Fireside Chat: AI and Learning

Nancye Blair Black is an ISTE-certified educator, speaker, and consultant who cultivates dignity-driven instructional practices that empower educators, leaders, and students to succeed. Nancye is the author of nationally-implemented computer science curricula and several books, including Tablets in K-12 Education and the Hands-On AI Projects for the Classroom series. She is ISTE's AI Explorations Project Lead, ProjectSTEM's Director of Innovation, and a TC Games Research Lab leader. She's completing her doctoral degree in Instructional Technology at TC Columbia University. Talk to her about equity, AI, ISTE Cert, unique educational experiences, anything you're passionate about! @NancyeBlackEdu.

Richard Culatta is an internationally recognized innovator and learning designer. As the CEO of ASCD and ISTE, Culatta is focused on supporting education change-makers to create equitable and engaging learning experiences for students around the world. Prior to joining ASCD/ISTE, Culatta served as the chief innovation officer for the state of Rhode Island. In this role, he led an initiative to make Rhode Island the first state to offer computer science in every K-12 school, and created a state vision for personalized learning. Culatta was appointed by President Obama as the executive director of the Office of Educational Technology for the U.S. Department of Education. In that capacity, he led efforts to expand connectivity to schools across the country, promote personalized learning and develop the National Education Technology Plan. He also pioneered new opportunities for engagement between the department, education leaders and tech developers, including bringing top game designers from around the world to the White House to help rethink the design of assessments. Culatta also served as an education policy adviser to U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, and a resident designer for the global design firm IDEO. Culatta’s book, Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World, uncovers the challenges with our current approaches to preparing young people to be effective humans in virtual spaces, and presents a path to a healthier and more civil future digital world. Culatta began his career in the classroom as a high school teacher and has coached educators and national leaders around the world on making learning more equitable. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish teaching and a master's in educational psychology and technology from Brigham Young University.

Tony Frontier, PhD is an author, researcher, and consultant who works with teachers and administrators to prioritize their strategy and collective efforts to support each learner. His most recent article, “A Transformative Approach to AI” is in this months issue of Educational Leadership. His most recent book is “Teaching with Clarity: How to Prioritize and Do Less so Students Understand More”. He can be reached at tonyfrontier@gmail.com

Sherry Lachman is the head of social impact at OpenAI. For two decades, she has dedicated her career to improving the outcomes of underserved communities as a policymaker in two presidential administrations, social entrepreneur, and public interest attorney. In the Biden-Harris Administration, she led the division of the White House Office of Management and Budget charged with developing policies and budget proposals and strengthening the implementation of federal government programs spanning the Departments of Education and Labor, the Administration for Children and Families, the Food and Nutrition Service, and the Social Security Administration. In the Obama-Biden Administration, she served as a domestic policy advisor to then Vice President Biden and as a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education. From 2015 to 2021, Sherry founded and served as the executive director of Foster America, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the child welfare system. Earlier in her career, she served as a senior education counsel in the U.S. Senate and a children’s civil rights attorney at the Juvenile Law Center. Sherry received a master’s in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, a master’s in public policy from Harvard, and a J.D. from Columbia.

Lukman is global head of solutions for the Public Sector in Google Cloud, with a focus on smart analytics and AI based solutions for the education and government. Formerly he was the ML/AI Solutions lead, working with customers across Google Cloud to enable business applications in AI and ML. He speaks regularly at conferences around the world about Google’s AI technology and its applications in education, such as the keynote at the World AI Summit, EDUCAUSE, the Disney Datathon, McKinsey Analytics Forum, & Google Cloud NEXT conferences. Lukman joined Google in January of ‘17 after acting as CTO for a series of New York startups in education technology, AI and speech recognition. Most recently he was the founding CTO and Chief Product Officer for Acrobatiq, a spin-out of the Open Learning Initiative at CMU, providing machine learning analytics & courseware for both on-ground and online universities. Prior to that he was CTO of Neverware, a startup that builds virtual desktop servers for high schools. Earlier in his career he built speech recognition applications and platforms for call centers. Lukman did his PhD work in Computer Science at UC San Diego, doing computer vision research at JPL in the Machine Learning systems group. As an undergrad at MIT in Cognitive Science & Computer Science he worked on multi-layer neural networks before it was called "deep learning." His academic interests have always centered on the intersection of Cognitive and Computer Science.

#TheRealCareerUpgrade - Former District Technology Coordinator now classroom teacher, Brandie is a STEM Educator for a micro-school in Norfolk, Virginia. Brandie strives to bring the highest level of engagement, innovation, and creativity to her learners. Her passion projects include working with Amazon Future Engineer: Your Voice Is Power, ProjectSTEM, Coding Club for Girls with ImagiLabs and Black Girls Code, and partnering with local innovation labs and organizations for community learning experiences. Brandie is also an Instructional Coach for the ISTE-GM AI Explorations Course and a member of the Cult of Pedagogy Tech Guide Team.