Episode 282: Eduaide.AI

Episode 282: Pedagogy First, AI Second with Eduaide.Ai

[00:00:30] Fonz: Hello everybody. And welcome to another great episode of my ed tech life. Thank you so much for joining us on this wonderful day and wherever it is that you may be joining us from as always, thank you for all of your support and for making us part of your day, as always, we appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows.

Thank you so much for all of the feedback guys. It has been an amazing year. So many amazing conversations. Thank you so much. And if you haven't done so yet, please jump over to our YouTube and give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel to help us meet our goal of 1000 subscribers this year. But again, I'm excited because as you know, at the beginning of every show for a while, I've always mentioned EduAid and I am really excited to have Thomas Hummel and Thomas Thompson from EduAid.

Here on the show, and I believe this is going to be Thomas's both of you. I think it's your, yeah, Thomas Thompson. It's your third time, Thomas Homo. It's your second time. So I am excited to have you both here as our guests today. And honestly, I want to say thank you too, as well for sponsoring our show.

And thank you so much for believing in the work that we do, as you know, We try and bring the best conversations out there, you know, so we can put them out into the education space for all our audience members, our educators to learn from, and to, again, take some of those knowledge nuggets and put them into their practice.

So I'm excited about today's conversation. So again, before we get started, just in case there may be some people still out there in, in our world, in our bubble that may not know. Who it is that you are and what it is that you do. If you can just give us a little brief introduction and what your context is in the education space.

So I'll start with Thomas Homo. Thomas, give us a little intro and what your context is in the space.

[00:02:17] Thomas H: Yeah. Hey, I'm a seventh grade and eighth grade science teacher. I just wrapped up my eighth year of teaching, , on the Eastern shore of Maryland. And I am a co founder of edu aid. ai and, You know, I think that it's weird now to say, but like, we've been here and we've been at it for a year and I kind of have found myself speaking on AI in the space of education.

So, you know, I'm a teacher, , I'm a founder, but I also just like, I'm generally, , driven to help education and drive it forward through using AI.

[00:02:50] Fonz: Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I know that Thomas, you are very active both on X and on LinkedIn as well, and you definitely help drive the conversation and sharing a lot of things.

So I do really appreciate that as well. Thomas Thompson, thank you so much for joining us again today. Third three time guest. Can you give us a little brief introduction and what your context is in the education space?

[00:03:12] Thomas T: Of course. Thanks for having us on. It's always a pleasure to sit down and have a conversation with you.

We love what you do on this podcast. We think, Intelligent conversations on all things educational technology really go a long way to building teachers capacities and using these tools. I was a middle school social studies teacher taught across the hall from Thomas Hummel, and together we built EduAid AI, which high level is an instructional design tool for teachers.

You know, you could design an entire course from the Broad level unit plans and lesson planning documents all the way to the formative and summative assessments and feedback that you give to students. We just so happen to use generative AI to integrate all of the tools you may use in the course of instructional design, but we very much put the science of learning and the kind of teacher planning focus first and then AI, is a secondary thing.

[00:04:00] Fonz: Excellent. And that's something that we definitely want to talk about and highlight, because like I said, , one of the things that I really love about you both and the work that you are doing, and when I see you all on other podcasts, and when I see you all doing webinars and things of that sort, is really often the feeling that I get the Gen AI is secondary to what teachers are doing as far as pedagogy first, good pedagogy, and then help supplement with some of these tools, as opposed to sometimes there may be just some hype around some tools where it's like, hey, don't worry about any of that pedagogy stuff, just pick it up.

Plug in what you need and I'll give it to you and we're good to go. And we'll talk a little bit about that because I always love to bring up stuff that past guests have said and so on. But like I said, there's just something that when I see you all that you do very different and I love the transparency of it.

Like we mentioned a little bit. In the pre chat. So we'll definitely talk a little bit about that. But again, before we get more into it, and I guess this will kind of lead us into a little bit more of the conversation, as you said, , Thomas H. You said that, it's been a year, that since you guys have been doing this kind of work.

So we'll start with you, Thomas Hummel. , what have you seen in this year? What have you learned wearing the teacher hat? The founder hat and, , generative AI and the work that has happened in this one year span.

[00:05:22] Thomas H: Yeah. So we launched, , March 23rd last year. So just over a year and I can say that.

It's super hard to compartmentalize these two worlds that I live in. It's like, I am a teacher, I'm in the classroom, so I feel the pains and I see the things that are going on and I get to see the beauty of, you know, teaching kids and watching them grow and experimenting with, you know, generative AI and different things.

But then I also see like the founder side of things and running this business and the ed tech space. So, yeah. So from a school side, I could say, At my own school and you know that all this is obviously anecdotal, but there are some major issues still occurring and especially post coven. You know, things got amplified and we're seeing teacher burnout at an all time high.

Still, you know, nothing's getting better. That data is trending in a really bad way. We're seeing teachers leaving the profession. I think I read the other day that Mhm. Only 16 percent of teachers actually encourage students to get into the education field. I mean, we are not getting, , the most out of our students right now in education and, , anybody who's teaching and who's in the classroom, you know, there's a million different problems with it and there's a lot of pain points, but as a teacher, you know, I live that and I try to bring that every day to edu aid and trying to help.

You know, teachers get the help that they so desperately deserve. And on the founder side with the ed tech space, it's just incredible. What we've been able to do, we've helped over a million teachers already. And. We have heard countless stories from district, high level district people saying how much that this is helping their teachers, , take back and getting the passion to teach again because we're cutting out some of the stuff that frankly, teachers are getting some of the pain points that they're living.

But we've also had awesome stories like principals using EduAid and they'll take, we, we heard this one story about a principal who used to go to their staff and would make suggestions and, you know, just kind of prod the teacher to make a better lesson, but now she can use EduAid to actually bring content and bring the suggestions and bring the questions and bring the activities to these teachers to help them truly drive their profession in a better way.

And , that's just an amazing thing. We're, we're finding all kinds of ways that we are helping people. And I would say on the broader side of the space to, us kind of being the first company to launch and using this generative AI to figure out a way for teachers to plan and figure out a way for teachers to get the best material that they can with it.

It's been incredible to see this workflow that we've designed. And it's all over the place now. And, you know, regardless of EduAid lives or doesn't live through all this hype cycle, you know, we can truly say that what we've done was make a huge impact on education because there's claims being made in the space doing almost the same thing that we do that are just remarkable.

And if those claims are true, and teachers are finding that much help, and these companies are growing at this pace, I think that that's an awesome thing. As long as teachers are getting the help that they need.

[00:08:28] Fonz: One thing that I must say that I really enjoy and love is that you are still In the classroom, you're still, , putting in that work and that kind of helps give you some insight to as well as you're able to see how the students are.

Well, actually, how the teachers are using this and how the students are gaining from those enhanced lessons and the tools that are available to teachers. I think that's one of the things that I love the most. The ability to facilitate the learning and and. You know, cutting out some of, like you said, that, that middle work for teachers, but still being able to understand, okay, this is what I'm teaching.

These are my teaching objectives and being able to get something that falls in line with what it is that they are teaching. I think my, my thing is, is I'm always again, very cautious. And I tell people I'm very cautious. Like, I know that this is something that is going to be very helpful, but sometimes there are some platforms out there.

They're like, okay, yeah, just click here and here are your standards. But. Then I'm like, wait a minute, like this kind of doesn't kind of quite line up with certain things and, you know, the claims that are being made, but I have never seen anything like that, at least in myself and working with some of my content specialists, you know, they're really enjoying the fact of just putting that little refresh and that little extra spark in some of the lessons that are already creating.

But just adding that additional component that really just heightens that engagement, and also for teachers, it's just that freshness of being able to see something like that. So, Thomas Thompson, now to you. Like, it's been a year, a little bit over a year now. What have you seen? What are some of the reflections that you have as far as this year

[00:10:06] Thomas T: yeah to take the teaching side 1st again, as Thomas Hummel said, anecdotal based on my experience. So I'm not sure how well this tracks across multiple school districts, but there seems to be still, I think, as an effect of maybe some of the concerns that cove had brought to bear. That there are gaps between student knowledge and what the curriculum as it stands is asking them to do.

And it's kind of like you're keeping pace on the curriculum, but you're not kind of stopping to do the necessary reteaching on the massive gaps that students have. It's like, okay, you're teaching 8th grade US history, but if students have, , a. 3rd or 4th grade reading level, there's certain gaps there that you need to close in order for students to be able to perform with that material.

And it's like, if you're not doing that, because you're just kind of pushing students through the existing curriculum, there is there's a disconnect between the needs and the services being offered at the schools. Now, that's 1 gap that I've seen just kind of my teacher facing experiences. And then the Eduaide founder side of things.

One big push that we are going to be making is doing a better job of actually evaluating claims made for efficacy and increased teacher efficiency, right? We need an objective analysis of tools, error rate, benchmarking, comparative analysis of, say, like, lesson planning materials against basic marks for teacher, licensure like the Danielson domains, for example, using the Danielson domains to evaluate lesson planning outcomes on different AI platforms versus human made things. So there's a lot of stuff that we want to do now in terms of evaluating tools and better understanding exactly what the effect of AI will be.

I mean, that's kind of foundational to our design process, which is strip away all technology, ask what problem you want to solve, then figure out what instructional methods you will use to address that problem. And then finally, what technologies best. Bring those instructional methods to bear. We need to evaluate how well AI actually brings instructional methods to bear.

Right? So that's going to be a large push on our part. So we'll be launching a research network where we're going to be partnering with a number of institutions and professors doing studies on these different AI tools, ourselves and some of the others in the space, and then creating an open access repository for all of those research articles so that teachers can get access to really the best practices and what works, kind of a clearinghouse for different AI research.

[00:12:27] Fonz: Yeah, and I love that. You know, the fact that you're just willing and just openly saying, Hey, let's go ahead and put this to the test and let's go ahead and see what is there. I think that's something that's very important and speaks volumes to again, like I mentioned early in the show, the work that you're doing, because you are really taking this to heart.

I mean, being in the classroom. And knowing what it is that you're offering teachers and what teachers are saying. And now it's like, okay, let's go ahead and put this to the test. But I love that because then you're going to get, , the data, you go back, you refine, you adapt and you overcome those things.

And now you come back and, you know, and, and that's, that's what I love to see, you know, the, the ongoing process where many times, and, and, you know, and we all know that there is a hype out there with so many things that are out there. But what exactly is it that they're doing as far as this is concerned?

Like, are they doing some research? Is it just simply just anecdotal evidence where it's like, Oh, well, my, my, my students are, are engaged. And I always say, well, engagement oftentimes may not equal learning. You know, they're engaged for that moment, but how in depth did they go into the content, into the objectives and so on?

And that's on the student facing side. But on the teacher side, I think that the most important thing is, is that the outputs really do line up with the work. That they are doing. And I think for the most part, for a lot of teachers, they would definitely be very appreciative of that. And of course, being able to know after you do the research and things come back and you work things through knowing that they have something that they can definitely rely on as opposed to maybe, well, I can rely on it and the output is maybe you know, 60 percent correct, but I'll just go ahead and do it anyway, which is something that I've always said that my biggest fear is that The habit or the bad habit that can be formed as far as saying, Oh, this is 100 percent accurate.

So whatever output I get, that's what I'm going to go ahead and do and share that learning with the students, which I'm like, Hey, you know, like, let's take a step back and let's take a look at this because you are the expert in the room as far as the content. So we want to make sure that it does match.

But like you said, Thomas, I think Thomas H oftentimes it's the time constraints where. You know, we have to be or meet a certain curriculum at a, you know, there's a deadline. You got to get students ready for data point assessments throughout the year. Then you got benchmarks, and then you got state testing.

Where, like you said, that I love is that in the education system, I think we're we're really We think about this the wrong way where there may be some students that do come in with gaps, but instead of really going down and helping the students there at that level to catch them up, it's always, no, accelerate them.

Let's accelerate them. Let's accelerate them. Well, wait a minute. I mean, you're accelerating the instruction, but then there's a huge gap that is there and it's almost very counterintuitive. So those are just some of the things that, that I have seen and that I have heard, you know, throughout you know, this past year.

But again, there is that upside of the generative AI. And so again, I really enjoy the fact of what I heard that you guys are planning on doing. So that's really excellent. So let's take this on the other side too, as well. As you know, I know in our show here on my tech life, you know, when we do talk about gen AI and we were talking right now about outputs and what you're planning on doing, you know, my biggest thing too, is just really data.

data privacy. So we would love to talk a little bit about that. And we'll start with Thomas H. You know, we'll actually, we'll start with Thomas Thompson first. That way we can kind of go back and forth. Thomas, so what is it and some of the work and, and I know that you guys are always very transparent in talking about this and I've heard you on other shows and even here on this show too as well.

What are some of the things that you have or that you can share with our educators out there that are interested and maybe still haven't learned Quite taken that leap into Gen AI and maybe they want to go ahead and use EduAid. What are some of the things that you can tell them as far as data and data privacy?

Maybe they may be a little bit concerned about that.

[00:16:25] Thomas T: Yeah. So. AI is necessarily a kind of a generalist tool, right? It takes a large data set. It generalizes some patterns and trends from it, and then does predictive work on, you know, wording and sentences and things like that. What we try to do then is create this kind of transactional alignment, or we take that system and kind of constrain it within a environment where the teacher can engage in instructional.

Development instructional planning with evidence based methods. That necessarily means that we're taking standards or objectives or kind of topics and then creating content around those. You're not really entering information about say students personal like learning profile or anything like that.

that. So the tool is very much a high level tool for them. The teacher to take each module and personalize it themselves to fit their unique teaching style and the unique needs of the students in front of them. That process does not involve us ever asking for retaining or using any student personally identifiable information.

The only personally identifiable information of the teacher that we retain on our site is their email address. None of our Inputs or outputs are ever used for model training. Given our A. P. I. Agreements with our A. I. Providers. We use both open a I and anthropic in offering our services. We have differentiation between open a I products as well.

We have things built on GPT four. Oh, we have things built on GPT 3. 5. That might be like a fill in the blank question, right? You don't really need the best model of all to do that. 3. 5 is quite serviceable for that task, and that enables us to offer our product at a very low price and even free in some instances with our scholarship program.

So all of that to say, educate a I does not ask for use or retain any student personally identifiable information. The one area where a teacher may accidentally enter that information is our feedback bot. And If a teacher say does that right once you leave the feedback bot, those pieces of information are not perpetuated in our databases.

We don't store them anywhere, right? So once that feedback's gone, it's gone. So really, we try to keep our system pretty tight in regards of we're not sharing any of your data that you enter on the site. We don't really retain much of the data that you enter on the site. And what we do retain is your email address and your content generation history.

So you could pull back lessons and reuse them. So we try to keep a pretty transparent Data privacy policy. It's right there on our site. I'm happy to go into more details if we need to, though.

[00:18:51] Fonz: Excellent. Well, I love what you said, first and foremost, you know, just that simple walkthrough for the teachers and just to kind of give them that peace of mind.

But I just want to say thank you so much, too, because just you saying like, hey, We've got stuff with OpenAI. We've got stuff with Anthropic. You really don't hear a lot of people saying those things. And, you know, just kind of making it seem that what they have is just something that is very unique.

 To kind of focus on that point a little bit.

[00:19:16] Thomas T: I mean, we lean into the fact that we're a model garden. That we connect teachers with various large language models on our site. Because Really, I think that's more of a virtue than it is something to be ashamed of. Right. We're not kind of a GPT wrapper. We know that we're taking steps between what the user inputs and when that gets sent to open AI, for example, what we might do is we take a prompt, then we run that prompt through our retrieval, augmented generation, right?

So we have a data set of different educational research that we use to refine that prompt. And then the teacher's topic gets injected into that, that gets sent to our content moderation endpoint. And if there's some sort of retrieval augmented generation as well, it'll get run through that. And our cause we have like our Lang chain, so we'll chain together different requests.

And then that will get pinged back to the user. I mean, we'll be pretty transparent with our Our workflow here because it's not I think it's a best practice to do so to be totally transparent with how teachers are getting this information because you know, AI itself is rather opaque to most people.

So the processes that we can be very transparent about we should and then the processes that we are unsure about need to be evaluated.

[00:20:20] Thomas H: It would be totally disingenuous for us to sit up here and claim to be AI experts. We're teachers, we are, are education experts. And the one thing that we, you know, we don't own the model and no, but none of these companies own models.

They don't, they don't create their own models. They're not education specific, no matter how many times and guardrails they put on them. And, and so, you know, the cost to do that would be absurd. And the time spent to make those models would have been done years ago. And so, you know, when people are popping up.

And, and doing this stuff, we just continue to say that we're just teachers and this all stem from the idea that, you know, I sit in a PD now and we talk about like Kagan structures or restorative circles and, you know, things from the 70s or even things that are just tangible to like social emotional learning things that are really important to my school at the time.

Teachers are not going to be able to learn. At least schools are not going to be able to teach their teachers anytime soon how to use a chat bot and how to prompt it appropriately and how to get high quality stuff. And that's what we're here for. We're here to bridge that gap and to really leverage that.

And, you know, we're not AI experts. We're teachers. And We, you know, we believe in the best teaching methods and the science of education and, and that's what we're driving on.

[00:21:38] Fonz: I love that. I love that, you know, honesty and, and genuineness that, you know, that you guys have shared because, and, and again, this is just my perspective, you know, just from the outside looking in, you know, definitely a lot of hype.

I know ISTE, this is what it's all going to be all about, you know, it's just going to be, you know, now that AESED merged with ISTE, it's just. A I S T E. And I was like, very coincidental because I know this is going to be the year of a I and everybody's gonna be doing it now. The thing is, is that oftentimes it just seems like now a lot of the presentations and a lot of the things that are out there is just really just tool specific and focused, but really not a lot of the pedagogy and a lot of the work that teachers must do.

So I'm going to quote something that Dr Kim Kip Glaser, who Who was on the show several months ago, said that many of the companies that are out there, and this is what I love about you all. You know, you have that education background, you are teachers in it, in the classroom, and you are listening to teacher feedback and bringing forth a product that can be used by teachers, by, for teachers, by teachers and so on.

But there are many companies that are out there. That are coming into this space and really trying to force themselves in a space. And, and, but more of that feeling is I can do this better than you. So she kind of coined that term. And that's the first time I ever heard it. So I always credit her and give her attribution is tech chauvinism, where the tech company really is like, I can do this better than you.

You just plug in your prompt and I'm going to go ahead and give you everything that you need and cause I'm way better. And so that's what I feel that many times is happening where there could be a lot of companies that can say, Hey, you know, there's no need for, you know, any of the extra work you're doing, which I know for teachers, it's, it's always been like time and burnout, but those are a lot of things that are very systematic too, as well, that need to be taken care of.

But I know that there isn't going to be. At least not yet. One tool to rule them all and to really get rid of that burnout. My big fear too is that as teachers use the Gen AI in such a way where it's just like, hey, I'm just going to show up and I'm going to create the worksheet for today and give it to my students, that they always said like, well, robots will never take our job.

I'll say, well, you're just outsourcing all your work to this robot. And so when your principal walks in or a superintendent walk in and say, Oh, So I really don't need anybody. I can just prompt this in here and just pop it in and give it to the students. All right, there, there go jobs or there goes a change in education.

I know that teachers are valuable. I've been in the classroom and I know the difference that a teacher can make in a student. So. It's just for me, seeing and hearing those claims really just breaks my heart and just really makes me think about where it is that we're going. And so I want to ask you Thomas H, we'll start with you with everything that you've seen now, what would you say?

We are to expect maybe within this coming year you know, maybe talk about teacher use and maybe talk about just the industry, you know, I know that you're, you know, on LinkedIn often, and I'm there with you on that. So what are some of the things that you're seeing and that you think might be happening?

[00:24:53] Thomas H: Yeah. So I think, you know, in this last year, I think, you know, and I don't want to say that anybody is doing anything with malpractice. Like we're not saying, but things change and there is change happening all the time. So, you know, I don't know anybody's intent behind things, but clearly there's a push to get.

You know, chat bots in front of students and, you know, until recently, and I still don't even know. I don't, I don't truly believe it. But if they were working off the 35 model and things like that, I just do not as a personal teacher. I do not feel comfortable putting that in front of my students because I know that the hallucination rate is absurd and you have a responsibility to not put fake information, false information in front of your students because you're in the place of authority.

And so, yeah. You know, I never felt comfortable like that as a teacher to do that. I like tools like CuraPod, who use different types of AI to you know, leverage and kind of get into a regular workflow of teaching. So that, that's going to be the biggest push coming as an industry is that, you know, I don't know if people believe that teachers are failing because of the data or what, but I don't know why there's this push to just assign authority to technology.

My entire educational career, we spent all the time saying that Wikipedia is not good enough and to check all your sources and always validate things. And that was technology, and that's where information came from. And now that chatbots are available, I don't know why we're trying to take teachers out of the loop.

It's very concerning to me but I don't know. I mean, it might be a good thing, but I'm just sitting here thinking as a teacher it's a little scary to take myself out of the loop as far as AI because I don't think it's really, it's, it's job is not to educate our students. It's, it's a tool that we should be using in certain ways and in certain formats.

And so I get really concerned about that going forward.

[00:26:51] Fonz: Yeah, excellent. Thomas Thompson, your thoughts?

[00:26:55] Thomas T: I guess one litmus test we should be using when evaluating these systems is the degree to which the user is passive or active on the site. What I mean by that is Are you a passive recipient of AI generated information or are you actively collaborating with the AI to create something unique to that collaboration between you and the intelligence?

What this might look like is say you click on a resource you want and that'll take you to a page where you input all of the information, then you hit generate and then you have the generated material, right? That's more of a passive role, right? You just provided some contextual information, then you have an entire document and then export it, right?

I think that can lead to some of those nightmare scenarios that you both were discussing where it's just like you're pushing out generated content to students without really vetting anything. Then you have an active system where the teacher is, I'll take Edu Aid for an example, because we try to make an active system, where the workspace is such that you are stacking specific small components of instruction.

So you're taking, say, a. Fort informative text, stacking that into a jigsaw assignment with three other texts that you created. And then you're sequencing those together to make a sequence of instruction that is logical to the environment that you're teaching in. This means that you have to take each component vetted itself, do different work with it.

That might be extracting keywords or chunking the text or creating headings, and then taking those various components and putting them together to create Something that's greater than the sum of its parts. We don't want an AI system that will create a jigsaw activity with the three texts that you need and the questions that you need all in one go.

Because, okay, you're asking it to do four different discrete tasks and the likelihood of hallucination or task mixing where different Parts of the previous task lead into the next, I think is much higher. So we're trying to limit the amount of hallucination by creating a modular system where the AI is doing something very specific, well founded in its data set that we can then give to the teacher in a small chunk for the teacher to then actively use and integrate in a broader context, their classroom.

This, I think, goes back to There was an interesting distinction being made. It I read Dan Meyers, substack math worlds. Great. Right. And he goes into the Sal Khan prop product testing with the went viral. Everyone saw it, right. The AI tutor. And he was going into the split between the cognitive and the social aspects of the classroom, right?

The actual learning methods the student is using, and then the social environment where those learning methods are being used, the social interaction between the students and the students, the student and the teacher, et cetera. And what he was getting at is that in the AI ed tech space, there seems to be a Splitting of these two, right?

That these are completely different concerns, right? The cognitive and the social, they can exist separately in the classroom, but really, they interact quite intimately, right? We learn in a context and that context affects how we learn. AI is really good at the form, right? It's really good at the form of language, the form of knowledge, establishing things that, Pass for human made works.

Right? So the A. I can do the cognitive pieces. It can give you the worksheets. It can give you the informative text, the materials that you're going to use for instruction, but it cannot attribute meaning to those words into that like a teacher can because the teacher is socially mediated. They're in the classroom with the students.

They're not going to see. Here's an example. A student doesn't do well on some sort of I don't know, problem set. And you have your personalized AI tutor there alongside you, and it sees the mistakes you're making, and it is giving you, you know, remedial tasks to close prior knowledge gaps. It's doing all the great work of tutoring.

But what it's not knowing is that maybe you're not performing well on that specific problem set because you have some interpersonal problems going on outside of the classroom. And there's these body language cues and things that a teacher is going to pick up on or could pick up on. That the AI isn't so then when a teacher sees that a student is struggling with something due to some sort of interpersonal conflict or whatever it might be through conversation, the teacher may be able to relate that material to the student's personal experience, creating a more meaningful learning experience that you're not really going to get with these personalized AI tutors.

Personalizing content is not personalizing instruction. You have to personalize the path and process of instruction as well as the content that is being delivered. And that's a gap that A. I. Is not quite ready to cross. At least it doesn't seem so because those kind of interpersonal situations are beyond its training set.

And what we found is that I can't do these novel tasks that go beyond its training set. There was an interesting episode of the dorkish podcast that just came out where they're talking about evaluating a I on discrete reasoning tasks outside of its training set. And these models don't really do that well.

Probably more than you were asking for, but I go off on tangents.

[00:31:40] Fonz: No, no, no. And, but that's perfect because that kind of goes in line with, I know here in Texas, and I don't know if you've heard, and I'm sure that there is you know, on LinkedIn and stuff like that, there is a school called alpha school.

So alpha school really is in, there's one in Austin and there's actually one right up the road for me, maybe about an hour and a half away and for 40 grand, You know, students can go in there you know, for, I did, did that shock you, Thomas H? Yeah,

[00:32:08] Thomas H: I spilled coffee because of that. Oh my

[00:32:10] Fonz: gosh, I said 40 grand and then, oh my goodness, that was a very genuine, I like, Some people would respond to that too, but for 40 grand a year tuition, students can go in there for a couple of hours and they don't have teachers.

They have facilitators, which I get, you know, we want our teachers to be facilitators, but also be there within the loop and so on. They were very open in a way that, you know, they, I opened up what some of their curriculum looks like here for Texas and really it's the same worksheets for, for our state test.

But I looked at some of the programs that they're using and they say like, Oh yeah, this is the school that is all AI driven. But I looked at some of the platforms and they were very open. Some of those platforms are some platforms that we use in our platform and they're not necessarily considered Gen AI, but they do have a little path where they close the gaps and try and get, I don't want to say personalized because really it's just like, they're, they're going to just end up closing that gap.

And I'm thinking to myself, I was like, okay. You know, for 40 grand, I can, you know, send my student, my child there and, but they're going to be using the exact same things that they would be using in the public space, in the public school. So how do we differentiate there? So that's where I think there, that AI term has now turned into something that is just of great marketing value and so on, you know, just the, the hype that there is around that.

And so, but the other thing Thomas that I wanted to add, because I mentioned that is just. Not having that personalization through a teacher, like you said, student shows up, you don't know what they may be going through. I mean, yeah, I mean, if they're able to pay, the parents are able to pay 40 grand for the student to go there, you know, we assume that, okay, things must be pretty good or, you know, around there, but you never know with, with children and, and to have somebody that may not necessarily be a teacher or a certified teacher, but just simply a facilitator in the room.

That might be very difficult for a student to say like, Hey, I just don't understand this. I don't get it. How do they get that proper instruction? Also, because they are not there often enough, how do they socialize with their other classmates or even socialize with teachers? So those are some of the things that kind of worry me in that sense, because now we're seeing high teacher turnover, not a little, not a lot of teachers coming into the industry.

And. Maggie Perkins was on the show and she was on the show a couple of years back after COVID. And she actually mentioned, and she said, you know, the way that things are going from year to year to year, she said, it wouldn't surprise me that now that schools are one to one, that they would just put everybody together in a gym, all, you know, no teacher really, just a facilitator.

And they're just on their Chromebooks, just sitting there all day long, just on programs. And that is the scary part about things because, you know, as you know, Systemic changes need to take place within our schools and so on. But I think the socialization and like you mentioned, the learning process, that cognitive side, you know, the social emotional side, all of those things, you know, work together for good for the student.

And like you mentioned, many companies pushing out, you know, the, the chat bots, but like you said. There is a distinction, actively engaged, or is it just passively engaged? I don't know if we're there yet at the actively engaged portion, but we may soon be getting there. But I think also too is just safeguarding our students also in the sense of making sure that they're not getting any inadequate Mm-Hmm.

any, you know, inappropriate responses and things of that sort. As we know, it's very hard to control something that you're not completely tethered to, that you don't own. So sometimes too, when I hear people say, oh, I, we, we can put guardrails on this, I was like, that's very tough to say because you're not.

really necessarily tethered and you're not really connected. So kind of claiming that you can do that, it kind of, you know, like I said, it kind of gives you that false sense of you know, security. And we definitely want to make sure that we take care of our kids, not only just their privacy. But also just education wise and things of that sort.

So thank you so much for sharing that on and what it is that you're seeing and obviously with the chat bot. So now for as far as eduate is concerned, I know you mentioned a little bit as far as what you're planning on doing and being able to share and work, you know, create a body of research based on.

The usage of EduAid and its efficacy in the classrooms for teachers and so on. But I want to ask you both, and we'll start with Thomas H, what is it that you foresee, you know, or going into or doing in these, in the next year? I won't say two years, three years, because everything goes so fast, but in the next year, you know, what is it that you see, where, in what direction do you see EduAid going and what is it that you're hoping to do with it?

[00:37:04] Thomas H: Yeah. I mean, I do think that we're going to continue to grow and I would like to continue to build out our community of teachers and just find a bunch of educators that are aligned to our mission. And that is just, you know, increasing the quality of the state of education. And We're going to be putting a real focus on that piece, kind of really pulling everybody together that has used this and pulling together all the resources that has been created with us and the high quality ones, and just giving those out for free and doing an open network like that, because there's a huge gap I mean, we have sales in like over 80 countries, so, you know, not everybody, we're not just talking about America having high quality content, but we can really provide high quality educational content all around the world and So that's a big push for us.

We have a couple cool little features. I don't want to say them because they seem to pop up on everybody else's pages whenever we kind of release something. So I don't really want to kind of give away too much of that. But I'm really excited about this education or this research thing that Tom's putting together.

We're gonna have some really major institutions tied with EduAid. And, you know, we can't really Announce that quite yet, but I'm just really proud of where we're going and what we're doing, and we're just going to keep on and hold the line and keep staying transparent and keep growing and keep helping teachers.

I think I read like only one third of all teachers are actually like using AI in any capacity. So there's still plenty of room for growth and plenty of work to be done there.

[00:38:32] Fonz: Excellent. And I love that. And like I said, I definitely hope for the best. Like I said, you guys are doing a fantastic job. And one thing that I absolutely love is just how different, and again, this is me personally speaking, like, this is just really how different it is that you are as far as that transparency component and really in a world and in an industry full of Many other platforms.

To me, that's really what stands out. The most is really just that that customer service, but that genuineness and authenticity that you guys have in just putting out great stuff and putting it out for the masses. And like you said, a lot of it for free. A lot of the resources that you do is just wonderful and how you're helping the education space and continue to grow.

And obviously, too, with this research project that you guys are Are going to be doing. I'm really excited to see some of those results and I would definitely love to have you back, you know, for a show just when we see some of those findings and just to continue to grow from there. And I love, you know, like I said, you know, holding strong and being consistent like you guys have.

I think that that's what what's going to. You know, help you just to continue on, because as we know, many times when, you know, Dev day happened, some little smaller platforms kind of just said, okay, there we go. There's another platform that's gone now. GPT, you know, for, Oh, and all that stuff and all the different models.

Oh, there's a couple of other platforms. And now with Apple and their announcement, it's like, Oh, well, there that goes. But I think, like you said. There's plenty of room for everybody. There's plenty of room for growth. And I think those that are just open, honest, hardworking, see what the problem is and are trying to really meet that problem head on and just being consistent will definitely still be there at the end.

So I'm hope definitely I've I'm excited for y'all.

[00:40:19] Thomas H: I do feel though, Fonz, that like, you know, if we weren't doing things the way that we're doing them, like. We are not here to exploit the space or teachers because ultimately that comes on the back of their funding of their money of the school's money.

And then ultimately that takes away from students and that just. When we started this, that just felt wrong. Like we're here to help and we're not here to do anything but that. And, you know, like you said, the hype cycle is so real. All these tools are popping up for what? I mean, if we're going to help teachers, let's help teachers.

If you're here to make money off of teachers, you're taking away from students if you, you know, and that's just wrong, And, you know, the ed tech space now being inside of it, it just, it drives me crazy seeing it from both sides.

[00:41:02] Fonz: Exactly. Thank you. And I do see that too. It's been 18 years and it's been interesting and just kind of the way things have changed within the space, some good, some bad.

And it just seems like a lot of things have augmented just my vision and seeing things in a different way. And now I'm just kind of just holding back. Seeing things and, and just you know, hoping for the best, but when we have great platforms like you and the work that you're doing, that just makes it, you know, worthwhile because we know that there's people out there, you know, that are doing some great things such as yourself, Thomas Thompson, how about yourself

[00:41:35] Thomas T: So as Thomas Hummel said, community will be a huge piece of that giving teachers a place where they're able to share resources that they created with one another. That's a giant push on our part. We view that as an important system of checks and balances between the artificial intelligence in the classroom for teachers to vet and share, kind of create a system of open educational resource sharing because the copyright concerns are still being litigated regarding Who owns generative content.

Does anyone own generative content who is, has a right to remuneration or credit, that kind of thing. So we're definitely taking a more open access creative commons licensing approach with, you know, once you create something, this should be given freely and openly to others because it is built upon the work of.

Well, the collected corpus of human knowledge on the Internet. And then secondarily to that, we want to build out a better administrative tool set. Right? So when teachers are using the platform, how are we going to be able to kind of de silo that information that the teacher is getting about their classroom so that you have an active integration with administrative knowledge with You know, teachers being on the ground and you kind of get this direct feedback.

So what that might look like is we just pushed an update yesterday with a few new tools around better gauging response quality. Teachers can mark responses as good or bad and regenerate things. And then we can get some information on the quality of our prompt structures and on our site and do some development there.

But one of the tools is called Remediate, where you Identify a specific task that you created. The student lacks the prior knowledge or the ability to access this material. What are they lacking? How do we close that gap and then providing actionable steps or specific assignment that you can give to that student who struggled?

Well, where that might be an interesting overlap between the teacher facing tool and an administrative tool is an administrator could then see a report of, okay, I have my eighth grade social studies teachers and they are All uniformly flagged an assignment that is built to this specific standard. Okay, well, maybe there's some gaps that we need to go about closing here to kind of, get students to mastery of that specific standard.

So then you have some more kind of fine tune information of teachers on the ground across, you know, objective standards and being able to identify gaps in student knowledge. I think that'll be powerful. I think then that will, create a more, I mean, integrated evaluation of what's going on in the classroom.

It's hard for administrators to get a good insight of what's going on in every classroom around them. Yes, they do teacher evaluations, but that's only but a small snapshot of what's going on in the daily work of the teacher. And you also don't want, Kind of this just consistent, constant oppressive oversight upon the teacher because then they're going to feel as though they're constantly being evaluated and don't have autonomy and freedom.

So you need to balance a lot of concerns with for ensuring instructional quality. So those are some questions that we are grappling with. And then, of course, you have the added complication of how do you align AI with these goals and how do you create a system of transactional alignment where teachers are getting what they want in the moment that they're trying to get it.

So There's a lot of questions that we are working towards for you know, improving our platform, our offerings, and the quality of responses.

[00:44:46] Fonz: I love it though. But see that, and that's again, going back and I know I've said this a lot, but honestly, and truthfully, that's what I love that you are putting that getting teacher feedback.

That is amazing. I mean, I don't, I. Keeping the teacher in the loop of things, helping them because at the end, they, they are your end user. And now you want to get the feedback to make sure that you're putting out the best product out there for them to help simplify some of those tasks. And I absolutely love that, which is very different.

Like I mentioned earlier, the, the term tech chauvinism. Where it's like, nope, the, like, I can do this better. Just do this. And no you know, Opportunity for feedback and things of that sort. It's just really like, Nope, what you see is what you get. And that's it. You know, we don't do anything for anybody, but ourselves and just doing those things.

I think that's what really distinguishes you from the rest. And I think that consistency, it will definitely help out in the long run. For sure.

[00:45:42] Thomas T: I mean, we're just trying to make a utility for teachers to use. That means that the product, the application itself needs to be fit for purpose for the teacher, and it shouldn't be the other way around.

We shouldn't be trying to fit a teacher inside a platform and, you know, have them adopt our ways of thinking, right? We want a very modular platform that gives teachers autonomy and freedom to Make their own instructional environment to make their own curriculum and they're not their own curriculum, but adapt the curriculum to their own classroom.

I suppose I should say. So, I mean, it's just understanding that if you create a high quality Platform, a workspace where teachers can do good work and you give them the autonomy to do that and the proper training to excel at using that tool. They'll do interesting things that you couldn't predict.

And that's what Hummel was getting out at the beginning of the show. People are using this platform in interesting ways that we didn't even anticipate them using because we built in a lot of freedom for the end user to adapt different things and change different things on the spot in the workspace, instead of having to go to a different tool to do that or.

Creating frictions between that kind of freedom. So we try whenever possible to make our tool very open for teachers to express their own teaching style upon it.

[00:46:54] Fonz: Excellent. I love it. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. It has been an amazing, amazing conversation. I really appreciate all your shares. Thank you so much for everything that you've done in the past year and how forward thinking you are, and obviously how open and transparent you are too as well, and just sharing a little bit about your passion, not only as teachers, but your, your product edu8.

1. But obviously what the future holds for EduAid AI and with the research that you're going to be doing and taking from that, learning from that, fixing things, adapting, overcoming certain barriers. And I think that's phenomenal and that's great. So thank you so much for sharing that. But before we go, as you know, we always end the show with the last three questions.

And I know that some of you are two time guests, three time guests, and maybe, you know, some of the answers might have changed. Obviously it's been a while. Since you both have been on. So let's go ahead and get started. We'll start with Thomas Thompson first with this first question. You may already know, but let me go ahead and share the question here.

All right. So as we know, every superhero has a weakness and for Superman kryptonite was his weakness or his pain point. So Thomas Thompson in the current state of education, what would you say is your current edu kryptonite?

[00:48:11] Thomas T: How to best. There's not much consensus on Instructional methods with high efficacy. Yes, there's meta analysis that shows certain methods have high effectiveness. There's a lot of work out there on certain learning techniques that we know to be effective. But what does it mean to apply high quality instructional methods in that environment?

And what does it mean to embed them into like educational resources? What's a high quality educational resource? Kind of reconciling all those concerns is a perpetual challenge or I wouldn't say a weakness, but it's definitely like the thing that takes up a lot of my attention and something that I want to get better at because I don't have a clear consensus on this yet.

[00:48:54] Fonz: Excellent. All right. Great answer. All right. Thomas H.

[00:48:58] Thomas H: Yeah. Something that's driving me crazy is that we're blaming students for a lot of things. At least that's what I'm seeing is like, oh, the kids have changed. Oh, it's their fault. Oh, they're not. you know, they don't care about this. I think that that is just negating the responsibilities of an educator to engage students and find ways to make learning meaningful because we do live in a time where it's difficult to get attention, but we have to do better as educators to harness that attention because it's not the kids fault.

Students are gonna be students. Kids are gonna be kids. And We have to figure out how to prepare them for the future.

[00:49:31] Fonz: Great answer. All right. Question number two. We'll start with Thomas H. Now, if you could have a billboard with anything on it, what would it be? And why?

[00:49:42] Thomas H: I'm exhausted. Just ended to teach, just ended my eighth year of teaching.

I, and I, and I just became a father to Fonz. So I, that's what my billboard would say. I'm exhausted period.

[00:49:55] Fonz: All right. Well, congratulations to we've got father's day also coming up. So congratulations, happy early father's day. And that's wonderful. And so eight years and you, you just finished wrapped up.

So you're in that teacher tired kind of mode right now. And so hopefully you get to unplug, get some rest and, you know, just recharge that battery. All right. Thomas Thompson, what would your billboard say?

[00:50:17] Thomas T: It hasn't changed over the three appearances I've made on my ed tech life to this point. The Oracle of Delphi, the Great Maxim, know thyself.

I think it's still an important thing that we should consider because at the end of the day, a lot of times people, you know, on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, you have a hard time of knowing what's on your own mind. You just have your own idea. You're taking in ideas of other people, how they think the world should be, and you don't really know what you actually believe deep down.

And I think that is Something we could all use a reminder of in an information dense society.

[00:50:50] Fonz: Excellent. Great answers, gentlemen. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it again. You know, you, your appearance here is for me, it's wonderful, especially having repeat guests and especially having.

Amazing guests and educators like yourself, founders, creators, educators that are here trying to make a difference. And, you know, obviously help the education space. So thank you so much for all the work that you do. And again, guys, don't forget, go check out eduate. ai. Make sure you check that out. Sign up.

[00:51:21] Thomas H: Yes, go ahead. Can I say something real quick? Sure. We have granted 100 percent of all scholarships to EduAid. So if anybody needs a free account or you're struggling, just email us and we will grant that 100 percent of the time for you. We are here to help you. So, 100%, we are going to maintain that. So if you need EduAid and you can't afford it, let us know.

[00:51:39] Fonz: Excellent. Well, there you go, guys. Appreciate that. Thomas, did you want to add something to that?

[00:51:44] Thomas T: No, I think that's pretty clear.

[00:51:46] Fonz: All right. Well, there you go, guys. Wonderful announcement, educators that are out there that you are kind of on the edge, you're kind of like, should I, should I not want to try it?

You heard it today. You hear how these gentlemen through their work are being completely and absolutely transparent, genuine, authentic. And not only that, but just really giving because. They truly believe in what they're doing and the changes that can occur in the education space and how this can help spice things up.

Not necessarily just say, Hey, I'm going to create something and just give it out that way, but just taking what you already have, not reinventing the wheel, but just adding that extra spice for your lessons. And of course they have a plethora of tools that you can look through that. I promise you. This can definitely be the tool to help you out in this coming year to take care of some of those tasks.

But like I mentioned, most importantly, enhancing that learning too, as well. So thank you so much, Thomas H, Thomas T, really appreciate the work that you guys are doing. And for all our audience members, please make sure you visit our website at myedtech. life, where you can check out this amazing episode and the other 282 Wonderful episodes with creators.

We're almost at 300 with creators, founders, educators. We've got a little bit of everything for you. So you can take some knowledge nuggets and sprinkle them on to what you are already doing. Great. Please make sure you follow us on all socials at my ad tech life at my ad tech life. And please, if you haven't done so yet, like I said, in the beginning, jump over to our YouTube channel, give us a thumbs up, subscribe.

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