What It Really Means to Be an AI-Ready Graduate with Richard Culatta of ISTE+ASCD

As CEO of ISTE+ASCD, Richard Culatta focuses on shaping innovative learning leaders. He previously served as Rhode Island's Chief Innovation Officer and was appointed by President Obama to lead the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology. His book, Digital for Good, helps create conditions for healthy tech use.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode

1. Why being “AI-ready” is about human skills—not technical ones
2. How AI can deepen learning, not just make education more efficient
3. Why questions are becoming more valuable than answers in the classroom
4. What role educators should play as AI reshapes teaching and assessment
5. How schools can model healthy, ethical, and empowering AI use for students

✨ Episode Highlights
[00:03:00] Richard Culatta introduces the Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate—and why none of the skills are technical
[00:05:35] Using AI to deepen learning rather than just speed things up
[00:07:59] How AI makes long-promised ideas like project-based and personalized learning finally practical
[00:10:57] Teaching in a world where questions matter more than answers
[00:13:49] Reframing digital citizenship around what students should do—not just what to avoid
[00:20:22] Why schools and edtech companies must communicate the why of technology to parents
[00:29:25] Culatta’s call to raise the bar on student experience and joy in learning

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Richard Culatta: In a lot of schools, AI sort of, I don't know. It feels like it's like the new CS course, right? Like we used to teach Python and now we teach like AI. Yeah, cool. Like that's great. But like I want the English teacher to be the champion for AI. I want the music teacher and the art teacher and the civics teacher to be champions for AI.

Like I think when we have that understanding that AI is really far more powerful. In those non-technical skill areas, then we'll start to really take advantage of the value for learning.

[00:00:34] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. 

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And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoy today's pod.

EdTech Insider listeners, we have a very special episode for you today. The one, the only Richard Culatta, CEO of is ISTE+ASCD is joining us today. Now, for those of you who know Richard from the main, main stage at ISTE, he's actually a great down to earth guy coming from your living room here. Where are you dialing in from 

[00:01:36] Richard Culatta: Virginia, right here at home in Virginia.

[00:01:38] Ben Kornell: At home in Virginia. So you're gonna get up close and personal with Richard. Now, those of you who don't know about is ISTE+ASCD. You've gotta get out from under the rock that you're living in the work we're gonna talk about today. But it's really focused on shaping innovative learning leaders, working with teachers, schools, districts, and ultimately helping shape education for the better for the future.

He previously served as Rhode Island's Chief Innovation Officer and was appointed by President Obama to lead the US Department's Education Office of Ed Tech. His book, digital for Good helps create conditions for healthy tech use. Welcome to the pod, Richard Culatta. 

[00:02:18] Richard Culatta: Oh, thank you. It's good to be here. You make me sound far more impressive than I am.

I'm just really excited to talk to you, Ben. 

[00:02:22] Ben Kornell: I mean, I remember the first time I saw you and it was like 40,000 people. It was in Philadelphia at one of the ISTE conferences, and so it is always such a joy to get a little bit more one-on-one time. So let's talk a little bit about ISTE and one of the big pushes that ISTE has undertaken really over the last decade was.

A profile of a future graduate, and now it is really morphed to profile of an AI ready graduate. Can you tell us what that looks like? What skills or dispositions you believe are most essential for students to thrive? This AI infused future. 

[00:03:00] Richard Culatta: Yeah, so we love these Portrait of a graduates, right? Because we love the idea that it's stating the skills that we want, right?

The end goals. And they're about the type of people that we want to have come outta schools. And so we love that. We've been big supporters of that for a very long time. What we recently came out with Ben, as you mentioned, is what we're calling a profile of an AI ready graduate. And so this is saying, all right, what are the skills that we want students to have?

To thrive in an AI world when they graduate. Now, the interesting thing, if you notice them, if you look at 'em, you go find 'em where they're online, just search profile of an AI ready graduate, they'll come up. None of them are tech skills. They are things like being an effective learner, being a good researcher, being a problem solver.

Being a storyteller, right? These are the elements. But in order to thrive in this AI world that we're in. We believe that students will need to know how to use AI to help them do those very important human tasks. And that's where I think we're getting a little wrapped around the axle, my friend, we can talk about this if you want, but there's so much talk about AI, what is AI and how does it work, and what is an LLM and all that sort of stuff.

And I think we're missing the more important point, which is how do we model using AI to help students be better at being human? And that's the part that we're trying to help get front and center with this profile of an AI ready graduate. 

[00:04:23] Ben Kornell: Yeah. With any competency model where you're trying to create that profile of a graduate, you're moving your educators away from what they're teaching to really the skills or underlying competencies.

And because the AI future is so unpredictable, you really are going back to many of these sane, universal skills. Basically to navigate change, to navigate dynamic, complex, inter operational systems and communities. One of the things that stood out to me in the AI Ready Graduate is really about deepening learning, using AI to deepen one's understanding and learning, rather than this kind of efficiency play, which we're hearing a lot about AI, helping everybody be more efficient.

You take a little bit of a different tact and that also weaves into how you're talking at ISTE about AI literacy. So when you talk to districts, what steps should they be taking to embed AI readiness and decor learning experiences? Is it about efficiency and learning? You know, those hacks and tricks? Is it about deepening?

Is it a little bit of both? What's your advice? 

[00:05:35] Richard Culatta: Yeah. Oh, great question. I mean, look, I am glad that there are some ways we can use AI for efficiency purposes. Like, don't get me wrong, as a former teacher, I would've loved to be able to use AI back then to make some of the things I did more efficient. And that's true for students too.

There's a lot of stuff that we ask students to do. A lot of time. We ask students to spend on activities that really don't add a whole lot of value. And so if there's ways we can make that efficient, like I'm all in, and if we think that that is the power of AI, just making kind of what we've always done a little more efficient.

We're totally missing the opportunity here. And so what we really need to do is say, yeah, yeah, just find some efficiencies. Great. And let's really look at how we're using AI to change, how we're learning to change, how we can tackle problems in different ways to change how we can demonstrate what we've learned in schools.

We spend so much time having the demonstration of what we learned, the output be text, be something I've written. I'm all about writing. I love writing. I was a former language teacher, so I'm all about learning to write, but does everything that we need to do, does every assessment need to be something that is a written answer?

AI is allowing us to really rethink assessments in some exciting ways. It's also allowing us to show and to model how students can get unstuck. Right? Lot of time is spent with students not understanding something that they're reading because it's written at a level that's too high for them. Not understanding the instructions, not understanding how they're supposed to.

Pull something together because there's a concept maybe that they missed in a day. They were not there or they just didn't understand how the teacher was saying it. Those are all hurdles. Those are all barriers to student learning, and if we can teach students how to get unstuck, how to use AI to get unstuck, we set them up with a very powerful learning tool for their rest of their lives.

That's the thing that we need to spend more time modeling and, and I just worry, you know, back to your comment before, I worry that in a lot of schools AI sort of, I don't know, it feels like it's like the new CS course, right? Like we used to teach Python and now we teach like AI. Yeah, cool. Like that's great, but like.

I want the English teacher to be the champion for AI. I want the music teacher and the art teacher and the civics teacher to be champions for AI. Like I think when we have that understanding that AI is really far more powerful in those non-technical skill areas, then we'll start to really take advantage of the value for learning.

[00:07:59] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and there was a big movement around making learning visible. You know, I was in project based learning circles, and one of the challenge with project based learning is the amount of work the teacher has to do to set up the project. Yes, amount of assessment on project based learning is really hard and time intensive, so we have new technology that can really lower the barrier to creating authentic work.

And to assessing it. And for students it's this ability to authentically self-express, which we know not only does it demonstrate mastery, but also encourages engagement and connection. So of course, like it's actually one of the things I find so interesting is pedagogical theories and themes from the late seventies.

And like late eighties are actually now totally doable with the new technology. It's just we had the no child left behind in between. So everything's focused on input output, input output, input, output assessment. And so it is a really exciting time. 

[00:09:02] Richard Culatta: I love this point. So just before talking with you, I was on the phone with some friends from the Department of Education in Indiana and we were talking about how.

Personalizing learning, right. Was another one of those things that we were always so excited about customizing, learning that if I have a kid who, you know, really likes baseball or whatever it was in their class, you know, the idea as a teacher, I always wanted to be able to have an activity that just aligned with their interests.

Right. That's right. Right. But like project-based learning. When AI taught high school, 30 kids times, five periods a day, like that was just impossible. And now I can go in and in two seconds say, here's the standard that I'm teaching. Come up with an activity that helps make the point for a kid who really likes baseball.

Bam. And not only is it fast, it's better than the assessments that I've usually come up with on my own. And so I think that ability to, like you said, bring back onto the table. These ideas that were solid from a research standpoint, from a cognitive science standpoint, but because they were so impractical, kind of had to get shoved off to the side.

That's awesome. It's awesome. We can start pulling that stuff back and go, Hey, now we actually can do this. That we've always known is the right way to do it. It was just too hard. 

[00:10:06] Ben Kornell: Yeah, I mean, I think it's very common for us and those of us in this broader EdTech ecosystem to focus on the potential and be excited about it, but at the same time, we need to acknowledge that for many.

Ed tech or tech is something being done to them as an educator. And if you think about the Rogers adoption curve, we've got our innovators and our early adopters and they are fired up. But we've got early majority, late majority, and laggards who are really, really concerned and some of their concerns are are very valid.

Is education, technology being done to educators, to students, to schools, or with them. So can you talk a little bit about how you see the role of educators evolving now that AI is becoming more integrated? How does teaching and learning shift, what should the role of the teacher be in this shift? 

[00:10:57] Richard Culatta: Yeah, man, what a great question.

I think there's sort of two things that come to mind. First is to your point, how does the role of the teacher shift? And it is shifting, right? It's shifting from being the source of all information, right? Being the presenter of information to a co-learner, right? But a co-learner that adds real value in the sense that they can help.

Model and ask questions that can help guide the conversation in really powerful ways. Lemme say it this way, in education, we have always valued answers, right? Give me the answer, the answers. What gives you a point? The answers, what gives you the grade? Whatever it is. That's because we were in a world where answers were really valuable, right?

Questions were cheap. We are now in a world because AI can generate answers so quickly. Answers are very cheap. The value of answers has dropped. I'm not saying they're not important, but the value of them has dropped because they're available in such abundance and what is now becoming far more valuable.

Is questions, good questions, a question that demonstrates that you understand how to tease out the information you need. A question that helps you dive deeper in and be more curious. A question that drives AI in a way that is really valuable, but we have an education system that is still stuck on valuing answers.

And so the big shift I think that we're gonna have to figure out here is how do we help teachers and school leaders figure out that shift? To what teaching looks like in a world where questions are actually far more valuable than answers. 

[00:12:26] Ben Kornell: Yeah, it's fascinating and it does feel like, you know, we've almost come full circle back to Socratic education here, but the other kind of vector going on at the same time.

Is concerns about the ethics, responsibility, and empowerment of young people amidst the sea of changing technological resources. And to be fair, you've been a strong proponent of digital citizenship and understanding one's role and interplay with things like social media before YouTube, short form video.

So this is not new space to you, but AI introduces unprecedented risks. So while you've got these opportunities, it is also a challenge. And so in your book, digital for Good, which I love the title because it's digital for good meaning for the benefit of people, but also we've crossed the chasm, we're in it like we're in a digital world, let's make sure that we think that way.

And it really focuses on empowering students, but with a digital citizenship framework. So it really says like, we've gotta educate kids on how to navigate that. How do you think this changes now with everything we're seeing with AI companions, with deep fakes, with misinformation? Like what's your read of the landscape and what recommendations do you have?

[00:13:49] Richard Culatta: Well, I mean, it means we got a lot of conversations we need to be having with students, with the adults in the system, but particularly in this case, we need to be talking a lot about how are we just talking about these things, you know, in digital for good. One of the things I talk about is we tend to, in the education space, go first to lISTEng all of the don'ts, all of the things to not do with technology.

Right? Don't cheat and don't share your password, and don't be a bully, and all the don'ts. But one of the things that we know is that we learn much faster through the dos, right? What are the things we want to be practicing? Maybe just say it more bluntly. You can't practice not doing something. So if all we're doing is saying what not to do, we are never afforded the opportunity to practice doing the things that we need to be doing to be successful.

So I think that's just a really big piece of it, is we need to have conversations about. What does it look like? How do we frame this in a positive way? How can we say, how are we using AI and other technologies to help us be deeper thinkers? How are we using AI to help us be more creative and more curious?

How are we using AI to identify information that may be fake, right, that may not be real. And, and so I think those are just by sort of flipping that into the skills that we want to see, that we want to practice, that helps us be prepared to not be. Kind of taken advantage of by either fake news or fake information, or just distractions that aren't helpful for our learning process.

[00:15:18] Ben Kornell: And I think it also connects with this idea of real world relevance that ISTE often comes back to. We're not just preparing kids to be successful in the classroom, we're preparing them to successful in college, career and life. Yeah. And there's a way in which the digital skills, and especially with AI.

These aren't going to be lifelong skills that kids are going to need to hone as they get older. I think about my parents and what they're exposed to on Facebook and with AI, and they believe it all because they never had those foundational skills. So it's almost of societal importance. 

[00:15:55] Richard Culatta: Yeah, I think that's right.

And you know, if you think about that, back in, in not so recent past, there were times where on the radio, right, something would come out and it was, you know, there's the very famous war of the World's show, and everybody believed it. Right? Now somebody says on the radio, I, I'm not gonna believe that the aliens are invading because somebody says it on the radio.

Are you kidding me? Right. But that took some adapting and adjusting. I am not worried that we are going to fall apart completely as a society because we can generate fake images and fake videos. I am worried if we aren't talking about it and recognizing it and learning to say, Hey, just like we've learned in the past to recognize radio, then film, then stuff in writing that wasn't true when it became easier to manipulate.

We can also learn to recognize that for media created by AI. 

[00:16:42] Ben Kornell: And so there's personal things like AI companions. Is that the role of the teacher to talk about it? Is it the role of the parent? Is it both? And at what age should you start talking about these things? What guidance you give, particularly for like elementary learners, we wanna shelter them, but the data increasingly shows that kids are exposed to stuff by third, fourth, fifth grade that we would be shocked by.

So how do you think about who owns those conversations and what that needs to look like, especially with regards to some of these areas that don't just touch academics but actually touch personal life. 

[00:17:20] Richard Culatta: Yeah, I mean, look, the short answer is everybody, this is an all hands on deck, right? I often say digital citizenship is a team sport, right?

Everyone's gotta be in, parents have gotta be in, teachers have gotta be in school leaders have gotta be in companies, developers, solution providers have to be in government. Agencies that are looking at regulations need to be, we gotta be all, all in on this one. And so, so it does require everybody to be part of it.

What's interesting you, Ben, is that we hear a lot of misunderstanding about what the data shows and what is not helpful is actually having no engagement with technology. So banning technology, banning all access to technology is actually not helpful. To prepare a kid to be a healthy digital citizen.

Right now, what is also true is just handing, opening unfettered access to the internet, to devices that is also not helpful and dangerous. And we're, and we're seeing, and I think we're paying the price for how unprepared we were and, and blankly how, you know, bluntly how asleep at, at the wheel we were.

When social media was first coming on the scenes and just sort of handing full featured phones to kids, I've been an advocate to not do that for long before it became the popular thing to talk about. Right. But what we have to realize is, while we do want guardrails in place, we also want to be practicing and modeling how to use technology in healthy ways.

And so I think, you know, being able, particularly in schools, to show devices that are being used in ways that are distracting, sites that are not supporting learning. Yeah, they don't belong in school, but we are gonna practice how to use these technologies. To collaborate, how to use these technologies to research.

You can't go research anymore by going to a card catalog in a library. Show me a library that still has a card catalog. Right? It doesn't exist. So if we're saying we're not gonna use technology at all with kids, even younger kids, we're actually holding them back from being able to research and problem solve.

And that scares me. And so yes, we need controls in place. Yes. We need to be thoughtful about it. Yes, we need careful supervision in monitoring. But we also do need to be practicing with kids how to use technology to help them be problem solvers, help them be creators. And that nuance is hard to find right in, in the world.

We either wanna swing one way or the other. And so we had this move like. Unfettered access. Everybody gets technology. That's a bad idea. And so now I feel the swing to be like, whoa, let's ban every bit of technology everywhere. Also, a bad idea what we need to do. And it's, it's always the hardest thing to do is recognize that in the middle is where we really need to be.

We need to be in a place where we have protections, where we're using technology purposefully and, and we're making sure we're preparing kids for this world that they have to live and thrive in, which is a very digital world. 

[00:20:05] Ben Kornell: I totally agree with your point, and we've gotta find that balance and that nuance and technology is neither good nor bad.

It's really the use cases. And, you know, AI is just a great example of that. The extremely bad use cases are extremely bad, extremely great use cases are 

[00:20:22] Richard Culatta: extremely great. And Ben, can I add, add something to that? Just, just to follow on there? I also just want to say that the education community, including solution providers, and I know a lot of people that listen to your show are, you know, solution providers, building tools and apps and education.

We also need to recognize that we've done a pretty bad job of talking about technology, particularly to parents, right? I was at the school district the other day. They had some parents that were, they were pretty frustrated, you know, they were saying, we're gonna opt out of all tech use in the school and, and the school saying, oh my gosh, what do we do?

Like, these are core. This isn't just like frilly stuff. Like we are using technology to write and to, you know, read and write and learn. And I said, okay, you know, show me the communications that you've been sending to your parents. And they sent this just like confusing legal document that was like, this is where your kids' data will go.

And there was no why. There was no nothing inspiring me as a parent to want to engage in that sort of technology use. And you know, my response to them. I'd be out there demanding my kids off out too, if that's the communication you give. And so my recommendation for school leaders and for solution providers, if you're building tools and apps and education.

Make sure you keep the why. Very clear and very simple as you're talking to parents. The why for this is we want kids to be more creative. We want kids to love math. We want kids to be better humans. Whatever your why is, just be really clear about that and don't get caught up around the what and the how.

You know, some of you probably read Simon Sinek, start With Why, right? We always wanna talk about what we're doing. We always wanna talk about why you know how we're doing it, right? We often forget the why and nowhere is that more true than when it comes to EdTech. Yeah. Stop being excited about the features.

If you can't explain the why for why you have the app in the first place. 

[00:22:08] Ben Kornell: If you can't explain the why, then it's a great reason to put it down and not use it. 

[00:22:12] Richard Culatta: Yes. Maybe that's a sign you shouldn't be doing this, right? Yes. One of two things. Either you get your why or if you can't try to do something else, right?

Yeah, totally. Yeah. 

[00:22:20] Ben Kornell: No intentionality rules, and this is where. You know, I do feel like the idea that maybe, and I was a middle school teacher myself, sometimes I felt like an active, you know, decider in my classroom. Here's what we're going to do, here's the tools we're gonna use, and sometimes pass it.

Here's what the district wants me to do. And so, you know, in thinking about the educator role, you, you know, you're really focused on. Learning environments that prepare kids for the future. And a key vehicle to do that is to prepare educators for the future. And yet at your local school, you are doing food for a bunch of students that don't have meals.

You're doing childcare, you're making sure everybody is, their social emotional wellbeing is good. You've got your academic standards. And then on top of it, you've gotta have a discussion around. The societal challenges with AI, it's a lot to ask for educators. So can you talk a little bit about how do we prepare our educator workforce, and whether it's in educator prep programs or within exISTEng districts?

What advice do you have? And also do you have any shining lights of where it's working really well? 

[00:23:33] Richard Culatta: Yeah, great. Great question. So we do have to spend much more attention on making sure we're preparing our teachers. We have so many new teachers coming into the field. A lot of people are, you know, commenting on how many teachers have left the field in the, in the wake of, of COVID, which is true.

And, and that's, you know, sad to see. What we miss though is the other part of that story, which is that we have so many new. Educators coming in, and while they may not have as much experience as some of those who have left, what they bring is excitement, joy, energy. That is really awesome. So we wanna keep teachers as long as possible.

Yes, of course we do. And let's not forget that as, you know, as, as sort of leaders have left and teachers have moved up into those leadership roles, there are many more teachers coming in that are bringing this great, uh, energy with them. And I just love that. And we have to make sure that we are preparing them for the realities, to your point of the classrooms they're walking into, which are very different than the ones that they graduated from.

Right. And I think there's a number of ways to do that. We have a project that we call the Alliance for Innovation in Teacher Education. We call the EPP Alliance sometimes for short, the Educator Prep program. We work with 150 schools of education around the country, helping them. Build in these effective modeling of, of technology into their program.

So their teachers, when they come out already, we actually are gonna be releasing a new certification. So ISTE has our, our certification that we're very known for. We have thousands of, of educators around the world that have his decertification. We're going to be releasing a new version of that certification just for new teachers, for pre-service teachers and early teachers in order to help be able to reach them.

And so that's one of the ways that we're doing it. And to your point, Ben, we also have to make sure we're not so focused on the new teachers coming in, that we're not supporting educators that have been in the classroom for a while and still need help and support as we move into AI and other things that are changing.

And we have got to care about teacher training. Again, we, you know, not to plug isty, but I'm gonna plug iste. We have some really great opportunities. We have a whole suite of online courses related to using AI in really meaningful ways. We have some great events that we host and so. I hope that through participating in organizations like ISTE and others, we can actually get to a bit of a tipping point where we're feeling like we're kind of wrapping our arms around educators and making sure they have the support they need in ways that, you know, frankly, we haven't done a great job of in the past in education.

We gotta, we gotta correct that. We gotta get ahead of that. 

[00:26:02] Ben Kornell: Yeah, totally. So, let's talk a little bit about future Forward. What is the most exciting trend you see in that tech landscape right now that our listeners should keep an eye on? 

[00:26:12] Richard Culatta: Wow. I'm really excited about this idea of how we can personalize learning and empower students to really.

Care about what they're learning. In part, back to a previous thing that we were talking about because AI is making that easier. I care, you know, for a long time I was always a proponent of personalized learning, but in the past that always a big complicated systems that took millions and millions of dollars to purchase and, and, and it was all this sort of black boxy thing.

And now we're able to do, we're able to personalize learning much more simply just by using these, some of these off the shelf, you know, AI tools, 

[00:26:48] Ben Kornell: which is amazing. I'm there with you. I was CEO of Al school. Yeah, we had 50 engineers, eight data scientists, and we were using ad tech AI, which had a 40% accuracy rate, and it was just non-viable, like the massive amount of data you even need to make those systems approximate.

Like an assistant teacher was just mind blowing to us, and now here it is off the shelf available. It does kind of go back to this point that we were talking about earlier, where the old ideas are worth bringing off the shelf again because the technology is ready to meet the moment. 

[00:27:25] Richard Culatta: That's right. If you look at that, you can look at other examples of technology where that's happened in the past too, where you said, you know, there's a bunch of strategies for engagement and collaboration, sort of business strategies that were available before the internet and just were too cumbersome to pull off.

And then when the internet happened, you literally could pull those off the shelf and start to do things that, you know, the ideas were not new ideas, but the practicality of implementing it finally became. You know, made it a reality. And, and so we see that, and there's lots of technologies you can look at that's a familiar cycle.

We're really starting to see that with education, which, which I am, I'm just super excited about as we think about people who are building new tools and apps for education. The thing I hope, let, let me, let me say it this way, Ben, if it's okay, you what, what I'm seeing in trends, I'm gonna put one in that I, my hope for a trend, I wanna create a trend.

We go, here's what I wanna create. The movement starts today. We're, we're starting it right here. EdTech insiders. Here we go. I am excited. I'm gonna do everything I can this year to really help make this happen, to get a focus back on the user experience of school. I feel like the user experience, the student experience of school mm-hmm.

Has deteriorated significantly, particularly post COVID and school, you know, has gotten very serious. It's gotten very rigorous and we have not spent enough time asking, is this a great experience for the learner? And that's something that I think we need to pay attention to. And in particular, when it comes to the tools and apps that we're building.

Are they awesome experiences? Right? Don't tell me did they get the thing done? Did they bring joy to the learner? Did they bring excitement to the learner? Did they help really capture their imagination? That's what we need to be asking. We need to ask it in tech and non-tech parts of school, right? When I walk into a school building, if it, the decor makes me feel like I'm walking into a prison.

We got a user experience problem there. If I log into a math app and the, you know, the clunkiness of it makes me feel like I'm filling out a government form. We have a user experience problem there, and so we are gonna keep putting that front and center. We do something then, you know, called the Solution Summit every year, and it's the day before ISTE live before our conference.

And it's just for people who are building tools and apps and educations for solution providers. And one of the things that you're gonna hear us talking about there is how do we leverage the tools and apps that we're creating? To make a really amazing learning experience, not just to, not just to like, you know, do something more efficiently, not just to be a little fun, but like a deeply amazing learning experience.

We've just set the bar a little too low, and I think this is the year 2020. 2026 is the year to raise the bar on student experience. 

[00:30:03] Ben Kornell: Yeah, and I think if you had said that five years ago. It would've said, that's great, Richard. Love you for doing that. Good luck with that. But now we also see that AI tooling, and this was actually one of your very first points.

We end up focusing so much on the technical. But when we actually focus on the experiential, we open the aperture of who can be involved in designing that future. And AI as a technology is moving so quickly to require very little technical expertise to engage productively with it, at least at the base layer.

So when we think about what does the school design, whether it includes tech or doesn't include tech at the future level, there's so much more at the hands. The, the painter's palette here is way more robust than it used to be to design and create and imagine. So you know, as much as there's like these forces at work where there's this backlash that's happening and there's.

Tensions around binary, all in on AI or not in on AI. When you think about the opportunity to reimagine what teaching and learning looks like, there's really never been a more exciting time to be in education from my right. 

[00:31:21] Richard Culatta: I feel like that all the time. I, you know, again, I, I've said that even just earlier today when I was talking to.

But friends from, from Indiana, I just thought this is a great time to be in education. I know there's weird stuff going on. I know there's weird politics. I know there's, you know, funding issues. We gotta work through that stuff. We always do. I'm not trying to minimize that. I know that's real serious stuff, but.

Wow. What a cool moment to be in a time where we can really redesign what the future of learning looks like with some really powerful tools that we didn't have before. That's awesome. 

[00:31:49] Ben Kornell: Well, that is a great note to end on. If people wanna find more out about IST Live. I believe it's in Orlando this summer.

Yeah. Orlando on June 28th to July 1st. Where can they find out more about ISTE is live a SD. 

[00:32:03] Richard Culatta: I mean, you just go to our website, you can go to ist.org, you'll find a bunch there. Obviously, we also have our, our ASCD resources on ascd.org. We will be bringing those sites together soon, but you're welcome to check those out.

Uh, in particular though, as you mentioned coming up, we have these great events IST Live, which is our big event for educators, education leaders and solution providers. And then the day before we have Solution Summit, which is our sort of a, a, a smaller, uh, little more intimate event. Just for people who are really building the new tools and apps that are gonna shape the future world to hear what educators want, what they don't want to hear, what's working from people that are building tools that are being very widely used.

It's a great experience, so I hope, hope you all join us there. I wanna see you there, Ben. I'm excited to, to see what we can cook up together, but hope to see many, many people there this year. 

[00:32:48] Ben Kornell: Absolutely. Well, I'll be there and so will the EdTech community. Thanks so much. Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD .

Thanks for joining EdTech Insiders. 

[00:32:57] Richard Culatta: Thank you so much for having me. Good to see you, Ben.

[00:33:00] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.