Reimagining Education with Technology (Google Cloud Next '17)

[MUSIC PLAYING] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: It takes more than good tools. It takes someone who can tell good stories. SPEAKER 2: Who can simplify the complicated. SPEAKER 3: Experiment with the expected. SPEAKER 4: Inspire the uninspired. SPEAKER 5: Explore the unexplored. SPEAKER 6: Excite the boring. Engineer new hands-- hands that wave hello. SPEAKER 7: Mentor the mavericks. SPEAKER 8: Make sense of the nonsensical. SPEAKER 9: Connect with cultures far away-- SPEAKER 10: --wh

ile staying close to those nearby. SPEAKER 11: It takes more than tools to make a classroom special. SPEAKER 12: It takes a teacher. [END PLAYBACK] RAJEN SHETH: All right. Well, thank you all for coming today. My name is Rajen Sheth, and I'm director of product management for Chrome and Android in business and education. And we want to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing here at Google in education. And so the video that we just showed was something that we produced last year. And re

ally, what we've been keying in on is it really does take a teacher. It takes a teacher to really make a difference. And so one of the things that I love about conferences like this is I get to meet people from various different walks of life, various different geographical areas, different age groups, all kinds of different things. All of us-- one thing that we all have in common is that we were kids at one point in time. We all went to school. We all had great teachers that influenced our live

s. And so what I asked you to do is to think back to that time. Think about a great teacher-- somebody that actually made a difference for you, that has actually impacted what you've ended up doing in your career. So for me, my favorite example is a guy named Robert Thomason, who you see here. And there's a picture of me that's a little bit younger than what I am right now. And Mr. Thomason was my fifth and sixth grade teacher back in Colorado. And he came into my life at a very important junctu

re. When I was in about fourth grade, I had a lot of potential, but I was not showing that potential whatsoever. You know, I was failing tests, I was skipping homework assignments, I was getting bad grades. And everybody was worried. My parents were worried, my teachers were worried, I was worried. I was wondering, could I cut it at school? Would I have the interest in school to be able to do well? And then Mr. Thomason came in, and he changed my view of what education and what teaching is all a

bout. So I'll give you some examples. Rather than just doing multiplication tables, Mr. Thomason came in with a box of staplers. And he handed us these staplers and he said, hand these out to friends of yours or to your family, and ask them what they think about it. Get data about do they really like it? Do they like it a little bit? which one do they prefer? And then come back with that data. And so we used that to analyze data and try to figure out who liked what, and be able to learn math in

that way. Rather than just teaching us about wildlife and about outdoor plants, we actually took a week-long camping trip in the Colorado wilderness. And so we went as a group and learned about how to navigate in an outdoor environment, and learned about animals, learned about plants firsthand. And then also got to learn about each other and really have a bonding experience. Rather than teaching us how to write a five-paragraph essay, Mr. Thomason had us write persuasive letters to figures that

we wanted to influence and to companies whose products we didn't like. And so in my case, I actually wrote letters to a presidential candidate-- at that time, Gary Hart-- and also wrote to our state senator, Tim Wirth. And then I also wrote to Wesson Oil Company because my mom's oil bottle was leaking in the cabinet, so I wrote them a strongly worded letter to complain about that. Amazingly, I got replies from everybody. I got a handwritten letter from Gary Hart, handwritten letter from Tim Wirt

h, and I got a stack of coupons from Wesson Oil who I'm sure was pretty amused that a 10-year-old was writing them about a leaky can. But these are things that have stuck with me to this day. And it's that kind of thing that has really inspired me to learn and inspired me to take learning into my own hands. And these are the kinds of things that we need to reimagine education. And so the title of this talk is a little deceiving. It's not about technology reimagining education, it's about educato

rs reimagining education. And how can we empower those educators to do great things with their kids to be able to then really reimagine education? And this is even more important now than it ever has been in the past, because a lot of the things that were important when I was growing up in terms of just getting knowledge into your head aren't nearly as important. So as an example, I had to memorize the list of all the presidents in the United States. And I can recite for you 1 through 45 who the

presidents are. However, what I realized later is that it wasn't important to know that Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. It's more important to know what exactly did he do? How did that impact the United States and the rest of history? What can we learn from that? Those are the kinds of things that are important. A lot of the rest of it we can now-- any of our kids can now pull out phones and look them up in three seconds, whereas for us, we'd have to go to a libra

ry to be able to look up that kind of information. These are the things that we need to start to teach. How do you use that knowledge as opposed to just the knowledge itself? And in fact, one of the interesting things we did is we actually worked with the Economist Group to talk to employers and try to figure out what types of skills do they see as really necessary to be able to succeed in the workplace? And these are the results that came back. And this is from senior executives of a lot of dif

ferent companies. The really interesting thing, if you look at the top five, and really almost all of it-- very little of it has to do with the knowledge that is in your head. All of it has to do with how you work with each other and how you use the knowledge in your head, and how do you actually create new knowledge? Things like creativity and critical thinking. Those are the kinds of things that we need to be teaching in schools, and those are the kinds of things that we need to really orient

our technology towards. So one big question that comes up is does technology really improve educational outcomes? And that really depends. You've seen studies which show that technology makes no difference. You've seen studies that show it makes a negative difference. Many, many that show that it makes a positive difference. And what I really think is it's asking the wrong question, because technology is not the driver here. It's about how you use that technology. And so we believe that technolo

gy is a tool, and used correctly, it can make amazing differences in the classroom. And so part of what I want to talk about today is how can you use technology to make a difference in the classroom, and what are some of the principles that you can adhere to? And then talk to you about how we're designing our technology to adhere to those principles, as well. And then finally, hear from a set of educators who are actually doing this and can tell you more about what they've seen. So at Google, we

have really been involved in education from day one. Google, if you look at it, was founded at Stanford University. Was google.stanford.edu for many years before it incorporated. It was started by two founders who were sons of college professors, and so it's really rooted in education. From the very first day when we had Google search, schools started using Google search, and that was a key tool in education and has been since the founding of Google. And then about 11 years ago, in 2005-- at th

e end of 2005, beginning of 2006-- we started to actually think about how can we improve the school? How can we help schools bring technology in? How can we help teachers? And that's when we launched G Suite for Education, which at the time was known as Google Apps for Education. It started with Gmail. That was the only app that we had. And then it has expanded to a variety of creative and collaborative applications. On top of that, then, we added Google Classroom, which is really kind of the mi

ssion control for all of this for a teacher, and lets them guide what's going on in the classroom in a much better way. And then we added Chromebooks. And one of the key problems that we heard from a lot of teachers was OK, great, I have all this technology, but how do I have my kids get access to this technology? If they can only use it one hour a week in the computer lab, it doesn't really make a difference. They need to be able to use it on a daily basis for me to be able to change curriculum

, and that's where Chromebooks really came in-- giving people an affordable, manageable, secure, and shareable way to bring computing into the classroom. And we've gone beyond that with things like Google Expeditions, making it so that you can have virtual reality experiences, and visit a far-off land while sitting in a school in California. Those kinds of experiences are now possible with the technologies that we have. And we're going to continue to innovate to make things better for teachers.

Now, to figure out how to best impact education, one of the things we did was actually took a step back from this to try to really figure out the kinds of principles that we want to be able to foster. And so we actually worked with the Columbia University Teacher College to try to figure out what are some of the characteristics of really successful schools, or schools that are using technology in a great way, or schools that are just succeeding in one way or another? And can we boil it down to a

set of principles? And we came up with four principles that came out of that research. So the first thing is that learning should be personalized and measured. If you tailor the learning to the needs of the individual, they will be able to learn better, as opposed to just teaching the same thing to everybody in the classroom. And that's an easy concept to understand, but it's hard to actually do. If you're teacher and you have 30 students in your classroom, it's very hard to differentiate the l

earning to every single kid, but this is where technology can help. In addition to that, learning should be measured. And so we think about measurement in a lot of cases as high-stakes assessments that happen at the end of every year. Measurements should be going on on a constant basis, and really, to give feedback to the student about what they're good at, what they need help with, where they can move forward-- those kinds of things. And then feed that back into the education and tailor the edu

cation even more to their needs. So great example we saw of this is Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. And so Charlotte-Mecklenburg is one of the largest school districts in the United States-- 140,000 students. And they went one to one with Chromebooks, so all of their students now have Chromebooks. And they've been able to see amazing things that have happened in terms of how they can actually now get personal with learning now that they have Chromebooks. And so for example, they now have digital

classes that students can use if they fall behind in something or if they need to understand something a little bit more. Or they can do live one-on-one sessions when they need it to be able to interact with the teacher when they need help. Those kinds of things. So a student that's a little bit behind can catch up. They also came with this idea of the genius hour. So students that were ahead and that were feeling bored-- they can get a Chromebook and they can go and research anything that they

wanted to research, and then be able to go and present that back to the class as part of this genius hour. So amazing things like that you can only do now that you have technology in the classroom. Since they started implementing technology, they saw their graduation rate increase from 70% to 90%. And a lot of that they credit to the amount of engagement that they now see that students have with school in general. Second principle is that learning should be collaborative and diverse. And what we

mean by that is that students need to learn how to work together, and they also need to learn how to absorb diverse viewpoints and reconcile that together. And this is something, again, where we think that technology can really, really help. An example of that is McKinnon Secondary School in Australia. What they were able to do is now that they had technology there, they were able to bring in collaborative tools with things like Google Docs, things like Google Classroom. Students were starting

to use that to ask questions of each other, and help each other with homework. They would comment on each other's documents and help each other get better at writing documents. And the teachers can actually go in and comment on the document while the student is writing it to give them real-time feedback. That kind of feedback is something where they can now start to work with each other and bring it and accept a lot of diverse viewpoints. And they're a very diverse school district, so they were

able to actually bring in multiple viewpoints as a result of that. The third principle is that learning should be project-based and self-managed. And so if you give students ownership of the learning, that learning will stick in a much better way. I told you about the examples that I had, about writing letters to senators and presidential candidates. I remember that because I took ownership of that. That was something that was mine. And so those are the kinds of lessons that really, really matte

r. An interesting statistic we saw is that it is very likely the vast majority of people that are graduating from college right now will end up down the line some time in a career that doesn't exist today. What that means is that what they learned in college will be somewhat valuable, but they're going to have to learn more and more on the fly to be able to do what they need to do. And so that skill of being able to manage your own learning is really, really critical. An example we saw of this i

s in Maine Township High School in Chicago. There's a set of kids there that started what they call the Chrome Depot. So they were able to actually create their own little business to be able to help kids with Chromebooks and help kids with technology. They did this all on their own. They started, as you can see, an actual physical place that kids could come to. And what happened is that they had to learn a lot of things that nobody could actually come and tell them. They couldn't go to a teache

r to learn how do you repair a Chromebook, or how do you do x, y, and z with a such-and-such tool? They had to learn that, and they ended up becoming the experts, even more so than their teachers. That kind of learning is the kind of thing that will stick with them now for a very long time. And the fourth principle is that learning should be conceptual and experiential. Back to the example of the list of presidents-- it's not about the knowledge, it's about what you do with that knowledge. How y

ou take that knowledge and create concepts about that, and how do you experience it? So an example we saw of that is [? Olou ?] school in Finland. What they wanted to do is teach their kids about Africa. And so I think about how I learned about Africa. I learned about it as a map with a bunch of countries, and learned a little bit about a few of the countries here and there. What they did is they actually had their kids plan out a trip to Africa. So the kids could figure out a country that they

wanted to go to, they would have to research that country using the Chromebooks that they had in the classroom, and plan out a trip itinerary. And then they could actually take the trip using Google Expeditions and actually experience that country, be able to go there and see what that was like. That kind of experience gives them a much better idea of what Africa is all about, and lets them start to not just have that knowledge, but also bring it to concepts. So then given this, how do we design

technology for schools to make it such that we can adapt to these kinds of environments and help these kinds of environments? So one of the first things that we've been realizing, especially over the last year, is that we need to design for versatility. How we think, for example, a device is going to be used is maybe not how it's going to be used, especially as students try to do things by themselves. As many of you know, when we first released Chromebooks, they were released as laptops. And mo

st of the Chromebooks out there are essentially in a laptop form factor. But we've been asked by students and by teachers to do all kinds of things with these devices-- everything from turning them into tablets to turning them into notebooks to turning them into books to turning them into microscopes, for example, or turning them into virtual windows into a virtual world-- those kinds of things. And so one of the things that we just did is we released a whole set of Chromebooks that are converti

ble and that are versatile to be able to turn them into a tablet, a notebook, a textbook, and whatever you need it to be. So it folds over, you're able to turn it into a full tablet. You have a stylus with it so you can be able to write on it and do all kinds of things. The hardware is part of that, but then you also need to design for versatility in terms of the software itself. And so one thing that we recently released is the ability for Chromebooks to run all Android apps. And so now, you ca

n run apps from the Google Play Store, and be able to get access to a whole host-- millions-- of applications that can do all kinds of interesting things, especially for education. And so that has really made it so that these devices can be used for even more scenarios than we would have ever dreamed of. The next thing is that we design to empower. How do we empower students and empower teachers to do great things? One of the first examples of this was Google Docs. We knew that for decades stude

nts and teachers collaborate on documents, and that people try to collaborate on papers. And when I was in school, that was I write a paper, take that piece of paper, hand it to my teacher, they mark it up, and hand it back to me. What we now have is the ability, of course, to be able to collaborate in real time. And that makes it so that you can collaborate with students from student to student or student to teacher in a much more seamless manner. By designing that as a core principle of the pr

oduct, we make it so that the product itself is more powerful and fosters that collaborative nature. We're also now starting to make things even more personal. An example of this is Google Classroom, where we now can send you a personal alert, and send personal alerts to parents, as well, about what the child has been doing and how they're doing. What are things that are up on tap for next week? What were the activities for them this week? Those kinds of things. And be able to give them a better

sense of their own personal agenda. And then we're now even taking that a step further and starting to incorporate machine learning. And we're really just at the cusp of this, and there's a lot more that I think we can do. But an example of this is adding superpowers to spreadsheets. And what I mean by that is you have a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers-- how do you actually draw concepts from those? So now we have the ability to actually ask Google a question about that spreadsheet, and the

n be able to figure out answers. So for example, you can ask, in this case, is there a correlation between age and dexterity? And it'll actually look at the spreadsheet and look at the data and be able to give you back an answer. This is useful for students in a lot of ways to draw concepts out of data. It's also useful for teachers. If a teacher, for example, uses Google Forms to be able to do these ongoing assessments, they can use that to draw concepts and draw conclusions about are there con

cepts that they're missing, or the whole class is missing, or a certain set of people are missing? Those kinds of things you can now start to do because of machine learning. And last but not least, we design for scalability. We talked about access, which is a key thing. How do you get access to this technology to every single student, and make it so that they have that technology available? That's not an easy thing to do. You know, it's all about how do you get devices out to these students? How

do you actually maintain those devices? How do you make sure you don't turn your teaching staff into IT support when you do that? And those are principles we really designed Chromebooks around. When we designed Chromebooks, we really wanted to take a step back and make it so that we were designing something that was really, kind of, taking computing to the next level. So we made it simple so that anybody can pick it up and use it without any instruction. We made it affordable so you can finally

get a computer starting at $200. We made it secure. We turned the security model on its head and added manageability as a key part of this such that you're able to manage the device and make sure that your users have a secure experience. And one last thing, which we didn't realize was critical at the beginning but was critical, is sharability. I can pick up any Chromebook and log into it and get all of my applications, all my data, everything, in seconds. So what that means is you can have a ca

rt of Chromebooks. 30 students can walk into that classroom, pick up a Chromebook, log in, and start to do their work within seconds. The next class walks in, they do the same thing. And so with 30 Chromebooks, you could then serve 180 students all throughout the day as more students walk into that same classroom. Those kinds of concepts make it so that you can start without having to go full one to one with these devices. So I started with talking about the past, and before I bring up the educa

tors, I want to talk a little about the future. So these are my two kids. [INAUDIBLE] is my older daughter. She's seven years old. And [INAUDIBLE] is my younger son. He's four. And so as many of us do, we try to describe what we do at work to my kids. So I try to tell them. They mostly think I just go to meetings all day, which is actually true. But one day, my daughter came home from school and she said, Daddy, do we have a Chromebook? I want to log in with my Google Apps account. And I was jus

t absolutely shocked and thrilled all at the same time because that was my entire career right there. So as I started to explain this to her, she was like, yeah, whatever, just get me the Chromebook so I can start doing what I want to do. And so I gave her the Chromebook, and she logged in and she started to do all kinds of things. She uses technology like i-Ready to start to learn more about English and math. She uses technologies like Newsela to have a kid's view on latest news. A variety of o

ther types of programs, things like Raz-Kids, to be able to have access from home to a massive library of content. Things like that that she wants to do. She wants to come home and she wants to do these kinds of things, and that kind of engagement and that kind of love of learning is the kind of thing that's going to carry her really far. Actually, last weekend, [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] were talking, and [INAUDIBLE] said something and [INAUDIBLE] said something, and she said, [INAUDIBLE] I'm

using the literal meaning of that, not the figurative meaning. And so [INAUDIBLE], being four, kind of looked at her strangely and went off and played with his trucks. But then I asked her, how did you know that? Where did you learn that from? Because she's in first grade. She said, oh, I learned it from i-Ready. So these are the kinds of things she's able to pick up on her own now, and move at her own pace. And so those kinds of things are the types of tools we're going to be able to give the n

ext generation of students, and give them a much better experience than what we had. So with that, I'd like to actually have you hear from a set of educators that are really doing this. So I'd like to bring up Roland Antoine, who's the deputy chief of technology for Dallas Independent School district. He has a masters in educational psychology and has been in education in Texas since 2005-- first as a teacher, then as an assistant principal, and then he's moved into technology, and now he leads

the Dallas ISD, Information Technology Department. One of the things he did is he headed the ETE, Elementary to Engineers initiative, to actually start to put computer science into the early grades. And I want to introduce David Vannasdall, who is superintendent of Arcadia Unified School district. He has a doctorate in urban education leadership, and became an educator in 1992 in Cincinnati to start off with, then moved to Arcadia in 2005, and is now the superintendent there. He's also helped la

unch AUSD's annual Arcadia Innovation Summit, which brings together schools from a variety of different places in California to have free professional development. And so we wanted to bring them up to actually talk about how they're using technology in the schools. So thank you very much for coming. Just to start off with, it would be great to get an overview from you about your districts. Just tell us a little bit about the context of your district. DAVID VANNASDALL: All right. I'll start off.

From Arcadia Unified School District. And we have about 10,000 students, TK through 12. We're located right at the foothills of the beautiful San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. We are an affluent neighborhood, which comes with some very high expectations on the school district. Most of our students are hoping to get into the Ivy League schools. ROLAND ANTOINE: So Dallas Independent School District. Now, how do I describe that? We're an urban school district. We have between staff and

students-- I like to describe it as, like, a city. So when I talk to people about it, we have 180,000 inhabitants of the city that I like to talk about as Dallas ISD. And the reason why I do that is because if you were to put us on a scale of cities in the state of Texas, we'd be in the top 20 based on population. So when we think about things, we have to think about scale in a very interesting manner. In our city, we're K-12, have very diverse populations, OK? Mostly low socioeconomic. That mea

ns free and reduced lunch. So there are also some significant economic challenges that we have to deal with. RAJEN SHETH: And so Roland, you know, you're from a very large urban school district, very diverse population, and in that, how do you reimagine education, and what are some of the challenges that you've hit? ROLAND ANTOINE: Well, as part of a new leadership team-- and we're, like, barely a year old-- our first major imperative is resource equity. And for us, that means meaningful access

to technology for everybody everywhere, because in a city that large, you might miss some things and miss some people. The reason why those things are important is for two reasons when it comes to students. First of all, that every student have access to technology as a tool, because those are the things that we currently use in, you know, post-secondary education and in work environments. The other one, and I believe this one to be as important, if not more important, is access to technology as

subject matter. What I mean by that is areas like computer science, like robotics, like engineering, that involves that. Part of what we did in 2015 is we rolled out computer science into every middle school in the district. So if you're a student in Dallas ISD, by the time you have exited eighth grade, you will have taken at least coding or robotics at some level. Next year, we will be pushing it down into elementary school so that we can actually notch up the level in middle school. The reaso

n why that's important is because in a large urban school district, students may not ever encounter those learning experiences. And if we don't do that, there won't be anybody to go to this conference in 2027. DAVID VANNASDALL: That's a good point. RAJEN SHETH: Well, we appreciate that. And David, you know, you're from a very high-performing school district here in California. Similarly, what's your approach to transformation? DAVID VANNASDALL: Rajen, we had to start by grieving some things that

have been very important to education for over 100 years. The first one was we had to recognize that we're no longer the experts. Obviously, our students can now Google anything. That's more information than a teacher has. The second one was that we're no longer in control of the learning. In fact, we realize that some of our students were learning in spite of us. So we were disrupting their learning between the hours of 8:00 and 3:00. And the last one was that students are no longer motivated

by grades. They sincerely want to have a purpose and a passion for the work they do, and they're looking to have a voice. And they're finding that voice outside of school, unfortunately, and we had a desire to help them find that voice and get a voice, and so we call that a device. You can call it a device for whichever you go with, but that's actually the source for students to perform, to publish, to author. And so we went one to one over a three-year rollout. And although we call it one to on

e, our students-- like many of you, it's, like, four to one, because you have one in your pocket and a tablet, et cetera. So that's why we also, at the same time, rolled out the G Suite for Education for everyone. It's our LMS because we recognize that kids are going from one device to the next all over campus, space, and place, and so it was just seamless for them to interact with their peers. RAJEN SHETH: That's great. Well, for both of you guys, what are some examples of transformation that y

ou've seen, and where have you seen this actually work? DAVID VANNASDALL: I'll jump in on something that was just very exciting to witness myself-- we had a student that, after his junior year last year, decided to go back to China and spend some time help taking care of his aging grandparents. And while he was there, he became increasingly frustrated with the fact that three times a day, he had to spend at least a half hour dispensing medication for his grandparents-- fumbling around with the b

ottles, these pills you give once a day, these twice a day, three times a day. And he couldn't leave during the day because he had to be there to do that. So he came back to school and decided that he was going to commit his maker space and genius hour time-- and, of course, having the ability to collaborate with G Suite, he decided to invent and create a dispensary for medication that could be done over Wi-Fi on an app. And he was able to create a prototype, and actually get it to market. We'll

see where it goes. But that's that source of passion that it started from. It was a desire to have a profound impact on the community. And obviously not just his grandparents, but we believe it's going to save a lot of people, as well. RAJEN SHETH: That's amazing. Very cool. Roland, how about you? ROLAND ANTOINE: So for this illustration, I'm going to take you to a second grade classroom I recently visited. And you don't really know what's the effect of some of the things that you do, kind of l

ooking for one thing, how that actually turns into something more interesting. So I was on the campus. I'm peeking into a second grade classroom, kind of watching what kids are doing. I like to do that. And so the way that we've set up the Chromebooks is where students are immediately taken to a Clever login page. So when they log into the Chromebook, we use Google as an identity provider. They go to the Clever login page, and then they just click an app and go. They never have to log in to anyt

hing ever again. So the reason I did that was to save instructional time-- a very notable objective. I'm watching a student, and they had just finished working inside a math curriculum app. And since they had some spare time in class, they immediately flipped over into code.org, which we actually have it available to all grade levels, but formally only in middle school, and starts working on an exercise I guess his teacher had allowed them to start working on. And so this kid has moved from math

ematics to coding, and the reason why that's significant is because this student, a second grader, first of all, is learning how to iterate at a very early age. Whenever you start working with students in those populations, failure becomes this silent killer of any type of curiosity, because everything's a test, everything's a grade, everything is something that either I pass or fail. The other thing is he now has been exposed to something that he would not otherwise be exposed to. So his view o

f what the possibilities of his life are vastly different from the student who never encounters that. He knows of a very different universe where he can create and do things that other second graders in some other school district probably aren't even aware of, especially if you're in an urban area, like the area where that school was. RAJEN SHETH: That's amazing. And you bring up a very good point about the concept of failure. That you almost need to teach that failure is OK and that you need to

learn from that. And that brings me to my next question, is that how do you actually measure the impact of some of these things? Because traditionally, a lot of that has been done with test scores. But how do you measure things like that? How do you measure impact? DAVID VANNASDALL: One of the things that I'm not proud of is in education for way too long, we've been defining learning as just the acquisition of knowledge, you know? How much knowledge can we jam in their head, and usually store i

t in silos-- math, science, et cetera. What we know now is learning is what takes place-- well, I should say authentic learning is what happens when knowledge intersects with application. But it happens at a point of intrinsic motivation, right? That's that purpose. There's a passion there. And I'll give you a quick example. I gave you the example of the student that did the app, and that has a lot of technology involved, but here's one that's as important. I was visiting a student in the hospit

al-- actually, a student's parents in the hospital-- from our district. And visiting with the family, and there's a knock at the door. And two kids come in-- they didn't know me, I didn't know them-- but they were carrying violins. And they asked the family if they could play the patient's favorite song. Now, the patient was asleep. They shared the favorite song with the students. They didn't know that song, and they said, we'll be back on Wednesday. So they went back and they learned and they m

astered and they worked on this song. And they came back on Wednesday, and the patient was awake, and they played the song beautifully. It brought a smile to this lady's face, probably in one of the lowest points in her life. That wasn't for a grade. It was not a motivation to be best in the class. It was truly to take the knowledge and their love of music, master a song that was important to someone, and then deliver it. And that's where learning is, and that's the project base, that's the moti

vation that we're trying to tap into. So you can't measure that quantitatively, but we're trying to figure out how to measure it, because that's where we're headed. RAJEN SHETH: That makes sense. ROLAND ANTOINE: We actually have a couple of ways of running at that. So we do use BrightBytes Clarity. That's our quantitative measure, because as we kind of move along this path, we want to be able to kind of look at how things progress for individual schools so if we do need to consider different way

s of approaching things or different directions to point people in, we can do that. The reason that we are doing things the way we are is so that we can be very flexible with the model of implementation at each individual school. Now, the qualitative measures, which are actually a little bit more fun. So every year, we have this thing called STEM Day. And inside that, we have this little competition called Tech Fest where students submit projects. And I'm a judge. The last couple of years, most

of them have been interesting videos, slide presentations, things of that nature. So as I'm going through the electronic submissions, all of a sudden I start running into animations built using Scratch. And understand these are coming from fifth graders. So I'm now beginning to see this a very different approach to using technology in this exercise. And then a couple of other fun things. The first year of our robotics program, we had one of our [INAUDIBLE] teams go to nationals, which was a huge

surprise to them. And we had two of our VEX robotics team also go to national competitions. And that's just after one year. One of the VEX is actually an elementary school team. RAJEN SHETH: Wow. That's amazing. Well, so what's next for you? What are you thinking about in terms of you've gotten this far. What more do you want to do? DAVID VANNASDALL: One of the things that has getting me up early right now every morning is big data. I think the first big jump we had was letting go of the knowle

dge, and the next one was letting go of the learning-- putting that in the hands of kids. The next one is really using big data to drive our decisions. And so just an example. We have an incubator group on one of our campuses that is currently using Prediction API to do virtual schedules for a student before they even show up at the school. And we can optimize their learning environment by knowing that they're not going to be successful with that class and that teacher. Just an example of what w

e're doing. However, there's a lot of ethical dilemmas that come with that in the field of education, because if I know that information, what is my obligation at that point to make those changes? And does our structures support those changes at this time? Some big hurdles. We have to answer them, though, because we have this data. This isn't in the future. This is right now. The field of education has more data points, I think, than any other field, and we just need to harness them. RAJEN SHETH

: How about you, Roland? ROLAND ANTOINE: Well, as I said, we're a new leadership team, and so this imperative of resource equity-- we still have a good ways to go. We're working hand-in-hand with our school leadership division to ensure that by the time we get around to August of this year, our campuses are in a position to where that is not an issue anymore. So that's the first stage of that. And I just got an email after we spoke earlier that our initiative for pushing computer science into el

ementary is going before our board, like, tomorrow. RAJEN SHETH: Great. DAVID VANNASDALL: I'll add, too, if you don't mind real quick-- Vision API. This is one of the things that just made so much sense to us when it was brought to us, is that every one of our kids is sitting in front of a camera all day long, whether it's their phone or it's the device, the laptop. So, you know, harnessing the strength of Vision API for a teacher. They can only look at one student at a time, but knowing the emo

tions that is going on across the classroom and being able to be alerted to that and intervene before a behavior even happens-- I mean, imagine that. And we have that technology right now. So just being able to go to scale with it and use it is very, very exciting. RAJEN SHETH: Yeah, definitely. DAVID VANNASDALL: And I'm hoping someone out there is going to take our big data and use TensorFlow to just do some dynamic things. RAJEN SHETH: Well, so last question for you is that, obviously, you hav

e the technology that's there, but you have a lot of constituents. You have the students, the teachers, the parents, the community. How do you bring everybody along on this journey? ROLAND ANTOINE: Very carefully. There's a lot of communication that has to occur, because you're not only talking about students and teachers and administrators, but, of course, you're talking about board members in a large district. Everything can become political, so you have to be able to communicate very clearly

about things. Also being able to demonstrate some victories-- again, like robotics competitions; again, places where people can encounter students actually doing the things that you're trying to explain to them verbally. That's how you do that. RAJEN SHETH: Makes sense. DAVID VANNASDALL: Yeah, the more school increasingly looks different than when parents were in school, we have to do more and more to educate parents and bring them along. It scares them. All of these transitions-- the kids are m

ore fluent on the technology than they are. I believe schools are having to work as hard to educate parents and bring them along as students. And for us, the data, the big data-- and this is just in here, right? So no one-- you know, it scares our parents. It completely scares them when you start talking about sharing their data and using it. But I think if we bring them in and share with them how we're using it and the amount of predictions that we can make that's going to increase and optimize

their student's learning, I think they'll be right there with us. But we have to do a better job of bringing them along. RAJEN SHETH: That makes sense. [MUSIC PLAYING]