Category: Education

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Department of Education AI Toolkit

The Department of Education1Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe. released a toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable, AI Integration last October. I finally made the time to read it and love what I found. As with most things in education, if it’s sensible in that context, it is worth considering in every context.

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    Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe.
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Self-Satirizing Nonsense and The Department of Education

From a recent Chalkbeat article by Erica Meltzer and Marta W. Aldrich:

Former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has been named to serve as deputy education secretary in the incoming Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump announced the pick in a post on Truth Social Friday evening. […] He also misstated her name as Peggy Schwinn, rather than Penny.

We again enter a period of time where The Onion has its work cut out for itself. The next paragraph of this article is also pitch-perfect in its matter-of-fact approach to reporting on how ridiculous everything is.

Schwinn […] would bring extensive education experience to the role, in contrast with Trump’s education secretary pick, World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon.

Sometimes laughing is the only antidote to the crying.

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Tony Wan at EdSurge, on AI Writing by Students

A short article that mirrors my thinking rather well. In particular:

Each little metacognitive act of constructing a sentence, though, reflects valuable thinking. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for instance — the ifs, buts and therefores — is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to AI? Too much, and the writing experience may feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.

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Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy

In my weekly perusal of education newsletters, I came across a Time magazine article about new attempts to bring AI and machine learning to monitoring student behavior on school devices. While the article focuses on student mental health—suicide prevention in particular—I looked into the companies mentioned therein and discovered that the scope of monitoring efforts is broad and deep. It is a fascinating and discomforting topic, with each company working on a different aspect of student safety with rhetoric to match.

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“The Great School Rethink” and Assessing Ideas

Last fall I read The Great School Rethink by Frederick Hess, who works with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He focuses largely on education policy initiatives, many of which might be familiar: school choice, assessments, funding distribution, and curriculum adoption, among others. While I find these topics and the debates around them interesting, my main takeaway from reading this book was broader. It reminded me that a person is not static, and when we talk with someone we have to focus more on the thoughts they’re presenting and not conflate that with our notions of who the person is when taken as a sum of their parts.

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Dynamic Content and Curriculum

Textbooks have been the premier mechanism for presenting curriculum for centuries. While the printed word is powerful and, for many people, superior to digital versions, the physicality of textbooks requires that their content remains static. Errors are inevitable, as are changes in relevant topics or pedagogy. New editions are the only tool to fight against the decay of a textbook’s utility.1Let’s not fight over who’s at fault for the prevalence of new textbook editions or their cost. I’m typically quite impressed by the forewords I see in many math textbooks comparing editions, and believe much of the time a new edition is worthwhile. In an educational landscape dominated by digital tools, it’s tempting to have content updated rapidly and frequently. This approach requires a deft hand.

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    Let’s not fight over who’s at fault for the prevalence of new textbook editions or their cost. I’m typically quite impressed by the forewords I see in many math textbooks comparing editions, and believe much of the time a new edition is worthwhile.
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Science Museums

Science museums are awesome, and The Exploratorium in San Francisco is particularly fantastic. We went for their Thursday After Dark series, where they stay open from 6 to 10 at night, and you must be at least 18 to get in. They serve drinks and have a different theme each week with various exhibits and presentations among the standard fare. It was a surprisingly vibrant experience!1To be fair, we happened to go when the theme was Sexploration. I have a vague feeling that other theme nights don’t have quite the same turnout, but it still indicated a healthy crowd. When we would go to similar adult nights at the Minnesota Science Museum, it felt like there were a couple dozen people at most.

There are so many opportunities for excitement at a science museum, all stemming from different areas of curiosity and experience. Going to a new museum means new demonstrations and exhibits that I’d never come across. Others are similar to what I’ve seen before, and take me back to my favorite bits of physics classes oh so many years ago now. I get to experience concepts again, sometimes in fresh ways, and marvel at the world we live in. If you have any science museum nearby, give them a visit at least once a year. You won’t regret it.

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    To be fair, we happened to go when the theme was Sexploration. I have a vague feeling that other theme nights don’t have quite the same turnout, but it still indicated a healthy crowd. When we would go to similar adult nights at the Minnesota Science Museum, it felt like there were a couple dozen people at most.