Chris Colley: 0:12

All right, welcome everyone. Another episode of Shift Ed podcast coming to you. I am reaching across the pond, I am pulling in the AI educator, dan Fitzpatrick. What we have so much to talk about, but AI it's such a hot topic in schools now and Dan is going to help us shed some light Now. Dan's an author, high school, ex high school teacher, writes podcasts every day, speaks, and I think that he's dominated his focus on AI these days. Dan, thanks so much for joining me today and, yeah, we'll AI it.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 0:51

Yeah, thanks, chris. I appreciate you having me and for making this work with the time difference and everything, it's great to be with you.

Chris Colley: 0:59

Yeah, well, thanks for joining. It's always a pleasure to talk to insightful people, or you've spent probably more time than most of us focusing, looking and researching and playing around with AI. But, dan, before we get there, what were some of your moments that led you here? Like, how did you become the AI educator?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 1:20

Yeah, I guess I remember when I was training to be a high school teacher, I remember I went into one we had like it was called a skit program. I'm not sure if you have them in Canada, but they kind of train on the job. So you start with a 60% timetable so I was teaching kind of from day one and then every Friday at the school I was at we would have teacher training kind of classes and sessions. So I remember this one Friday it was led by one of the tech teachers and they were talking about Google for Education, essentially like kind of the early versions of it and cloud computing, and it just captured my imagination from that moment because I remember thinking why aren't we just using cloud computing everywhere? Like we can put student resources on there? Students can access them from any device from home at any time. Surely this just makes sense and I suppose yeah. So I got very excited about the, the prospect of of technology enhancing uh learning and the school experience for students.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 2:31

So kind of was always an advocate in my in my teaching career and I moved into leadership where I was responsible for technology integration.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 2:40

Then I moved into college education where I kind of moved into a more strategic director role around integrating technology into college education.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 2:51

And it was there when I kind of started playing around with early LLMs and the technology behind it, like a tool like ChatGPT and kind of seeing again very rudimentary versions of it, but starting to see this could have benefits for our teachers, especially teachers who have to give feedback on large amounts of writing.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 3:13

That was kind of my first kind of way in to think, right, well, how could this help? And then, of course, history it's in the history books now End of November 2022, chat gpt was released kind of changed the course of the world, I suppose, over the last two years and the and the. The world is still kind of reeling from it and trying to understand it, and every business is trying to understand it. Every school is is trying to, to some degree, understand it. So, having a bit of knowledge about it, having knowledge about technology integration in school, I decided to start writing about it really firstly on social media, then in my books, and it kind of allowed me to step aside from the day job and focus on this full time and, yeah, I suppose I get to travel the world and help schools, districts, businesses integrate AI.

Chris Colley: 4:09

That's amazing, amazing. And for you, like what was your first reaction to when chat, you know, opened its doors in that, you know, cold November day, like what were your first impressions when you were just starting to muck around with it a bit? Like what was your kind of reaction to it all? Yeah, I suppose I'm. What were your first impressions when you were just starting to muck around?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 4:27

with it a bit. What was your reaction to it all? Yeah, I suppose I'm. I think, when it comes to this type of thing, I'm naturally an optimist, and so I could. When I saw how good that first or that early version of ChatGPT was, I kind of thought, well, let's ask it to do some things. I mean, it's very, very cliche now, but, like back at the end of November 2022, asking ChatGPT to write a lesson plan for you was almost monumental. It was huge. And just seeing that kind of response from it and seeing how and I suppose my mind, just my mind went straight to.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 5:06

I remember when I was, when I was teaching full time and and a lot of my colleagues had this attitude as well, especially those with ambition it was kind of like every weekend you would say, right, one day, one day of that weekend's a work day.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 5:21

You weren't getting paid for it, but you just knew that if you wanted to stay ahead and at the top of your game, you're gonna have to dedicate at least one day of that weekend yeah to for the workload, yeah, and, and I, and I did that and I, I, I, I threw myself into that um, especially um, earlier on in my career and I kind of my mind straight away thought, oh my goodness, all that time I spent um upstairs in the in the box room in our house, um not seeing family, not seeing friends, um on an evening, like with my laptop in front of the tv doing work and getting feedback, and I just kind of thought I need to. At that moment. Nobody else was really talking about it, I felt especially not in the social circles I was in, and so I just thought I need to, I need to put things out there. So like, yeah, it kind of excited me, it made me really positive about, about, first and foremost, that workload element for sure, for sure.

Chris Colley: 6:21

I I heard this um ratio 80, 20. Um, okay, yeah, and they were saying that AI is great at like 80% of your like school tasks, but your professional judgment still is that 20% right, so you always are, are kind of like having it generate things, but at the same time, your professionalism is still a part of that mix I don't know, I'd probably flip that on its head.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 6:47

You know, I'd probably say probably your skills and knowledge and experience is probably the 80 percent. Now, don't get me wrong. I think chachupji can help massively. I suppose probably like admin tasks it can be right.

Chris Colley: 7:02

Yeah, more like administrate, you know, like school is so full of those tasks too. Right like all of these, like administrative, like monotonous work it's and there's a lot less of like working with the kids and like interacting in those developmental relationships. Do you think that that chat has an ability? Or? Or ai, ai I'll say AI, we'll keep it general that it has the ability to um help teachers, um um have more focus on on humans rather than computers, even though we're talking about machine learning I think it has that potential.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 7:40

And I use that word potential, um, because I I see some educators who are doing it um a lot, who want, I think. I suppose it's kind of like I and I. It's becoming a bit of a cliche in itself now, but I always kind of compare this to kind of the mid 90s of the internet and right, um, it was a lot of hype, um, and and a lot of it rightfully so, to be honest. And people say, oh, look, what you can do, look at this email thing, look at this browser, I can search a website. And it was very unregulated. It was, but most people didn't kind of get it.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 8:17

I remember my parents, and I think it was 97, I was 11, and we, we got a computer in our dining. I remember it was in the dining room on like a trolley and after a few weeks my parents, I think, sent it back because I never saw it again. Um, and I think they just collectively came to the decision what's the fuss? Well, why? And they probably I didn't come from a well-off family, so we probably had it on finance. So I think they probably just thought, yeah, let's send it back and save ourselves. And I think, unless you were really dedicated to it in those early days, it wasn't just kind of bit like oh well, what's, what's, what's? What value is it going to bring?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 8:58

I don't think there's a lot of people kind of like that with ai at the moment. So I think kind of those early adopters, the ones who are really getting into it, trying to figure out their own workflow with it, and it's a bit of a it's a bit you've got to stumble across it. You've got to find that works well. If I connect, if I do something with that tool and then I bring this tool in it'll, it'll create a presentation deck for me.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 9:23

This isn't, and then, but you've almost got to kind of discover that for yourself there's very few just kind of one click tools, um. So it requires a bit of upfront time and dedication and that which obviously not all teachers, probably very few, are going to actually do that. So I I can see it offering a lot of value and I've heard research stats like three hours a week said time saved and so on, um. But I think I think we've still got a long journey to go with this technology and to see its actual potential to successfully affect education. I don't think it's going away.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 10:01

I think it's going to be here. I don't think we're going to get to the point where we're like, right, we played around with the AI.

Chris Colley: 10:07

We're done with that. Now Put it away, show it.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 10:12

I think it has to be, even if some schools do decide to restrict it and in England we do get a lot of traditional schools who are banning mobile phones and so on it's going to be part of the workflow of a lot of people. Just like I forget who said it now. Might have been Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said it's more like electricity than a new technology, um, and that it's just going to be part of everything. So I think so.

Chris Colley: 10:43

I think the potential is there, but we've got a long way to go to to realize that potential, I think totally yeah, and I mean I'm doing a lot of presentations too about ai with with educators and consultants, teachers, Um, and there's always these misconceptions I find, Um, and like you're so right on, like there's, you'll always have your early adapters that are going to be all over it, but that's, that's a small minority, I find, of the overall kind of, and oftentimes I get a lot of misconceptions about what it is and what it can do, and it's more of a fear than an embracing of right. But again, your your analogy between the internet, like it really reinforces that. I mean, can you imagine life without the internet right now? I mean none of this, we'd be doing none of this right, I'd never be able to talk with you.

Chris Colley: 11:33

You know we just so. We're so used to this now, because it's been around for so long. Do you think that the misconceptions that teachers have will fade away eventually and blossom in, or do you think that it's something that will never be fully integrated within the educational system?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 11:53

I've got a feeling that linger for for quite a while. I think, um, hopefully, as the technology develops and technology companies um come up with more solutions, especially around ethics and privacy and and all of that kind of thing, it'll it'll quell a lot of fears, hopefully. And again, like I remember, I used to give a presentation years ago where the first I wish I could find the slide deck because I'd love to use it again but the first few slides were quotes about technology, and it was like the first quote was like something like this new technology is invading our homes and taking our children's attention, and the whole idea is you say to the audience, what is this talking about? And they normally say something like it's the internet or it's a cell phone, and and then you reveal that actually they're talking about the, the telephone, and it's like a quote from 80 years ago or something. So you find these features totally technology throughout the ages and then it becomes kind of part of life.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 12:53

But I do think I I mean, look, today we still it's 30 years, I suppose, since the internet started to become very mainstream and we still have a lot of caution around it in education, not everywhere. Some schools are one-to-one device. They are doing it in a healthy way and in an impactful way. But again, I come back to the english system where, where I'm based, and, um, there's still many, many schools who are who.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 13:21

The only technology in a classroom is is the 10 year old pc at the front of the room which the teacher does their register on and and and pulls up their powerpoint. So and that's 30 years later. So I I still think we're still going to be talking about the ethics of this, the there's still going to be research being done in 20 years time, and that makes us think twice. But like around social media now and so on, um, but I suppose, coming back to what we said before, it isn't going to go away. So we we have to find a way to make sure that our students, um are living in this world in a safe way and in a way where they have the skills for it to benefit them and not harm them.

Chris Colley: 14:04

I guess right, right and in your latest book, infinite education um, you present this four-step blueprint for educator educational transformation. Could you give us a little insight or a little preview into into what you explore within those four steps?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 14:22

yeah, absolutely so. Um, the the four steps are scope, so it's a very practical. It could be applied to so many different things, but it's about how do you? How do you make change happen within an organization? Essentially and I've kind of plugged my eye into that okay, it's a lot of things I learned when I was, um, a director within college education and a lot of things I was taught from, from my colleagues, on how to kind of make change happen within a on at an executive level. It was quite a big college group that had an executive team and so on, so I kind of adapted a lot of that.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 14:59

So, yeah, it was sort of scope, kind of being able to survey what's going on within your school, what teachers are using and so on, what's going on outside the school, what the trends are. Then it's shape. So how do you start to shape the message, the strategy, the plan of where you want to go with this? Then the next one I think a lot of actually a lot of organizations kind of stop there. They look around, they go right, can you write a strategy on this? Somebody writes the strategy, they save it as a PDF and it goes on the website and gets sent to parents and governors Check the box. Yeah, yeah, and it's referred to every now and then. But I think that's kind of step one really. Well, step one and two within this framework, but it's kind of the first.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 15:46

It's almost the least important bit in a way, because for me the second two bits, which are influence and alignment, I think are so important and that kind of it's a strategy skill that goes way beyond just being able to write a strategy. I suppose it's a bit like and I've just come up with this analogy off the top of my head, I've never used it before, but it's coming to my mind it's a bit like being able to draw a car and being able to drive a car like, I suppose every you could ask it. You could ask a four-year-old to draw a car, asking the driver cause something very, very different. And I think I think the driving the car bit is the how do you, how do you realize that strategy, how do you manifest it? And that essentially comes down to what we've kind of traditionally called change management, being able to influence the people in our organization and then being able to align them, and I think that's kind of where elite leadership comes in um, but but I do think that those are skills that anybody can learn, um, and it's just practicing those skills.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 16:54

So the kind of the second half of the book is goes through each of those four steps and it I kind of preface it by saying right, you've got to get a group together. I call it an accelerator group, whether that be a group in your school or a, a regional group, um, or or kind of a multi-faceted community group so you can have parents, teachers, students, local government, whatever it is. And then I put I've got a lot of tasks. And it's a bit like a playbook really, the second half of the book, where I go right, what about this task in terms of um influence, and I bring in psychology and um and so on to try and just give people a bit of a toolkit to get on that road with who maybe have never done it before.

Chris Colley: 17:42

Absolutely Well. I think it's important information for school leaders to have access to and to understand, because the acceleration of AI is not slowing down at all. We are seeing almost daily. I mean, I love your daily podcast where you kind of isolate on one little topic, but I mean you have enough to talk about something every single day, which is amazing.

Chris Colley: 18:08

I love the little clippets. I encourage listeners to go and listen to the AI Educator podcast, to the AI Educator podcast. So with education, we have AI too, and I know that you've been asked this question before about the age factor, about using AI, and we're kind of battling with that here in Quebec, canada, where the platforms are putting age restrictions on. Yet we want to make sure our kids understand this. How do you recommend that teachers in schools, you know elementary through high school? I mean I guess some platforms are 13 now 14, 16, they're around those age range, but we need to start early right. Like I always felt that we missed the train on social media, you know of training, of not training the kids but creating an awareness of you know, digital citizenship free and all of that stuff, Kind of like everyone was responsible for it but nobody really touched on it.

Chris Colley: 19:08

Because what does that have to do with English or math or science, you know, like our subjects? Yeah, how do you find that we're going to integrate AI with these age restrictions that are in place?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 19:26

Yeah, I think probably, first of all, I think it's good to look at it in kind of two categories. So there's teaching about AI and then there's teaching kind of with AI, and I suppose we probably need to do both and I suppose the first, the first part of that, the teaching about AI, doesn't you don't necessarily have to give, give your elementary children the tools you can demonstrate things for them, you can do kind of indirect activities that that get across the point of how these things work. There are some tools out there. They're quite older tools now, but things like Google have got a tool called Teachable Machine and what's it called? Draw, sketch, draw, something like that.

Chris Colley: 20:14

Yeah, sketch it. Yeah, we played with that with some kids.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 20:18

Yeah, yeah, where you, we played with that, with some kids.

Chris Colley: 20:19

Yeah, I find that that's a great platform too, because it shows you how it, how it learned. You know how it decides what it might be.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 20:26

You that, what you're drawing with the model, like there's tons of data, and you're like, oh cool yeah, and it's engaging the way it talks like a a very kind of um early voice on their AI voice, which is quite funny yeah hilarious.

Chris Colley: 20:41

It's a cat, it's a dog, it's a horse, it's a yeah, so I think things like that really help.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 20:49

I think then, the second part of that how do you use the AI? Yeah, I suppose it's going to depend on the region, like what your school policy is, what the policy is from local government and so on. But we're starting to see I was, I I had, I had the privilege of being at google hq in san francisco last week and I was talking with the education team and, um, I didn't realize this, but they, they've rolled out gemini for for ages now. So if you are within Google Workspace and you think you might have to pay a higher tier for Gemini, but your students can use it Not the full array of tools, and maybe not the Gemini tool within certain apps, but the raw form of Gemini students can use it. So I think we are starting to see now that that those some companies, especially the more established companies, the more giving us the a bit of confidence that, um, that, uh, they can be used. And also some third party, some third-party apps um, school AI, magic, school brisk, kind of offering um chat bots that the teacher can train and and share the link with students.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 22:08

Uh, some of it's still a gray area, um. I think that's why you've got to kind of check just with your school. So my team managers are happy some on to kind of because it goes in in that gray area. But I think there are ways and I think we're starting to see a lot of AI um literacy curriculums be be created. There was one factor my podcast this morning was all about it Um, and I can't remember the name of it now Um, but yeah, check out the podcast. Uh, but it's a. It's a. It's a great kind of overview of framework of how what the different parts of ai literacy should be, um and how it's called from ai literacy to ai fluency, a framework yes, that's, that's the one.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 22:53

Yeah, um, and it's good, it's kind of it's, it's a framework for you to then build kind of a curriculum on top of, like a set of standards, I guess. But yeah, I really like it, I think it's good. They've really thought through the different elements. So I think we can do this, and I think we can, and not treating AI as like a subject, like, oh, we'll just leave it to computer science. I think AI is a context, it's not a subject. So we need to bring it in into different, I suppose, like we would.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 23:28

Um, you might bring careers into your lessons. You might be teaching a class on biology and plant cells, but I think good teachers can't contextualize it. They talk about the careers that that are where this might be useful in the real world and I think, just doing more of that. But now the real world is going to involve AI. Every, every job, pretty much every sector, is going to be using AI. So perfect opportunity to bring, like I was. I was doing a workshop the other day actually using Google's teachable machine, where you literally just show a few images, and I think I did a fox. So I did like three images of a fox, three images of a badger. It learned what each one was and then I showed it a picture of a badger and it would. Because it's trained itself, it says right, that's definitely a badger or that's definitely a fox. You could use that with plant cells, like different types of cells, and it could be a way to bring that into the biology class or whatever class we're doing.

Chris Colley: 24:30

I mean forget simulations, I mean go deeper, go higher. I love that idea. And, dan, just curiously, what have been the most effective integration of AI that you've seen? Maybe a couple of examples? You could share an example of where you see AI kind of heading in education and supporting it with an example that you've seen.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 24:55

Yeah, I see, I think a lot of schools are still very early, very early days, so it's very difficult to go right. There's a school over here who are kind of like 10 years in the future. I just don't think we're going to get that at the moment, although we do see some experimental schools. So, for example, there's a school in the United States called Alpha Schools, and I think there's three or four of them and they are using artificial intelligence, a platform, an AI platform for students to learn kind of the core content. They are claiming and I haven't seen the research behind it, but the headlines of their website claim that students learn just as much in two hours as they would in a full day of regular school. So it's interesting to see there are some kind of schools kind of going out and really pushing themselves. They tend to kind of they're not state schools, they're not within the system, they tend to be independent schools.

Chris Colley: 25:59

They're always kind of pushing the limits.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 26:01

Yeah, and they've got that freedom. They've probably got a bit of money as well from investment and so on. Some online schools are starting to do some really interesting things around creating AI tutors, again to teach core content and material. So I think that's probably kind of the radical end of this and material, um. So I think that's probably kind of the radical end of this, right, but I think, probably on on the ground, within kind of your regular school, uh, I I think it comes down again, going back to what we were saying about leadership and integration, I think it comes down to where I see it happening really well is a head teacher or a principal who is passionate about giving their teachers the best tools possible, and so they get someone like me or yourself or somebody into their school and go, right, can we work with you?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 26:53

Can you show us how to use these tools? Can we work on a strategy, a plan, um, and slowly, over a period of a year, let's, let's upskill our teachers, upskill our students. Let's let's create our policy so everyone knows where we are, the confidence in, in, in kind of what, what's expected, and just kind of building those, those skills level, layer by layer. Really it's not. Yeah, I suppose it's not record rocket science, it's just good old um, how do we integrate something?

Chris Colley: 27:28

whether that be sure like an ai competency, almost. You know, or you know where you're, you're developing skills, and how do I prompt properly, how do I, you know, get it to go a bit further? Like it's, there's tons of skills involved.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 27:42

I, I, I feel anyway yeah, no, I, I, I, 100 agree with you and I think probably the major hurdle is um that I think in a lot of schools and this is just from my experience and I talk about, and I'm mainly my own experience of schools is that ed tech has always kind of been treated as an additional extra. So it's like, if you find value in it, use it, but we're not going to push it on everyone, because we've got a teacher here who's been teaching for 50 years, still gets good grades and uses a chalkboard, so we're not going to disrupt them. So it's kind of like yeah, if you want to use it, use it. We might get a tech coach in to show you, but you don't, it's not, you don't have to use it.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 28:26

And I think that's where something like this starts to become unstuck, because then you bring ai on top of that and then the mindset of most people in the school is oh well, it's just, it's just a tech thing, it's for those techie teachers it's, and then it. And then I suppose the the the gap becomes even wider in what teachers are able to do and what students are able to do, between those who are using the tech, are comfortable with tech and those who aren't. So I feel like some schools have almost got to reverse back 10 years and go right. Let's tackle just using a device in a class first. Let's tackle those. Get the foundation in place before we start to put AI on top of it.

Chris Colley: 29:02

Totally, totally. You know I've been experiencing small wins. I've kind of had that as my mindset, like let's just show them little things, because most of the time it's kind of seen as the kids are going to cheat. Using it right, it's going to make their lives easier, they're not going to critically think anymore, it's like. But one win that I that I had success with is just differentiation, because it's a really tough thing for teachers, mainly in classrooms where you have such a variety of students in front of you, and just showing them how they could adapt reading levels was kind of like. So I find like if I can show one thing that they might be like oh wow, that, that that was fast and good and I can help now jimmy, who can't read what I have in class. You know, like those little wins I find that slowly start to, but as in everything, it's it's like one teacher educator at a time, right, it's system. Change in education is, um, it's hard yeah yeah, yeah, and I think you're right.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 30:06

I think it's like I don't know about yourself, but when I do workshops, I I sometimes get a lot of people, a lot of teachers, into those workshops because their head teacher has kind of said right, this is your, is your slot, you're going to go along to this question. And I hear comments a lot of the time like, oh, I've heard people talking about it, but until you actually sit that teacher down in front of a computer and you show them it, show them that literally you just have to type this in and this is the type of response you start to get, then they just can't conceptualize it. And I suppose it. Yeah, I suppose, if people are talking about this ai thing, what's ai?

Chris Colley: 30:46

what's this new thing?

Dan Fitzpatrick: 30:47

all the time, all these new things, new flavor of the month, um yeah, and if workloads are are crazy, like they are for most teachers, then who's got time to start exploring something that could disrupt and I'm gonna have to change everything, adapt it all again and yeah, well, it's an interesting um, it's an interesting life in world that we're in education anyway.

Chris Colley: 31:17

Um, it seems to be evolving and evolving slowly, but I mean, the stuff's there and it's it's, it's at our fingertips. Now it's just kind of figuring out how can we leverage that technology in an effective manner to help our kids. I mean, because these kids are going to grow up with this, like you said, everywhere. Um, ai is not going anywhere, like the internet didn't go anywhere. Like tvs, radios, telephones, like these things exist still today, but at the moment they you know when they came in it's like tipping points, it's like whoa, um.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 31:52

So I feel yeah, he's doing that, yeah, and I think we it will get to the point. I mean, eventually that teacher who was a teacher at that school for 30 years and didn't like tech eventually had to sit down because the register now was on the computer and that's how they had to access it, so they had no choice. I think it will get to the point where kind of you're not going to have any choice but to get to grips with some of this technology, and whether that's painful or not is going to come down to good leadership, I think, and I think it's a patchwork out there at the moment in terms of good leadership around this, but again, I don't blame them because there's so much buying for their attention, sure.

Chris Colley: 32:40

Absolutely Totally Well. There's so much buying for their attention. Sure, absolutely Totally Well, dan, this has been a super pleasure Like this was so fun. I would love to have you back on, cause there's so much more. Yeah, this is just like a part one almost A lot of things.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 32:53

Yeah, I'd love to come back on. Thanks, chris.

Chris Colley: 32:57

Amazing. Well, take care of yourself. And thanks for sharing. I will link your site and your books on the post and people check it out. The AI educator. Thanks, Dan.

Dan Fitzpatrick: 33:11

Thanks, Chris.