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Join two former teachers - Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel - for the EdTechnical podcast series about AI in education. Each episode, Libby and Owen will ask experts to help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. They’ll be asking questions like - how does this actually help students and teachers? What do we actually know about this technology, and what’s just speculation? And (importantly!) when we say AI, what are we actually talking about?
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In this episode of EdTechnical, Libby and Owen sit down with Dan Meyer: math educator, EdTech innovator, and self-proclaimed “token AI sceptic”. Dan’s rare mix of classroom experience and product design insight gives him a unique perspective on how technology intersects with real classrooms. He shares what the classroom teaches him about student engagement, the challenges teachers face, and why motivation is deeply social - which EdTech can overlook. They dig into how AI can support creativit...
In this episode of EdTechnical, Libby and Owen look at Alpha School, a model that started as a micro-school in Austin, Texas, and is now expanding. At its core, Alpha condenses academic learning into a morning block where students work largely independently using software, supported by guides rather than traditional teachers. Afternoons are reserved for enrichment and life skills. Libby and Owen discuss the appeal of this approach , the evidence behind mastery-based learning, and the big ques...
Millions of students now study with AI chatbots. There are growing concerns about what happens when vulnerable teens form emotional bonds with AI. Tragic teen deaths have sparked intense debate about how to protect young people from AI systems that blur the line between tool and companion. California just drew the first regulatory lines—but they're messy and educational AI is caught in the middle. In this short episode, Libby and Owen discuss the trade-off between building guardrails for safe...
In this episode of EdTechnical, Libby and Owen speak with Candice Odgers, a psychologist and researcher studying how online experiences influence children's mental health. They revisit the debate around social media and teen wellbeing, questioning the claims that social media use has caused rising rates of depression and anxiety. Candice calls for a more careful reading of the evidence and cautions against rushing into restrictive policies that may have unintended consequences or divert...
In this episode of Ed-Technical, Libby and Owen explore why traditional AI detection tools are struggling in academic settings. As students adopt increasingly sophisticated methods to evade AI detection - like paraphrasing tools, hybrid writing, and sequential model use - detection accuracy drops and false positives rise. Libby and Owen look at the research showing why reliable detection with automated tools is so difficult, including why watermarking and statistical analysis often fail in re...
In this first episode of EdTechnical Season 3, Libby and Owen speak with Dr. Jason Yeatman from Stanford University about how the brain learns to read, the power of better assessment, and a broader look at how AI is beginning to reshape our relationship with reading itself. They touch on the science behind reading as a learned skill, the surprising overlap between visual and auditory processing, and the challenges schools face in teaching it well. ROAR (Rapid Online Assessment of Reading), a ...
In this episode of EdTechnical, Libby and Owen speak with assessment expert Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor at UCL Institute of Education, about how formative assessment and AI are reshaping classroom practice. Dylan brings decades of experience in educational research and teacher development to a timely conversation about what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next for assessment. They cover: Why formative assessment remains underused despite its proven impact How AI is resha...
In this short, Libby and Owen digest a recent MIT study attracting a lot of attention, ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing’. The study looked at how using tools like ChatGPT for writing essays affects people's brains and writing abilities compared to using search engines or just their own thinking. Is there a potential trade-off between making writing easier in the short term, but harming cognitive abilities and learning over tim...
Voice AI is having a moment in education. As schools grapple with declining literacy scores and stretched teaching resources, voice-enabled tools have the potential to help. But what's already working in real classrooms, and what challenges remain? In this episode, Libby and Owen speak with Kristen Huff from Curriculum Associates and Amelia Kelly from SoapBox Labs about the emerging field of voice AI for literacy support and assessment. Together they explore how automatic speech recognition t...
In this episode, Libby and Owen talk to Sanna Järvelä and Inge Molenaar, two of the world’s leading scholars on self‑regulated learning (SRL). Together they cover SRL 101: what self-regulated learning is and why it is a valuable skill. Self-regulated learning is students setting their own goals and then monitoring their learning to achieve those goals. Self-regulation can come more naturally in informal learning settings like sports, but it can be harder to monitor your learning and kno...
This week Owen and Libby reflect on two recent EdTech conferences in the US: SXSW Edu in March and ASUGSV in April. They discuss how much things have shifted for US education over this short time period, and three themes that stood out to them both: AI literacy, transformation versus efficiency, and the disruptive potential of AI for education. Join us on social media: BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel) Listen to all episodes of Ed-Te...
Another live Ed-Technical episode! In this short, Owen does a deep dive on AI and discourse analysis (the study of how meaning is constructed through language) with three experts. The conversation explores the intersection between AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), and the study of discourse. This is a topical conversation as LLM capabilities continue to evolve. LLMs have mastered sentence level communication. However we know less about their ability to be useful over the co...
Everyone is talking about AI’s power to provide answers, but what about your lingering questions? What does the latest research actually tell us? Join Libby and Owen for this live session from SXSW EDU as they delve into the latest research to uncover where AI is truly adding value in the educational landscape — and where it falls short. They’re joined by two expert guests: Kristen DiCerbo from Khan Academy and Assistant Professor Peter Bergman from University of Texas at Austin and Learning ...
In this episode, Owen and Libby chat with Chris Agnew about Stanford's new generative AI hub for education. Chris leads this initiative within Stanford's SCALE program, which aims to be a trusted source for education system leaders on what works in AI and learning. Chris walks us through their research repository of 181 papers examining AI's impact in K-12 education. He outlines their GenAI tools typology which breaks down AI applications into three categories: efficiency gains, improving stu...
In this short, Owen and Libby discuss a recent World Bank blog post about a study in Nigeria that evaluated the impact of Microsoft Copilot (powered by ChatGPT) on student learning outcomes. In a six-week after school programme, students were supported to use Copilot. The full study hasn’t been published yet but the blog post reports “overwhelmingly positive effects on learning outcomes”. It reports that the learning improvement over the six-week programme was equivalent to nearly two years o...
In this episode, Libby and Owen interview Mike Frank, Professor at Stanford University and leading expert in child development. This episode has a different angle to the others, as it is more about AI as a scientific instrument rather than as a tool for learning. Libby and Owen have a fascinating discussion with Mike about language acquisition and what we can learn about language learning from large language models. Mike explains some of the differences between how large language models devel...
In this short, Libby and Owen discuss a hot-off-the-press study that is one of the first to test how ChatGPT impacts the time science teachers spend on lesson preparation. The TLDR is that teachers who used ChatGPT, with a guide, spent 31% less time preparing lessons - that’s 25.3 minutes per week on average. This very promising result points to the potential for ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools to help teachers with their workload. However we encourage you to dig into the summar...
This episode is the second in our three-part mini-series with Google, where we find out how one of the world’s largest tech companies developed a family of large language models specifically for education, called LearnLM. This instalment focuses on the technical and conceptual groundwork behind LearnLM. Libby and Owen speak to three expert guests from across Google, including DeepMind, who are heavily involved in developing LearnLM. One of the problems with out-of-the-box large language...
In this episode, Owen and Libby chat about AI tutoring with guests, Ben Kornell, Managing Partner at Common Sense Growth Fund, and Alex Sarlin, a veteran in the edtech industry. Both co-founded Edtech Insiders, a leading newsletter and podcast covering the growing Edtech industry. Ben and Alex differentiate between AI-powered search and true AI tutoring, and discuss trends like AI-enhanced human tutors, hybrid models, and fully autonomous AI bots. The conversation highlights the need fo...
This episode is the first of a three part mini-series with Google. There is a lot of interest in how big tech companies are engaging in AI and education and what their future plans are - in this mini-series, hear the latest directly from Google. The genesis of this mini-series was a short Ed-Technical episode from earlier this year. Libby and Owen discussed a paper Google released about the work they had done to fine-tune a LLM called LearnLM to make it more useful for education. This w...
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