Dec. 9, 2025
The Mission Behind Day of AI ft. Jeff Riley | My EdTech Life 347
In this episode of My EdTech Life, Jeff Riley breaks down the mission behind Day of AI and the work of MIT RAISE to help schools, districts, families, and students understand artificial intelligence safely, ethically, and with purpose.
Jeff brings 32 years of experience as a teacher, counselor, principal, superintendent, and former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education. His transition to MIT RAISE reveals why AI literacy, student safety, and clear policy matter more than ever.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome & Sponsor Shoutouts
01:45 Jeff Riley’s Background in Education
04:00 Why MIT RAISE and Day of AI
06:00 The Challenge: AI Policy, Safety & Equity
08:30 How AI Can Transform Teaching & Learning
10:30 Differentiation, Accessibility & Student Support
12:30 Helping Teachers Feel Confident Using AI
15:00 Leading AI Adoption at the District Level
18:00 What AI Literacy Should Mean for Students
20:00 Teaching Healthy Skepticism & Bias Awareness
23:00 Student Voice in AI Policy
26:00 Parent Awareness & Common Sense Media Toolkit
29:00 Responsible AI for America’s Youth
31:00 America’s Youth AI Festival & Student Leadership
34:30 National Vision for AI in Education
37:00 Closing Thoughts + 3 Signature Questions
41:00 Stay Techie
Resources Mentioned
Day of AI Curriculum: https://dayofai.org
MIT RAISE: https://raise.mit.edu
Sponsors
📚 Book Creator
🤖 Eduaide
🎓 Peel Back Education
Peel Back Education exists to uncover, share, and amplify powerful, authentic stories from inside classrooms and beyond, helping educators, learners, and the wider community connect meaningfully with the people and ideas shaping education today.
Authentic engagement, inclusion, and learning across the curriculum for ALL your students. Teachers love Book Creator.
Thank you for watching or listening to our show!
Until Next Time, Stay Techie!
-Fonz
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00:00 - Welcome And Sponsor Acknowledgments
01:30 - Jeff Riley’s Path In Education
03:10 - Why AI Now And Why Safety First
04:48 - What MIT RAIS And Day Of AI Do
06:30 - The Case For Policies And Guardrails
08:55 - AI As A Pedagogical Shift
10:15 - Cutting Teacher Busywork With AI
12:07 - Personalization And Differentiation At Scale
14:57 - Language Access And Inclusion With AI
16:42 - Building Teacher Confidence And Practical Uses
18:42 - Defining AI Literacy For Students
20:42 - Teaching Healthy Skepticism And Prompting
23:29 - Student Voice In AI Policy
24:59 - Bringing Parents Into The Conversation
26:29 - Responsible AI For America’s Youth Tour
27:29 - America’s Youth AI Festival And Challenges
28:39 - A Five‑Year Vision And Measuring Impact
30:14 - Lightning Round: Kryptonite, Billboard, Role Swap
31:29 - Closing Thanks And Resources
WEBVTT
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Hello, everybody.
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Yeah, welcome to another great episode of My EdTech Life.
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Thank you so much for joining me on this wonderful day.
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We really appreciate what we do.
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Actually, we appreciate all the love that you give us, and that's why we do what we do for you to bring you some amazing conversations.
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Thank you so much for believing in our mission to bring these amazing conversations into our space so that we as educators can continue to grow professionally and personally too as well.
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And I am excited for today's show.
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I have an amazing guest, and of course, we're going to be talking about artificial intelligence, and we're going to be talking about uh so many great things as far as day of uh day of AI.
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We're gonna be talking about other programs and things that will be coming up with our amazing guest, Mr.
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Jeff Riley.
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Jeff, how are you doing today?
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Wonderful.
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Thanks so much for having me today.
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Thank you, Jeff.
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I really appreciate you joining, and thank you so much to your amazing team, also to for reaching out and choosing our wonderful platform to amplify your voice, your work, and the work that the rest of the team is doing as far as day of AI and all the great things that we'll be talking about this evening.
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But before we dive in, Jeff, for our audience members who may not be familiar with you just yet, can you please give us a little brief introduction and what your context is within the education space?
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Sure, my name's Jeff Riley.
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I did 32 years in public education.
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I started as a teacher.
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I think I did every job in between: school counselor, um, principal, deputy superintendent, superintendent.
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And the last six and a half years of my career I spent as the commissioner of education for the state of Massachusetts.
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Excellent.
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Wow.
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Well, I mean, that's great.
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Like coming around full circle, you actually got to see everything.
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Uh, I haven't quite gotten all that high in steps yet.
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Um, right now I'm at that district assessment, uh, district coordinator role.
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So hopefully I'll be able to see uh, you know, the education uh space through more lenses too.
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But I think that that's a wonderful perspective that you bring to this conversation and obviously being able to see so many things uh throughout the 32 years.
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But I'm definitely excited about what we're gonna be talking about today.
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So I want to ask you, you know, your transition into this and talking about obviously AI and generative AI and AI and education.
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Where did that begin?
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Well, you know, as I said, I had done uh over three decades in K-12 public service.
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Uh I was getting ready to what I call retire, retire.
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And uh our friends at MIT called and they said, Hey, do you want to help lead a nonprofit we're launching out of MIT focused on AI and education?
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And I said something which I think took them back.
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I said, Can I say what I want?
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And I think they were they were a little confused by that.
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And I said, Well, look, 15 years ago, we didn't really regulate social media and cell phone use, and it appears from research coming out that you know we've had rising rates of mental health issues with our kids.
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AI, I think, has some problems as well.
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Uh AI also can do amazing things, and I think it's going to chart you know the next revolution in education, but I want to make sure that we can focus on keeping kids safe first and foremost, uh, and then talking about the pedagogy behind it and how it can improve things in K-12 education.
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And they said yes, and so here I am.
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Excellent.
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Well, that is wonderful.
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So tell us a little bit about MIT Rays.
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Uh, just again, for our audience members that are not familiar with that, and of course, this program, tell us a little bit more about that, and of course, like you mentioned a little bit, the the extensive mission and the work that you're doing with them as well.
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Yeah, I mean, essentially who we are is we're a fusion of young MIT technologists and experienced read old uh educators like myself.
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They know the technology in a deep way and we know how to apply it in schools.
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And uh and it's just been a fascinating um kind of fusion of like-minded people who want our kids to use this technology safely and productively.
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And Day of AI, which was spawned out of MIT RAIS, uh, you know, really does three things.
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We train teachers and administrators, we help districts with policies, and then we build AI literacy curriculum, K-12, uh, for teachers.
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Excellent.
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Well, that is definitely something that is very much needed because believe it or not, I know that from November 2022, we're already here, November 2025.
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It's been, you know, we've seen so much.
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We've seen so many platforms that are coming in into classrooms, and uh, but we still see many school districts that are still not creating a policy yet.
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They haven't really discussed much.
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There's the conversation seems to kind of get a little bit of steam as the school year starts.
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But then, you know, as we go into that October slide and going into Christmas break, all that falls into the wayside because at least here in Texas, you know, we know that starting January, it is testing season, as we call it, because it's test after test after test, where those conversations kind of all of a sudden they just slide into non-existence, and then all of a sudden you have the summer slide, and then it picks up again that same August or September of that following year.
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And I think that's something that's very important that the work that you're doing, because at least here in our local area and our region regional area, I think there was there is only one school out of the many schools here in in our region one area that does have an AI policy.
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And that's something that is you know very alarming, being that we're already three years in with so many apps, and teachers are, you know, they welcome a lot of apps into the classrooms without maybe CTOs vetting them properly or networks, uh network specialists uh vetting them properly as far as CAPA, FERPA, where the data is stored and so on.
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So I think that what it is that you're trying to do and the awareness that you're bringing to educators is something that is definitely very important.
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And so, as we know, you know, since 2022, education has definitely turned, uh, you know, hit a major turning point.
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And like you mentioned, one thing that I do like that you talked about is partnering with MIT, where you say we have the the young crew that knows the tech, but then you have the experienced seasoned veterans that can tie in that pedagogy uh to really make sense of things in the classroom.
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So I want to ask you in your 32 years seeing just about anything and now working uh and partnering up with MIT Rays, what makes this a unique opportunity, not only for you doing this work, but other um, you know, entities that are doing this work for students and educators?
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Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, during my 32 years, we had a revolution called education reform, right?
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And that was basically the idea that people came together to get better outcomes for kids.
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A lot of times it was about increased dollars for schools in exchange for test scores and accountability standards, uh, all important architecture that we didn't have before in education.
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But if you look at kids' academic trajectory and their progress, for the first 15 years of education reform, kids across the country were moving up.
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Uh, but for the last 15 years or so, we've been flatlined.
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Now, some people posit we've been flatlined because uh education reform ran out of steam.
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Other people point to cell phones rising at that exact same time 15 years ago.
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Kids have lost the ability to pay attention.
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Whatever the case, I think, you know, we are grateful for what happened during ed reform, but we always realize that there's more that can be done.
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When we talk about artificial intelligence, uh, this is the first time that I've seen technology change have the ability to change education in a fundamental way.
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Education has always been looking to technology as you know, for silver bullets, right?
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If every kid just had a laptop, uh the problem would be solved, right?
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But it hasn't actually turned out that way.
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Um, this is the first time I think technology will be able to change educational practice so that we can get demonstrably improved academic outcomes for kids.
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And let me tell you how.
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Uh, first and foremost, when I speak to teachers about this, I tell them AI is not gonna replace teachers.
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There's a personal relationship involved in teaching that I think is never gonna go away.
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But what it can do for teachers is make their lives easier and take away a lot of the administrative burden they have so that they can get back to focusing on what they got into teaching for, building exciting, engaging lessons for kids.
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And when teachers see that and when they see examples of how it can make their lives easier, I'll give you one.
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Uh I was a special education teacher for a long time, and uh I used to write spend hours writing IEPs.
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Well, there's a program now called Magic School, and in its suite of services is an IEP generator, which can really quickly build you a foundation for a document like that.
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It doesn't mean you could just let the technology do all the work.
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You still have to take your expertise as a special ed teacher and infuse that into the document.
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So it's in truly an individualized education plan, but it can save you a lot of time that you wouldn't otherwise have that you could then go back and make even better lessons for kids.
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Um, and the second thing this technology is going to be able to do for us is uh it's gonna be able to differentiate and personalize instruction in a way we never could before.
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And if you have a classroom of 30 with a myriad of reading levels, you suddenly can get kids information on the same academic standards written at their particular grade level, whether an eighth-grade science class has mostly kids reading at a middle school level, but a couple of kids reading at a second grade level, and another two or three kids reading at a college level, you can actually beam the appropriate written coursework to them at their level without embarrassing them, and then they can still all do the activity together.
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And what that means is the kid who's reading at a college level who might have checked out because he's bored can suddenly be re-engaged.
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And the kid who's reading at a second grade level can now access the information and feel like they understand what's going on, so they're not overwhelmed.
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And so to be able to differentiate or personalize instruction like that, that's gonna be a new revolution in education.
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Absolutely.
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You know, one of the things that you mentioned there, which is that differentiation component.
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To me, uh, you know, working here in my area with here in the southern tip of Texas, where we're right across, you know, from Mexico, you know, and we do have a lot of students that their first language is Spanish.
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We've got a lot of students that are emergent bilinguals.
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And I think when I was in the classroom, I mean, just the difficulty that there was in being able to take what we are teaching them as far as the lesson is concerned, and then having to either send it to somebody at our service center to be able to translate, or I myself doing the translating.
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And back then it was just strictly just Google Translate, and we didn't have the tools that we have now.
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But I think to me, that's one of the important pieces because being in the classroom, I remember when there would be students that would need to be uh, they had a pull-out teacher or they had a a push teacher that would come in and uh, you know, be be mindful of helping the student out and so on.
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And, you know, at that age, and really at any age, a lot of students, you know, can be just downright mean and you know, seeing like, hey, uh, you need the additional help, or they get pulled out for so on and so forth.
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But what I what I like that you mentioned is that there are through the ability of some of these platforms to be able to differentiate where everybody can take, you know, can be learning at the exact in the exact same classroom, but obviously they don't know that they're reading the content at different levels and they're still being able to understand and be part of the whole class and not being singled out.
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You know, I think that's something that is very important and that I really do like and enjoy.
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And obviously the the the how quickly teachers can do this now, because imagine from one day to the next, you get a new student that comes in and maybe comes in.
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We've seen students come in from Vietnam here, China, Korea, um, and so on.
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And now to be able to immediately translate that text into that language and maybe either at their level, slightly lower, but depending, but they're still getting that content.
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And I think that's something that is fabulous that I am seeing.
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But I want to ask you now, because I I know that we see obviously the good that this can do, and we also see some teachers too that are still a little bit afraid, they are a little reluctant.
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Some may just really see this as oh great, like this is something else that is added to my plate that I'm gonna have to manage and guard against.
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So, what might be some things or or things that you currently share alongside with your team when you go do school visits or district visits to help teachers feel a little bit more comfortable, to let them know that this isn't something that you're just gonna manage or guard against, but making them feel confident and actually using it?
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Well, it's such a great question.
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And I I think it starts with what I spoke about at the top of the show, which is we don't think uh AI is gonna replace teachers.
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We think uh teachers and their ability to work individually with kids and have that personal relationship with kids is the foundation of all education.
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Um, and we also think, however, that these AI technology can make teachers' lives easier in a variety of ways.
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And we show them uh examples.
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Uh, I talked to you earlier about uh you know special education and building an IEP, but something as simple as a letter home to a parent, let's say there's a student in your class that's acting up and inappropriate, they've really frustrated you, you want to write this angry letter, but you don't want to send an angry letter to a parent, so you can ask ChatGPT, hey, can you can you make this so it's forceful but also professional?
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And it can do something really quickly for you to give you a basis, and you can go back in and tweak it a little bit, but it can save you that time and money and all that hand-wringing you do about how to word how Johnny acted in class today.
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Uh, and so I think there's a real value to that.
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If you're a teacher and you have great lessons already, we can show you examples of how to infuse AI into that great lesson and make it even better, right?
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And so I just think um what this can be shown as is a tool that can really uh support a teacher in a way that they've never had the support before.
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And that districts haven't had the time or money to give to teachers, right?
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And oftentimes we leave our teachers, you know, on an island in their own classroom, and and hope is not a strategy, right?
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But to be able to have such a powerful tool like this um can really uh make the teachers' life easier and help them be more effective in their practice.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, and I agree with all of that.
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You know, one of the things that I do want to add, um, Jeff, is for me, it it really just also starts at the top, you know, as far as leadership.
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And with your experience as a superintendent, I am sure that there were things that would come through you that you say, okay, you know what, I I got to lead by example.
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And so as it goes down into your curriculum directors and then from your directors to the teachers and so on, I mean, I think that that buy-in too at the very top level and stating like, hey, this is our mission, this is what we intend to do, and maybe it could just be one small step, but there definitely has to be that buy-in at the district level because I've seen so many things, you know, through through my years where there will be initiatives that get started and then all of a sudden they start off great and then it just kind of fizzles out before it even gets to the campuses.
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But again, because there is so much that is happening, but we definitely need to make time to learn what is out there, the new technology, and also how it can be embedded into our curriculum.
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So that's something that is great.
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Now, I want to switch it up here, like you know, so now we talked about teachers, but now I want to talk to you about students.
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And uh recently I had a wonderful guest, Amber Ivy, on the show, and we talked about AI literacy, and we hear this, you know, so many times in a day.
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I'm on LinkedIn and everybody talks about AI literacy.
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Where uh a friend of mine posted it, said, Does anybody like feel like they really don't know what AI literacy is?
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I mean, they say it so much, there's so many definitions that are out there, but there has never been something solid, and I guess it can mean whatever it means to whoever it is that you're talking to and districts and so on.
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But I want to ask you, you know, as far as uh AI literacy for students, what would you say would be the most important thing to start for a let's say a district that is just wanting to start and implementing a policy?
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What should be the first step for students to learn about AI literacy?
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So I think when you talk about AI literacy, that could be an all-encompassing term.
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And you with your assessment background probably know that the PISA International Assessment in 2029 is going to start testing AI literacy skills as a discrete examination uh that year.
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But I think about AI literacy in a more simplified way, which is how do we teach kids to be healthy skeptics of this technology?
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And so, because we know uh it's a profound tool, but we also know it makes mistakes.
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There's bias, it hallucinates, and sometimes makes up answers.
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Um, and there's a lot of funny examples out there, right?
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And so I think for us, what we need to do is to teach kids uh what AI is and what it's not.
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This is a giant prediction machine, right?
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It's not a real human.
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We've got a lot of kids right now who have an AI companion.
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Think of that as like an AI imaginary friend that they talk to and have a relationship with.
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Uh, unfortunately, some of these companions have aided in kids harming themselves, up to and including suicide.
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Uh and I think if kids knew from the outset what this technology is and what it's not, that might prevent a kid from uh treating an AI companion bot as a real person.
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And so, how do you teach kids to be skeptical of this technology?
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Uh, I'll give you a couple of examples.
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We know it hallucinates.
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Um there's a famous uh example out there where someone asked, uh, I don't know if it was Chad or Gemini or which program it was, but how do I keep the cheese from sliding off my pizza?
00:20:46.420 --> 00:20:49.859
And the answer was add an eighth of a cup of glue.
00:20:49.859 --> 00:20:52.339
Okay, that's not a great answer.
00:20:52.339 --> 00:20:59.700
Uh, and it's believed that uh AI got that answer by scanning its data, and it was either on a Twitter uh tweet.
00:20:59.700 --> 00:21:05.299
Or a Reddit thread where someone sarcastically said, add an eighth of a cup of glue.
00:21:05.299 --> 00:21:10.500
The computer didn't know it was sarcastic and just presented it as honest information.
00:21:10.500 --> 00:21:57.660
Where do cheeseburgers come from?
00:21:57.660 --> 00:22:00.300
Cheeseburgers come from cheeseburger trees.
00:22:00.300 --> 00:22:02.620
That was how that was produced recently.
00:22:02.620 --> 00:22:06.940
Well, there is no cheeseburger trees unless they're in Texas, in which case I'm coming tomorrow.
00:22:06.940 --> 00:22:13.500
But, you know, kids need to see the mistakes that this technology is not all-knowing and all-powerful.
00:22:13.500 --> 00:22:19.340
And if they have that kind of skepticism, then they can treat it for what it is, which is a tool that can help you.
00:22:19.340 --> 00:22:24.460
And they can start learning about how to make sure you reduce getting bad information.
00:22:24.460 --> 00:23:12.980
One way to do that, for example, is through prompting.
00:23:12.980 --> 00:23:21.300
How do you teach kids to be really exact in their questions or their prompting of an AI bot so that you get better information?
00:23:21.300 --> 00:23:24.660
If you ask something generic, you may not get a very good answer.
00:23:24.660 --> 00:23:29.140
If you're very specific and detailed, you're more likely to get better information.
00:23:29.140 --> 00:23:31.380
And so how do you teach kids how to do that?
00:23:31.380 --> 00:23:41.140
And we have activities that are some of which are analog, where we teach kids how to think about AI in their world without ever having to touch a computer.
00:23:41.460 --> 00:23:41.940
Excellent.
00:23:41.940 --> 00:23:44.420
You know, and I think that's something that is very important too.
00:23:44.420 --> 00:23:55.620
Like you mentioned, not only them learning, you know, how effective or the, you know, just the misses that the technology does have so they can build those skills.
00:23:55.620 --> 00:24:03.940
But I'm thinking too, you know, as far as maybe a district, like I mentioned to you here in our area, there's only one district that had an AI policy.
00:24:03.940 --> 00:24:20.980
But I think that even the student body can be used uh to be have sort of like a platform or an advisory board of students to see how AI would be implemented and how they would use it or ethically and learning about the bias and so on.
00:24:20.980 --> 00:24:23.700
So I'm thinking about that too in that sense.
00:24:23.700 --> 00:24:46.340
In your experience as you visited campuses or visited districts and you know, through your research, is this something that possibly you have seen where districts have taken into account uh bringing in the student body and maybe a small subset or a group to help them um build and uh or be part of the building process of an AI policy?
00:24:46.740 --> 00:24:51.700
Yes, uh in fact, we promote such a thing uh through our network.
00:24:51.700 --> 00:25:00.500
Uh we think you know, AI policy is a tricky subject because school committees uh immediately want to put out an AI policy.
00:25:00.500 --> 00:25:07.060
But the reality is this technology is changing so quickly, you'd have to change your policy probably every six months.
00:25:07.060 --> 00:25:13.860
Uh so instead, what we say to people is start at the high school in your student handbook.
00:25:13.860 --> 00:25:16.980
There's a lot of talk about cheating and plagiarism, okay.
00:25:16.980 --> 00:25:20.500
And start from a place of your district's values.
00:25:20.500 --> 00:25:22.660
We value academic integrity.
00:25:22.660 --> 00:25:23.300
Great.
00:25:23.300 --> 00:25:31.300
Then a kid needs to disclose if they're going to use an AI bot for their work, and a teacher needs to disclose if they're if they want them to use it or not.
00:25:31.300 --> 00:25:34.259
And just start simply and dip your toe in the water.
00:25:34.259 --> 00:25:36.500
Kids can be part of this conversation.
00:25:36.500 --> 00:25:43.140
Kids, particularly at the high school uh level right now, uh, have an intuitive sense of this technology.
00:25:43.140 --> 00:25:44.980
They're seen as digital natives.
00:25:44.980 --> 00:25:47.220
People like me are seen as digital immigrants.
00:25:47.220 --> 00:25:48.340
They were born into it.
00:25:48.340 --> 00:25:50.900
There was no internet for the first 20 years of my life.
00:25:50.900 --> 00:25:52.259
I'm an immigrant into it.
00:25:52.259 --> 00:26:02.259
Um, and so they understand the technology, but they've also seen the malicious effects of technology uh through social media and other aspects with their friends.
00:26:02.259 --> 00:26:10.259
So a lot of times we see kids are pretty wary about AI and have really good thoughts about how to incorporate that into their lives.
00:26:10.259 --> 00:26:14.259
And so asking them to be part of the conversation is crucial.
00:26:14.580 --> 00:26:14.980
Excellent.
00:26:14.980 --> 00:26:25.700
Yeah, and you know, that kind of lines up with, like I mentioned to you in my most recent episode with Amber Ivy, you know, I asked her the same question because she works with districts, they're in the Baltimore area, and she helps out.
00:26:25.700 --> 00:26:28.259
And I asked her, you know, what is one of the most surprising things?
00:26:28.259 --> 00:26:44.180
And so she mentioned too that, you know, this the students nowadays having access to technology at such an early age, she said, we often don't give them enough credit that they are able to pick up on deep fakes faster than us.
00:26:44.180 --> 00:26:51.220
That, like you mentioned, that for the first 20 years of our lives, there wasn't any internet at all whatsoever until like later on.
00:26:51.220 --> 00:26:55.300
And so they are very tech savvy in that aspect.
00:26:55.300 --> 00:27:20.019
And so she she mentioned, you know, and right along with you, like the importance of that, that they are familiar with the technology, and it's just a matter of us to also be able to help them out and lead them into that uh ethical conversations on how to use it correctly and making sure that they understand, you know, some of the limitations that the technology does have and having those conversations.
00:27:20.019 --> 00:27:27.779
And I think that's great because it also builds uh, you know, community and just building as many stakeholders as you can bring in.
00:27:27.779 --> 00:27:35.779
I always say, you know, we can also bring in parents to talk to them and explain to them also the types of technologies and so on.
00:27:35.779 --> 00:27:48.580
Because I think that oftentimes for parents too, it's like they don't know what they don't know and they hear stuff, but you know, they hear stuff on media, social media, wherever it is, and they may not be getting the correct information.
00:27:48.580 --> 00:27:54.019
So being able to have them also be part of the conversation, I think, would be very crucial as well.
00:27:54.340 --> 00:27:55.700
Yeah, so two things.
00:27:55.700 --> 00:28:00.420
One, uh, you know, we really believe deeply in student leadership on all things AI.
00:28:00.420 --> 00:28:06.580
One of the things we're doing on our tour this year is we're we're coming back to Boston and MIT and the Edward M.
00:28:06.580 --> 00:28:09.460
Kennedy Institute, which is an exact replica of the U.S.
00:28:09.460 --> 00:28:24.980
Senate, and we're flying in two kids from every state to serve as uh state senators to draft a national AI policy, um, which will be done long before the adults ever get together and have a national AI policy, because we believe in their expertise, right?
00:28:24.980 --> 00:28:27.539
We really think they have to be part of the conversation.
00:28:27.539 --> 00:28:39.140
The second thing, and it's it's right on point to what you're alluding to now, is parents have to be deeply involved in this conversation in a way we've never allowed parents uh to be involved in schools before.
00:28:39.140 --> 00:28:41.460
Uh I we have a situation now.
00:28:41.460 --> 00:28:57.539
Uh we've partnered with a group called Common Sense Media to build a parent toolkit on all things AI to help them have discussions with their kids about this new technology, recognizing that parents don't always know as much about the technology as their kids do, right?
00:28:57.539 --> 00:29:07.220
And so we've created videos to help start these conversations and toolkits to help with questions and guided readings to help them understand what's happening.
00:29:07.220 --> 00:29:08.660
Why is that important?
00:29:08.660 --> 00:29:23.620
Well, based on the research from Common Sense Media, 70% or more of kids right now have an AI companion bot or its equivalent, but only 30% of parents think their kids are using any kind of AI, much less an AI companion.
00:29:23.620 --> 00:29:28.019
So there's a wide gulf between what kids are doing and what parents think they're doing.
00:29:28.019 --> 00:29:38.980
And we need to we need to bridge that gap quickly and make sure in order to keep kids safe and to be on the same page with schools, uh, that everybody is kind of rowing in the same direction.
00:29:39.220 --> 00:29:39.460
Yeah.
00:29:39.460 --> 00:29:44.580
And I think that's so great that you've partnered up with Common Sense Media because that is one of the resources.
00:29:44.580 --> 00:29:52.180
Uh, when I, you know, last year and for the last seven years, we would do Technology Tuesdays with parents where we would meet with parents once a month.
00:29:52.180 --> 00:29:54.259
And I talked to them about digital citizenship.
00:29:54.259 --> 00:29:56.259
We talk about cyberbullying, we talk about those things.
00:29:56.259 --> 00:30:01.220
And of course, the most recent conversation from 22 on was, you know, AI.
00:30:01.220 --> 00:30:04.420
We were talking about, you know, chatbots, companions, and so on.
00:30:04.420 --> 00:30:15.460
And I think for it was just an eye-opening experience for a lot of those parents, like you mentioned, to be able to hear that, oh, I had no idea that this technology did this.
00:30:15.460 --> 00:30:26.740
And here I'm I'm hearing my child talk about, you know, an AI companion, an AI bot, or this platform, and so on, but they had no clue what was happening.
00:30:26.740 --> 00:30:36.580
So I think that I really and and I one of the resources was Common Sense Media because they had some great stuff both in English and Spanish that I can share here with our area.
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