Ready to Rock and Roll: What K-12 Leaders Can Do Now with AI, EdTech, and Unlearning

1. Publish a Balanced Use Brief for staff and families (one page).
2. Run a 60-day micro-pilot with teacher choice and mid-course huddles.
3. Update integrity & AUP addenda with disclosure norms and scenarios.
4. Kick off a “Time Back” sprint focused on saving 10–20% on one task.
5. Host an Unlearn/Keep/Prototype session—then celebrate a small win.

Learn more: Explore CoSN’s frameworks and tools at cosn.org, and check out Mike Lubelfeld & Nick Polyak’s leadership series on unlearning, student voice, and the unfinished leader/teacher. that's fine yeah good lucky so you guys are clear I think we're going for like thirty thirty five minutes um and yeah and and we have the questions and it's a conversation you've all you've both done podcasts before right and so um let's just have fun with it some important so we ready to get going or is that it We're ready to rock and roll. I'm good. Keith is good. You're amazing. That's true. Yeah. Survival, it's called, not amazing. Welcome, everybody. I am Mort Sherman, co-host of the K-Twelve Change Equation. I'm honored to welcome my guest co-host today is Mike Luberfeld, a longtime friend, a wonderful colleague, and a tremendous superintendent that's been around for a long time. Welcome. about that in a second and I am excited to invite um keith into the conversation today keith cougar uh yeah good because we're doing a video and an audio podcast today so there is a gesture for mike welcoming keith and we'll get to his bio in a second but let's start with um mike lubafeld give you some context for this podcast um mike was one of the first it's not the first person we interviewed on on this podcast series and and the reason that I invite is because he has a background as a practitioner what I call the thought leading practitioner active in programs in Illinois and ASA nationally, and an author. I want to start just for a moment, Mike, with that series of books that you and Nick Paliaga put together because I think I think it's so relevant to what we're going to be talking about with Keith today, about learning and unlearning, about how to figure out how to navigate leadership in today's world. Would you give a thumbnail of the books you've written and why you wrote them? Absolutely. Good to see you, Mort. Great to see you, Keith. Can't wait to talk with you. So Mort Sherman wrote the foreword to the Unlearning Leader Leading for Tomorrow's Schools Today, Roman and Littlefield. So if you don't read anything else, read that, right? Read the foreword. Exactly. A hat tip to Jeff Zold, who's out there in the podcast audience, of course, for the title. But it really was about unlearning. Our brains are real good about learning and acquiring new information. What's challenging, we found, is that once we're faced with new realities, innovation, if I dare, you know, kind of tip the hat there, it's difficult for us to unlearn that which we do. Now, following our first book, Nick and I were joined by Illinois Superintendent P.J. Capozzi, and we wrote three more books, Student Voice, From Invisible to Invaluable, about including and incorporating students in their agency and leadership. Then the unfinished book, leader, a school leadership framework for growth and development, and the unfinished teacher, becoming the next version of yourself. Finally, Nick and I have Leading for Tomorrow Schools coming out this year, and it's a case study approach based upon a framework of change that we've penned, the Change Leadership Framework. So thanks for allowing me to share that, Mort. It's been a neat journey so far. Well, I think you're one of the first authors to coin that phrase, although I'm not positive. But Keith, as we go over to you, that concept of unlearning so that you can learn with fresh eyes, I think is so important, the work that you do at COSEN. Now, I have your bio, and I read it, and I've known you Gosh, for a long time, Keith, working together at COSEN and ASA. And I just want to start by letting you, just as we did with Mike, rather than me reading a bio and say, oh, this is Keith Kruger. He has the following degrees and he's done the fine. Give a couple of highlights of how you ended up at COSEN and your career there. Thanks. It's great to be with you, Mort and Mike. You know, I'm a big fan of both of you and Mike's and Nick's books. I love the framing around unlearning leader. And I want to come back in a minute. You know, I come to this humbly in the sense that I do not have an education background, nor do I have a technology background. I started thirty years ago, actually a little longer than that, working on Capitol Hill, thinking about policies around what we then called telecommunications, which was the start of kind of Internet and and I was less interested in the industry fights and I was more interested in how we use it for education and libraries and health care so I started and you know to the unlearning leader though I think is particularly important because if we think of innovation, and that I think is the right word, Mike, to focus on, how do we do things better? And when they invented the car, they called it a horseless carriage. And if you look at the drawings or the pictures from that era, It literally was a carriage and they had replaced the horse with a motor and thin little wheels. And, you know, it took quite a while for us to start thinking about the new power of the automobile and the way in which it worked. Although it was a horseless carriage, that wasn't the best metaphor for looking forward. You know, Keith, in a conversation recently with Jack Naglieri, I asked him, why does it take so long for change? And he talked about almost the same thing you did, Keith, where, you know, on the highways for around thirty or forty years, we had horses and cars on the same roads. Right. That transition was so slow. Excuse me. And and then I don't know if this is one hundred percent correct, but the game. of tracks and on the separation of wheels on roads, you know, and all that goes back to the chariots. And, you know, and so here we are. And is that right, Mike? Are you confirming that? It's almost a hundred percent. No, no, no. It's almost a hundred percent true. You know, I've gone to Snopes and I've tried to fact check it. You know, they say it's as wide as the horses behind and they say it's as wide as the Roman chariot, but it's not exclusive. It is that this old stuff has lingered with us for so long that we can't even unlearn the size of a, of a, of a train tunnel. Similarly to that, it's not exclusive, but it's close. Um, you know, Or we respect the past. You know, we build from it one track at a time. Yeah, we honor it. We honor it. So Keith, let's let's turn to some core questions about technology. And I am I am so struck, and I'm not going to go into my tirade about some of the books like John Hayes book and some others that talk about putting technology on the shelves or not letting kids use cell phones. And, and Kosen has written, I think, an exceptional paper on on this idea of finding balance. in today's world. Can we start with you talking about, hey, let's not go either extreme, but finding the balance with technology? Yeah, and I think that technology per se is not an end, it's a means. The end is the right word, I think, innovation, which is how do we do things better than what we've been doing faster or more efficiently or whatever the process is. But we do have a challenge right now in that Jonathan Haidt and others have narrowly focused around banning technology. Usually it's framed around cell phones, and yet it is discussed as though we are going to be banning screen time. And there are reasons why kids, students should have balance and not be in front of a screen all the time. No one, including the biggest advocates at COSEN for technology and education, would say you don't need gym time or time with crayons or whatever. But hopefully we think about how technology enhances teaching and learning and what too often in this moment where we're talking about devices that are personal devices and banning them doing classroom time, which probably has a lot of good sense to do. But there are other screens that right now we're in front of a screen. If you think of that student who has special needs, they may only be able to learn in front of a screen. Lots of others of us learn in different ways. And so it just seems like we've got a very simplistic framework that all screens are bad. And I think the more important thing is what's the instructional theory behind how we're going to use technology to improve learning and maybe more personalize it or or advance it faster. I see Mike nodding and smiling. Go ahead, Mike. Mort, I want to carry on what Keith just said. I want to talk about the ethical and responsible implementation. I want to tee it up this way. So right now I'm putting on even realities glasses that have screens on the inside so I can actually access my calendar and a whole host of things. I have two mobile phones here, smartphones. If I leave the office, I've got this device here. And behind me, I've got, you know, a laptop computer. And I'm looking at you at two twenty four inch screens. Let's talk not about the screen time or about me as an employee or a worker. Right. What is ethical and responsible when we not only talk about technology and telecommunications, which I love, But generative artificial intelligence, that seems to be all the rage. And Mort and I couldn't share enough with you as we prepared for this interview about how he and I have really fallen in to different uses as humans, scholars, educators, parents, all that kind of stuff. So can you talk a little bit about ethical and responsible implementation? And as Mort said, COSIN is a trailblazing organization in our world right now with you at the helm. Yeah, and I think it's how do we use things like AI on the side to make us better as humans, hopefully not worse. And I do think that the ethical use of technology is a critical, you know, it isn't just racing out with the new tool or toy to do that, but really thinking responsibly. And, you know, I've been very struck by Rob Reich's at Stanford, who's an ethicist, you know, and I worry sometimes I live in Washington, D.C. and you're close by, and sometimes things are framed as all that AI is, is a competitive race with China. there are economic issues around that, but we have to, particularly in a school environment, make sure that we do things in an ethical, responsible, as unbiased way as we can. Now, frankly, we all have biases and so does AI. So what we need to do is to educate kids around what are the biases that are inherent and how do we think more critically? How do we And I love, Mort, you were in preparation for this, talking about some of the ways that you're using AI that I thought were very fun. Yeah, I'll talk about those in a second. Yeah, I want to add Keith and Mike to the question about ethical use. And you just began, Keith, talking about the critical use, the critical thinking, the executive function approach, like how do you use it as a good consumer? And it's not an either or, and I never heard, and I love the phrase tool or toy, it makes so much sense. So for both Both of you, Mike and Keith, Keith is the national leader, I believe, in technology, and Mike is a national leader in practice. You know, this question of finding balance, both ethically and in terms of critical thinking and connecting to other skills and being good consumers. I know, Keith, in your documents, your recent publications, you hit on that, and so I'd like to hear from both of you about that whole set of skills that technology, not just AI, but technology gives you a chance to use. I'll start off really at a high level which is uh you know and insert the word paper or or pencil and uh you know we is you know is it or a book is a book good or bad I and I think that you know there are great books I just read a great book this weekend but there are also a lot of things that are published that aren't that good the same with technology it isn't that it's all good or all bad and I think we sometimes get in this linear conversation. And I think the way in which we need to move both teachers and students is to really become citizens that understand the ethical and smart use of those tools and technology. And Mike, I think you're about ready to say something. I love it. So I love what you have to say. And I'm going to give a tip of my hat to Amanda Bickerstaff. She's out there, you know, in this space, you know, teach AI and all the work. And she said about a year and a half ago in a webinar that I attended virtually, she said, penned the phrase or repeated the phrase, I'll give her credit here, that generative artificial intelligence is a calculator for the humanities. And I paused for a second and I thought through that. And I know of the articles when the calculator came out and the math wars and all this. And, you know, we have calculators built into our smartphones and And I don't think it's unethical to use a calculator to assist me in a mathematical problem or creating the budget for the school district, right? I also don't think it's unethical for me to use a generative AI tool if I'm trying to interpret a large language model, for example. What's ethical now today, partially because of the rapid fire of all of this, I simply think is attribution and acknowledgement. Yes, I used a calculator to do the logarithm calculation because I haven't done trigonometry since high school. I needed help. I used name the tool, you know what I mean, generative artificial intelligence based on this large language model to assist with my grammar check and with my word choice usage. So I look at it as ethics are ethics. Years ago, finally, I had a school board member that says, how do you judge a superintendent on ethics? It isn't one, two, three, four, five. You're ethical or you're not. I'm like, well, and hopefully the answer is ethical. So it's like there's ethics in using generative ad, but there's also ethics in auditing and budgeting. I tend to live with integrity and do what I say I'm going to do. I expect all people around me to do that. Therefore, I create conditions. So the adults who support the adults who support the kids allow that to be the norm. And if we're going to use generative artificial intelligence tools, I go back to Amanda and say, yeah, it's a calculator for the humanities to help us rapidly process large quantities of information as an example. All right. I have a quiz for both of you. Keith, we're going to start with you. What is this? A slide rule. Did you know that, Mike? I did, actually. Because you're so young, Mike. I'm going to be fifty seven in a few, you know, soon. So I actually use not only the slide rule, but one of the triangular rulers in industrial arts with Mr. Johanson in seventh grade. You know, I show this to younger generations and they do lean forward and say, that's a ruler that moves? What is that thing? And Keith, the reason I show it, it's technology, isn't it? Compared to what came before it, there are lots of things that are technology. It's not technology for the next generation. And this idea of learning that or learning, I remember an assistant superintendent in Westport, Connecticut, when CD-ROMs first came out and we had a budget discussion with the board and they said, we're not going to buy CD-ROMs, get them to buy the encyclopedias. And I said, wait a second. And it was really an interesting change. And then I think you just mentioned the whole TI calculator conversation. Should we let them use it? And I'm taking a very different approach than I think many of my colleagues, particularly those of my generation. to say it is a tool that has to be used wisely, ethically, and effectively. You know, this whole idea that it's there for us as an opportunity is very different than just to say, hey, look what it does, these following things. We haven't even begun to think about its possibilities. And so, Keith, this next... question is for you. And when you look at professional learning, I know Kosen has kind of looked at whose responsibility is technology in a school district. And I'm just wondering from Kosen's point of view, how do you go about this change mentality with all the issues we've already briefly talked about with ethics and practicality, but moving a district ahead? What advice would you give to leaders and whose responsibility is it? Well, I do get a lot. We talk about a chief technology officer as a profession, and I get a lot of puzzled questions, or I used to get more of them from superintendents. Are you talking about the person in charge of IT, or are you talking about the instructional person? technology person. And we like to say, if you really want to powerfully be using technology at the cabinet level, there needs to be kind of a chief technology officer that bridges both of those. And it's very similar to the finance world. If you think back to forty years ago, there were bookkeepers and accountants, but just about every school district has a chief financial officer because finance money is a strategic asset. I believe that technology is a strategic asset for school districts and so powerful districts like the one mike's in they see that technology is a strategic asset and can't be owned by one person but it is very helpful at the cabinet level to have a chief technology officer there to think about new ways new processes that affect certainly teaching and learning but also the operations I mean we have significant organizations that that do purchasing, that do run the buses, that run the cafeteria. How can we use these new tools like AI to do things more efficiently? That doesn't mean replacing every person, but it does mean that every person's job will be changing very rapidly. And so how can we... help make a teacher's job a lot more better. They only spend about half their time with students. So the immediate short-term opportunities, low hanging fruit are things like lesson planning or brainstorming on activities that you can do. And Mort had a whole bunch of them that he sent us this afternoon. Yes. I'm going to talk about those. productivity, I think at school sometimes has a bad name. It's not, we don't do, we don't have, we don't have shareholders in the sense that we give back money or profitability. But if we can save time, if we could, you know, save ten percent or twenty percent of a teacher's time in the way that they do grading or the way that they do lesson planning or the way that That can be significant opportunity, I think, that is right before us right now. Mike? Yeah, I'm, you know, COSIN has five positions on, you know, generative artificial intelligence. And we've started to address a couple. And if it's okay, Mort and Keith, we started talking a little bit about augmentation where, you know, AI can empower educators without replacing human roles. As Keith and we've been talking, we've addressed ethics and privacy. I'm wondering if it's OK, Mort, if I ask Keith about the readiness frameworks, the maturity tool and the toolkits that help guide folks in actually how to find out where to start and what are the questions we don't even know to ask. Would that be appropriate right now? Yeah, well, the maturity tool is we started with a framework. We partnered with the Council of the Great City Schools back two years ago. And the concern we had was that the only conversation seemed to be about in the classroom and were students cheating with AI. And I'll come back to that because there's some really interesting research out of Stanford about whether kids are cheating with AI or not. What we wanted to do was to broaden the conversation for superintendents and the cabinet level so that they were thinking holistically. Certainly we do have to think about teaching and learning, but there's a whole bunch of other areas around how we use data, how we do procurement, all those other sort of topics. And so we created a maturity matrix and a tool and we've built professional development. And in fact, we're partnering with the help of the Gates Foundation, with the Education Service Agencies, AESA. You know, there are these, with running a national organization, there are only a certain number of school districts that have the wherewithal that they can travel out of the district and go. But if we can use these education service centers to deliver high quality professional development. And so we've been partnering with them because they have trainers, but they don't always have expertise on things that are technology related like AI. So we're hoping that that's a real opportunity. to move the needle forward for a lot of particularly smaller and more rural districts who the superintendent may also drive the school bus. Exactly. Thanks, Keith. So I'm just fascinated by this professional development and the unlearning concept with technology. I want to go full circle back to that for a moment, Keith and Mike. The reason we have teachers, my wife is a teacher, my daughter is a teacher, or one of our daughters is a teacher. This question of how you help these remarkable people committed to children in the classroom day after day after day. how you continue to support them and have them think about technology in the ways we've talked about today is sometimes a struggle. Because I hear one person say, ban the cell phones, and they'll say somebody else said, oh my God, think of the possibilities. It's that word of possibilities that intrigues me the most about teaching and learning. Professional learning is not just how to flip the switch, Keith, is it? how to turn on the computer and make sure you get good audio and video. It's not just making sure you have a light here, a light here, a light there. It's how do you think about technology and instruction and learning and pedagogy differently. And trying things out. I mean, the thing I love about Mike is he actually tries things. He says, here, I'm trying to do this certain part of my job. How can I do it better? how can I play with it and every time I talk with him you know he's got new glasses on or a new something in his pocket that he's that he's showing me about it and I I think that sets a mindset for others and you know if if A teacher or a principal can every day just try something that they haven't tried before and see if there's a better way. You know, you're going to find out, well, actually, some of these things that I thought would work didn't work, didn't work as well. But we have to have a mindset to continuously improve ourselves and how we use these tools to do that. I love that answer. I think that is well said. Keith alluded to some of the research by Stanford, and I think you were going to share, Keith, that seventy percent of college kids said they cheated before AI was a thing. They cheat while AI is a thing and they're going to cheat after AI is a thing. And that seventy percent of cheating is not because of generative AI. It's not because of technology. It's not because of screen time. It's because of a lot of things I could just say gently and kindly due to their students' perception of relevancy and their voice. We'll just leave it at that, right? That's a great point, Mike, really. I love that. It might make you a better cheater, a faster cheater. But I think the good question, the follow-up question when you hear that from teachers or parents is, do we have an academic integrity policy? right and uh most school districts do but you know does any of that need to be updated uh with uh with the possibilities of ai and you talked earlier mike about disclosure and so having expectations that when we use these tools we say that we're using them or if we're told that you can't use them that you don't use them So that needs to be very explicitly in there. And actually, COSIN does a national survey each year. We're in our twelfth year. It's called State of Ed Tech. And we had some new studies or new questions this year about that in terms of policies. And we asked, have you changed any of your existing policies? And academic integrity policies and acceptable use policies were the top two answers. There are some districts that are doing a completely new policy around AI, not that many. So there's a lot of great information. The people on this call probably all feel that education moves too slowly, but I would also say that there is movement. and we saw forty percent of school districts said they had no policy a year two years ago this year they said that had dropped to twenty seven percent and the biggest answer was forty percent now say it depends on the use case And actually, I think that's a pretty good answer. It does depend on the use case. If a teacher wants to have a closed book and not allow the use of anything but your pen or pencil, then you shouldn't be cheating by using a plagiarism, a tool to do plagiarism. I'm teaching at a university level right now for principal preparation. teaching with three other professors. And the big dialogue we had was, what's the AI policy? What's the AI policy? And the great consensus is the university has a host of resources. And essentially it's, let's have a conversation. What are we talking about? Are we going to model it in our instruction? Are we going to use it in assessment? We want them to use it in production. So I'm really heartened that at Affirm that we're talking about it in what I'll say, a more sophisticated manner. And I sent, we had a prompt that, you know, come up with an icebreaker, a visual icebreaker. So I said to the students, I said, I took the prompt and I put it into Manus AI, which is just one of, you know, many new tools out there. And I said to Manus, here are five images I want you to use, you know, basically see if you can figure out where to use them. And Manus did a beautiful job, of course, made me look nice, touched me up a little bit. But I shared with the students, let's talk with each other about how and when and if we're going to use these tools so we can become more informed scholars of it as we create conditions for adults and for kids. Mike, before we come back to that, I want to ask a more practical question and then I want to dip deeply into what you were just sharing. Both of you, the federal government just withheld seven billion dollars worth of funding for education. We don't know where that's going. But we know a good chunk of it was for professional learning, after-school programs, and so on. And, Mike, you're okay in your district, but there are districts out there that are seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars in loss. It states millions of dollars. And if technology, according to some authors out there, were cut, if we didn't buy an evergreen program every year for Chromebooks, we'd have some money over here. How do you answer those critics? Well, I hope the money gets released. So I do have faith in the government, federal, local, and state. So I hope it gets released. I hope this is a blip. That said, in districts unlike mine that cannot weather this storm, I say this is the time they have to lean on their business partners and they have to go to some of their foundations if they have them. Now let's go to the lowest folks that are absolutely dependent on it who don't have these options. This is when you've got to roll up your sleeves and really find some of the tools that are low cost or no cost and see if and how you can leverage it. And you've got to get real scrappy with unlearning paid professional development and really lean on one another and say, Our result is going to be enhanced training. We no longer have the means. Can we come together and figure it out almost like the old EdCamp concept, but now it's not for fun, it's for necessity. So that would be the answer I would share with you in the moment right now. And I would just say, you know, sometimes you have to shake your head and say, what is going on? What are what are policymakers thinking, you know, to on the June thirtieth to announce arbitrarily that monies that have been appropriated are not going to flow almost seven billion dollars forward. That's irresponsible and clearly illegal. And so one hopes that the money will eventually flow. It reminds me of a couple months ago in March, suddenly on a Friday night, the federal government decided that The cybersecurity free resources that that it's something called MSI SEC. It's a little geeky, but for all our technology folks, they rely as do other governments, city governments, ports and whatever on on MSI SEC to alert you when something bad is happening. And on overnight, it was eliminated the funding for the rest of the year. So, I mean, these are the kinds of things that are not thoughtful. And I don't know who in Washington would say we shouldn't have good cybersecurity protection. Hey, for both Mike and Keith, a follow up to that. I was thinking before when you're talking about the functions of potential for AI or AR or just technology in general. And gosh, sometimes I get this, oh, wouldn't it be great to be back in the seat of superintendent? And then I shiver a little bit and say, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to do that. But wouldn't it be interesting, Keith, through the work you do or Mike, and maybe you do it already, Let's plug in some scenarios on budget through AI and see what it pushes out or scheduling or bus routes. There seems to be so many practical uses of running scenarios that we could not do ten years ago. Yeah, exactly. You think of how much time like the typical school district plan for planning like a schedule for students. You know, now with AI, you can do it instantly with at least, you know, all kinds of different options and then pick the best one. So I think, yeah. Yeah, I remember when I was a principal, all the little yellow, purple, green stickies on the wall for different classes. The magnets. I come from Minnesota, so there's. And the magnets, yeah, and I can slide those magnets around. You did that? Oh, the magnet was the greatest thing the principal ever bought for me when I was an associate principal. It was like five hundred dollars. I thought, oh, my gosh, I can't believe we're spending five hundred dollars. It was just thirty years ago. And that was our schedule board with the teachers' names. And it took longer to cut the magnets than it did to schedule, you know, five hundred students. I think when we look at some of these practical uses and then coming back to technology, I think that whole question of spending money on technology can be answered really clearly. Again, that's this concept of possibilities. Where would you be without it? How more efficient would you be with it in answering some of these core questions and potentially how much more money would you be saving if you used it strategically, Keith, to use your term? So we're getting close to the end. We're like four or five minutes more. But I want to come back to what Mike was saying. And Keith, you were right. I like this little kid in a sandbox with me. with uh ai and and I'm always looking for thank you but I'm always looking for impact on technology and so my daughter and I wrote a book it's somewhere back there on this shelf on the transformative And Mike did one of the reviews. Thank you for that, Mike. But this question of technology has just fascinated me more than ever. I was an English teacher in high school, and I never brought music in to teaching Shakespeare. And it is full of music. I never brought Amazing Grace. It was written in the seventeen fifties. Every single president has used Amazing Grace. Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in nineteen thirty nine because the Daughters of the American Revolution led her into Constitution Hall. So she sang to seventy five thousand people in nineteen thirty nine. And there are recordings of her. And you can go on and on and on. And that's just social studies or English. But there are so many opportunities. that AI could instantly say to us, here's a way to use it. Again, as an English teacher, I was playing with this idea. Hey, look, I'm going to sketch out this poem, this experience my wife and I had of cleaning our canoe. And these nice little guys came by and helped us load it because we're like senior citizens picking up and hosing. It was just so sweet, like pastoral. So I put some words into one of the engines, Mike. I'm not going to, you know, whether it's chat or something else. And a poem popped up. And then I said, now do it in the style of E.E. Cummings or do a sonnet. And then I was thinking, I wish I had this as an English teacher. Because I would say, what is the difference among these different writers? And how do you do that? Now you can put your own words in. And just this possibility, Keith, this idea. of not just practical, but instruction and pedagogy. It could be, I just think, so amazing, so critically acclaimed if we use it in ways that help us unlearn how we did it before. So, Mike, do you want to react to that wonderful tirade that I just went on? I love that tirade. I will tell you this. So Nick Poliak and I learned through our reading and our researching for Unlearning Leader and with PJ through the Unfinished series, takes about fifteen to twenty years before something that we learn can be unlearned. And one of it was Dr. Barry Marshall, who won the Nobel Prize for H. pylori bacteria being the cause of ulcers, not smoking spicy food or stress. But it took about eighteen years for the general medical population to accept and embrace that which they had proven. Nick and I were called to action. We don't have eighteen years because if a child enters my system at age five and leaves his system at age eighteen or three to twenty two, whatever it may be, We can't rob an entire generation of it, whatever it is. So we demand unlearning and relearning and iteration and reiteration. And like Keith says, try and fail, succeed, keep going because we don't have time not to. And I will tell you that in my years, there was nothing more potentially revolutionary than generative AI in society, not just K- twelve education, but society. And I remember when the internet was reopened for the public, right? Quick set of stats. I learned this from Google, so I'm sharing it because I learned it from Google. It took sixty seven years for five million people to use the airplane. It took, you know, like five weeks for fifty million people to use a generative artificial intelligence, sixty seven years airplane, five weeks generative AI. So we got to pick up our pace and we need to unlearn and we need to move faster and we need to reiterate because how we've always done it in the past is certainly not going to allow us to pass it forward. It's not about screen time. It's about innovative practices and the future of the economy. And I completely agree, and we all have white hair on this Podcast. But, you know, I... As I started off, when you asked me my background, Mort, you know, thirty years ago, just as the Internet was starting in a consumer way and we were thinking about what it could be for schools, that was an exciting moment for me. But I think this moment is even more exciting because it isn't just it's going to touch every aspect of our life, our society. We just have to figure out how do we do it in a responsible, ethical way. better way than what we've been doing and not just slap it on top of the automating the things we were already doing. Yeah, and Keith, you led into the concluding section of our podcast, is the now what, so what, and you've kind of led into that. But so if people are listening and not viewing, we are three men with white hair and white faces. And the question beyond the three of us is what about other populations? What about those out there who might not be able to have the kind of conversation Mike has with this community? you know we have conversations coming up with all of synopsis and others um and and mike I'm hoping that we're able to do some guest co-hosting with you around some of those questions but to me this this issue of equity that you've outlined uh keith is one of your positions in in kosen uh could you comment about uh your view of that throughout the country Well, I think we need to make sure certainly that everyone has access, and we've been talking about that for decades. But we also have to look at with things like AI, it's based on the data that's out and publicly available. And that's a problem because lots of populations, lots of languages are not there. So we have to, as we use these, if you ask AI to write you a history it might be biased towards the the sorts of histories that have already been written now frankly that may be no different than the way textbooks were done in the past but we've always had problems with biases but we have to be intentional and thoughtful and rigorously look at and make sure that we're doing everything we can to mitigate that that situation and and I think equity is at the heart of it uh you know whether we can politically use that term or not the the way we have to make sure that every child has has the tools to succeed and and um it's a yeah A hundred percent. I would say to our listeners, I do think that people should check all the big players in generative AI, but also if they're not aware of Latimer AI from John Passmore, it is written for people. It's written for everybody. The perspectives are leaning towards people of color or indigenous populations, and it's not to pro-bias one group or the other. It's simply to say there's multiple large language models out there. And as I've been sharing this in the community, it's use this company, that company, this company, use them all. But then let's not forget, like Keith is saying, we're here. There's a bias there. Let's also make sure that we balance out the perspective so we can help teach critical thinkers to make their own decisions about the information that they're consuming. So I'll give each of you a way to summarize this, but the now what, so what? We've hit upon some of the threads here, you know, balance and unlearning and what is technology? What will technology be? But what do you think is gonna, within the next year or two or three, some of the big challenges or issues that may emerge or opportunities may emerge? Mike, we'll start with you and then Keith had the final word. I'm the eternal optimist and I genuinely believe whatever the company is or whatever the conglomerate is, we're going to see tools in the hands of teachers, school leaders and district leaders and parents that can allow us to individualize, personalize and most importantly, differentiate the learning experiences each and every day for each and every child. We simply have to open our hearts and minds to the fact that it's time to unlearn the nostalgia of the past and move forward with the reality of the present. Thank you. And I think Mike has already pointed out the pace of change that's happened. Even those of us who try to stay up with these things can't completely. So you have to be humble and say, you know, what we said today might not be true next week, next month, next year. Things are moving quickly, but that means we do need a mindset to prepare students for a world that's absolutely going to be AI enabled. And so what does that mean? What are the core skills that everyone still needs? What is it that AI can't replace? It can't replace, I don't think, humanity or being a good person or things like that. So we better make sure that our education systems don't lose, don't simply be about automating the things that are not important, but the empathy, the caring, all of those things that we as people really need. Thank you. So combining Mike and Keith and what you've just said is that we are eternal optimists. That's why we're educators. And Keith, that we have to create this mindset of openness and willingness to look afresh at what we're doing, how we're using it, even if it means some changes. And we need to support those remarkable educators out there. who are day after day in the classroom trying to figure it out in the middle of a storm. So I thank both of you. There's been a terrific conversation. And thank you. Keith, we have to have you back like every six months to do a check on how are we doing now? How are we doing now? What's new in the world? But it has been terrific. Keith, I do want you to say, because I was looking for it. I don't know that we have a means to put it on the screen. But if people want to find out more about COSIN, can you tell us where they go? Sure. Just go to cosn.org. That's easy. I love it. One of the best organizations in the nation. I agree. Well, Keith and I have been with him for a long time.