Utilizing artificial intelligence in the classroom

All right, artificial intelligence. It is rapidly changing the way students learn, teachers teach, and schools operate. Here in Tampa Bay, thousands of students are using AI-powered tools designed specifically for education, including a chatbot called BaxterBot that helps support learning in the classroom. And now the company behind that technology is expanding into health care, into special education services, with the goal of helping families across critical or access critical evaluations more quickly. And joining us today to talk about this is Ed Buckley, founder and CEO of Scholar Education. Ed, thank you so much for being here. And for viewers who may not be familiar with Scholar Education, give us an overview of what your company does and how it's being used in schools today. Well, thanks for having us. As you can see, I've got two awesome Bernadoodles with me, and they're really the inspiration for the AI assistance that we've put into schools. So we knew that students need real-time assistance, you know, throughout the periods of class, and teachers certainly could always use more resources to help them to provide the most quality and personalized learning. And so Baxter right here is the assistant for students, and Bruce is the assistant for teachers. And so they're each animated AI assistants inside of the classroom. And luckily we're in, you know, with 20,000 students here across Tampa Bay. And what kind of impact are you seeing in classrooms here in Tampa Bay? You know, when we first started doing this a few years ago, we honestly weren't sure where would be the biggest value unlock. And what we figured out was this generation of kids is so much more comfortable asking an AI assistant a question rather than raising their hands and worried about being embarrassed, you know, in front of their peers or in front of their teacher. And so being able to just get real-time answers and ask almost anything you want to is really where we're seeing the interactions, you know, exponentially increase compared to traditional learning. Yeah, and what are you hearing from teachers about some of the challenges that they're seeing and some of the challenges that your AI platform is helping them solve? Yeah, I think, you know, we ask a lot of our teachers, and teachers are irreplaceable. We need them at the center of the classroom experience. But there are, you know, I don't think any of them got into it to do all of the paperwork around it. And so for us, we look at the administrative side. How can we help them? How can we help them almost crowdsource the information from their students? Where are their students struggling? And be able to feed that, you know, information back to the teacher to make them as effective as possible. Now, I want to back up here to Baxter Bot and Paul Fester Bruce. They've become a unique part of this platform here. Yeah, tell us about these, the real-life dogs that you've got there in your lap now and how they inspired your company and your story. Yeah, look, we knew a few years ago AI was really new. It was really scary. Heck, it still is. And we wanted to put a friendly face on it. And so I think the thing that most anyone can get behind is people love dogs and especially cute, you know, Bernadoodles. And these guys love going to the schools. They love seeing teachers. They love seeing students. And so that's what we wanted to do was we wanted to put a friendly face on this for everybody. So it wouldn't be so scary. And you weren't talking to a nameless, faceless, you know, robot. And luckily, it gave it some personality. And it allows when the boys come out to the schools, you know, you hear the kids say, oh, my gosh, Baxter, I just asked you a question this morning. It's really quite, it's pretty funny. How are you able to make sure students are using AI to learn and to think critically, rather than just using it to get answers and create good papers and do their work for them? That's a great question. Look, the way that I say this is when we introduced the calculator schools, we didn't stop teaching math, right? It just gave us a new avenue to be able to teach math to a more accessible group. We have tons of guardrails. I mean, we built this platform with the teachers. So we're constantly looking at ways to make sure that it is a learning unlock and not a cheating unlock, if that makes sense. So if a kid, for instance, were to try to ask Baxter about here, hey, give me the answer to this, he would say, no, you know, let's try this again. You need to try to redirect them. And so that's what it does. It tries to redirect. And if they continue to try to abuse the system, it alerts the teacher that that's happening. Right, right. And you've also, as we mentioned off the top here, recently expanded into scholar health. What is this and what problem are you trying to solve for families? Yeah, for us, the entire personalized learning journey is really three phases. It's getting a child evaluated. It's getting a personalized plan written for them. And then it's getting them those accommodations inside of the classroom. Well, that's where, you know, Scholar started was inside of the classroom. That's where Baxter and Bruce have been so helpful. And so now what we wanted to do was to help that journey compress, because right now it can take families months, if not years to go through all three phases. And luckily, my background has always been in digital health. I've started and sold a number of companies there. So I've always been comfortable in the digital health space. And really the schools essentially begged us, how can we help use technology to help the same way we did in the classroom, the way that the teacher is the center of the experience. And we wrapped that teacher in technology. We're taking our clinicians, our psychologists, and wrapping them with technology. I think at the end of the day, what families want is, how can I get my kid help? They're not sitting here asking, well, how should AI be used or not be used? What they're saying is, I'm standing in line forever and I shouldn't even have to be in line. Help me out. Yeah. And on that note, you know, parents sometimes face long waits for special education evaluations. How does this technology shorten that process? Yeah, for us, we're really trying to compress that timeline. You know, we've seen it in a number of other industries when you're able to wrap a clinician with really, really thoughtful AI and technology platform. Hey buddy. You're able to significantly increase the accessibility. And so that's one thing that, you know, we've been working on. We just launched and we did our first evaluation this week, and hopefully we'll be reporting back soon. In a couple months, we'll come back on and tell you that we've been serving hundreds, if not thousands of families across Tampa Bay with this new service. One of the things that we've been reporting on this week, and we had Hillsborough County's, one of their officials on yesterday talking about, with the school system, talking about how they are going to go to a low tech, I guess, system moving forward, where they are essentially removing devices and technology from K through second grade classrooms and doing a much more moderate approach for a third grade through 12th. What does structured screen time mean to you and how does that impact what you're providing to the classrooms? Yeah, what I would say here is I appreciate and I'm happy that government officials and elected officials are waiting in and trying to figure out the right balance of technology. I'm not so certain that screen time is the right variable to measure. That would be like saying the amount that a teacher can teach in a classroom is measured by the number of pages. And that's going to be uniform across every single classroom. We don't measure the value of textbooks by the weight or pages. So to simply say the effectiveness of technology is by screen time, I'm not certain that's the correct landing spot, but I do appreciate the iterative process that it takes to go from really never quite regulating something to getting to that homeostasis spot of regulating it correctly. So I would say we're on the right track, but I'm not certain that we're quite there where we want to be yet. So in your expertise, what should parents and teachers look for when they're deciding whether a piece of educational technology is actually benefiting students? I'm not trying to give you a non-answer, but each teacher needs to decide does that individual platform or website or service unlock something that can't be done analog, right? If simply all you're doing is reading a book on an iPad instead of reading the book, I don't think that there's a dramatic change. Now is when that kid's reading the book, they can touch a word and get a phonic sounding pronunciation for it or look it up in a dictionary, right? That's a good use. And what we should be asking our teachers is to say, look at the technology. If it's good, let's keep using it. And if it isn't, let's not use it. All right, Ed Buckley, founder and CEO of Scholar Education. Thanks so much for joining us and sharing your perspective here this morning. We do appreciate you coming on The Plus. Of course. Hey, thanks for having us. Of course. Take care.