Revolutionizing Education: Insights With The AI Educator, Dan Fitzpatrick, pt. 2

Full Transcript

Dr. Emma Zone:

On the previous episode of Teach and Learn, we started a conversation about AI in the K-12 space with an authority and thought leader in artificial intelligence and education. Today, we’re continuing where we left off.

Our guest is an international keynote speaker, bestselling author podcaster, an award-winning digital and educational strategist who works to empower students and teachers by leaning into the practical applications of AI. As promised, our conversation with the AI educator, Dan Fitzpatrick continues.

Dr. Cristi Ford:

Welcome to Teach & Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.

Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K-12 space. Sharpen your pencils. Class is about to begin.

Dr. Emma Zone:

What’s interesting is I’m hearing you talk about the conversation you had around the demand for other types of more human-first skills like interpersonal skills and communication and that kind of thing. That is one area, I think, of focus for people to continue to lean into. But then there’s also something around that marriage from the critical thinking standpoint, as well, as AI has continued to infiltrate into all aspects of one’s education, whether you’re talking about the content argument, the skills piece, or the marriage of the two. I think that’s something that I hear happening when we start to step back and say, well, how do we start to think about critical thinking in all these conversations? And the way that we’re infusing that into curricula and other places in the system. As you’re talking about the need for ongoing innovative models.

I want to turn to your books because I think you have a few of them. I want to break them down for listeners, too, to understand where they might want to start in their journey with you. You are a bestselling author.

The first book you wrote, I want to make sure I get this correct, with Amanda Fox and Brad Weinstein, The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence and Education. And then you followed that with Back to School AI Guide 2024, 46 Tips and Tools for Educators explaining Artificial Intelligence, and then you wrote Infinite Education. Can you just quickly give us an overview of those first two and then how that led you to Infinite Education, your newest title?

Dan Fitzpatrick:

The AI classroom was very much, it was written during the time when everyone in those first few months of 2023 was like, what is this thing [inaudible 00:02:42]? I’m seeing this guy online doing this with it, creating lessons. What is going on here? We aim to try and pull together the first teacher’s guide, the classroom guide. Most of the book is how can a teacher start using generative AI tools and how can they do that well? And it’s a very, very practical book. It’s a big book, as well. I keep looking to the side because there’s a copy here. It’s quite a big book. It’s like-

Dr. Emma Zone:

It’s more of a how-to.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

Yeah.

Dr. Emma Zone:

I want to get started with this.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

In fact, been a while since I’ve jumped into this. It talks about where does this AI thing come from? We just suddenly seem to have it and it’s here. And then it goes into the pedagogy. Well, how might we use AI to support good pedagogy? How might we use AI to get the most out of it in our classrooms? How might we use it in a way that can support accessibility for our students? Then it goes into the-

Dr. Emma Zone:

Great topic.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, absolutely. And some tools, and then it looks forward, and that’s where I started that last bit of the book looking forward to get into the little bit of the strategy and starts to look at, well, what kind of leaders do we need? And so on.

That was the first book. The second book, I was really conscious that at the start of the new academic school year in 2024, that I was coming across a lot of teachers who were just like, where do I begin? Because a lot of teachers, I think in that first year from the ’23 to ’24 year just didn’t have the bandwidth. Were like, “Okay, I’m hearing about this AI thing.” A lot of teachers got to the summer break of 2024 and just I think thought, “Right, well, I’ve got a bit of time to delve into this now.” I just wanted to pull together essentially a tiny little book, it’s about 80 pages. I’ve got here back to school AI steps. 10 steps for exploring AI, figuring out what it is, how to try it out. Then, part two is 11 tools recommended by teachers.

Dr. Emma Zone:

I love that.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

It goes into what teachers use and what do they recommend. Then it goes into how do I get the most out of a tool like Chart GPT? That’s like an extended version of the chapter that’s in the first book, because a lot of research came out in the meantime. And then it goes at how can it save your time? How to boost leadership, there was a chapter on there. It’s like if I just want to pick up something small. I haven’t announced this at all yet actually, but we’re going to do one for this coming year, as well. I don’t know if it’s going to be an annual thing every year. The start of the new academic year, there’s going to be a new updated version every year, but I’ve got some really big players on board actually to make this into something a bit bigger.

I went around doing professional development with teachers and leaders and schools and districts using the frameworks out of these books. It was while I was doing that that I kept coming back in the back of my head of, well, I’m spending a lot of time in the box one, I’ve spent a lot of time in helping teachers grapple this and integrated into what they’re already doing. But there was more and more of a glaring question of where do we go? Just to give you an example of that assessment, how many teachers out there have questioned how the traditional ways of assessing students over the last year or two? Pretty much every teacher, I think. And if they haven’t, then, they…

Dr. Emma Zone:

They will.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

I don’t know. Maybe they just don’t know what’s going on. I think we’re going to start seeing more question marks over traditional practices when it comes to this technology as it grows in capability. I wanted to write something for leaders or people who wanted to be leaders, who wanted to lead in this new time ahead. That led me to write Infinite Education.

Dr. Emma Zone:

That’s awesome. Well, what I really appreciate about the description around the first two books as compared to the third is the first two are meeting… I think as educators, we are very pragmatic and we want to know what can I do right now that could make an impact on my students or on my daily workflows? To what you said in the beginning, as you have been traveling around, hearing how people are saying, where do I start? I appreciate that your work is giving people a chance to have an entry point, because for some, it can feel very overwhelming to know where to start. Now there’s so much noise around AI in education, speaking to the burnout, speaking to the need for additional time, I think for some of us, it feels very daunting to know where to start. I appreciate that that’s the first step with a lot of this, and to know that there’s another version coming out as the new school year begins.

But to your point, as you step back and you don’t want to just be in box one, having another work like Infinite Education to say, now let’s think about the strategy and how we start to build a culture around this. That’s one of the things that I also appreciate about the other work that you publish. You talked about the work you do with Forbes. The podcast is so neat because it’s short, bite size, it’s very accessible in terms of time.

Can you talk a little bit about how that has been impactful as you’ve heard from different teachers around the globe? How are they using those little tidbits beyond the books? What might be some advice you have for any educators listening today of… Beyond these books, where else can they start? What are you trying to get across to help them?

Dan Fitzpatrick:

I guess I’ve tried to say it as my mission from the start of how do we take… I suppose very early days, it was more how do we take something that sounds very technical and make it understandable and practical? I think now it’s like what you are saying, it’s become, how do I just try and take something or distill down the noise? Not necessarily the technical, but just the amount of noise that’s gone out there and give teachers something that’s digestible. That’s where the podcast came from. I literally just every day pick a current story, whether it might be a school in Idaho have created an AI strategy, and this is what they’re doing. It made a local newspaper in Idaho. I do a search, I have alerts for stories that pop up, and I think, you know what? That could be a really nice podcast where I’ll explore it for 10 minutes, talk about what they’ve done, and then that will give a teacher somewhere, Sydney, Australia, driving to work that day, a little 10-minute bite-size of… There are schools out there that are doing this in our work.

Sometimes it’s global news, sometimes it’s on-the-ground news, but I just try to take one story every single day. In fact, it’s AI that does it. I don’t know if you’ve figured that out, but I don’t read it. It’s not my voice. Well, it’s my voice. But I’ve got an AI that’s trained on my voice. So I write the piece, make it into about a thousand-word monologue, and then I put it into my AI, my AI reads it out in my voice, and then I put it on the podcast channel. Otherwise, I’d be doing it all day every day.

Dr. Emma Zone:

I got time efficiency. There you go.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

Exactly. Every now and then, I think, should I do more with it? Maybe I should record it, but then I remember, actually I can’t because I just wouldn’t have any time to do anything else.

It works really well and I’m really surprised by how many teachers get in contact with me and say, “I listen to this regularly and I get a lot from it.” I listened to another podcast actually, which is just about AI in general, not AI in education. That podcast comes out I think every two or three days, and it’s a bit of a breakdown of what’s happened over the last few days. I got the idea and I just thought it’d be amazing to have something like that for educators.

That’s the podcast. It’s called AI in Education Daily on all podcast apps.

The Forbes pieces, I suppose they’re wider pieces. Every week I have a newsletter where I go a bit more in depth, it’s a bit more for teachers, educators, leaders. The Forbes pieces are a bit more for a general audience.

Dr. Emma Zone:

Got it.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

It’s a way to try and raise awareness just to the general public, I guess. They sometimes appear to be a bit more sensationalist. They sometimes appear to be a bit more headline. For example, I wrote a story about the Tesla Optimus robots a few months ago, and when you’re writing for a publication like Forbes, you’ve got to write a headline that gets people to then actually read the article-

Dr. Emma Zone:

Click it, right?

Dan Fitzpatrick:

Yeah. You’ve got to try and get people to click it. If nobody clicks it, nobody’s going to read it. And then what’s the point of doing it? I think I wrote headlines, something like, Are Elon’s Robots the next teachers? Or something like that. You’ve got to click and realize that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying they are. I’m just asking the question to try and get you to think, well, what are these things and what’s the capability? And actually could they be? I try to give a bit of a nuanced approach. It’s more to just raise awareness. And to do that, you’ve got to be a bit more sensationalist and you can’t be as academic in those types of scenarios.

But I like it. I really liked writing those pieces. Yesterday I wrote a piece, it was just a very simple piece. I knew it wouldn’t get a huge audience because it wasn’t as sensationalist, but it was simply just five ways that a parent can start to build entrepreneurial chip skills with their children using AI at home. It was like five different ideas and I really liked them. Mainly because I think the Forbes audience is an entrepreneurial audience where you get to address a bunch of people who might be professionals, might be entrepreneurial educators, might be people who want to do more with their kids, but they don’t know where to start. You just get to share some thoughts with that. I really like the folks pieces.

Dr. Emma Zone:

Well, there’s a different audience for some of this work, as well. I think going back to what I said before with your books and even the Daily podcast, even though I think it’s great for educators, you have so many different topics, whether it has to do with HR and hiring or international topics, and they are very consumable. But even hearing you talk about this latest piece, if the listeners haven’t caught on, yet, the idea here is an entry point, way to dip your toe in the water and not to feel like either an imposter or you don’t understand what’s happening. Because there’s plenty of theoretical work happening around this, as well, no shade to that by any stretch. But if you’re somebody who’s looking for, how can I help my child, my student? Or just get a pulse on what’s happening in education with a lot of this work. By doing something like five steps or 10 things you can do or five ways to do X, Y, Z, that feels very accessible and it’s very akin to what good teachers do, which makes sense because you’re an educator by trade, right?

Dan Fitzpatrick:

Absolutely. It helps me, first and foremost, I think. I backed myself into a situation where I have to learn what’s going on in the news every day with this technology. That’s what I do to challenge myself. It’s how I throw my hat over the wall, I guess. Sometimes if I really want to learn about a tool, I’ll get in contact with the company and say, “Do you want to do a webinar with me in three weeks’ time?” It’s almost like I’ve given myself three weeks to try and learn about the tool. But I think it’s quite a stressful way to work, but it’s a cool way to, if you back yourself into a corner where you’ve got to fight [inaudible 00:16:51], and I suppose it’s that continuing to grow and it’s the thrown the hat over the wall, I guess.

Dr. Emma Zone:

For sure. I love that.

As we’re coming to a close, and as I’m listening to you talk about throwing the hat over the wall, I’d like to know a little bit about what’s next for you and your hope for the future in terms of AI and education. And particularly, what conversations do you think that students, parents, guardians, and educators need to be having about AI in the future?

Dan Fitzpatrick:

I honestly think we need to move into a time, and I think it’s happening, but I think parents need to now suddenly start to be thinking, what type of education do I want for my child? That’s been a very difficult question to ask yourself in the past, because there hasn’t been that many options and there hasn’t been that many choice. Also, I mean, if you’re like me, I literally come from a village in the northeast of England where you just go to your local school, your local elementary school, then your local high school, and then your parents did, as well, went to the same school. They’re just doing what they know. I think we’re in a cycle of where we are just doing what we know. Actually, even now at 38, if I went back to my old secondary school, high school, I don’t think it would’ve changed all that much and I know because I work in a lot of similar schools that it hasn’t changed all that much.

I think parents need to take control back and start to go, well, actually, can I supplement it? There’s a school called Synthesis out of California that does online sessions that teach kids collaboration skills, problem solving skills. Could I supplement what I’m doing with that? Could we… I think we need to stop pushing a bit on the system and going, is there more here? Can we do more? Because we don’t just want our students to be at the level that we were when we left school, we want them to have gone a bit further and to be ready for this world, not the world we’re coming out of.

I think I’m all for empowering parents, empowering the student, as well. Also, I think, empowering the teacher to be able to make decisions about where they want to work, when they want to work, how they work, whether it’s with AI or not.

I wrote on LinkedIn yesterday and I was thinking about this, and why am I such a big advocate for AI? I’m aware of the risks, I work helping schools to mitigate against the risk, but I’m still optimistic for it. It comes down basically to the reason why that I think, as humans, we’ve always created tools, we’ve done it ever since we were living in jungles and we created tools, and that’s how we got to where we are today. I think we live in a world now where humans are treated as tools as cogs in machines. I see AI as a way of giving everybody a set of tools where they don’t necessarily have to be the tool anymore.

Dr. Emma Zone:

That’s really interesting.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

It’s very optimistic view, but I think it could be possible.

Dr. Emma Zone:

That’s okay. We like optimism. I would say thank you so much because I think your work is also inspiring us to push on that system to think innovatively. It doesn’t have to be an either/or, it can be a both and.

Thank you so much for joining us in our virtual classroom today and agreeing to be a part of our conversation. I just appreciate it so, so much. Like I said, at the top of the podcast today, I’ve been watching your work, love the podcast. We just really, really appreciate you being here. Thank you. Thank you so, so much.

Dan Fitzpatrick:

Thanks for having me. Thanks, Emma.

Dr. Emma Zone:

To learn more about Dan Fitzpatrick and the work he does, please visit his website, the AI Educator at theaieducator.io. You’ll be able to order the books there, listen to the podcast, subscribe to the newsletter. Like he said, he is also on LinkedIn. Lots of places to connect with Dan.

Thank you to our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere.

Remember to follow us on social media. You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook at D2L, and subscribe to the D2L YouTube channel. You could also sign up for the teaching and Learning studio email list for the latest updates on new episodes, articles, and master classes. If you like what you heard, please remember to rate, review, and share this episode. Remember to subscribe so you never miss a thing.

Bye for now.

Dr. Cristi Ford:

You’ve been listening to Teach & Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L. To learn more about our K through 20 and corporate solutions, visit dtol.com. Visit the Teaching & Learning studio for more material for educators by educators, including master classes, articles, and interviews.

Remember to hit that subscribe button and please take a moment to rate, review, and share the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, school’s out.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• The AI Educator
• The Three Box Solution
• AI in Education Daily Podcast
• Forbes | Dan Fitzpatrick