were talking about some of those things then you know when I used to teach you know I remember get getting given one of my favorite examples I think I used in recent podcast episode as well, I got given a um sheet of paper at the beginning of the year telling me it was like a box and whisker diagram that told me roughly where every kid was going to land at the end of year 12 and you know they were in year seven and I was kind of and that was that was something that came from like um the department it was in the UK so it was department of education in the UK but it was a statistically you know it was it was there was a lot of bias in that where's the data set that that came from where did it you know but but it wasn't just because we've always I think really when you said there it's all pervasive. There's lots of AI that are being used already in schools to kind of give us data to give us analytics to help us understand where the kids are. Sometimes we think that it's going to be this big thing like the robots are coming to take our jobs and the fridge is going to attack me. But actually like you're right there's a lot of subtle AI isn't there where where especially in teaching where we get given data we're given um specific information and that might be asked, right?
Yeah. And and do you know what the best example of AI that makes teachers happy when when I've had these sorts of conversation and it actually still triggers a question in itself, although most people when they initially hear it absolutely love it, is that I have seen a a number of startup companies that are using AI to um help children uh improve their their written samples, their their writing work, their their essays so that a child produces a piece of work um they submit it into machine. The machine actually scans uh looks for uh what type of what type of um uh audience they're looking for, what type of what's the purpose of this. It'll look at their grammar. Not only will it then identify their grammar, it'll identify their purpose. It'll actually help s make suggestions about, you know what, if you do this, this will improve your writing, you do this, this will improve your writing. So, a child can actually um submit their work, improve the the quality quality of their their writing or improve the quality of the result that they'll get marked against a matrix. Uh and the teacher also will then have uh if the entire class puts their this piece of work through through this tool then the teacher actually gets teaching points. Oh, you know what your class uh 17 out of 23 students um need addressing this issue. So the teacher then gets the AI feed out that tells them okay I need to be uh very specific in um explicitly explaining this type of thing in the lesson follow. So most teachers go, "Wow, you know what? So the kids are getting help with their performance. I'm not having to mark their drafts because the AI is marking the draft for me. So I've just saved myself about 10 to 15 hours of marking. The kids are actually going to improve and do a better performance and it's going to give me teaching points. This sounds like win-win until you start thinking about okay, so where's the creativity in this? So where actually is they might be producing better performances and it might be against a measure against a against a matrix. They might be able to score higher on that matrix but but where has actual the the creative thinking the analyzing the humanity of that thought process where is that in that loop? So yeah, it makes my life easier. Yeah, it makes my um teaching more more explicit and more direct and yes certainly it's able to help the students get a higher performance but it does also raise some questions.
Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts, Rob?
Well, just on that last point, I think that I've seen some recent discussions around rubrics, which were very similar, which kind of asked the question, if if we're teaching students to jump within the boxes that we're giving them, then are we actually reducing their creativity as well? It's a similar thing. The tool, it doesn't matter if it's the artificial um intelligence doing it for us and giving us that feedback or whether it's the rubric telling us, okay, no, we we need you here, not there. Then um whether that's actually reducing the creativity. However, sometimes we need to reduce creativity because we're asking for a certain task. Most of our bosses don't necessarily want us to be creative if they're giving us a simple task. In certain cases, they might, but other times we need to be able to just, you know, jump through the hoop as necessary in real life. So, um yeah, I think I think part of the job job of the educator is to kind of find the good middle ground of all of these things. Um I I use the Hemingway app, by the way, which doesn't do all of those things that Brett just said, but I love it because um Hemingway, I believe, was known to be a fairly concise writer and not use the passive voice too much. So, it kind of points out to me when I'm using kind of weak writing or my sentences are rolling on too much and
and it forces me to be a bit more concise with big red highlighting and yellow highlighting.
And I think one thing that and you know, this is a bit of a gold seam of thought here really, I suppose, that you guys are opening up, but but I suppose when you look at it as well, Well, you know, this this has happened in time in memorial, hasn't it? When I'm sure they had this conversation with a calculator came out and they said, "Oh, mathematics isn't going to be the same again. Calculators and our
you know what this invention of this invention of paper and pen ruins how would students be able to learn without Yeah. Exactly.
chalk is all you need.
Yeah. And and what it does do some some you know the thing that I've seen is like with with some of the AI stuff around writing is that it's really allowed some of the kids dyslexia and the special education needs kids really come alive a little bit and be able to be supported and feel confident in their writing. But again, you know, I you know, there's so many things, isn't it? Like when I when I see kids doing iMovies and things and they all look the same, you're like, where's the creativity? You see, you know, and Microsoft, I know there's an ongoing thing that I always bring up and that there was a transition in Microsoft Movie Maker which had the Star Wars credits and like every kid in the UK that I used to teach had a movie with the Star Wars credits on it. you're like, "Oh god, you know, they look the same." So, you're absolutely right. So, so when when you you guys have been doing some interesting stuff and I I think um before we get on to some of the stuff you've been doing with some of the AI assistants, Brett, I'd be interested in your thoughts because this is, you know, it can go in multiple ways. You know, we've talked about, you know, you brought up the fact that AI is, you know, like hidden almost in a lot of ways, but when it comes down to the crunch, you know, teachers get a curriculum given to them. How the heck do we sort out a curriculum ulum does it fit into a curriculum where where where's you were thinking with that as a thought leader in this area
you know what I had a principal really challenge me once challenged not not not me directly but challenged my staff I was I was much younger teacher at the time and and I must admit she was a tough capital T tough principal right capital T tough and she put up the question one one staff development day she wrote this question on the board and she said uh what's your job is teacher. And you know what? Every everyone wrote everything under the sun, you know, uh carer, uh mentor, uh you know, or or every every every beautiful verb, every beautiful sort of um uh you know, nurture a child, you know, communicate, or you know, everything. And you know what? She she challenged us all. Uh and and I've never forgot this lesson. And as as ruthless and ruthless and and cold-hearted as it is, uh our job what we actually get paid to do what the the thing that people give us money for is deliver curriculum. The the actual the actual task our our actual purpose um the thing that that that gives us cash is that we are paid as a service to de deliver a curriculum um and and pass information from one thing into into our into our students. So we we move knowledge from one space and and and that's cold and and hard and I'm not saying I I totally subscribe to that but at the end of the day that that that is our job right so our job is actually to help our students learn now we do that encompassing all those all those other things now now she she wasn't about all of that obviously but we do that because we we know we know that like uh um uh we have to have uh we we have to have uh empathy have to have compassion. We know that like that that Maslo hierarchy of needs. Students need to feel safe, feel feel like their their needs are being met before they can even start to succeed academically. So So we actually as educators have to look all after all of those other things because at the tip of that peak after we've looked all after all of those other things, we then actually can push them along academically. Uh so as a teacher uh sometimes If we're talking about these technologies, if we are just focusing on the tip of that that pyramid, tip of that triangle, yes, we're just trying to move that needle here and we're not actually looking at the at all the other things. Um then we come back to that actual straight up um issue that that principal challenged me with early on. Um what is the purpose of a teacher? So what is the purpose of of this technology? If we're going to integrate AI, is the purpose to just move that needle right at the top or are actually trying to develop the whole child. So we actually move the child along and they naturally progress further and actually achieve more. So so it's more than just the tool. It's actually the purpose behind the tool.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Exactly. I suppose that's that's a great way to think about it. I suppose and and in terms of like the the other thing is I suppose the technology is about you're you're right to sort of that progression as well. So you know and so what where where do you guys think it should land? Is is AI something we should be you know teaching to everybody. Is it some is it a life skill to be able to understand and and be a kind of discerning user of technology and utilizing AI or should it be something for just the people who study technology?
I don't think we need year 2 kids jumping in and developing their own neural networks. I think I think okay, let's say that's one end of the spectrum. Welcome to kindergarten. We're going to build a neural network today and you're going to teach it how to uh well learn for it. itself and
yeah
no no that that's probably not necessary at the other end of the scale we could just ignore it completely and we're probably closer to that side of things but um there's a lot happening behind AI AI relies on data for instance a whole lot of data and um I don't feel like as a society our if you want to call them citizens but our students our teachers anybody there are very few of us that really understand data and its implications well
I think that um even though it's really in the curriculum I think you know understanding statistics as part of it and how statistics can be used and misused but uh there's more to it than that our data is everywhere right now and it is being used by corporations by governments um and by some of some some nefarious people for instance
how is it being used how can I protect my data is part of that data security but it's not the whole thing public data is very interesting and I think I honestly think that we could plug into public data in education a lot better. We could have more authentic um lessons and and and just just learning programs using the data that is around us be it the sorts of um you know public data uh like the uh what's it called the the the twin the digital twins that's being made available across many cities uh cities now where we have a virtual version of many of the physical aspects of our city.
Uh be it be it other other public data and APIs, all of that kind of stuff, the weather data,
all of that. All of that. I mean, look, I don't I don't really subscribe to the whole um let's have our students save the world thing. I I don't love the pressure that is put on students about that. But if we're actually going to do some authentic learning, then we should really not be focusing at a world level is my point of view. We should be focusing at a community level. So within our own classroom, within our own school, perhaps within a local community, but there is a lot of data around that and and you can be looking at things like how much electricity we're using within our school. Um uh what's our what's our classroom environment like? How much light are we allowing in here? Because light has an effect on the amount of learning that we're going to get done.
Yeah.
Why not have the kids measure that and then respond to that in a real way? That's authentic learning. And when you use data, I think um I think you can do a lot more with that. And you can give evidence for the decisions that you're making. And too much in our society, we have people, including our politicians, making decisions without good evidence. And they call it science. And often it's not science. It's just somebody has said something and we're going to pretend that's a consensus and we're going to make a decision for or against it. Um so I I really think that we need to build up the data science understanding for not just our students but our teachers as well and I think that already fits into the curriculum really well. Um perhaps it's not built out enough but
that's fantastic. Yeah, that's a great great great point. So so you guys have been doing quite a lot. Um I I know Brett you were talking about the AI assistance and things. Can you give us a bit of information uh about how how that project will work then and kind of connecting I suppose with what Rob just mentioned as well?
Yeah. Do you know what funnily enough Actually, you mentioned Megan Towns earlier, a conversation I had with Megan Towns.
Do you know I saw someone make a post on Twitter about the AI safari that that took place I think like one year and like two days ago or something. I saw someone post a few days ago
and a conversation I had with her that day about something that had been bubbling away in my in my head for a few months prior and it crystallized a little bit that day, but it took me some time to be able to act on it and it was it was about using voice assistance to help uh students in their final year of education uh be able to to study more effectively for their final year exams. Um and I'll I'll give a I'll dive into that a little bit more in a moment because as soon as you start saying I want to bring in some AI assistance or some voice assistance I've I've connected in with a lot of experts and and I don't think this term voice assistance really here in Australia, but it but it seems that that seems to be the international term that a lot of people are are using in the research. Um certainly a lot of the research that I've come across and read that the voice assistants, so we're talking about your Alexa devices, we're talking about your Google Home, we're talking about your your Siri on your phone. Um these these are voice assistants um are things that are controversial because just as Rob was talking about using data to inform and giving students real life examples for learning, As soon as you start talking about data then obviously we also start talking about privacy and what data is open for sharing and what data is good for for knowledge and learning and then what data is my private data and shouldn't be u public knowledge shouldn't be um data that that's owned and shared by a company and especially in an education setting what data is and is not appropriate for for people to collect when it's um data around children usage um any any one of our students. So so what do we do with data there? So there becomes a huge ethical decision that we as a society we actually need to as a society start to come to term. You mentioned before that AI is an emerging technology. We actually need to start to come to terms with okay what sort of things are we comfortable with as a society? What what are we happy to share? What are we happy to keep private? And then we need to make sure that In a democracy where we've actually discussed these things and come to some sort of a consensus, we actually legislate appropriately. So as the technology continues to develop, it develops in a legislated way that we're actually able to keep what is core for for for what we've agreed to u as as ours um safe and then we can move on. Without these discussions, tech the the technology development isn't going to slow down and wait for society to decide its place. the technology is going to continue. If we don't have these discussions to try and work out what we are and are not comfortable with as a society,
we're going to be playing catchup to the technology.
Um, so there's there's a big issue there. So, some of the stuff that I have made, so I I use I use Alexa a lot. Um, I'm happy. I'm almost part Android. I got to be honest with you. Like I've got just about every device. I've got obviously my phone always by my side. I've got my, you know, the Fitbit always wrapped around me. I I will confess to the fact that I'm expecting delivery of my um Echo Frame glasses in a in in a couple of weeks. I'm I'm proudly going to say that I'm I think I'm going to have one of the the few pairs of them in Australia. Um
Cyborg Salarus.
Sorry,
Cyborg Salarus.
Cyborg Salarus. Um now, uh and I know I'm going to have to be careful when Rob comes over because one of the first things Rob does when he walks into my house is turn off Alexa. Uh he He doesn't want Alexa listening into our conversations.
Isn't it's so interesting? Yeah, because I I I can't live without Alexa in my house at the minute. I need it for everything. Timers, cooking, alarms, the works.
I've got it set up for for my for my old parents. They're their um you know, don't hardly use technology for anything. My dad loves having Alexa being able to um turn on turn on the lights. Alexa, lights on. Boom. Alexa lights off when they go away on their their trips. Not so much at the moment because of Corona, but when they go away on their trips, he loves being able to just use the Alexa app so he can make the lights go on and off at home. So he trick all those bad robbers to think because the lights are going on and off, there must be someone in the home, no one's going to come around and and steal his house. But um uh look, so we we actually do need to decide what we want want to do there. So to get around that, I have been playing with a thing called um blueprints, uh Alexa blueprints. And with a blueprint, you can make a skill So, it's actually just a template to be honest with you. It's actually very very easy to use. It's so easy to use. You you you don't even need to to be very technical to be able to create one. You can as long as you've got the the information, the the questions that that you'd like. You you go in, you you log on, you you've got to have an Amazon Alexa account, you you have a blueprint, you set up you set up the the frame that looks like a whole bunch of different apps there that you can select from. You've got trivia questions and this questions and all all all different things. You just add in your series of questions, add in all of the answers, and then you send that information to your device. So, right now, I actually have a HSC, which is the the the highest level here in in the state I am, I've got a HS HSC biology, pardon me, biology study app that my son is using to help practice with his uh HSSE biology studies. So, I've sort of scoured a lot of resources of of of past questions and the same sort of this is what I love about it and this is what I love about a lot of technology. I think too often we we throw out learning and and and and skills from the teachers of the past and we try and push forward in in in in into the future. Actually, if we can just use these tried tried and trueue um methodologies that we know work pedagogically, these are sound things that we know helps students to learn. We know making questions helps you remember the answers. We know going over content, repeating it, studying it over and over helps with retention. Revising things works. These are oldfashioned these are
ask any medical student to to get by without flash cards for instance.
Yeah. True.
Yeah.
But but these are old pedagogies.
Old pedagogies that are you know these are the cornerstones of so much teaching. But here we have a very modern high-tech device to be able to leverage these old pedagogies and deliver them to the students. So I've got my son and on the weekends he doesn't want to study. I say do one round of do a round of Alexa um do a study session with Alexa. So he can talk to Alexa. He can lay on his bed go through he's actually studying his biology
while he's laying around just talking to a device.
Yeah. Superb.
I think that's very powerful. I'm skirting the whole issue with with students because I'm because I'm just doing study sessions in the home by choice. I'm happy to I've shared it with a couple of friends. Um so I've been very very careful because there are a lot of laws about um student data. So you can't just take these devices right now and certainly in the the um legal settings of where I am. I I can't just take these devices into my classroom and use it.
Yeah. And a lot and a lot of the cases, you know, a lot of this technology like the Alexa stuff or say you take the the Xbox stuff for other other you know they consumer things so they use consumer identities and it goes under a completely different terms and conditions
you love my house every single object in my entire house is run via my Xbox I've got my entire housews as well the the Alexa and and that kind of AI assistance stuff is quite interesting where's your thought process for that have you got any interesting projects or or are you thinking about doing things around that area? What's next on Ryzen for you?
Well, I've I've been uh this year and especially as a response to co uh been working within Power Apps. So, this is the whole Office 365 area. Uh I I got brought in to uh help out after only been working on Power Apps for probably about 3 months. And so,
I was a bit of a beginner, but doing some interesting things there and and being in towns again and Andrew Ballser, some uh some Microsoft people that you would know, um called me in to a uh little project where I helped out to make what was called a digital lanyard. So that was their idea and I built that out.
I remember that. Wow. That was that was your project. I see.
Yeah. And so so as part of that I um I'm sort of leveling up bit by bit in learning some automation work really. Now this isn't necessarily artificial intelligence but but there is some interesting automation work in there. So I was getting I feel quite good at that um for the first half of this year and that's using uh you know, Microsoft Power Automate or Flow and Power Apps and that sort of thing. But since uh well, only recently and since we've been talking more about AI, Brett, the last month or so, I've been playing with uh some of the AI that you can plug into with the connectors with Office 365. So, I've set myself up with a Office 365 developer account,
which anybody can do for free. So, that's really cool.
And it means I have access to all the premium versions of all of the connectors and all of the other tools. And so I can start to plug into um very similar tools to what I used to plug into with Google's cloud vision.
So these are around things like computer vision. So being able to tell objects within either a a image or a video and some of their text to speech, speech to text, uh detecting key phrases in text to kind of work out what somebody's talking about. And also one that we made just on the fly the other day Brett and I which was detecting sentiment. So uh we were thinking to ourselves what we're going to do a quick presentation
powerful.
Oh and don't say say you and I thought of it because you know that will give me way too much credit because we may have we may have spital uh some ideas around but my brother you made the whole thing happen and you
no but you want to know something really funny.
But you know what this is a very very simple way um uses flow uh and it and it actually just goes through and it is a way that you know if um is a very very simple way to check on the well-being of students uh to be able to look after the care build that empathy into education and it's a very powerful reason a powerful example of how AI can be used for good and I want you to listen to this I want everybody to listen to this one because this is rock solid gold and it is Rob I can't take any credit for it
it's not Solid talk about he really talk things up solid and I don't think gold is a rock but anyway
I think it's gold as well now when Dan said come on the podcast I listened to a couple of episodes and in just one episode um this is only yesterday since we' done it but um he he that the two of them came up with the same idea. So but we did build it out a little bit and it's um it's quite interesting and and basically it uses the adaptive cards that are available in Microsoft Teams and uses some flow and all it does is each morning asks all of the students within a team uh in into the channel for them to answer uh just how they're going that morning. And so this is really a a sort of co I'm learning from home situation. Um and me as the teacher, I'm very separated from my students and I can't necessarily get around to all of them and check on them. Usually the start of my day when I have my own class is to go around and check on how my students are going. I want to know how their night was or that the the last week perhaps the weekend if they had it. I want to know if they're mentally in a space to be able to learn and if not if I can get them there or or what we can do instead.
And so, uh, just being able to ask them that and get some feedback on that is really useful. But unfortunately, if I do do that, in most cases, I'll have that put into a spreadsheet or just come up in my teams on a timeline and um, it will just it will give me of their feedback and it could be clicking on a button just telling me how they are from 1 to five smiley face um chart for instance uh maybe write a sentence or something like that telling me how they are uh sometimes it's difficult to get to that early enough and so uh I actually think of a lot of AI one of the most useful things in the in the classroom at the moment is as a triage
and so a triage really helps you to get to the people who need it when they need it as early as possible. And so this is asking them for something, but the flow, what it does, it actually uses the um the text analytics tools, the the connector that detects the sentiment of what they're saying. And so if there somebody is saying something and and and it's it's close to a zero, it's very negative, then that's going to pop up to me in my teams with a notification and also notify my phone just saying this student said this. It's got really low sentiment, what do you think? That allows me to reach out to that student, be it with a Zoom call or Teams call or whatever or or or to the phone and and to be able to say, "Hey, how you going? How can I help you?" And it could just be that it's very negative around the work that we're doing. For instance, hey, I'm really having trouble with it. Maybe that's going to get like a a 0.2 out out of a scale of 0 to one, but um that enables me to see, hey, they're really struggling with it. I'll get to them first.
And so I think sentiment analysis could be really interesting for that classroom triage. Now, I say that because we can't just cidle up alongside somebody if they're working in a different environment. And um I I honestly feel like I don't know, but I honestly feel like we could have even if we don't have more lockdowns, maybe learning from home is something that is going to be more acceptable in the future in that students will just do it just like just like our workplaces are working from home often. that seems to becoming more acce acceptable. Some companies are moving towards a completely working from home. No matter co, no matter anything, they're just going to have most of their employees working from home.
Maybe education is going to go that way soon. It wouldn't surprise me. And if that's the case, we really need to be able to up our communication with students. Perhaps AI is a good place to do that where we can just quickly triage the needs of our students, but we also need to give them access to us as the teachers. to be able to say, "I need help with this in this moment." And so, um, sometimes it means that AI will give them feedback in the moment what they need if it's a simple task perhaps, but sometimes it will just notify the teacher, this student needs help with this in this.
That just sounds absolutely fantastic. I agree, Brett. It's gold, isn't it? It absolutely is.
Well, these I must say the impact a lot of this stuff though is all hypothetical and a lot of this stuff is the potential of how we can use AI because we are at the precipice of using this. So we're talking about things that we've made. We're talking about things that that can work
but that things that haven't really been rolled out and tested in the classroom yet. So so it's important because sometimes it hasn't gone through that that rigor of actual lived experience within a school.
And sometimes sometimes that's the thing isn't it with with educational technologies we know you know there can be one pocket of something and you know where there's always been that element. I remember seeing a guy called Ben Goldick in in the UK once and he was very much around random control trials. He was he was he was old GP and um well not old GP he was a GP in the in the UK and he was basically talking to us about how you know educational technology was the same you know you could give like teacher A I don't know an iPad for example and teacher B no iPads and then just because teacher A had better results of the iPad there's so many factors you know it's very difficult this is Same as giving, you know, when you're testing drugs.
Exactly. You can't just give it, you know, you need to have you need to have almost identical twins to give a drug to to kind of test that. You could have random control trials. And often we we do fall into that trap in in edu, don't we? Where where somebody's talking about the next thing. Um, so it's great you call that out, Brett, because it's uh very humble of you to kind of say, well, you know, it works and you know, it has an impact, but you know, it could have a bigger impact. You'd like to see it in the classroom at a bigger scale.
Yeah.
If I could give any advice to the edtech community in general is that you need to give the tools to the educators because education is more than probably anything perhaps more than medicine. It's context reliant and so one classroom is very different to another classroom. It might just be geographically but but often it's many other factors too. If I had one student that um was a a real behavior challenge for me that would impact all the students in my class, no matter how good a teacher I am. If I had one student that um all sorts of impacts can happen
um and and and it can be the sort of lifestyle they live uh it could be all sorts of factors but if you can give these AI tools to the educators make them simple to use but allow them to develop things in real time and I'm thinking here like uh tools like Microsoft flow or if um uh Zapia those kind of automation tools but then allow allow using those um uh teachers to plug into the AI with different APIs, then put it in the hands of the educators and allow them to come up with what's suitable for them. It's obviously going to be suitable for a whole lot of other teachers as well. But but why I say that is because most of the tech that comes out in edtech, it falls flat. Uh it's it's a very hard industry to build in. Speaking from a little bit of experience here. Um and and the reason is because different contexts really require different needs and so what I want to see is educators if if they are getting into this field then they need to be able to have the tools which are simple to use and when I when I use flow I know that um if I have my developer account I can access everything but if I'm in a work space like in an education workplace I can't access them all as a teacher I can't access any of it so um I'm thinking here of a product that I used a few years ago for instance, which is an augmented reality um piece of software called Metaverse. That enabled me to create little experiences in augmented reality for my students to use and then for them to create them themselves. They could create little experiences in augmented reality, use a bit of computational thinking, just it's all very visual, pull things together, but it wasn't very hard to take that to the next step and start to plug in. They had blocks for all the Google Cloud Vision possibilities and So all you could say is
connect that together. Yeah.
Well, you could encourage the person who was using it in the app, say, "Take a picture of a dinosaur and if they if they took a picture of a dinosaur, then their little program would go in one direction and if it didn't see the dinosaur, it went in another direction." And so it used Google's cloud vision to do that. Now, you could use that in all sorts of ways. Um,
and and and that basically that empowered the teacher to be able to build things that were actually useful for their students that did use these AI um objects or you know this AI technology that's usually hidden behind everything that only the engineers can touch.
Yeah. Yeah. It's very it's a very good point. It's dem democratizing a lot of those tools now, isn't it? So where do you see this you know where do you see AI or any elements of this AI or personal assistance or ethics? Where where where's where's one thing you you see in the future that's going to be really exciting for you?
Look I I can say I can say something straight up while you you have a little bit of a ponder, Rob, but um because I'm I'm quite passionate about the the place that voice assistance will will will play within the classroom. Now, obviously, we have to get a legislative uh legal things right about data and privacy, but um uh if I use the term smart spaces, I think every classroom of the future will have smart spaces within that room. So, that there there'll be a wall, a spot, an an area where a child will be able to go up to and communicate and and and get further information. Now, when you talk um you you you talked earlier about helping uh students with additional needs, whether it might be dyslexia or or or whatever additional learning need that they might have. I I just think this is potential a potentially a huge gamecher for students that require additional support to have a digital assistant to have a smart space in the classroom that they can can go up to and just verbally talk to and then have that output. It'll make them more able to achieve the the the goals of the lesson and then more integrated within the learning and then be able to get more out of it. I think of a new arrival student who's just come straight to a new country, very limited um language, uh have no no language only their their native tongue, don't know the the language of of of their of their current country that they they walk into a classroom and they've got an area that they can can actually communicate and translate and they they can get they can understand what the teacher is asking them to do. They can talk to the teacher, the teacher can translate back to them. This is technology that literally exists now. We could be helping our ESL EAL students. We could be helping our students that need additional support. I find it quite frustrating To be honest with you, you can you can probably hear it. We actually have the technology right now to be able to deploy into the into our classroom to help a child who might have Asperers to to help a child who might have struggle you physically being able to to to write and work. We actually have the technology to put in there right today that could actually help them learn to help them be more engaged to help our students who have multiple languages and and are trying to learn learn English. We could deliver that tomorrow. But we don't have the the legal structures in place to be able to to safely do that within the education.
Yeah, I yeah, I can your frustration. I get frustrated sometimes because I know there's there's a tool inside the Microsoft stack and I know this isn't a Microsoft podcast but but um there's an immersive reader tool which is phenomenal at like reading back stuff and and translating and things and everybody's got access to it in edu but not many people know about it and it's so frustrating when I know that you know there's a kid somewhere who's struggling to read and and you know like what one of there was a parent that came one of my um daughter's friends a bit of a personal story she uh is one of her friends in school came over a couple of weeks ago and and he had profound visual difficulties and um and I and I said to the dad when he picked him up I said ah you know I didn't realize uh your son had um these these difficulties you should have a look at immersive reader and these tools and I was showing some of the other stuff you know in in the Google land and Microsoft land and he's like wow that's amazing and you're like ah it's ah just it just yeah I can hear the frustration
and you know what that that frustration is not a frustration that's a negative and and it's probably the wrong word but you know what it's a passion because it's a passion for wanting to help the children uh who who can be helped and and those people that you you know you're able to support. So it it's more probably the word for is a passion to help those not not a frustration because it's not an anger thing. But it's a fr it's a it's a passion for for wanting to do more. We're always wanting to you know that's that's the core of being a teacher, isn't it? We we don't choose to become a teacher because we want to be rich. We choose to become a teacher because we want to help those students help the children uh in our society be better people and and and and that's at the end of the day
that's absolutely fair. Rob, how about yourself?
I think that our world seems to be going very much in a smart way. We have smart devices, uh, internet of thing. Our cities are becoming smart, our classrooms are becoming smart spaces. And the reason that they're called smart is because they're taking data and they're doing interesting things with it. Be it what we call automation, which I don't think is a great term for what it actually is, or whether it would be artificial intelligence, which I don't think is a very great term for what it is. I think you'll agree. Um, but but any of that relies on data, and I don't think that we have a very good understanding of just what kinds of data are around us and how we can access it. But um I say that not because it's necessarily just an interest thing. I say it because we can use it to engage learners in authentic experiences in locations that they are rather than just using data out of a textbook like we always did. Um I've been working recently with the OEM Foundation as part of my work with SLAM uh on professional learning for what's called the Cookerberry. And it's a little device that is um very powerful, but it enables students without any coding like they might have to do for instance with micro:bit to just plug in sensors and start
just looking at the data that's around them.
Uh if they want to, they can log it very simply to a spreadsheet and just plug it into a computer and run it straight off the the cookery itself. And so they can start to analyze the data that's around them in moments.
Now, Uh why I think that's exciting is because it's it's building up uh every student as a data scientist. Why do we want to do that? Because our democracy I mean this this is overused perhaps but our democracy does depend on all of our citizens to understand the types of data that is being used for and against them and with them. And so I really do do think that that empowers students a lot if they can understand data and And if we have AIs everywhere that are using that data, then let's understand what they're working with before we even start to try to understand how they work with it.
Yeah.
So hopefully my my my hope is that we can um have that in our new curriculum that should be, you know, being worked on now and soon and that we can sort of upskill all of our teachers and students in that field.
That's fantastic. Well, gentlemen, you know, like you blow my mind and hopefully, you know, really inspired a lot of teachers and people in the education sphere with with your insights today. You know, like honestly, thank you from bottom of my heart today. It's fantastic speaking to you. You know, you inspired me and hopefully lots of others around this field. So, thanks for joining us tonight, guys.
Well, we love you, Dan, and your podcast is great. So, thank you. Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot, guys. Cheers.
You're a good man.
Cheers.
So, Lee, having listened to the fantastic Brett there and Rob What what are your thoughts?
Well, uh they obviously love each other very much and that's great to see that two two grown men can be that comfortable with it, which is it's wonderful to see. Um, listen mate, it was it was really interesting for me as a non-teer and you know there's a lot of finesse and uh skill I think in that teaching that that you know that a lot of people miss you don't necessarily have a full appreciation of. But I loved it. I thought they had some great input, some great perspectives. Um I I assume you had a great time talking to them. Yeah, sounded like it.
Yeah, I did. Yeah. And the thing is, you know, normally with podcasts, as you know, you know, and and any podcast you listen to, they they kind of well thought out and you think about a story and try to bring it down, but but Brett and Rob definitely rifted off the off the cuff and it was great because we could really explore some of those things that that weren't premeditated questions that were trying to guide people to think about things in a deeper context. It was about, well, what do they really think with their heart on their sleeve? What are they really doing in schools? And and that was what Kim came up quite uh to the top for me I suppose when I was listening to it.
Yeah. Like what do they say? You should never work with children and animals. Maybe they should extend that to you should never work with children, animals and ex-teers.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Exactly.
Hard to corral that conversation, but they did a great job.
Yeah. I think their passion came across really well and that was really interesting. But also the fact that they came from different angles. So Brett was obviously from that angle of the classroom and the practicalities and he was always bringing me back in the conversation to how we would do it in the classroom and all very well saying about some of this technology, but what can he do? And then also that ethical element that Brett talked about was interesting, right?
No, definitely. You know, and when you say that is the point about the kind of how um you know, people tend to forget how important it is the education, the grounding we start our children in is such an important guide for where they go to in the world. And and that was it really shone through for the two guys. And it made me think we have a um You know, our CTO Kevin Scott's written a book on recently called Reprogramming the American Dream. Of course, it's, you know, focused on the American world. But a big chunk of that is about this need for us to actually get back to the very roots of what is the future we're building through the students and the children today and how they'll grow into that future. So, it's great to see that, you know, the guys are thinking about AI at that student level and not just AI, you know, it's all the things around it. I think one of the guys said in the conversation, it's not just AI, it's the whole stream of technology and tools that that enable that and make that come to life. Uh, so it's it's it's fantastic to see and well aligned to what
one thing that I'd like to ask you about which came out quite quite prominently in there because they were talking about Alexa and your ex XWS. I've got Alexas at home, right? I love love love home automation. And the interesting piece was Brett could see a tangible benefit from personal uh devices to be able to ask question. questions of to supplement learning and he was wrangling with that ethical element of consumer technology versus enterprise technology in school and I know there's no answer to it but I'd just be interested to hear your thoughts on that.
Well no I did listen to that and and actually it made me think about because I I use them all the time and the blueprints I think that they were talking about as the way routines or blueprints it's one of the two in the Alexa ecosystem.
Um and it's interesting ethical thought so I'll give you a very personal story on it Dan. So uh got um as we've talked about, I've got a couple of kids and my they both had Alexas in their room and my 13-year-old son came in one day, gave me back the Alexa, dumped it in my bedroom and said, "I don't want that anymore." And I said, "Why not?" He said, "I don't want you watching me all the time." And I'm like, "Listen, I've got better things to do than watch you all the time. That's not what I do." But he was consciously aware of the this is a thing that's listening to what I do. And he didn't want that. And I'm totally totally on board with that mindset. Whereas my 10-year-old daughter who has one in a room and She talks to it all the time and she uses it. In fact, I found if anyone knows the ecosystem, you know, you install the skills on Alexa and those skills do things. I found that I've come in and looked at my Alexa app and there's 20 new skills enabled because she's gone in and asked Alexa about some new thing that she wants the device to do. Well, my Alexa's talking to me right now because it keeps hearing me. Um, but she got it to, you know, she wants to do some new maths training or she's found some new skill that will help her, you know, learn how to write songs. or so it's like two opposite ends you know the ethical challenge of I don't want in my device but it is an amazing tool and you can use it
but but it was interesting you know that he was cognizant of that and I suppose that's our worry from a vendor point of view and he was cognizant that that was he understood how that technology worked and he knew that it was very much a consumer grade device. So the more information he knew about the students then the more shopping better shopping experience better experience generally that that person would get. So it was yeah And we get we get that obviously sometimes when you're comparing you know the Xbox services to the consumer services in M365 right?
Yeah it's a it is a really important definition between you know a product that you buy to get a particular outcome like M365 where you expect those things around privacy and security and controls and then when you consume a public service that you the value is that the service gets you access to a whole bunch of stuff but in that you know but the trade-off is you you know you you keep track of what you do and it's a difficult one to balance particularly for
yeah totally well thanks for your inputs on that and the thoughts because it was fascinating to me when I was speaking to them and the other the other interesting one which is interesting to think about and I will edit out the word interesting because I've said it 10 times in a row now but um Rob was talking about power apps which was fascinating because power apps has got AI built into he was talking about AI builder and the things he was doing around that so that's another level again.
Yeah. No, that was good to see. And uh you know, and and it wasn't even necessarily AI, but you know, I think it if you look at both stories, the the Alexa story and the Power App story, both of them are about how technology in some form or other is a tool that can be used to really change the way that we learn or develop. And you know, Power Apps enables anyone to build apps and Alexa enables people to communicate with devices and and access information. and you know the the quizzing tool I think he talked about for his son's uh biology exam.
It's incredible which I think brings me to this other thought and there was something else that one of the gentlemen said on the call which was
yeah you we I don't think we need to be teaching year two students neural networks. I think that was almost the was made
and I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to challenge that in that you know one of the things that I believe at least is we are we tend to be we tend to be a bit afraid of exposing children and young people to these rich and complex scenarios because we either think they're not ready for it, they don't understand it, or it's it's not right for them to learn about it yet because it's not, you know, not the time they need to, you know, go through a mature stage of their own education before they're ready for that. And I think we underestimate children significantly and it's it's almost impossible for you and I to compare what it was like for us as growing up as children when the most complex things we had was an Atari 2600 to children today who are just naturally climatized to that that complexity. Yeah.
I think it would be quite interesting to take year two students and explain to them
what is the idea of a neural network, a computer that can sort of rep replicate the synapses of an of a neuron uh system to generate an idea. I think they'd understand it better than you and I do. Yeah.
And I think that for them to start getting a sense of that early on
is actually a good thing. But I'm not a
but but it's the same with the Schrodingers cat. I think it's easy to explain to kids. You know, you explain the Schrodinger cat principle to an adult and they think you're barking mad. Um well or meowing mad if I say that. Um but the other interesting one I had a conversation on Twitter today about this around the teams interface. Somebody said to me,
yes,
uh on on Twitter today, when when will Microsoft make a really good educational interface for teams? For goodness sake, you made the Xbox interface. And then I I replied back and said, have you seen how complicated the Xbox interface is? It's wildly more complicated than teams. So, you know, interface to different people mean different things. Right.
Look, absolutely. But you know, in I agree in some ways that, you know, the Xbox is a very complicated interface, but also very intuitive. Um, but I look, I think it really comes back to that point that broadly speaking, we do underestimate just how capable children are of understanding these complexities. And I think the younger and more the younger we get them aware of what AI is about and what the technologies can do and what they can't do, you know, we've talked about in the past, you know, understanding the the limitations of AI. I think we set them up to be a generation that is actually ready to do the right things with AI versus the ones that come out of school and go, you know, blurry eyed going, "So, what's this AI thing? I apparently it's my new job, but I don't know how to do it." I think, you know, I think there's a balance in there somewhere.
Definitely. Well, thanks for thanks for the feedback on that. And uh I'm sure Brett and Rob are listening in intently and I'm sure they'll be kind of developing their AI journeys going forward in the future.
Rick, they'll be back for another episode of Counter everything we just said.
Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Lee. Awesome. Thanks, Dan.