Chris: 0:13

Another episode of Shift Ed Podcast coming at you. We're uh we're joining you here in our new uh 2025-2026 school year. And I'm bringing again, I you know all my guests, you uh my listeners, sorry, love to uh have when I have people come over from the overseas, and I have Mark Anderson, the IC evangelist tech, who is coming in to talk to us a little bit about getting our mindsets around all this tech that we have surrounded by us and how we can leverage it to actually get kids engaged and excited about learning. We know it's not an easy task, but Mark is gonna come and share some of his amazing knowledge and and just Mark is is uh an author, blogger, an educator, you know, a thinker. So he dabbles in modern day technology, what's going on. He's got a great finger on the pulse of what's happening in the ICT world. So, Mark, thanks so much for hopping on here with me today. It's a real pleasure having you with us today. Thank you so much, Chris.

Mark: 1:18

And I feel like I should put on a podcast voice. So hi, welcome. You're making me sound just like some funny bloke from from England right now. It's it's um it's delightful to be with you, and thank you for the opportunity to come and share. I love sharing. I got into teaching to help people, you know, make a difference, have an impact in the world, make my dent, as it were, in the universe. And so any opportunity to share like this is always gratefully received. So thanks so much for having me, and thank you to all of you for listening. Thank you.

Chris: 1:49

So, Mark, let's get let's start off with I always ask this question to kind of like situate the guest and where they're at and what they've kind of gone through to get to this point that we're at today. What are some of the experiences that you'll never forget that helped kind of shift the direction that you were taking? I mean, you started off as a school teacher and then evolu, you know, you evolved and evolved. What were some of those moments that you experienced throughout your career so far that really influenced the direction of where you are today?

Mark: 2:24

I think you know, looking back with a land with a lens of of you know, being just over 50 shh years old, I I think back, and I think about my mum and awful lot as well, right? With these sort of things, you know, she she's you know in her mid-70s, and I think you know, if she's born in 1949, think about the you know different types of technology she's had to get to grips with, you know, and as she she's seen during her her lifetime, you know, where science fiction has become science fact. And I see I think back to my time during the sort of you know, late 70s, early 80s, into the noughties, and things I'd see on television like Star Trek Next Generation and like you know, the the the characters on there uh holding like these thin, wafer thin like pad, like they were called pads, right? You know, and I'd I'd see these things in their hands, you know, and I'd be like, my god's amazing. Meanwhile, I was using a game, you know, gaming console which would load from a cassette, right? You know, so that that's the comparison from where I was then. Right. And you know, I'd think to myself, like, never in my lifetime would I see technology like this, it's just so amazing, and yet here we are. And so you asked, you know, about what's you know, has been some sort of pivotal points for me. And the iPad was was one of those moments. So in 2011, when the iPad was released, we started a little research project in my school, looking at how it might be helpful for teaching and learning, and just part of that teaching and learning toolkit. So, not like the de facto computer for a computer room, but just like you have a ruler or a compass or a pencil in your you know analog sort of learning toolkit. So, so having something like that would be really good. And it and it worked out really well. So in 2012, we rolled out to 1,400 students in our school, from age 11 to 18. And the impact of that with a focus not on the technology, but on how we can support teachers to help them with their learning, reduce their workload, help children with their learning, improve pupil and parental engagement, all of that sort of thing. That that was a really sort of big thing for me. And I was already doing a few things. I went to some conferences and heard about people, you know, people, some brilliant people sort of sharing about the impact of blogging and all this thing. So I was I was I was sharing my journey and sharing the things that weren't working at our school because you know, words like M or phrases like MDM these days are you know just de rigueur, right? These weren't and the things existed really for devices like an iPad back in 2012. So it taught me an awful lot about the importance of what happens between the i between the device and the chair. Because getting the technology right isn't that isn't that hard really in the scheme of things, but bringing people on board with it and making that work both for educators, for leaders, for parents, for children, you know, who parents very quickly got concerned about how much time their children were on that device, so how you manage we didn't call it screen time, we called it etiquette with the device, you know, when it when it's right to, when it's not to, all these sorts of things. And so that was a really pivotal thing. And taking on board student voice as well was another big landmark thing for me. I started a thing, I'd learned about it from the US, and uh a few educators who were sharing on Twitter, as it was at the time, about what they were doing, um, had student digital leader groups, and these were students, you know, pupils, uh, young young people who were really interested in technology, often didn't fit into that mold of being uh, you know, in the on the sports team and all those different things, but would would would really rise to the challenge of of working and helping around all things technology. So we started a student digital leader group at my school, which over the course of three years went from like three students up to 50. We had loads of them. And and they would join us on on staff PD days, you know, so they would learn about how to use the tools. They came to our strategy meetings and would tell us about what tools they felt best helped them learn. Right, you know, you know, they they would they were saying, Well, we we'd like to make an app. One of my pupils became one of the um sort of youngest app developers in in the world, ended up speaking Apple events around the UK and they went over to Cupertino for one of the big Apple launches. You know, really, really amazing stuff. And people say all these lovely things about it, but it was just about listening to the students and giving them that opportunity, taking on board their voice, you know, and and and allowing them to do that. And that led to a a UK-wide student digital network where any school that wanted to get involved could come on board and get involved. But you used to have a weekly Twitter chat to get together and share wins and ideas. We'd have like national conferences, all this sort of thing. Those are just I mean, I I can share lots of little stories like that, but it it's about giving others that opportunity to grow, I think.

Chris: 7:08

I love that idea too, the iPad, because I remember too. I mean, I think we've we're like brothers from a different mother in the sense that your path is what I did as well. So I started at a one-on-one iPad school, you know, trying to leverage it to get kids more engaged in their learning. And what you said really stuck out was that once they had the iPad, they started to develop voice, but getting it out in the world was really powerful, and that's where social media came in. And and you touched on that social media point. Do you find that students, once they started to harness the power of social media, started to engage them more in learning and and in school when they were allowed to use it as a part of what they were learning?

Mark: 7:54

Definitely 100%. You know, when when there's a quote from someone and I forget his name now, it's quite a f I might come back to it and oh, I'm after Google it. Um but he he said in his when when you you know ask a student to you know speak to you, that they'll tell you what you want to know, sort of thing. But when they tell it to the world, you know, they'll they'll they'll do it significantly better. I've it was much more eloquent than how I've shared it there. But when you when students know they've got a much wider audience, you know, then then it becomes exceedingly real for them, you know. Yeah, what was I I think it was when they when they have to do work for you, they'll make it good enough, right? As in good enough to just get the passing grade or whatever. But when you have to when you've got a much bigger audience, they'll want to make it really good. Right. And so, yeah, and we've seen tools, you know, various ed tech tools like Pobble, for example, they want to help young people make a writing exit uh exceedingly excitable and and and and uh incredibly um brilliant writing. Yeah, and yeah, the idea is that they write and then they publicly blog it and having and the networks then feedback on each other. So they know they got an audience that's actually gonna give feedback on it. We're seeing similar things recently as well, like with some of these brilliant AI tools, whereby there's one tool I met with them this morning about some new work they've been doing on their tool, actually, a company called Olex here in the UK. And based upon the quality of young people's writing, it generates an image using what they call their imaginator. And obviously, the more complicated, the more detailed, the more rich they're writing in their stories and the work that they do, the better the output. It's a garbage in, garbage out approach, isn't it, right? Right, right. And so the more that they actually put into what they're writing, the better the output. And then that again is a real motivator for young people to improve their writing and improve what it is that they're doing so that you get that better output.

Chris: 9:50

But yeah, yeah, right. And and kind of like talking about AI, I mean, since November, what is it, 2022? I mean, it's just been in education anyway, on like there, like talking workshops and how does it work and training and what do you find the greatest asset right now is with AI for teachers when they're using it in their profession? Are there are there things that we didn't see back in November 2022 that we're starting to understand where the power lies with the AI for educators?

Mark: 10:25

It's interesting because you know, there's always your early adopters and things. I heard a statistic just this last week, Chris, where they were saying that in terms of industries, education is the industry which uses AI the most, which is just phenomenal to hear and really good because you know there have been a few times. I don't know if you've got kids, Chris, but mine certainly set through that hole. Are we nearly there yet? On long journeys. I've felt like that with Ed Tech over the past few decades, you know. And and the pace of adoption and change with AI has been phenomenal. What I am seeing is I talk a lot in my work around desire lines, in the idea, which is the idea that you want to get from A to B as quickly as possible. Okay. And for teachers, that's often about reducing workload, being able to give feedback to young people as quickly as possible, all of those sorts of things. And there's been a bit of pushback in the educated community because learning isn't easy and it requires a struggle. And so, if like my children were when they first started using AI, it was taking a photograph of the question and then saying, What's the answer? and just going, there's no learning taking place there at all. That's just ticking a box, right? So AI literacy is super, super important. But I think I think it's twofold, really. I think teachers have become better at writing prompts. I think the AI's gotten better at recognizing what it needs to do and bringing that through. But what is really powerful is educators and young people. There's a brilliant report by the Alan Turing Institute, sponsored by Lego, and in there they're talking about bias and ethics. All right. So teachers are starting to realize now that a lot of the outputs are influenced by bias. And so they're becoming more savvy to the ways in which they can mitigate that with the prompts that they write and within the tools that they're using, right? What's really interesting as well, though, is that you know, particularly young people of colour, and in in the report from that Alan Shering Institute I mentioned, and I can give you the link to share in the show notes afterwards, right? Yeah, then but young people of colour are gravitating away from wanting to use AI because, and I think this is pretty much quotable this bit, they don't see themselves represented in the outputs. Interesting. And that's you know, from whether you're using VO3 with video, whether that's you know, Mid Journey or DALI or whatever, you know, any of those sort of things. Uh it's it's really interesting. I've been reworking recently as well with the BBC, and you might have heard of we have these um video series for young people called BBC Bite Size, yes, across a whole wide load of topics. And I've just been I've been working with them as their lead consultants, producing AI literacy videos. And again, that there's there's a lot of misconceptions around energy usage and those sort of things. Right. But what's been really good in in the sort of the research and field work I've been doing to bring forward ideas about what what matters to young people, they're b they are more increasingly you know discerning users, which is lovely because we know metacognition and self-regulation is super, super important. It's great to know that young people are really keen to use this technology properly and being mindful of you know the environmental impact of using it, being mindful of the the scraping behind it, you know.

Chris: 13:45

I can talk about this stuff for ages, so I'll find in the air for a second, but it's loads in the end too, like we're training the future users of AI, and I mean who knows what's gonna what it's gonna be, you know, yeah 20 years down the road. But I I I love what you're saying that we need to not only just train them about how to use it, but how to use it ethically, because it is biased I totally see that. I mean, there's been so many studies about it that that that it's biased you know, you have to somebody told me 8020, right? Like AI can do about 80% of what you want it to do, like administratively or like lesson plan wisey, but the 20% is on still on on the teacher to vet it, to edit it, to make sure that it's represented accurately in in what it's saying. Which kind of brings me to this question to you Where do you think we need to go as teachers looking down those 20 years from now? How do we get these kids ready for something that's so hard for us to imagine what it will be like down the road? And I know we've had these conversations in education since the dawn of education, you know, how do we prepare kids for a future that we're not aware of? I think AI throws more of more stuff into the soup that we're making for that future. How do you see it? How do you what are some tips or tricks that you give to teachers that through the lens of preparing our future generations for that future with this technology that we know is going nowhere? How do you speak to that to to teachers or administrators or you know people in the educational sphere to to a question like that?

Mark: 15:36

That's a really good question. At a leadership level, right? I'll talk about you but you're probably aware of Dylan Willem, John Hattie, a guy called Aaron Hamilton, the three of them wrote a great paper about 13 risks to do with AI and things we can do to mitigate that risk. To that effect. Again, I can share a link to that. Totally. It's really good reading. And one of the things they talk about in there is the impact of a novice educator using AI, okay, versus an expert educator using AI. And what they say is that you know, a novice educator doesn't really have at their early career sort of status the depth of knowledge, domains of knowledge to be able to interrogate the output sufficiently so that when the AI inevitably gets something wrong, you know, you talk about Pareto's role 8020. Personally, I talk more about 7030 or 6040, actually. Although it's getting increasingly better, right, as we get closer to AGI, right? It's getting better and better. But if novice educators don't have that domain of knowledge, they're going to de-skill themselves over time. As we outsource more and more of our sort of resource creation, lesson planning, all those things to AI. What Dylan Willem, John Hassie, and Aaron Hamilton say in this paper is that they become like novice minus over time. They de-skill themselves because they don't have the the domain knowledge to you know check the outputs properly. And I and I can see it myself when I first started teaching, you know, I'd finished my school week, I want to in the end of the week, I want to do I do my marking, do my prep, and I want to get out as early as possible. I can see why you'd want you'd want to get that done as quickly as possible, right? But what they also then say is that experts will get even better, they can interrogate the outputs and they can extend them even further, and they move from being not just expert teachers to what they call elite because they're doing what they call riding the machines. Okay. So with that sort of lens, it stands to reason that conversation is important. So so many educators, you know, we we talked about this a little bit off air before we started to recording, right? Many educators see using AI as being something where you might be cheating, you know. But actually, you know, you're being smart, you're you're you're you're it's what it is to be a modern educator to use the right tools at the right time. But as you're new to something, you know, a professional, you know, try and use some relatable sporting terms like a quarterback or a racing car driver doesn't start in a Ferrari straight away, you know, you you build yourself up to the the big game, Ferrari. You don't you don't you don't start at the top end, you you build yourself up to it. So, what can you as a leader do to support your colleagues who are earlier in their career to have those conversations? How do you quality assure those outputs? How do you make sure that you're giving them the right facets and tools and and everything else so that they can become better, so that they can ride the machines themselves too? And I think that that thinking applies really well to young people too, because it's not just about how to use the tools, it's about you know, we we talked about the iPad stuff back in 2012, 2013, whatnot, Chris. Right? I was always just as happy to walk into a classroom and see a teacher not using technology as I was to see a teacher using technology when they could explain the pedagogy and the thinking behind it. One of my favorite models for learning is T Pak, and and you know, if you if if in 2025 you don't know T Pak, then do some research. But you know, it's about combining your pedagogical knowledge, your content knowledge, along with your technological knowledge, and it's not about using tech all the time, you know all these things, but I'll I'll share this for listeners. That sweet spot in the middle of that three-way ven is about knowing when it's right to or not to use technology, and and the the the writers of this guy, Misha, and I forget his name now. Terrible, old age. Yeah, good teaching and learning is about using knowing when to or not to use technology, open bracket because sometimes that's the right reason, close bracket, right? And so in one of the one of the things in my book, and I'm sure we'll come on to this later, in there, the five C's, one of the C's in there is cognizance. After you've got your confidence and your competence, it you know, competence, you can use the stuff, competence, you know how to use it and you're using it well, and it's cognizance about when to or not to use those tools. Because going on to the AI thing, back to the AI thing, Chris. You know, sometimes using AI can be a bit like using a sledgehammer to tup in a nail, can it? You know, so giving our giving our young people the the skills to to be able to use these tools, know when to use them, when not to use them, I think is really, really important. I also think it's really, really important thinking about some of the outputs from organizations like the World Economic Forum, where they're talking about that sort of future skills around critical thinking, adaptability, resilience, the growth mindset stuff, problem solving, you know. We can talk about it.

Chris: 20:42

Right? Like merging those two together is is key.

Mark: 20:47

It absolutely is. And if you think about how the experts become elite, it's about by going, but it's about calling out the AI and saying you're wrong, you know. And in my demonstrations, I talk about, you know, back along, you might have seen this. It used to be the case that if you'd asked ChatGPT how many R's there are in Strawberry, right? It would tell you the wrong number. And and no matter how many times you went back and said, listen, mate, there's there's there's three R's in Strawberry. No, no, no, there's two. Look at it, yeah, it doesn't matter how you told it. And they fixed that problem. And uh I went back because I whenever I would present that sort of thing at events and things, Chris. I'd uh before I went in, I'd always check it to make sure it still actually worked. And then I was doing an event about six months ago, right? And it said, Don't worry, no, we we fixed it, we fixed that, we fixed the other hallucinations. This was Chat GPT, we we fixed this, we fixed the other. I was like, this is brilliant. I said, What have you fixed? Well, we fixed loads of these anomalies where you know that we say that there's you know three R's in strawberry when there's two, and uh that there's three N's in banana when there's two, and I'm like, hang on, there aren't two N's in banana, so it still gets things wrong, and so that and that ability to be inquisitive and to call out the the hallucinations that come through, and you know, you'd you'd hope that educators, you know, in their within their content knowledge alongside their pedagogy would know an awful lot, but you you need to be able to call this stuff out, don't you? And so helping educators and young people better do that helps them and promotes those critical thinking skills, doesn't it?

Chris: 22:16

Totally, totally. Well, and you have a really good publication that you put out not too long ago about tips on creating prompts for teachers. Practical a practical guide for teachers on on effective prompts when they're using AI. Can you talk a little bit about that, Mark?

Mark: 22:33

Yeah, of course I can. Yeah, absolutely. What I did, I've released a bunch of free um little guides. Um, if you go to my website, um they're all on there, they're also on my profile on LinkedIn and and what have you. There's no gateway to fill your email address in. I'm not gonna start spamming you with X, Y's, or Z. Yeah. Probably the worst businessman in the world, to be honest, Chris. But um, you know, each of them has an introduction which talks through what a prompt is, or what a good one looks like, a prompting strategy, which I call my stare approach. And I'll talk about that in just a moment. And there's a book for educators, there's a book which covers sort of 14 or so different subject areas, and within each subject area, there's sort of for 15 prompts across different domains of sort of teacher resource creation activity from lesson planning to keyword charts to whatever. Super cool. I've got I've got one for middle leaders as well, and one for for senior leaders as well. Cool. And in there is that stair approach, like I mentioned, S-T-A-I-R. And what I share in there around that, and then you get a level of detail for a good prompt from looking at the prompt examples throughout the book as well. And and just to say, other you know, libraries like this are available. Ethan Mollick, for example, has got some amazing prompts in his libraries that he's got as well. But my stare approach asks you first of all to be really specific with a prompt that you give. So, and that's about the language you use. I'm sure, like me, Chris, you know, you've written a prompt, it produces the output, you think, oh, I forgot to put this in. Or I didn't phrase that quite the right way. I said make something, and I and I I meant it, I wanted it to be portrait, and it's come at landscape, and oh, I meant yeah. So be really specific about what you do and tell it in minutiae what it is that you want it to do as well, which is the T of stare. Okay. The A is to make things actionable. Okay, so don't just give it one thing. If you're creating a lesson resource, don't just ask for the lesson plan, ask for the keyword cards, ask for any adaptations you want, any any low-stakes quizzes that you want to download as a as an Excel file to put into Microsoft Forms or whatever tool you're using, you know, really get into the nitty-gritty. Be prepared, which is the I of stare to iterate. It's not gonna get it right first time. So make sure that you you go back and and you know work with it. There is a there is there is an important um sort of health and safety warning around the iteration thing, right? If you're looking for a perfect output, then you're gonna be sat in front of your your laptop or your device for for quite some time. You we talked about the sort of 80-20, I went a little bit lower than that, but if you try and get it to it doing 100% of it, getting it absolutely perfect, there becomes that tipping point where you become less productive, yeah. I I think it's it's it's good to have that sort of mindset um and and just be mindful about when it's time to you know take your winnings and run. Yeah, right. I felt that at times actually, Mark. Yes. That that tension, right? Yeah, so don't be afraid to I remember like I was creating an image and just wouldn't get a word right on the image, and I spent another 20 minutes trying to get it to put an output with the correct word on the image. When the reality is I could have taken that image, popped it in PowerPoint, and just put the word on myself manually, right? I mean, yeah, which would have been the quicker output to to success. The final part of the stare sort of prompt guide thing is the is the R. And that's about giving the prompt a role. AI tends to, if you say, you know, you're if you're if you're a physics teacher and you're teaching a physics class, and say, you know, you're working and supporting a physics teacher, you are a physics expert yourself with 20 years' experience of teaching and learning in the classroom, try this. So, yeah, so be specific, tell it, actionable, make sure you iterate it because you will have to, and give the prompt a role. Since doing that and sharing that resource, I'll if it's okay with you, Chris, I'll share another resource because this I think has been real. This is this is and I and I share this with all my schools that I work with and teachers I share with and things. There was a great piece of research, and again, I can share the link to this, that showed that if you run a simulation on an output, okay, and then get it to analyze the simulation and then get it to you produce a new version of what it was you try to make it on the first step, you get a much better output at the end of it. So there's a lesson planning refinement resource that I've got again on my website and and on my LinkedIn. But it's essentially a four-step process. So let's say step one, you make me a lesson plan and you've written quite a detailed prompt following like the stair approach, okay? You've put you put in whatever curriculum you're following, and and you've given it a role that you're teaching this and so forth and so on, and what have you. You then get it to run a simulation, second step, okay. And it's really fun to watch, actually, because it runs like a real class. You know, Kai from the back of the classroom put his hand up and says, Sorry, miss, but right? And it does all of that. So it runs a simulation, and then if you if you and the third part is about a bit like what happens with lesson observation, you know, as an educator, yeah, leaders will come in and see you teach and have a discussion about how well you're doing, and student outcomes it run that analysis in that kind of mode, okay, and then off the results of that analysis, synthesize that into improvements for the lesson planning, and then get it to run the lesson plan again. And if you download that resource, I've got templates for each of the four stages that you could just copy and paste and change some of the, you know, just the the parameters which will be different for each person, but yeah, you can use that to just to generate the output. And that's been really powerful. Really powerful. That's amazing, amazing.

Chris: 28:04

Well, I mean, I just I've been you know on your site oftentimes, and it's always got something new, always a great thought provoke. It's just it's a wealth of information. Emmerich, I want to thank you. I I don't want to use too much of your time in the day, actually your evening, but I really appreciate you coming on and making us all smarter. I mean, some of these tips and the resources that you produced around this surely will help our educators kind of get their heads around how AI can be leveraged in the classroom for students and learning. And I appreciate all of the links that you were that we'll put in this post of of all the places and and research that you had mentioned. It's important for us to connect all those together as well. So, Mark, I just want to end off by a big, big thank you. This has been great. I feel like right at the start of the school year with some like new inspired uh thoughts around AI and tech as well. So thanks so much. And I wish you all the best. And uh I would love to catch up one day. Um, you produce so much stuff, and this just never stops that this conversation will never get old.

Mark: 29:15

No, and that's the beauty of technology, right? You know, it's uh every day's a learning day. There's always a new update to sort of consider and think about. And if you want one sort of thing to sort of take away from all of this as well, you know, when when someone says to you, Chris, you know, I've had this amazing tool that does this, right? A healthy dose of so what. So what? So what it can do, that right, and then forcing the conversation around so that, right? Because if you can flip it from a it does all these things, so what, so that it helps you, you know, with your teaching or their learning or reducing your workload. Those are my sort of three north stars, yeah. If you can, if you can add to a so that, it does one of those three things, then that's going to keep you on the straight and narrow, I think, around pedagogy, around support.

Chris: 30:00

learners or helping you with because you know we all know wherever you teach in the world as educators there's always something else to do right so if you can reduce that workload then it's it's gonna be worth a look at amazing well mark anderson ict evangelist check it out thank you and we'll put all the links in this in the descriptor and in the blog post that we'll put out about mark in this conversation so mark thanks again yeah cheers chris thank you so much thanks everybody happy new academic year