box 5 and Hot 97 present Street Soldiers with Lisa Evers I'm so glad you're joining us for this episode of Street soldiers on the digital revolution in education I'm your host Lisa Evers many barriers to learning are gone and new opportunities are unlimited all because of this digital revolution in education there's still a few naysayers who want to turn back the clock but for the most part today's students are looking at a future where anything is possible school systems and educational institutions were compelled to adopt digital technology during the pandemic and create virtual classrooms whether they liked it or not nationally recognized educator Dr Christopher emden says young people benefited from using digital technology as a learning tool Dr emden says those who are still reluctant to fully embrace it should think again Educators have to meet young people where they are because if you don't meet them where they are they're not goingon to follow you they're not gonna they will they will literally ref Ed to learn from you the old model was about how much we can make kids hate school the new model is how much we can make everyone love learning the digital revolution in education is providing unlimited opportunities for both learning and teaching for students they can learn anywhere anytime barriers and limits to knowledge and information are largely gone for teachers it allows them to customize their instruction to an individual student's needs with the emergence of AI there are even more options teachers are finding their own ways to implement it says chalkbeat New York reporter Julian Shen Barrow I think like a lot of school districts New York City is still figuring out how exactly it wants to incorporate AI tools into the classroom um you know there are a lot of different AI power tools out there they do different things they uh there are a lot that are marketed to Educators and what I've been hearing right now from teachers across the school system is sort of you know different approaches in different places digital technology is native to today's students who've grown up with it in one form or another many schools colleges and universities now use canvas software programs for instruction and grading but canvas vice president Ryan lkin says their technology is not designed to replace teachers good technology just amplifies that teacher and helps them engage in ways that they couldn't do just in a physical classroom and so uh that's why as we build our technology it's all teach you know very teacher centered our job is to make a teacher's life easier not more difficult so we hope they embrace technology and view it through that lens let's take this to our amazing panel and find out what they have to say joining us is Ryan lkin he's the vice president of canvas that's a learning management system that's used by many many students from uh grades K all the way through college Ryan great to have you with us thank you having me thank you so much also with us is Julian Shen Barrow he's a chalkbeat New York reporter he covers a lot of issues with the schools we're going to get his take on a lot of these issues as well Julian thank you so much for being with with us great to be here thanks for having me thank you so much also with us is Dr Christopher enin he's a professor at the Columbia University Teachers College the director of the idea lab and yes he's the one that founded hip hop Ed and the science bowl and all of those uh other methods that we've been talking about for years here on Street soldiers Chris great to have you with us again so glad to be back with you thank you so much Chris I want to start with you on this you were an early proponent of bringing technology into the city school system especially to reach kids and underresourced communities where do things stand now we're a very interesting space I think during the pandemic the entire school system sort of embraced technology we were communicating via Zoom we were finding ways to be creative and Innovative and now that we're in this although not quite post-pandemic but what I call a post-pandemic era what we're finding is folks are reverting back to pre-pandemic approaches um in New York City right now which is astounding to me there's a cell phone ban which is like Banning the most us use ful technological innovation of our time a method for communication a way for sharing lesson plans a way for communicating a way for accessing a way for using jck gbt and Ai and we're Banning it and so we're in this interesting place where we learned that technology can work but we're still so Tethered to a age-old approach to instruction they were trying to return back to a normal that we knew was never really good and so we're at this impass and my hope is that this conversation and others like it will move folks to recognize that we have to re-embrace technology because the world Beyond education it's really deeply entrenched in it and we can't go back to an age-old approach that has not been serving a really digital generation Ryan in terms of the national picture because you deal with a lot of schools you deal with kids all the way through tell us what you're seeing happening and and why your platform is is in demand by so many yeah I mean we see you know right now about 50% of of college students use canvas about a 30 about 30% of K12 students use canvas across North America and we see widely uh varying degrees of adoption right and I think to Chris's point he spot on this is a digitally native uh set of students they've grown up with screens and and what we really need is that shift in thinking all screen time is not created equal we kind of take the approach that all education should be uh technology enhanced education uh and that if we can get Educators to start adopting that approach uh it's much more likely to to continue to engage students at a high level I think especially in the age of AI teachers are feeling overwhelmed by everything out there and and really they we need development we need AI literacy we need to focus on building those teachers up so they can pass that on to students oh julan in terms of technology in the New York City public school system what are you seeing yeah you know I think when we look ahead to the coming school year we're um you know very I I think interested in seeing how all of these different Technologies continue to play out in the school system um you know like Chris mentioned we are expecting to see a cell phone ban this year um you know there has been a lot of concern expressed by um you know school's chancellor David Banks by governor Kathy hokel by some of the others who are in charge of the school systems here in the city and the state over you know the potential harms of social media the potential you know phone addictions that we might see among students and and the potential disruptions in the classroom but at the same time we see technology having uh you know a lot of potential and a lot of untapped potential for ways that it can be helping teachers improving classrooms you know especially with AI we're seeing a lot of cautious optimism from some of the Educators we speak to about these tools having potential to help with lesson planning or help speed upgrading um you know help remove a lot of the teacher burnout that we see by um you know giving them tools to help make these processes easier while at the same time sort of handling some of the limitations of those programs and being wary of the potential for Flaws in them as well so I think it's a very complicated picture and and we're excited to see how things play out this year stay with us there's much more to come in terms of the resistance to technology what are you seeing you know I want to start with this I can very well understand parents and teachers and superintendents who are like what is this thing that the students are on and and I like I get the fear I get the consternation but I'm telling you this if your babies are on it you need to be on it too and everything that the students are on whatever it is that they're using if you're there with them you can a learn with them B you can learn from them and see you can be there to really understand if what they're doing on the device or on the app or on the tool is something that's edifying or something that's problematic but if you're not there at all you can't even use your wisdom to help them to guide through it like my son loves Roblox all the parents here will know what Roblox is and for a very long time I was like I am not doing Roblox I'm not playing these little games with you when I got on Roblox with my son I really understood the sophistication of Roblox and so being on the platform with him allowed me to be able to develop his sensibility in out of digital worlds and so you know assistance is futile parents uh superintendents principles but if you go on there with them you will find that your presence alone will help them to use the tools in ways that are more supportive in their learning than anti- learning we tend to villainize tools like tick talk and Snapchat and those kinds of things but they're teaching students how to create media how to create videos how to create short engaging content this idea that we're going to stand in front of of these students and lecture for an hour and that they're going to be engaged is is a thing of the past there's there's tools to take digital uh surveys from your phone right they can they can respond to questions and you can put that up on a chart on the screen immediately within your classroom we just have to make sure that educators are adopting that and evolving their approach to teaching well one of the controversies in in many of the school systems especially in elementary schools and High School Middle Schools is the use of the cell of cell phones because they figure okay the the cell phone is kind of like the demon and if it's there the kids are going to be like this the whole time they're going to be texting each other they're going to be on social media who knows what else and then New York City considering the cell phone ban or whatever Julian what can you tell us about that yeah I think it's an interesting issue and it's one that we've seen a lot of movement on this year you know if you go back to the start of the Year school's chancellor David Banks who you know is in charge of the school system here in New York City um you know he was asked about whether or not he thought the city should adopt a cell phone ban which you know it used to have a cell phone ban in the past um which was later removed and you know at the time he didn't think that was something that was needed for the school system as a whole and so the system that was in place and is still in place for now is that every school can kind of determine its own policy and decide whether or not it wants to allow cell phones within the classroom um but over the course of several months we saw him having communication with principes with Educators and finding out that they were overwhelmingly calling for you know a band to be in place some kind of guiding policy for the city um so he changed his mind about that and now we're expecting one to roll out in February next year but you know these these policies can have um you know some potential problems attached to them they can be really hard to implement it can be difficult if school is going to collect all the cell phones at the start of the day um or put them into these these pouches that lock the phones away during the course of the day those things can be time intensive they can also take away from learning and sometimes uh you know students find ways to bypass them and so it's a complicated issue we know parents also feel uh mixed things about this some of them want to be able to know that they can reach their kid during the school day if there's an emergency you know no matter what I love what Julian is saying here he's spot on you know listen the first time I ever knew what a proxy server was was from my ninth grade students and I had no idea what it was the internet was a new thing there was a ban on websites in New York City Public Schools we'd have these little laptop carts and there were these websites that kids couldn't go on and I I noticed this kid on YouTube and I was like how you on YouTube YouTube is banned in all of New York City Public Schools how you on here and he said he said he said yo Dr E let me do you know what a proxy server is I was like I don't know what that is it's a website that you go on and you could go on that website and then they can go to another website and you could find and so they're going to spend their time subvert in what you ban yep and the energy that's spent in subverting what you ban is energy that could be spent in utilizing that tool to support their learning that's number one and number two you cannot have unimodal instruction for multimodal students they actually are going to be bored by the fact that they're not being intellectually stimulated yeah you're G be handing them a different device that you then have to pay for as as a district as a state you know how to replace their device with a device that bring your own device debate has already been put to bed in in higher education and it's still raging in the K12 space but the cost to schools is astronomical to replace what they already are carrying around right canvas is in I mean you know this your you know it's not a commercial for canvas you know you know I just met you for the first time today just be clear but if you're go to any University campus I'm I mean over 90% is using campus yep the readings are on there the syllabus is on there Etc and so when you graduate from high school and you go into college there's an expectation that you have a familiarity with that tool already if we're Banning it and you're going to college now you're creating a new learning curve for these babies you teach them to use the tools not ban it and then they get to higher education and I have to learn to use it for the very first time yeah and ran explain for people explain for people what canvas canvas is actually essentially canvas creates a digital classroom for every course where they can put their syllabus all of their assignments they can submit homework they can get feedback from their Educators on on their uh assignments and also it's it's an open platform so that you can plug in thirdparty LTI tools or what they're called but they're thirdparty learning tools that plug right into canvas uh so when your student logs into canvas there's a math interactive tool there's a reading interactive tool there's all of these different tools that a teacher can create this compelling user experience and if they're leveraging that again you know the sitting in a in a classroom staring at a chalkboard or a whiteboard to Chris's point is not engaging this is not how these students learn they're used to learning on YouTube and micro bursts they're used to learning on Tik Tok right they're used to these tools and if you're putting them in a in a analog classroom they're just not going to learn they're not going to respond to that Ryan in terms of the the technology that you're using and at the ability to have all of these things all in one place so it's not that big heavy book bag or I left my book at my dad's house because it was his weekend last weekend and now I'm at my mom's house this weekend speak to us about that yeah I mean the you know my kids blame me for the fact that we no longer have snow days here in Utah right during the winter they're digital learning days and you know with with increased climate change there is more disruption right we're we're seeing that that frequently we see you know if there's a Resurgence in in uh the pandemic or things like that we see disruption and and Technology allows for a you know adopted properly and deeply allows for a seamless piece there and I think there's a kind of a false dichotomy that that it's either analog in person or online and really it's that Blended hybrido approach that is the right approach that that meets the needs of most students but now there's like it it's so easy to copy things which Julian has has been one of the big concerns about uh you know AI Chad GPT it's like how are they how do you really know what that the kid has learned something or that they're using it what do you see as the benefits for students in the New York City public school system with AI this is something that we saw you know when chaty BT was first unveiled when these AI power chat Bots started becoming more and more prevalent that was the big concern was you know these are going to be a tool that can be used by students for cheating for plagiarism to bypass learning and bypass you know the whole educational process and there was a lot of fear over that and that's what led the school system to initially prohibit it on school networks um but I think there's been an awareness on the side of Educators and on the side even of students and conversations that I've had with you know high school students who have been experimenting with chat GPT and other tools like this is that you know these tools are speaking to a need to adapt the classroom environment and adapt the learning process so that you're not creating assignments that can be solved by putting the prompt into something like and spitting the answer back out and so you know I've seen an awareness from teachers here in New York City already of okay if these tools are out there you know students will always look for ways to to bypass some amount of work and and look for ways to potentially take shortcuts but you know the fact that these tools now exist means that we need to be adapting assignments and lesson plans so that you know they are responsible for critical thinking they are making sure that the responses aren't something that they can just kind of plug into a chat chat bot and and get an answer copy and paste that into the assignment people want a shortcut because they don't see the beauty in going the long way yeah if if the assignment is this and then I plug in that's great and then also you know one of the things that I've been working on with my young people that I that I do research with is prompt pedagogy yes which which is teaching does that so pedagogy is a science of teaching and learning if you interact with a AI bot usually what you do is you put a prompt in so it's about the question that you ask the AI that gives you the response that you get so we're teaching young folks how to be able to ask the appropriate questions to the tool to get more sophisticated answers and so we need a teaching Force that's actually teaching kids how to be able to utilize the tools in a way that allows for more sophisticated thinking and thought Ryan when you look ahead what would you like to see in an ideal situation or scenario from K through the end of four years of college for kids we tend to be our own biggest critics in the United States in New York right uh and and we really worry about how we stand uh in in regards to education across the globe I'll tell you right now I travel all over the globe and the United States sets the the gold standard for Education right there's things we can improve on stem there's things uh that we can we can focus more on and make sure that we're we're teaching uh civics AI literacy and things like that but we really do set the gold standard and and when we talk about improvements you know we we understand that we want to make the best better one of the things we didn't talk about uh around AI is the the digital divide Chris hit on it briefly but when we look at AI tools that are out there uh the free tools tend to be the older versions right they're the they're the tools that are trained on billions not trillions of data points right we we pay for those more advanced versions and one of the things I think we're very cognizant of in the the edtech space is making sure we don't open a digital divide where only students that can pay for these Solutions uh only only the wealthiest districts only the wealthiest universities will have the best tools we want to make sure that these are accessible to everyone at every level Julian in terms of the new in terms of the New York City Schools you know the school population in New York is extremely diverse people from all over the world what do you see the the technology doing in terms of making everybody you know have a chance I think right now there is is um I think I mentioned the term before cautious optimism there's a lot from teachers in terms of you know seeing these tools as something that can potentially be very beneficial for the classroom um I think at the same time there are concerns about the potential pitfalls of something like AI um you know these Technologies are very new they're still developing every single day and we haven't seen all of the rollouts of these tools be successful we've seen school districts across the country where they have failed and they have introduced problems with student privacy and student data uh where they have introduced potential biases um potentially have taught students incorrect things and so I think that what we're looking for here in New York City over the course of this coming year and and school years Beyond it as well is to see how teachers and and the school system and those in charge of it as a whole are managing all of those things Dr Chris Emon in terms of for families for and for parents and I'm I'm sure you hear it too parents will say oh I don't you know I don't know how to do all that stuff on the computer I don't mess with that or I don't want to deal I don't want to deal with that what do you say to them so one of my favorite quotes uh that that is just it always sticks with me is by this gentleman Nam Alan Toffler and he says the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write but those who cannot learn unlearn and relearn and it's a point in point because whether you're talking about technology or the lack thereof we're utilizing technology to teach young people how to learn which is how to be able to see something gain information from it process it make meaning of it and then once that's happened oh wait here's new information I'm going to unlearn what I just learned and I'm going to use the new information to relearn a new approach and so that is not just for young people that's for everyone I tell parents all the time you never learned it that's not your fault but guess what every human being has the capacity to try to attempt and then learn it right and then you can unlearn your old way and then you can relearn it if we don't evolve as a society we we're archaic thanks for joining us for the episode of Street soldiers on the digital revolution in education you can watch it again and share it on our Fox 5my YouTube page and the fox Local app Remember use your mind it's your best weapon I'm Lisa Evers let's push for peace love and justice for all
2024-09-09