Beyond the Buzz: Responsible AI Integration in Schools with Sam Whitaker”

Curiosity should be a feature of school, not a casualty of shortcuts. We sit down with Sam Whitaker, Senior Director of Impact at StudyFetch, to unpack how AI can deepen learning without doing the work for students—and why the difference matters for equity, creativity, and the future workforce. Sam pulls from data on a million student chats, showing that when guardrails are clear, most learners use AI to understand concepts, plan essays, and practice step by step rather than asking for answers. That insight flows into powerful teacher tools: class-wide and individual dashboards that spotlight misconceptions, save planning time, and make targeted support feel doable in a packed day.

We take on the two big mistakes schools make: banning AI outright or rushing in a generic productivity bot that invites cheating. Sam maps a third path—responsible integration—where AI acts as a coach, not a shortcut, and students build critical thinking, resilience, and AI literacy from the start. From rural Uganda to STEM installs in Utah, the same spark shows up when students feel seen, supported, and challenged. And for families and districts weighing costs, we dive into real talk about pricing, donated licenses, and how costs will drop as the tech matures, keeping the mission—every student everywhere deserves the best—front and center.

Looking ahead, we explore the AI economy as simply the economy. Some roles shrink, many grow: data center HVAC specialists, electricians, applied AI roles, and new hybrid careers. Students don’t need to memorize code; they need to express ideas clearly, prompt effectively, and protect their creativity. Sam’s take is simple and bold: AI won’t replace teachers; it should give them back the time and insight to do the human work only they can do. We close with practical guidance for leaders on privacy, safety, and picking tools that teach rather than tempt.

If this conversation sparked ideas, subscribe, share with a colleague or parent, and leave a review so more educators can find it. Your support helps us bring thoughtful, responsible innovation to every classroom.

Chapters

• 0:00 New Season, Big AI Questions
• 1:19 What StudyFetch Is And Why It Exists
• 3:20 Sam’s Path To Impact
• 6:18 Data From A Million Student Chats
• 9:32 How The Platform Discourages Cheating
• 12:05 Teacher And Parent Tools With Insight
• 14:32 Access, Equity, And Affordability
• 17:22 The Two Big Adoption Mistakes
• 20:22 Universal Best Practices Across Cultures
• 23:10 AI As Force Multiplier For Teachers
• 26:05 Balancing Cutting Edge With Cost
• 29:00 What’s At Stake If We Get AI Wrong
• 32:12 Closing The AI Literacy Gap
• 35:04 Geeking Up: Making Curiosity Cool
• 38:05 The AI Economy And New Careers
• 41:10 Skills Students Need Now

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Welcome back to EdTech Empowerment, Innovating Education Together, the podcast from Next Gen Classrooms, where we explore the future of teaching and learning through Ed Technology. I'm your host, Juan Rodriguez, and today we're kicking off the 2025-26 season with a powerful conversation about artificial intelligence and its potential to transform education around the world. Our guest is Sam Whitaker, Senior Director of Impact at Study Fetch. Sam has dedicated his career to making sure every student everywhere has access to the best learning tools. Whether that's students at a girls' school in rural Uganda, midwives in Ghana, or high schoolers in the US, please helping lead to charge in multimodal, multilingual AI that not only bridges traditional literacy gaps, but also builds AI fluency students who need to succeed in the future economy. Today we'll dig the best practices for integrating technology in schools, the risk of getting AI wrong, and the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have to get it right. Let's jump in. Hey Sam, what's going on? How you doing? So nice to meet you, and thank you so much for having me on. Ah man, thank you for joining us, man. Hey Sam, tell us, tell us a little about uh StudyFetch. What's what's it all about?

SPEAKER_02: 1:21

Uh so StudyFetch is an AI learning platform built for students. So um, and it's a learning platform first and foremost. So it's a way to bring AI into students into students' hands to help them actually learn material. It's been fairly successful. We have over five million users worldwide, uh, so that's nice. Uh now it's quite a few partnerships recently. Um, but at our core, we are mission focused. So we believe in the power of AI to transform education, not only here in the US, but around the world, close opportunity gaps, close workforce gaps, and make a real difference uh in education, in society, across the board.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00

Uh share your journey with us. Um, what got you to study fetch? What got you uh to making an impact in society?

SPEAKER_02: 2:07

So it's funny because I don't, I've said this before, I don't really have like an origin story here. Um it's not, I had a wonderful education experience all the way through, all the way up through college. And I've just always kind of had in the back of my head that if it doesn't have an impact, it really doesn't matter. So punching a time clock, I mean, there are jobs that need to be done, of course, all those things, but I always kind of felt like I had that in me and I had that kind of need to do that, to be impactful. And I've had some successes, some, you know, ups and downs, and I've but I've really been looking for that perfect opportunity. And the founders of Study Fetch are actually friends of mine, and they came to me uh a little over a year ago now, and they kind of knew what I had done. I had guest lectured at a few schools, and um, they said, Hey, do you want to kind of get involved? And so I just kind of started doing some things, you know, finding some areas where we could donate some licenses here and there. You know, a school that I work closely with here in Philadelphia, Go Birds, World Champions. Um, half of your listeners just stopped listening, by the way, because I said that. Um and so starting here in Philadelphia and moving uh abroad, and it just became uh it what started out as kind of a favor and a little side uh thing to do became a career, and more than that became a passion for me. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 3:21

I'm happy to hear that, man. And we'll roof with some Philly fans here, so there's nothing wrong with that. Um I mean, you had a unique journey, it's an incredible journey from consulting from uh from consulting at Web3 Ventures to leading global impact at StudyFetch. What was the moment that pulled you into education and AI?

SPEAKER_02: 3:40

It was just the opportunity. You know, what's the saying? Uh success is the joining of opportunity and preparedness. So I'd kind of been working on this thesis for so long and you know, meeting lots of people and you know, building relationships and friendships. And then when this kind of came and happened, it was like, okay, that's the one. This is this is what I was put here to do, essentially. And it's a great feeling that once you know it, you just kind of know it, and it makes it really easy to get out of bed in the morning.

SPEAKER_00: 4:11

Yeah, when like once you have that feel-good moment, it's like you said, yeah, it's easier to get out of bed and it's easy like to just get the job done.

SPEAKER_02: 4:18

Um it is, and if we can bring, and that's we're you know foreshadowing a little bit, but um, that's what we want to bring to students. You know, finding I I said I say this all the time to students is that everybody's brilliant, everybody has the capacity to be great at something. It's just for most people, they never get to find that thing. They never get to really find that thing that that just gets them like deep down where they feel it in their soul. And AI can really help open up those doors for so many students because they can be exposed to so many different things and find out what their joy and their passion is. Uh so yeah, we actually published a study a while back. Um, so we were looking at, we knew that students were, we grew as a direct-to-consumer platform. So students were buying our platform directly. We're rolling out more of our institutional side now in a really thoughtful way. Um, but we really wanted to target what do students want, what do they need, how do they, how do they learn better? And so we wanted to make sure that our system really was working because we're built as a learning tool, not a cheating tool. There's plenty of cheating tools out there if students want that. So we did a study, we analyzed a million conversations on our platform. And what we found actually was even better than we could have imagined. It was over 70% of the um of the interactions students were having with our AI were really around concepts and really around learning. So it was, you know, explain a concept to me, kind of walk me step by step through who how this gets done, or the the concept really doesn't make sense. Can you give me more information? Only 2.6% of our interactions were direct answer requests. And that's the form of do this homework for me, write this essay for me, tell me the answer. Um, and we actually saw an 80% drop in direct answer requests from conversations one to five on to six through 10 and up to 99 to 95 to 100 for some, because students realized they weren't gonna get the answer. So they started using our AI appropriately and they started using it to learn. Um, and we weren't losing students. We I think we lost like 0.6% of students when they realized they weren't gonna get the answer. And I can't say this for sure, but I think most of them signed up at like 2 a.m. the day before final and said, okay, this isn't for me, I gotta jump. Um but yeah, we'll we'll take losing that 0.5% if 9.5 are really there to learn.

SPEAKER_00: 6:41

Yeah, that's incredible. So, like your platform is actually teaching students how to understand the content. I'm repeating a lot of stuff that you said. So it's teaching students how to create the content and not allowing them to cheat. So if I type in, if a student decides to prompt in, hey, write an essay for me or give me the answers to all these questions, it's not gonna give it to them. It's uh what's it gonna do? Um it's it's gonna is it gonna kick them off? Um help us understand how their application works.

SPEAKER_02: 7:08

So um I always check out, it's there's there's so many platforms that pop up all the time. So I'll be on a call and somebody will say, Hey, have you heard of this? And I say no. So I go check them out. And there was one the other day uh which is actually pretty widely used. And the first thing I always do is I go into the chat and I say, write me a 300-word essay on the great Gatsby and make it sound like I'm in eighth grade. So this one pops it out. Boom, 300 words. How do you like it? Would you like me to add some quotes, et cetera? The system's done. There's no critical thinking, no creativity. And then they actually have an upload function. So I uploaded a like math homework assignment. It was like a multiplication table. And this system actually didn't even ask what you wanted to do. It just as soon as you uploaded, solved all the problems. And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking to myself, like, how is this possibly packaged as a learning platform? So in StudyFetch, if you do things like that, the system's gonna say, I can't do that for you, but let me walk you through how to do it. If you need to write a 300-word essay, let me help you with an outline. Here's kind of what the you know, five-paragraph essay structure should look like. Why don't you write a draft and then we'll take a look and see um how you're doing in terms of vocabulary usage and and sentence structure based on your level? And the system's always gonna learn from students. So it's gonna learn how they do it best and how they um what they like, what their preferences are, what their what kind of themes they like. Um it's it's built for students. That's the bottom line.

SPEAKER_00: 8:29

That's incredible. And I was on a platform. Um, I was visiting the platform. I see that it's also for educators, it's also for professors, and even for parents. Um, can you share with us like the some insight as to like how parents can use it, how perhaps a professor can use it, or how or even like a high school teacher?

SPEAKER_02: 8:46

So the most powerful thing we have, we have teacher tools and things like presentation generators and you know, assignment graders and things like that, but those are fairly common. There, there are a lot of those around. Um, the things that separates study fetches is our insights and our ability to take, let's say, from a teacher perspective, to take a look at your entire class and say, here are the class-wide strengths and weaknesses. Here are some areas where students are really having trouble. So the teacher can go back and maybe say, okay, I clearly didn't explain that well enough. So let's come back to the war of 1812 or whatever it might be. And also see where students are doing well, and then break that down all the way to being able to say, okay, here are some students who are really having some issues and we're coming up on exam time. Maybe this is where I need to kind of target my focus. Like maybe we set aside some office hours. Um, and that kind of targeted, you know, feedback in real time is gold for student for teachers because they're overworked and they they can't give every student all the attention that they want to. It's just there aren't enough hours in the day. So, really kind of being able to focus class-wide and student specific, that's that's where our kind of wheelhouse is. And then the system itself is student-specific. So, as students are having more trouble, they can keep asking questions. It's infinitely patient, available 24-7. Um, that we always say we want to get down to an N of one. So that's kind of a term saying that you know, every student experience is for that specific student, built specifically for them, how they learn, when they learn, meet them where they are.

SPEAKER_00: 10:21

Nice. And then that's going on to our next question, right? You're talking specifically one-on-one for each individual student. And our study fetch our mission is every student everywhere deserves the best. What does that really mean in practice, especially for underserved communities?

SPEAKER_02: 10:38

So not every student has access. Well, here, let me back up a little bit. What we believe in is equality of opportunity. So the students that I want to target are the ones who want to succeed but don't have the tools. And those tools could be the, you know, expensive private schools. They could be the one-on-one tutors that cost$300 an hour, they could be access to, you know, learning platforms and things that are way too expensive for a lot of families to afford. And um, AI can take that, you know,$300 an hour tutor, make it available to a student, make a similar, comparable uh solution available to a student 24-7 for$20 a month. And that all of a sudden becomes something that most families can afford. And, you know, bringing that down as much as possible is AI is expensive. It's unfortunately expensive to run, you know, keep these data centers running and use the large language models. But really, that avail access to opportunity is what we really believe in. And um that's kind of we're putting our money where our mouth is on that one.

SPEAKER_00: 11:46

That's amazing. Because I think it's like it's the mission, right? Is that every student deserves a chance. Um, and you're allowing every student to reach their full potential by giving them access to these mod these different models. Um, but what we see is that a lot of schools are making a lot of errors when it comes to integrating technology, specifically AI. Um, we're seeing there's a rush into adopting AI. Um, what's the first mistake you see that leaders are making and how can they avoid this mistake?

SPEAKER_02: 12:13

So I think um it's kind of one mistake um in two different ways. So the mistakes end up kind of on the different polls. So the one poll is we're just gonna ban AI. Like we don't understand it, we're afraid of it, we students are cheating, which I completely understand. Students are cheating. Um so we're just gonna ban it. The problem there is that students are using AI. So when I was in rural Uganda, um, seven hours from the airport, I was as far away, far afield as you can get where there's still an internet connection. Um there were 30 girls in the class, and of the 30, 28 of them were already using AI. Most of them were ChatGPT or DeepSeek, which was very surprising to me. So I guarantee you, every student is using AI on some level. So completely banning it isn't really an option because they're using it anyway. The other poll is okay, let's just get something out there. So we're just gonna give them uh a chat bot that isn't built for learning, that's just built for productivity. We're just gonna sign a contract, we're gonna get it in there, and now they have something. Well, the problem there is you're you're now encouraging them to use an op use an um a platform that isn't built for learning. And they're going to use it to cheat. It's the path of least resistance. They're gonna say, hey, do this homework for me, write this essay for me. So I think being too extreme on either end is really the problem. It's the the central solution. So, where are we where we can provide a learning solution for students? Where are we where we can integrate AI into our classrooms in a safe and responsible way? And there aren't a lot of us out there who are doing it, doing it well and doing it with the mission and the purpose. So it can be difficult for administrators. And I completely understand their frustration and their fear. Um, but this is a it's a team effort, quite frankly. So it takes all of us working together to find the real solutions.

SPEAKER_00: 14:13

Yeah, and and Sam, you seem like you've been everywhere. You just mentioned you was in Uganda. Um, perhaps I've read some stuff that you was doing, that not that you was doing, but some midwifery programs in Ghana, working with high schoolers in the US. So, what do you what do you think is the best practice for tech integration to hold true across all of them?

SPEAKER_02: 14:36

Oh, it's a good question. Um You know what? Honestly, the best practices are the best practices. Students are students. We have cultural differences, we have different languages and things like that, but students are students. Um, you know, I found this when I was when I was in Uganda. You know, I had never been to Africa before. So it was definitely a culture shock. And again, this was seven hours from the airport. So I was staying in a very nice kind of hut type of thing, but it was very nice and very clean and wonderful, and all the people were so amazing. Um, aside from me and the other teacher who was with me, were the only white faces I saw for five days. And um, but you get into the classroom and they're just kids. They're just kids who are learning. And just like any other classroom, they, you know, everybody starts off a little bit, you know, kind of nervous and you know, doesn't quite know what to expect. And then you see about 15, 20, 30 minutes in, they start to, they start to get it a little bit. Um, and this happens in every classroom. This is I was in Utah a couple weeks ago doing a STEM installation at for the Utah Black Chamber of Commerce. And it was the exact same thing. US students, Ugandan students. They start off, and then they once they start to get it, you see the smiles, and then you see them talking, and then you see them interacting, and then you see them talking to the other table, and they they're starting to really understand and they they say, Okay, I can get this. And that's that spark. What you were talking about with your after-school program, it's the spark. That's what we live for, is seeing that spark in students and seeing them really get it and just find the joy and the passion. That's there's just no feeling like it. And to be able to do it, so back to your question the best practices are the best practices. It really doesn't matter where you are, their students. Find a way to relate, find a way to make them uh get them interested, and find a way to find the joy and the passion, and then you're off to the races.

SPEAKER_00: 16:33

Yeah, man. You just have to spark that curiosity in them, right? And and ignite that in them. And once you got that, is that was that that's where the magic happens. And I like how you described it. Once you got that, you got them. You're in and I mean let's go back to the educators, right? Because educators, there's a lot of fear with educators when it comes to AI. I'm speaking with a lot of educators, many of them feel like they're that AI is going to replace their role. Um, you even talked about it a little bit when it comes to like feedback. Not not every teacher, not every educator could have that one-on-one with their students and provide them with feedback. And perhaps AI can step in and give the students the feedback that they need. Um, how do you see teachers fitting into this, right? In the this next chapter of learning?

SPEAKER_02: 17:18

Yeah, it's a huge part because none of this is possible without teachers. None of it is. And I mean, if you look at kind of this education system that we have, let's just talk about the US to start. Um it's not good, let's be honest. And it hasn't been good for a long time. Teachers have been holding this up. It's been the teachers. We have policymakers and we have politicians arguing back and forth and doing all the it's the teachers who are holding up the education system. They're doing it with duct tape and bailing wire. They're using money out of their own pocket. They are spending an ungodly number of hours that they would rather be spending with their families because they care, because they're passionate. And so there will never be a replacement for teachers. There's no machine, no AI, no learning model, nothing that will ever replace teachers. Teachers are overworked. In the United States, it's the number one most burnout profession. We've lost over 500,000 educators in public schools since 2019, before the pandemic. 500,000. And we weren't in good shape in terms of teacher staffing before that. So now they're even more overworked. AI comes in as a force multiplier, as a time saver. So some of the day-to-day tasks, like being able to see these kinds of insights on a class-wide basis, then the teacher really knows where to target their efforts and where to really target their time. And allowing teachers to do what they got there to do, which is to use their passion and their compassion and their experience and their intuition and all of those things that that make that allow them to find that spark in students. Those are the things that teachers can do and should be able to do more. And AI can help them with that. But I understand the fear. I completely understand the fear, but I'm here to tell you as someone in the industry, you know, in the middle of it, AI will never replace teachers. AI can make teachers' lives a lot easier, but there will never, ever be a replacement for a teacher. They're too important.

SPEAKER_00: 19:26

And thank you for emphasizing on that, Sam. AI will never replace teachers. But perhaps AI can be used as a teacher, a digital teacher assistant, right? Like where they're developing the data that we need to decide how we're going to differentiate the classroom or the lesson, right? Or perhaps to look at data to see how we're going to improve whatever it is that we're bringing into the classroom and support our students. So thank you for sharing that. Um You had previously mentioned um study fetch being affordable and making sure that if it's affordable, it can be accessible to all students and all families. So, how do you balance the cutting edge innovation with affordability and accessibility so that low resource schools aren't left behind?

SPEAKER_02: 20:08

It's a balancing act. Um, because like I said, AI is expensive, and especially the models that we use are expensive because they're the best of the best. Um and, you know, we go back to every student deserves the best. Well, you need the best technology to do that. Um, there are solutions out there, like the one I talked about, and it's one of many, many, many that you can use really cheap models and it'll solve problems for students, it'll write essay for essays for students, but it's not a learning tool. And so we have to balance, you know, being able to afford to use the best tools with also, you know, being able to provide the solution to as many students as we can. So if we go back to the example of the tutor, um, you know,$300 an hour,$100 an hour, whatever versus$20 a month is a pretty big leap. And so that's and that's you know, for if you buy study fetch month to month. If you buy an annual, it's$100 for the whole year. And then we have, you know, discounted rates for school districts and things like that. And we're also working with nonprofits. We're working with uh state and local governments to try to find ways to to defray the cost even more. And then offering things like um we have a literacy platform that's coming out soon, uh, which we're gonna offer as close to free as we possibly can, which is bridging the gaps of traditional literacy and also introducing this whole new literacy that everybody has to learn, which is AI literacy. And then the work we do in uh, you know, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, things like that, we donate as many licenses as we can around the world. Um, but these things are gonna get cheaper. You know, these solutions, AI is new, and it's so the newest things. Remember when you know flat screen TVs were five, ten thousand dollars for base level and now 150 bucks, you get a pretty good TV. So uh so yeah, as more as the you know we get more down the road, uh, these things will get cheaper. But it is a balancing act for now, and you know, we like with all these things, we do the best we can um with with what we have available.

SPEAKER_00: 22:09

I love that. I love that. And it is it's definitely a way to get students excited. Um and we'll we'll keep our eye out for that literacy platform. Um but what one thing that we also had learned um that we observed from our schools is that when a school is struggling to integrate technology or even obtain uh new technology into their classrooms, um, it makes it hard for them. Let me backtrack on that question a little bit. When schools have limited resources, they have a challenge to integrate technology. Um, and sometimes integrating the technology is done poorly, is not done the right way, um, just because they don't have the resources, they don't have the capacity or the manpower to integrate it the right way. If schools decide to integrate AI and they do this poorly without any guardrails, what's really at stake um for this generational students? Everything.

SPEAKER_02: 23:00

So um there was an MIT study that came out a few months ago. They they put uh students into three groups. There was a chat GPT group, there was a just Google search group, and then there was the handwritten group. And they had them write essays for four months. After four months, the and they measured brain waves and alpha waves and everything along the way. The ChatGPT group, um, they completely lost their critical thinking and creativity skills. The AI was doing everything for them. Um, they couldn't remember what they had written, let alone recreate what they had, you know, written. I'm doing air quotes because we're not on video, just so everybody knows, written with air quotes. Um and worst of all, after the four months, those students, it took them a while to recover their creativity and their create creative thinking or their critical thinking to be able to write on their own. Like they couldn't do it at first. So this is all so new. We don't know how long before that becomes permanent. Because students' mind, so I use AI personally all the time. I use it's a great assistant, it allows me to be so much more productive. But I had the advantage of building my critical thinking creativity skills when I was young, when my brain was still forming, when I was forming those neural pathways. And while students are still forming those neural pathways, if we put ourselves in a situation where we are um where they're not forced to use them, where they're not forced to build those muscles, they may never build them and they may be completely dependent on technology. You know, when you talk about this being a lots of people in Washington talk about this being a national security issue, that's not overstatement. That's not bluster. Because we have adversaries, and those adversaries are arming their students with the best possible chance to succeed. In China, for instance, they're starting responsible AI education at the age of six, and every single student is getting responsible AI education and training, starting at the age of six all the way through their education journey. So we need to act now, or quite frankly, this generation of students, I shudder to think of what's going to happen because at what point do we lose our leadership in the ideas economy, which is really what it's all about. It's not about the brick and mortar and all those things. They're great and they're wonderful and they make our lives possible, but it's the ideas economy. It's it's putting a man on the moon, it's inventing the internet, it's curing diseases, it's all these amazing things that we've done throughout our history. And it's been because we've been motivated and our students have had that creativity and that spark, that thing we call the American spirit. And it can go away. I mean, it really can in a generation. Um, so the stakes could not be higher.

SPEAKER_00: 25:42

If we don't focus on providing that literacy program, that AI literacy to our students, we're gonna be left behind. Would you agree that the spaces, the communities, um, the underserved communities, they're gonna be impacted the hardest. Um, but places like China are already developing and keeping their students ahead. So if we're not doing this, our students are gonna be left behind. Talk about that a little bit more, one more time, please.

SPEAKER_02: 26:08

Sure. And you're you're right. And that's that you're a hundred percent on spot on with that, is that it's the opportunity gap is gonna grow even more because it's gonna be, you know, the students who are in the main line in Philadelphia and the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, they're gonna get, they're their parents are gonna make sure that they get these, you know, these AI literacy tools and they're learning appropriately. But it's the students who are underserved, the students who are, you know, are always the last to get the newest technologies who are gonna be hurt even more. And then that gap widens even more because we're adding a new literacy. And now they're, you know, in addition to having issues with traditional literacy, they're having issues with AI literacy. And it's unacceptable because every single, I'll go back to what I said earlier. Every student, every human being has the capacity to be great at something. Every student is brilliant at something. And the more students we can find, help find their brilliance, help find the thing that they're great at, it just we have more opportunities to fit all of these jagged edge pieces together in the puzzle that makes up the United States of America and then also makes up the world, and it makes us all so much stronger. And when we when we kind of when we ignore these underserved communities, when we ignore students who we say have disabilities, learning disabilities, which is a phrase that I hate, um, they just learn differently. Um, when we ignore those students and say that, you know, they're dumb because they don't fit into this box that we create for everyone, we're doing ourselves and our country a death, um uh it's detrimental to ourselves, our country, and our future because those are huge pieces that can make us all so much stronger. And in so many ways, we've been letting them down. Uh, you know, in your TED talk, you were talking about how you know black and brown students are left behind on so many, so many levels. It makes us all weaker when everybody isn't stronger. And education is the silver bullet to all of that. And AI is the quantum leap forward that can close those gaps if we do it right.

SPEAKER_00: 28:14

Yeah, and I like that you closed it that way, right? Because there is a flip side, right? We don't have to live in this fear that it is gonna be wrong. There is a chance that we can get it right. And how could AI transform learning within the next decade?

SPEAKER_02: 28:28

Uh, go back to your TED Talk. Let's make geeking out cool. Thank you for saying that. Of course. Thank you for bringing that up. Anybody who's listening who hasn't watched the TED Talk, put the link in because it's good and it's passionate, and you're, you know, you're everything you believe in really comes through. Um, I actually use a similar phrase a lot, but um, with students, I say geek up. So geek up their skills, geek up their possibilities, geek up the future that they can have. And when you talk about students, you you talked a little bit about um how you know being smart sometimes isn't cool and it's not considered cool. And, you know, they're the dorks and they're the nerds, things like that. Well, the reason for that goes back to what I was just saying about we try to fit all of these students into this little box that's in the middle. And if you're not in that box that's in the middle, you would be amazed how quickly students start to think they're dumb and they start to think they can't do it. And then they kind of lash out and they look at the kids who can do it and who do fit in that box, and they say, Okay, I'm, you know, you're five, six, seven years old. What's the only thing I can do? I I can attack. And so I attack that student, I tell them they're dumb, I tell them they're stupid, and because I can't do it. And um, you know, kids haven't learned the emotional intelligence at that point, which they shouldn't have. But if we can make more and more students like expand that box out to the edges and make more and more students find their spark and find their joy. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All the students are supporting each other. And the cool kids are the smart kids, and the cool kids are the interested kids, and the cool kids are the ones who are going to succeed in life and bring all of these jagged pieces together into our puzzle. So for every kid out there, geek up. Geek up out of poverty, geek up out of a dead-end job, geek up out of gangs and geek, geek up geek up. That's the way we do it. NAI can help. I love that. I love that. Thank you for saying that.

SPEAKER_00: 30:33

I mean, every chance has every student has a chance to be smart, to be intelligent. And they they they all have it within them. But it's just making sure that we have the right educators in front of them to pull that out of them. And there's a chance for that too. Let's talk about um something that you had mentioned previously, and we didn't get too much into it, is AI economy. Could you explain that? Um sure.

SPEAKER_02: 30:57

So the A economy is just the economy. You know, it's like when you say when you have French fries in France, are they just fries? Yeah. So when we talk about the AI economy, we're in the AI economy. It's now, and it's happening now, and every student needs to be prepared for it. So I think I was talking earlier about when I was in Utah, um, we had 50 students, uh, all high school students, and I decided I wanted the theme to be about jobs AI is gonna create. So uh we all we talk about is the jobs that AI is gonna get rid of. And there are gonna be a lot of them. I mean, AI can replace a lot of things. I mean, think about like a lawyer's, for instance. And these are like white-collar jobs, the jobs everybody has said for years, this is what your kids should do. You don't need 10 associates working on a big case anymore. You can do one or two associates in AI and you get the same, if not better, results. So there are some jobs that are gonna be replaced by AI, but there's also gonna be a lot of jobs that are created by AI. So with these students, we had like, you know, some you know, quantum cryptography specialists and AI ethicists and things like that. But I also had like HVAC and electricians and plumbers. These data centers need such precise um calibrations in order to perform at their optimum levels. The temperature has to be exact to like 0.0002 degrees, and the electricity has to be up all the time, and you need a lot of water to keep these things cool. If students upskill into being um into these, you know, highly specified jobs, they can make an amazing living. I mean, we're talking$150,000,$200,000 plus being an HVAC technician at a data center. And so all these jobs that we've considered blue-collar and say, okay, well, that's where the vote kids or the dumb kids go. Not anymore. The blue-collar jobs are going to be sticking around and they and students can upskill for them. Um, and just when you're preparing students, it's really just kind of understanding AI from a young age. So um, you know, we always talk about like uh, you know, students who, you know, they have an iPad from when they're they're very young. They just figure out how to use it and then they just know that technology for the rest of their lives. It's the same thing with AI. If we teach them responsible use early on and how to prompt effectively and how to use AI to be a productivity enhancer as opposed to a shortcut tool, then that's just how they're going to use it for the rest of their lives because they learned it while they're developing those skills. So preparing for the AI economy is just preparing for the economy. And it starts with literacy. It starts with exposure, it's called starts with responsible use. And we need companies who are providing solutions that do that.

SPEAKER_00: 33:41

Nice. And preparing students for this AI economy, you mentioned literacy skills. What other skills do you think, uh, do you believe students should start building now?

SPEAKER_02: 33:51

Um, well, some of them are just maintaining the skills that we already talked about. So the create the critical thinking and creativity skills, like finding a way to maintain them when there are so many ways that they could lose them. And so when we talk AI literacy, it's really how do you interact with AI? How do you um how do you prompt effectively? How do you use it responsibly? In terms of real skills, I mean, I know so we we actually have uh we're partnered with NVIDIA on uh bringing their deep learning institute technologies into high schools around the country. Um, so kind of closing workforce gaps there. The CEO of NVIDIA, um Jensen Wong, uh, always says that the programming language of the future is human. So he always used to tell parents, have your kids get into computer science, get them programming programming in Python. But now we're getting to a point where you don't really need to know how to program. The AI can do that for you. But who comes up with the idea? Who has that spark of genius that says, okay, what if we did it this way? And then the AI is kind of the tool that makes it happen. So more than anything, it's getting students even more creative and even more um thinking critically, like those kinds of things, because getting the most out of AI is being able, being able to tell it what you want it to do. And that really happens from those that uniquely and wonderfully human thing of that creativity.

SPEAKER_00: 35:19

Yeah, so AI is pretty much just a brush, right? And we're the artist. Well, the student's the artist. So we can use that brush, we can use that to create a beautiful canvas, but it it has to be that creativity within the artist.

SPEAKER_02: 35:32

AI could perfectly replicate the Mona Lisa. AI could perfectly play Stairway to Heaven, couldn't paint the Mona Lisa from scratch, and couldn't write Stairway to Heaven. That's where the human component comes in.

SPEAKER_00: 35:44

Nice way to frame it. Um, and then we have our last question, Sam. Thank you. I want to thank you. You you dropped a lot of gems, shared a lot of great stuff with us. But this last question is what's one piece of advice that you'd give school leaders or policymakers who are hesitant about AI, but know that they can't ignore it. Do your best.

SPEAKER_02: 36:06

And that's all any of us can do right now. This is all so new. Um, trust your gut, focus on your students. That's the key. Um, you know, we talked about China and getting ahead in the AI race, things like that. We haven't even talked about data privacy. That's another huge piece is make sure that you're protecting your students because the data's out there. And quite frankly, adversaries of ours are using the data to, I mean, think about the kind of natural progression. China collects the data, they understand the um how what students are thinking and what they're asking, and then all of that kind of gets filtered on to social media platforms that then influence what they're thinking and how they're voting and what they're doing. Protect your students, protect them from cheating tools, protect their data. It's your job, quite frankly, and it's hard to do, but you know, doing the hard thing is worth it.

SPEAKER_00: 36:57

Yeah, I think that's huge, is that cybersecurity. And maybe we can have another conversation about that in the future. So, yeah, thank you, Sam. Thank you for sharing your insight. Thank you for dropping some gems. Um, you shared a lot of valuable information with us. Uh, but before you go, we definitely have some fun questions we want to ask you. Some three fun facts about Sam Whitaker. Are you ready for the hot seat? Ready for it. Let's make it happen. Sam, if you could instantly master one skill outside of tech or education, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02: 37:27

Okay, so if we took away laws of physics, I would want to fly, like Superman style. That would be number one. But if we're talking about the real world, um play the piano. I wish I had taken like I all like my parents would always say, Hey, you should play the piano. I was like, No, I want to play saxophone. I want to go to like a hotel lobby and just like break into Beethoven. Like, I just think that would be awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 37:49

But yeah, I just thought the same thing, like just kind of like walk around casually, like in Nordstrom or something, and just like jump on the piano.

SPEAKER_02: 37:57

You see on the same piano and like, yeah, uh man, I would love that.

SPEAKER_00: 38:01

Yeah, I I agree. Um, next question: What is the most surprising or unexpected thing you've learned from students during your work?

SPEAKER_02: 38:12

Surprising or unexpected thing. Um, well go back to what we talked about before. They're all the same. They really are. Like, it doesn't matter where you are, it doesn't matter who you meet, what the backgrounds are, what the education level is. I mean, when you're talking about kids, especially, like kids are all the same. You find that spark and then you're off to the races. And it can be hard to find it a lot of times, but yeah, kids are all the same. They're kids. Just teach them and love them.

SPEAKER_00: 38:40

That's it. Set, can I have you like rephrase that answer? Because like you talked about like not boxing kids in. Um and just want to make sure that our listeners are taking what you say and then not kind of being confused as with this last answer.

SPEAKER_02: 38:53

No, thank you for that. Yeah, so all kids want to learn, and all kids have the capacity to learn, and all kids have the capacity to be great. Um, you just gotta find their spark. You gotta find what they what they enjoy and what they're passionate about. And once you find it, it's that same reaction from all the students. You get that joy, you get that look in the eye where they say, Okay, I got it. I can dig into this. And that's the thing that crosses cultural boundaries and and national boundaries and all of those things. When when a kid really gets it and they see that spark, it's it's the same look across the board.

SPEAKER_00: 39:30

Love that. Love that. So every child across the world has that little spark in them. Yep, you just gotta find it. Nice. Last question if you could design your dream classroom of the future, what's the piece of tech or non-tech you'd put in it? Dream classroom.

SPEAKER_02: 39:49

Um honestly, I feel like my dream classroom wouldn't even be a classroom. I mean, I think we have such an opportunity now to revolutionize education and take like all of these decades of learning sciences that experts have been telling us about and just haven't made it to students, and really just make it make it an experience more than a classroom. Make it make it joyful, make it experiential, make uh just where it doesn't feel like a classroom where they're in their little desk and they're facing the front and they're this kind of rigidness. I mean, so rigidness is good for kids, you know, they need some rules and some uh regulations, but yeah, just just reimagined classroom completely. Um start from scratch and say if we didn't know what a classroom looked like, what would we build to help kids learn?

SPEAKER_00: 40:40

That's awesome. Hey Sam, you're off the hot seat. Thanks again for joining us. Um, and I hope our listeners listen soon.

SPEAKER_02: 40:47

Yeah, I hope so too. And thank you so much for having me. And I know you a lot of this is geared at teachers and to all the teachers who are listening. Just thank you. I said it before, you have been holding up the education system for decades. And you don't get enough credit, you certainly don't get enough pay. And um we're there are those of us uh out here trying to do it right, we're really trying to help. So we're here for you, and help's coming.

SPEAKER_00: 41:17

Sam, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your insights. From best practices in AI integration to stories of global impact, you've shown us that this isn't just about technology, it's about equity, access, and preparing every student for the future. To our listeners, if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you subscribe to EdTech Empowerment Innovating Education Together on your favorite podcast platform and share it with your colleague, parent, or friend who cares about the future of education. You can learn more about our work at NextGen Classroom or by visiting nextgenclassrooms.org, where we're building a future where every learner can thrive with technology. Thank you for tuning in. Until next time, keep innovating, keep empowering, and keep building classrooms of the future together.