Building an Inclusive AI Ecosystem for Education With Matthew Winters

Is artificial intelligence (AI) just for grading and admin tasks? Not according to Matthew Winters. In this episode of Teach & Learn, Dr. Emma Zone chats with Utah’s first state-level AI education specialist about how AI is helping educators turn creative ideas into impactful, inclusive learning experiences.

From personalized support to improved accessibility, AI is becoming a collaborative partner in the classroom—helping teachers reach individual learners and bring bold ideas to life. 

Winters shares how the Utah State Board of Education is building an AI ecosystem that supports educators through professional learning, inclusive frameworks, and creative classroom applications. You’ll hear how teachers are moving from fear to curiosity, from creativity to accessibility, and how a connected K–20 approach is shaping the future of learning.

💬 “With a little bit of pushing, teachers move into creativity—doing things in their classrooms they’ve never been able to do before. Naturally, they begin asking, ‘How can this be accessible for all my students?’” — Matthew Winters

📣What Dr. Zone and Winters talk about:

☑️The development of Utah’s AI education framework 

☑️Professional learning as an investment, not a cost

☑️Creative and accessible AI applications in classrooms

☑️Building a K–20 pipeline for AI readiness

☑️The “Portrait of an AI Graduate” initiative

🔖Resources: 

• Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation
• Utah State Board of Education, AI Overview
• Artificial Intelligence Framework for Utah P-12 Education: Guidance on the Use of AI in Our Schools
• ASU+GSV 2025: Utah Shares Plan for Statewide AI Education 

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Transcript

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- Do you believe that AI has the potential to be a creative partner in the classroom? Well, our next guest certainly does, and he's helping to make that a reality. In this episode, we look at how K-12 teachers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning for more than just grading and administrative tasks. We're gonna learn how an evolving framework, ongoing professional learning, and a little creativity are helping to reshape teaching and learning. Welcome to "Teach and Learn" a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L. Each week we'll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin. I'm joined by a very special guest today, Matthew Winters. So excited to have you on the podcast. You are the first state level AI education specialist in the U.S. which is super exciting. I know you've had a few more join you, but you get to claim that first. And from policy to practice, he is helping schools and educators really unlock AI's full potential in the state of Utah and really beyond. He's also the 2025 recipient of the ASU+GSV Summit Global Award for Education Innovation Impact. And somebody that I have been following now for quite a while, I'm super excited to have you on the pod. So, thanks Matt for joining the conversation and welcome to "Teach and Learn."- So great to be here, Emma, thanks so much for the invite and excited to talk about the work happening here in Utah.- Yeah, awesome. So, before we move into this unique role that you have, I do want you to tell our listeners a bit about your background in respect to, how you got into education and sort of a little bit about what brought you here.- Yeah, absolutely. I have a weird route. First of all, I almost dropped out in high school. I was in, my English class when I was a sophomore, and I went, I don't know if this is for me anymore. And I ended up having a great teacher in my second semester who pulled me in and taught me how to be a student again. And so I stayed in school, wanted to be a teacher, got pulled into being a college professor track and wanted to specialize in Irish literature. So, I actually have a master's in language and literature to start off with. And I realized I love just teaching. Got my second master's in education in, or 2016, and started teaching in a middle school and did that for seven years. Was made a educational coach about a week before COVID. And if you ever see my profile picture, it still does not have the gray here because this is my COVID patch. We were able to keep most of our teachers in the classrooms through COVID. Four of us left the building of about 60 teachers and one of 'em was me, I moved on to state work where I worked at Utah Education Network for three years, which is our statewide ISP for education and training, and then moved over to this role in 2024.- So, it's been quite a ride.- Wow.- I never expected to be working in AI, but it's one of the things that I've been most passionate about in the last decade as I've seen the changes that we've had for educational technology and things like that, in our educational environment and ecosystem.- Yeah, I love that. So, yeah, interesting route, but I find that sometimes those, detours can teach us a lot. So, excited for you to bring your perspective to the conversation today. I do wanna unpack your title and role a bit because it is unique. It's not something that certainly we hear about, you know, nationwide or even really across the globe. And so it would be great for us to understand a little bit about, what does that mean, AI specialists, like what does that look like on the day to day? And I'm also curious if you have any insight as to how that role even came to be in the first place.- Absolutely. And you're not the only group that's really interested in fascinated by this role. There's, we now have, I think it's six or seven of us across the country because other state educational agencies have gone, we need somebody governing this conversation in our state and like collaborating and making things happen. But then also, as of a few days from recording of this episode, I'm having some conversations with some countries in the Middle Eastern area because they're interested in hiring people as well in that space. So, my role day to day is kind of unique. I'm not legislatively or federally mandated. So, I was a role created by the state board and the visionary leadership of our state superintendency at the time. And also now as well, I spent a lot of time talking to our state superintendent. The focal point of the job is really three different areas that are pretty large. So, the first one is working in policy with our stakeholders. So, legislators, higher education, our K-12 folks, and then non-profit and for-profit groups to really try and figure out what are the best approaches to policy and governing that conversation and working through it. The second area is I work with our local educational agencies, so our districts and charter schools to do a variety of things to help them develop policies in schools or districts or even in the classroom, providing ongoing professional development and just basically supporting them in any way that I can, that they ask for. And then the third area is I'm internal professional development for the agency here. So, if somebody wants to up their skills, around AI or ed tech generally, I'm here to help support them at USBE. But then also, I kind of say I'm the the Robin for their Batman for presentations and things like that. So, that can have some support if they need to go out and talk to the communities. The role came to be because of that visionary leadership. About two years ago I was working at Utah Education Network and we saw, as soon as ChatGPT hit November of 2022, there was a group of us that went, we need to start getting ahead of this conversation'cause it's gonna go really, really quickly. And so we were one of the first groups, there was four of us that developed a free statewide professional development course through Canvas on AI and kind of the goals of what is good AI implementation that we could kind of find at that time, that's gone on to now be split into three, believe two or three different courses that still support teachers with free PD. At the same time at Utah State Board of Education, the superintendency and a large group of team members got together and formed a committee called the Sky Committee. And they got about six months in and we're building a framework and went, this is a lot of work, we need somebody to kind of take the work load on.- Do this.- And so they put out the call in April of 2024, and I was hired in May and started in June.- Wow.- So, it's really thankful, like I'm really thankful for the visionary leadership and the work that Superintendent Dickson who left office in July, and now Superintendent Hart, but then everyone else who's on the Sky committee that supports the work that I do, and really pushes it forward because it's paying dividends.- Yeah. Well it's interesting, you know, when you talked about understanding the pace at which these conversations, this work has to move in order to, you know, stay ahead, keep up depending on the way you look at it, right? And just needing a nexus to be able to say, we can't continually waste time having to parrot out this message to all of these different stakeholders. So, you have this really interesting advantage of being able to help, bring that work to life and probably cut down on some of the back and forth and the time, right? So, I think that's super interesting.- Yeah.- And you know, you get to bring that policy. It's like, if there's policy happening in one place, and we'll talk about policy here in a minute, how nice to be able to understand the underpinnings of that when you're working with teachers in the classroom or when you're thinking about what this means for you know, professional learning or even the internal professional development, right? I'm sure it all informs itself and they're all related.- Yeah. I often describe what's hitting us as a wave. Dr. Zach Boyd, who's over the office of AI policy in the state of Utah, where we talk about AI just as this giant wave that hit all of us at once. And so we really have to think through the amount of stuff that's hitting us on a daily basis.- Hmm.- I often tell people, I downplay my expertise in AI because I'm not a builder, I'm not a data scientist. I'm really good at organizing people and creating conduits for communication, and then negotiation around that.- Mm-hmm.- And I think that's really what a lot of people need right now is-- [Dr. Emma Zone] Yes.- It's not so much about let's build new systems or even the new technologies, it's about connecting the people who are building those systems to the boots on the ground teachers and the administrators, and then also the legislators who are making all the rules around those-- Mm-hmm.- To help support everyone that's going forward.- Yeah, yeah. It makes total sense. And that pathway and that continuation of that pathway versus the silos is critical, right? Or the work won't get done. So, I do wanna talk a little bit about the policy pieces and the framework in particular. I know we've had previous conversations around the framework that you and your team have worked on. Can you tell us a little bit about it? You know, we hear a lot about frameworks in AI, EdTech, you name it. So, what has that been like, and tell us a bit about how you approach that work.- Yeah, absolutely. So, the framework that we have here in Utah, we were somewhere in the tens to 15, I can't remember which state number we were that put out a framework, but we were pretty low like, in the rollout process. That work really started before I was even hired. And so we had a wonderful leader here who has since retired named Patty Norman. She was our deputy superintendent of public instruction. And Patty really led the kind of discussion around this, and asked so many people in our organization to really think through what this technology was doing to our systems, not just in terms of classrooms, but what is it doing to our infrastructure in IT, how's it gonna change professional development, teaching and learning, special education, all sorts of things. And really pushing the kind of the conversation about let's not go so far out in front that we are getting into conjecture, but let's really be purposeful about how we create the document. So, our framework has really put around a couple of big things. First, any laws and codes that are existing from the federal government, also the local state governments, and then also internal policies to USBE that help support best practices and are supporting the conversations around AI. So, things like data privacy, cybersecurity, all kind of weave into this. The second area is really some background information around what is AI, how is it changing our society, changing our education system. And then there's a list of, you know, AI dos, AI don'ts. There's some things that are really meant to be a thought process. And one of the big things that we come back to again and again that's in the policy or it's not in the policy in the framework, is, keeping a human in the system or human in human out. We wanna make sure that when teachers are using and students are using AI, there is someone there monitoring the work that the AI is producing. And that it doesn't just become the students are creating work using AI, the teachers are commenting using AI. And so the AI is the one that's learning.- Yeah.- And so that's a big chunk of our framework and it's a meant to be a living document as we go forward. So, right now I'm working on a version too. I've been working on it for the last couple months. And there's a lot of shifts in the conversation around AI, but I don't like to be... I wanna make sure that we get good information,- Right.- And the best information that will help support our LEAs here in the state of Utah. So, right now, a couple things we're adding are things like, a glossary of terms,'cause that was absent in the first draft. And just basic terms, like what is a 'walled garden,' what's an Agenta AI?- Yeah.- Those sorts of things. And then looking forward to some of the things that are coming down the pipeline to prepare our systems because it's coming fast. Things like Agentive, things like AGI and ASI, how does that play in and what are some possibilities there?- Yeah. That makes total sense, and I think it has to be a living document in this world for sure. Not just for the pace, but just you're having different people seeing the document and the framework as different levels of readiness also, right? So, I appreciate that idea of thinking through everything from a glossary where we can't make assumptions about what people do or don't know or even how that relates to their role, right? Do you think, as you've been working then, like within the school setting, are you finding that the framework has been a good entry point? You know, how does that work when you're working with teachers, for example, or you know, instructional coaches, students? Is it something you reference or is it just you're trying to weave those pieces into those types of engagements?- Absolutely. So, we have lots of touch points with our community. I'm very big on listening and finding out what the community needs, but then also trying to go out and talk more to them. And so we have touch points with our teachers. We just finished, well didn't finish, we're working on completing a professional development series, that brought in 5,500 educators roughly from the state of Utah, which is about 20% of our teaching population in the state.- Wow.- We were hoping for 1500 that went way off much higher. We just finished a series of leadership summits for our administrators. We're working on some professional development for teachers and we're trying to work with students as well. And so whenever we have these touch points, a lot of the framework gets kind of woven into that process.- [Dr. Emma Zone] Right.- You know, things like, again, keeping a human in the system, data privacy has been a massive concern as well. And making sure that, or if students, or sorry, students and teachers are using tools that they are approved tools under a data privacy agreement in their districts. And that's something that we really reinforce quite frequently through this. But we've also been reinforcing the importance of like creativity and critical thinking-- Yes, yes.- As we move through these systems as well. One of the big kind of structural points that we're excited about right now is starting to look at how AI can be used in, effectively used in work with students with disabilities or multilingual learners and are gifted and talented and trying to like see and lead out with not just our local educator communities, but with our larger kind of corporate partners and things like that across the state.- [Dr. Emma Zone] Yes.- And so that's a big part of, it's just kind of weaving in the framework as we do those things. But then on top of that, in the state of Utah, like many states, we have local control. And so we have encouraged many of our districts and charter schools to read the framework and then make their own that is effective for their local community. And at this point, we have somewhere between 50 and 70% of our districts have some sort of work-- Wow.- In play and many of our charter schools are working on it as well, because they can develop those policies more effectively for the local constituency. And so that's part of what the leadership summit was last week, was to encourage some of our LEAs to really work that through. We're doing some for charter schools specific in a couple of weeks as well. And it's really to just support everyone, so that we can get the best policies in place for our students going into the future.- Sure. Well, and we're seeing a lot of repetition in this work, so it's helpful to have some level of template to be able to go off of and maybe broaden the view of different leadership teams, especially as they're thinking about their communities and their populations, but also bringing to light things they might not be thinking about, right? Because there's certain things we might be focused on or not. You know, we talked about the living document and I know in previous conversations, and I've heard you bring this up before, but I've heard you talk about the portrait and we all know 'Portrait of a Graduate'-- Mm-hmm- If we're in the K-12 space and beyond. But you have a bit of a twist on that when you talk about the portrait of an AI graduate, right? Is that what you call it? And I'd love for you to speak to that a bit.'Cause I think there's, you've working on iterations as well, not just of the K-12 graduate-- Yeah.- But also, you know, college, et cetera. So, I think our audience would be interested in that, because that's really compelling work.- Yeah. So, a about six months ago, this was the end of April, beginning of May. We put together a team that looked at portrait of a graduate. We're a big portrait graduate state. There's many of us across the country and then around the globe. And if you're not familiar, portrait graduate is the knowledge skills and dispositions we would like to encourage in a system for when a student graduates from high school. And it's a really powerful project. It was something that I did while I was in my classroom and encouraged my other fellow teachers to kinda look at it. So, when I moved over to the state board, I knew that that's as our former superintendent Dickson, also always put it, but then superintendent Hart, now, it's our guiding star. We want to have all of our students graduate with these knowledge skills and dispositions. So, when we convened this team together in late April, early May, we wanted to build a portrait project around artificial intelligence. And so it's again, knowledge skills and dispositions. And we wanted to do students and teachers because again, it hit all of us equally at once. And so there's a lot of similarities between the portrait because the skill sets right now are very similar.- Mm-hmm.- There are differences in terms of roles and needs there, but it includes things like things that we want our students to generally learn, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, but then also things like prompt writing-- Yes.- And prompt development that's so important to understand the changing nature of how to work with an AI and actually ask it the correct questions. But then also things like data privacy and where is your data going? And so those portraits we're waiting on one last thing to publish them. We're hoping to have them out very soon. I am working on that actually later today as of this recording. But on a side note on that, I shared this work with our university partners, particularly at the University of Utah, and they did have an organization there called the Responsible AI Initiative, ran by Penny Atkins, Dr. Penny Atkins and Dr. Manish Parashar, and shared this information with them and they went, that's incredible. What would this look like for business?- Hmm.- And so we ended up convening a group at the end of July that was an intersectional group of business leaders, professors, entrepreneurs, students at the college level, and then myself who no business background. They asked me to come in and lead the room. And it was a really incredible experience. In about eight hours, we cobbled together a first draft of a portrait of an AI ready company and a portrait of an AI ready employee.- Mm-hmm.- And those particular documents are currently going through the university system at University of Utah to be improved and then make them publishable. The hope is that eventually, and this is a project probably for November, is to do a portrait of AI ready professor and an AI ready college student as well, so that we can have this kind of ecosystem set of documents that all support and look at each other and go, this is what we want for our society around artificial intelligence in of Utah. And so it's aspirational documents, but then it gives us a kind of a roadmap. There's been some follow-up conversations in the last couple weeks about some further work about how do we work with startups, how do we work with employing this in a school system, those sorts of things. And so those are things that we're hoping to work on over the next six months and bring more to the public eye when they're ready.- Mm-hmm, see, I love that because I think there's just this natural call to action around how we are creating articulation from the K-12 to post-secondary to workforce experience and beyond, and whatever that might look like. I mean, geez, I feel like as someone who's been in a lot of roles both in, you know, K-12 and in higher ed, we've had conversations about skills and skills articulation across curricular areas forever, right? And I'm still not totally convinced that we're doing that great of a job at that articulation. So, it's sort of interesting that this conversation around these different portraits could be also replicated across some of those other areas for a need that we know exists. Those conversations across these different sectors of the kind of learner experience, so to speak, and then thinking through those different roles, I think that's incredibly powerful.- Yeah, that's something that we've been thinking about quite heavily here, because again, you don't have a AI ready future or an AI prepared future.- Mm-hmm.- You don't have a pipeline from K-12 to higher ed to work for-- Right.- For AI engineers, for, prompt engineers, for the next generation of people who are able to use AI to do really creative processes.- Mm-hmm.- And so you have to start with looking at it as a full ecosystem. And one of the things I talk about quite frequently here in Utah is the increasing artifacting we're seeing from business being employed into K-12 systems, things like cybersecurity-- Right?- You have to have a cyber security system now because we rely so heavily on, kind of business related products in K-12 systems. And so if you start looking at the whole world as a larger ecosystem in terms of AI, you start to see some really interesting things. And then you just have to start, in my case, and I would say anybody who's in kind of systems work, doing outreach to the people who govern those processes, and share with them the work that you would like to see happen and that you're willing to build with them. A lot of times they're also looking for at least it's been my experience here in Utah, maybe we have a more in depth collaborative culture, but it's been really exciting to see them talk to me and have the same kind of questions that I'm having around AI and workforce development or AI and higher ed, and then just being able to collaborate through that process.- Right. Well, the work doesn't happen in a vacuum because the experience for the learner, the employer, the employee, the student, and those roles, even as an individual shift over time, at once you could be a student and a teacher, right? So, I think that's also what's really noteworthy. And I think that collaboration, having that happen within the state is critical. But, you know, I know you're involved in the national conversation as well. I wanna shift to the professional learning side a bit because I mean, there's certainly no shortage of opportunities to learn about AI, you know, depending on what that looks like and what that might mean. But I'm curious what you think we're sort of getting right about professional learning approaches and sort of what are we getting wrong? Because I know that there's a lot of experimentation, we wanna fail fast when it comes to this. We wanna provide ongoing support, it can't be one and done. So, curious, sort of what you've learned as you've introduced these professional learning programs to your communities.- Yeah. First I'll say this about professional development. My personal hero Ken Robinson, once said that professional development should not be looked at as a cost, it should be looked at as an investment.- Mm-hmm.- And I think that's no more true today than it was 20 years ago. It's been true forever with teaching if you pay in, and it's true for companies as well.- Yeah.- The more you pay into your employees and helping them develop the skills that they a need for their job, but then also be that they'd like to learn to be self, you know, have self-efficacy in their position, then the more likely they are to have job satisfaction and excitement. And we actually see less movement sometimes because of that.- Right.- Cause people are excited to stay where they're at. And so I always think about professional development as it's a investment in our future. And so with artificial intelligence, you said it right off the bat, it can't be a one and done thing.- Mm-hmm.- I was just preparing an agenda for an internal meeting today about some updates to AI systems. And I haven't looked at some of those updates for about a month. And my list is about a page and a half long. And there's so much happening that we have to come back again and again and again, and help teachers to understand, and administrators and our parents and our students understand, what's the mechanisms here that can help you do new things,- Right?- And new exciting things that you may have not been wanted to do in your classroom but never been able to do before. The other thing I'll say is that I think it's really important, at least for me, and I think it's also important for a lot of people in kind of these systems roles, is to remember that there needs to be a local context to these conversations as well.- Yeah.- It's great to have people come in from a larger national positioning, and it's great to have speakers and things like that, but unless you have the structure in house to monitor, to provide, and then to follow up with professional development to make sure that things are moving forward, you're gonna be kind of up a creek-- Mm-hmm.- Without a paddle. So, you need to make sure that there is a system in place. So, I often look, I got a piece of advice from somebody I really respect a few about a year ago they said, we need to create the next generation of people like you. And I went, that's great. So, I've been looking in our community, we hired, just to give you kind of a behind the curtain, the professional development that drew in 5,500 ish teachers, we were able to hire a part-time director for that. Her name's Emma Moss, she's from a local district here in Canyon School District, and then six other trainers from across the state for the summer.- Wow.- Those trainers have been, are either teachers or coaches I've been seeing at events. There's many people who applied and it was a really hard decision and picked the ones, but it just happened to be a bunch of people that I've seen things and they've been excited about not just AI, but the work happening in Utah.- Mm-hmm.- And so I think it's important to look to local communities and find those people that are excited about what you're doing, that are experts in what they're working on, know the local community and you can help bolster and give them a microphone.- [Dr. Emma Zone] Right.- One of my friends in kind of the national scene, he always says, don't be the micro... Or don't be the speaker, be the microphone. And I try to, I've taken that one to heart and I try to say, thanks Matt. I'm gonna throw this over to this person and make them in a good place.- Right. You know, and it's funny because what we know about professional learning and PD experiences in general, especially when it comes to teachers and educators, whether you're talking K-12 higher ed, changing their practices, you can put every expert or piece of research in front of them, but they are much more likely to make a decision or a change to their teaching practice based on something they've heard from a colleague. And I think that's probably true, you know, for most of us in most industries. So, there is certainly power around sustainability of a PL culture that is deeply rooted in those who are a part of that community, right? So.- And that investment's a two-way street too.- Yeah.- Like off of that, like the more localized you can have that, and somebody's in their room with them, you know, on a weekly basis, maybe even a daily basis, that's an investment right there.- For sure.- They can really provide dividends down the line. And I've seen that in action, not just in my old school, but across schools in the state of Utah.- Yeah.- We have a very robust coaching culture, and it's been really valuable to see.- Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's something we talk a lot about, just being in my role at D2L, as we think about how we can also create communities of practice using technology to help have a local piece, and that also even statewide connecting teachers from across the state. Or across the system, you know, in some cases where they can't necessarily get together face-to-face all the time. I do wanna shift to this notion of the creative application. You would talk about the policy piece. We know there's the privacy side of things. We know that there's administrative efficiencies that happen both from a teacher's perspective and certainly, from an administrator's perspective as well. But I think part of the work that you're doing is really trying to shift the mindset beyond just, here's an efficiency, here's a quick way to solve something or do something. And let's start thinking about how this can be a tool for moving creative approaches forward and how AI can be a collaborative partner. And I think that sounds great, but if I were a teacher, I think about when I was a high school English teacher, I'd be like, well, what the heck does that mean, Matt, right? What does AI is, maybe that's a little creepy, I don't know, right? So, what is AI as a collaborative partner? Like, what does that look like? And are there any anecdotal examples that you might be able to share from the work you've done?- Absolutely. Just to start off this summer, I helped with those coaching or going out to some of those sessions as well. And one of my favorite, I had a series where I had to go to some sites in rural Utah. There's one that was basically, you throw a rock and you're in Arizona. And I wanted to show the power of AI and the creativity factor there.- Mm-hmm.- And so I started off my presentation and said, I have a real big worry about this generation. I think too few of them are experiencing dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. And then I showed them in real time how to code an Oregon Trail type game in a couple different tools that was deployable with students immediately.- [Dr. Emma Zone] Wow.- And so, in real time, it took like maybe 10 minutes to show teachers that, but the effect on them was amazing. We often see in this training that we've been doing, I've noticed a trend and I'd love to figure out how to document it and things like that. It's a little bit hard to do, but a lot of teachers come to us in the frame of mind of fear, AI is gonna take my job, it's my students are gonna use it to plagiarize. And those are fairly straightforward conversations to have that can be easily discussed. But then they move into productivity. And that's where a lot of professional development kind of sits is like you said, it can help me write an email, it can help me write a lesson plan.- Right.- But if it stays there, then it kind of dies mostly because that is a singular perspective. How can it help me?- Right.- And we want this technology to be outward facing, especially in the classroom. And so with a little bit of pushing, a lot of teachers are able to move into creativity and being able to say things, or do things in their classrooms that they've never been able to do before. And then naturally, as we've seen teachers really get into that creative strand, they start to go, ooh, how can this be accessible for all of my students in my classroom? So, they move into accessibility.- Mm-hmm.- It's been really kind of cool to see that. So, a couple of examples of this, one of our teachers who did an intensive training with us back in, I believe it was in February or January, he did a two day with us. And at the end of it, he was like, my classroom is mostly students with disabilities. I work with the students that have trouble in other classes and I really wanna leverage AI, and I want 'em to have their kind of a bot that they can talk to. And so I walked him through the constitutionalized process and he started writing bots, a bot for all of the students to use to help with, their social studies in different classes that then focused on disabilities. And about a week into that process, he called me and he was like, this is so hard. I don't know how to write this, I can't get the AI to do it right with me, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it dawned on me that he didn't know and understand that he could write a bot, multiple bots, not just one bot.- Oh, right, got it.- And so he ended up writing a bot for every student.- Wow.- Keyed into their disability and the content area that they were struggling with. He said it took him about a day, he only has, I think he said like five to seven students per class period. But the turnaround with him was incredible. He had non-verbal students and he is like, I was able to, you know, quote unquote hear them-- Yeah.- For the first time-- Wow.- Because I could read their writing. And that's getting us into, from right out of productivity into creativity, and then-- Yes.- Directly into accessibility. And so I need to follow up with him. It's been a few months and see how he's been doing, but it's an incredible move. The other one that I always go to is, we have a teacher in the Provo area at a charter school who did a similar training, and he's a social studies teacher in secondary. And the first thing he asked the students to do was, I want you to go home. We're gonna learn about the Vietnam War in the next unit. Choose your favorite chatbot, ask any question you want for 20 minutes about the Vietnam War. Copy the transcript, turn it into me, that's it.- Right.- And he said, the students kind of rebelled. They were like, this feels like cheating. And I was like, it's not cheating, I'm asking you to do it.- Right, this is some assignment.- Yeah. As some people point out, there's some data privacy concerns with that. But really-- Sure, sure.- Let's just looking at what questions and knowledge activation. The next day he came back with a notebook LM, notebook that he had put only sources from the Vietnamese side into, and had the students ask questions of that chat in class. The next day he had the same notebook open, but had removed all the Vietnamese sources and only plugged in American sources from American's point of view.- Mm-hmm.- And had the students go through some of the same questions and watched as the information was different.- Wow.- And so he had this really great, you know, set of standards that he was working off of and he hit all of 'em.- Yes.- And so those are just a couple of the things that we're starting to see from educators. Part of that program that we were running, the teachers who finish, which right now we have about 500 of them that have finished, will be paid out for a lesson plan that either uses AI with students or teaches about AI with students. All those lesson plans will be available on an OER Commons in the next few months.- That's great.- For teachers worldwide, so, we're excited to see them.- Oh, wow. Yeah, so you heard it here listeners, even if you're not Utah based, this is something anybody can access?- Yep.- That's cool, that's really cool. Well, and you know, and as you're talking, I'm thinking about the other topic that is sort of in my mind lately, which is all about assessment and how we're rethinking strategies related to evidence-based instruction, but also how we're using assessment data. This has long been something I've, you know, I'm passionate about, but understand that it's hard to get, as a faculty member myself and teachers that I know, you know, it can be difficult to support that data-driven instruction in the classroom. But as you're talking about these different types of assessment, I think it's shining a light on the creativity around that. In some ways I think that that's also bringing fear for folks who have done it a certain way for a very long time, right? Do you see potential for AI in those scenarios? Like, number one, being able to rethink assessment, which I'm assuming is yes, because you've just described it, but also how it might help teachers use data more effectively to actually change or pivot some of their teaching practice?- Yeah. I think there's a lot of space for this place to, or for data use to grow with AI. What the, I think the biggest worry here is to do it right.- Right.- As you know, in any country we have data privacy laws for students in the U.S. it's FERPA and COPPA. In Utah, we have more laws on top of that that are localized, that are really important and need to be very deeply respected. But in order to get to a place where we understand how AI can affect assessment and achievement, and whether or not that information, or those test scores are actually, you know, kind of system wide, or if they're only localized to a classroom, you really have to have systems that enable researchers. As we know right now, as of recording, this conversation is only about two years and eight months old. And that's not a lot of time for research cycles to get do mass studies on these. And so that's something that we as systems workers, it's something I pay deep attention to, we have a collaborative here in the state of Utah that is our higher end institutions, our workforce folks, our Utah systems of higher ed.- [Dr. Emma Zone] Yeah.- Our K-12 team members, and then also some for-profit non-profits. And then we also have, you know, groups from like Stanford and MIT and University of Chicago on board as well. And basically what we're trying to do is figure out how to leverage AI and AI adjacent tool sets to help speed up that research process.- Yeah.- Not just for education, but across governance. Right now we're looking at some things with synthetic data and some of the work that may be interesting in that area, but we really have to, if we want to get to a place where teachers can more effectively use data, we have to understand how AI actually affects student achievement and student growth.- Mm-hmm.- And that takes, I think it's gonna take another couple years before we get there.- Yeah, for sure. Well, there's a theme, right? You're talking about, again, this is not a problem to be solved just within one system. There has to be that cross sector, cross-functional approach if we want to do it right. So, appreciate that for sure. You know, we're getting to the end of our time, so before we sign off, I always like to ask our guests for any words of wisdom for our listeners, you know, or a message that you wanna impart to those listening who might be interested in some of the topics that we covered today.- Yeah. I've been thinking about this one for the whole conversation. I think the biggest thing for me is listen more than you talk, there's so much going on with this conversation, but then an education in general, and you've got a lot of competing interests.- Mm-hmm.- And so if you sit and listen to people and try to understand their perspectives, you're gonna be in a much better positioning than if you spend most of the time chatting.- Right.- Or talking. And so that's been something that I really try to do here in my work is listen more than I talk. The other thing that I would say is words of wisdom is always look to your local community, ask them questions, see what they need, what are the worries that they're having, and try and do your best to respond to those, because I think that's going to pay a lot of dividends down the line as well.- Right, love that. Good advice whether you're talking about AI or not, right?- Yep.- So, thanks. Thank you Matthew, so much. This was such a great conversation. To learn more about Matt and what he and Utah are up to, you can check out schools.utah.gov. And thanks again so much for being here and being a part of the conversation, Matt, we really appreciate it.- Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Emma.- Of course. And 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 of course, subscribe to the D2L YouTube channel. You can also sign up for the Teaching and Learning studio email list for the latest updates on new episodes and masterclasses. And if you like what you heard, remember to rate, review, and share this episode. And please remember to subscribe so you never miss what we've got in store. You've been listening to "Teach and Learn" a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L. 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