This is the transcript for the episode where Shelby Danks discusses the critical role of professional development and implementation in EdTech success. She also explores best practices for product adoption, strategies for effective implementation, and how EdTech companies can better support educators in K-12 education.
Transcript: How Strategic Implementation and Professional Development Drive EdTech Success
This is the transcript for the episode where Shelby Danks discusses the critical role of professional development and implementation in EdTech success. She also explores best practices for product adoption, strategies for effective implementation, and how EdTech companies can better support educators in K-12 education.
Transcript: Balancing Innovation with Student Success
This interview was originally recorded on July 7, 2024, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome everyone to our podcast, all things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field, we'll all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy. Hi everyone and welcome back. Today we're diving into a topic that's been on everyone's mind. ai, also known as artificial intelligence, generative ai, gen, ai, whatever you want to call it. It has huge ramifications in ed tech and our world. In this episode, I am joined by my friend MaryBeth Hertz, who I have been lucky to learn alongside really about anything, all thing ed tech, all thing education for decades.
Mary Beth is somewhat what I call a canary in a coal mine. She is someone I have always admired for thinking through how technology can and should be used in education to first and foremost always improve learning and not using tech for tech sake alone. She is never one to jump on the bandwagon just because something's new and shiny. Instead, she asks the important questions, the ones that keep us grounded and ensure we're always centering our decisions on again, what is best for our learners. So in addition to ai, we really do talk about all things ed tech. This is a great episode if you are an EdTech founder or anyone in EdTech to talk about how can we leverage this technology, but in general, what should we be doing in the industry to truly help educators and students and how do our products and our services play a role in that? So as we find ourselves navigating all of these unchartered waters in EdTech, I love that I'm able to bring this conversation to help you enjoy. Welcome to the show, Mary Beth, I'm so glad to have you today.
Mary Beth Hertz:
Hello. Thanks for having me.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, it's been such a long time and I feel like I don't get to connect with you as much because I don't have this pulse that we used to connecting us on Twitter, but I am glad for your presence on LinkedIn so I can still learn from you on social media a little bit. And are you on threads as well?
Mary Beth Hertz :
I am. I have a threads problem, and so I had to move the app to a very hard to get place on my phone because that is my suck, my time suck.
Elana Leoni:
I got to make sure that I have push notifications on for you because it automatically push notifies you. And at Isti, I was talking to some people like Laura Thomas and Jen Roberts or something, and I get push notifications every time they do a thread. Oh, wow. It's going to be dangerous, right? Anyways, welcome to the show. I have learned so much from you over the years. We first connected in the Edge utopia Twitter days, and I've learned a lot from you of, I look at you as one of the people that think about things quite critically when there are trends. Let's not jump on the bandwagon just for the sake of it. Let's ask some critical questions. And today I'd like to talk about just EdTech in general, but we're going to be talking to a lot of you EdTech folks around AI and digital literacy and media literacy, and how do we navigate all of this unknown space in a way that makes sense for our learners, right? Let's center on that and let's not use student-centered as the buzzword and just say it, right? So why don't we talk to start with Marybeth, just your background in ed tech. Why Ed Tech? How'd you get into it, and where are you at now with your relationship with EdTech?
Mary Beth Hertz:
The funny story is that I was a French major with an African-American studies minor and did not study education in college. They didn't actually have an education program and ended up in Philadelphia after graduation, applied to be a literacy intern, which was a emergency certified extra teacher in the classroom. And so that's how I got certified and ended up with my own classroom teaching K through sixth graders, kindergarten through sixth graders science, and then ended up as a computer lab teacher when we got a Title one grant for a lot of desktops. It was like 34 desktops. I was the only person in the building that wasn't scared of computers at that time. That was 2000. And so we were talking about the Edutopia Twitter days, so that was 2007. I got this lab of computers with no curriculum except for word processing. And then 2008, 2009 was I think when the social media stuff like Twitter, the edu, Twitter as it were, started taking off.
And so I actually got on Twitter, I just remembered this because of the isti conference. So I was going to isti and the only way I could really figure out what was going on was Twitter. And so that was how I ended up at Iju Blocker Con with Steve Hargan on and a bunch of other folks. So, so that was kind of my journey into ed tech and it just kind of blossomed from there with me trying to figure out what should we be teaching with this stuff and what should kids know? And everything was changing so fast all of a sudden you could interact with the internet. And so what do you do when you can actually talk to the internet and the internet talks back, and so what does that actually mean? So yeah, I also ended up being a technology coordinator and then director of educational technology. So I've kind of been in all facets, both classroom teacher, curriculum development, it all different kinds of facets in ed tech.
Elana Leoni:
And that's why one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show is that you have these layers of appreciation of knowing this is how it interacts on different levels within the education system. And it felt like your story is like, yes, we had computers, but we just had ways to type. So you were already thinking about how do we integrate it in, even if it's a shiny new tool, which right now we have some parallels with ai. We've got shiny new tools, but how do we effectively integrate it into the learning process? And it felt like you were there way back in the day when computers were a thing and your dad was building 'em and things like that.
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah, and it's funny, I actually, while we were chatting, I remembered that I wrote a post and I was trying to figure out when I wrote it, that's why I was looking it up real quick. I wrote it a year ago, actually, June, 2023 called EdTech is Dead, and maybe that's okay. I've been doing this for so long and you said shiny a new toy, and I just feel like it's not a shiny, shiny new toy anymore. We used to have pencil chat back in the day. I don't know if you remember pencil chat, but the pencil used to be a form of technology used to be, oh no, they're not going to use the chalkboards anymore or the pen or whatever. And so I feel like we've gotten to this point where to say, ed tech, it means something different now. It feels like it's just like, well, yeah, you're using technology for teaching.
It's just kind of part of what we do in the back. Then it was like, whoa, look at this. It's so cool and it does this or it does that. And then now we've gotten to a point where that's just the expectation of how kids are interacting or learning. And part of it is because those tools and are integrated into the world and into the workforce and into our everyday lives in a way that they weren't before. And so it is not impetus for innovation, it's an emphasis for just existing in the world that we live in. So I think the shiny new toy right now, I think I have said before that I feel this kind of sense of responsibility as someone who was there when Web 2.0 came along to share my own regrets and my own, I don't know what the other word would be, but I threw these tools into the hands of children and didn't think about their privacy, didn't think about what these companies were collecting about, didn't think about those kinds of backend hidden kind of things that were happening that none of us really thought about. And we talk about if the product is free, you are the product. We didn't really realize that. And so I feel like having gone through this before that I have a sense of responsibility to not necessarily sound the alarm, but just kind of calm people down. Don't fall for the shiny new joy because we did that and that's why we are where we are right now.
Elana Leoni:
And I think those are good warnings. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. What are the things that we should be looking for as EdTech companies and vendors that are producing technology that students and teachers are going to be using in the classroom? What are the things they must have? We'll talk a little bit more about that, but before we get into the, I don't want to say it's negative, super helpful, but I want us to be real about what we really think and how EdTech can really help grow this industry and do things in a meaningful way. But before we go there, let's talk a little bit roses and sunshine of what gets you super excited right now, specifically in EdTech. What have you seen that you're like, wow, this is awesome, and this fundamentally could be a huge opportunity?
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah, I think something that I hadn't really been focusing on before in EdTech Sphere, that because of the experiential learning stuff I've been doing with past school year supporting internships and service learning projects and things like that, there are two tools that came across my path that I hadn't known of before. And one is Ruler and one is Blaze. And so Ruler is, I don't know how to explain it, it's almost like old school, but it's an opportunity for kids to kind of build a portfolio where they post videos or images, reflections, and then they can create this journey that creates a timeline where they can actually throw that up on a board or as a part of a presentation, and it captures their journey, whether it's through an internship or a trip they went on or something that they experienced where it's basically a online journal that they keep, but the teacher can put prompts up there, they can respond, the kids can respond to each other. And so it creates this whole community out, wow, I'm making all, let me back up again. Try that again. It creates this whole community centered around experience, right? Centered around their own individual experiences. And so I think to me, those kinds of tools where it's almost like going backwards if in some ways, if that makes sense. I feel like nobody blogs anymore.
All of our connections, all the stuff I learned back in the day was from reading about people's experiences and their blogs and learning from them and commenting, and nobody comments, nobody blogs, everything's just like engagement, farming, little quips. And so for me to come back to that, and they're not necessarily long form, but to tools that kind of bring back that human element of creating connections, meaningful connections that are not just the social media kind of attention grabbing stuff and building that community that I know you and I remember from back in the day, and the other tool I mentioned, just it creates a platform where schools can put partners up where they have in the community for internships, job shadows, things like that, and then allows kids to actually sign up for those opportunities. And when they go there, they can actually check in and say, I'm here, and they can write reflections and they can do things like that. So it creates a platform again with the student at the center. So that's something where both of the tools have the student experience at the center of it and that it's there to help the student build experiences and create experiences and reflect on those experiences. So for me, that's really exciting to see that centered instead of we can drill your kid in this academic subject until they pass this test real good is not necessarily what I'm excited about.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I like the way you phrase it. It's like sometimes we need to go backwards to understand what we're missing. So quick algorithms, everything is quick, immediate responses, immediate reactions. And when we fail to pause and think critically, and I know we're going to talk a little bit about media literacy and digital literacy and things, but those tools that you were talking about is can we go back to the things that we're actually working, giving people time to think through things and God forbid we actually read the article or the blog post and then we think respond in a comment. Those things, it got me excited, and I just want to let our audience know that any tool that Mary Beth mentions is not a sponsor of this podcast. It's completely, I told her to just talk about the things that work, and it's important that we talk about that openly, but it just reminded me of let's go back in time and think about the things that work because what we're missing right now is critical thinking across our nation.
Mary Beth Hertz:
And that's again, that sense of responsibility I have as someone who bridges the generations of no internet and internet to be like, I remember when we had the thing and it was before times. And so I feel like I have to pay it forward just that I have had that experience.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. So why don't we talk a little bit about, because you've had those experiences and EdTech is evolving, there's a lot of new players, there's a lot of players being acquired by other players, but what do you hope that the role that EdTech plays and specifically EdTech vendors, because EdTech is really ubiquitous to, it's not no longer a siloed thing. It's something that we actively all look at how can we integrate effectively in the learning process? But with that said, there's a lot of things that were like, gosh, I really wish they would do this, or I really wish the industry as a whole would support us in this way. What are the kind of gut reactions you have to those prompts?
Mary Beth Hertz:
Honestly, I don't know that in said, my thoughts on that have changed much. I used to run the Philly ed tech meetup before kids, so that was a decade ago. So we had a lot of pitch competitions and work with a lot of ed tech companies, local and some of them even involved in the Milken Prize competition and stuff like that. But I think what I saw a lot was people who were like, I went to school and when I was in school, I wish I had this and I'm going to build it and I'm going to raise money for it and I'm going to make it and I'm going to sell it. And so I don't think that's changed. I think you still have folks who just have this thought of their own experience or maybe they're seeing their kid have an experience too, and they just go, this is not unique to ed tech.
I mean, it's an entrepreneurial thing in general that are you creating, solving a problem that nobody has is a question that a lot of entrepreneurs have to ask themselves. So for me, I think that question is the eternal question. So if you're an ed tech company, is the product you're creating, is it, what problem is it solving and is that an actual problem that not just your kids' classroom teacher has, but that you see replicated across many classrooms? So I think for me, that's what I hope that, have you tried being a substitute teacher? You signed up to Stu and see what it's like to actually be in the classroom? Have you volunteered in your kids' local school or district? Have you actually talked to teachers across, whether it's schools, grade levels, something like that? And then thinking also about your product, who is the actual audience?
I think sometimes with ed tech, because there's so many little niches in education, are you K to three? It's like K to three is way different than four to eight or four to six or something like that. So I think I see a lot of ed tech companies struggle with figuring out who is your actual audience. Sometimes I see and we do this, and I'm like, but nobody needs that in this grade level or in that context. So I don't think that's changed. I don't think there's anything new about that, but that's always been kind of something that I've seen.
Elana Leoni:
And I'm head nodding over here because in my experience of mentoring ed tech startups, I call it seeking out confirmation bias at times is this is my experience, this is how I did it. So therefore, if I'm going to be searching for people, I might actually look for something that confirms my bias around it. And really what you're saying is, gosh, you need to look nationally and not only grade level, but there's niches within education and there's urban and rural and charter and magnets and academies, and there's all sorts of different stakeholders in education. And we need to make sure that what you are doing is truly solving a big problem that potentially fits most of their needs and not based on assumptions or confirmation bias or narrow your audience,
Mary Beth Hertz:
Be real about your audience and say, this is specifically for these kinds of schools, teachers, whatever. So I think it can go either way. Either you have to realize that your product is not universal and that it isn't a product for a specific audience, or you need to make sure if you don't want to be limited and you want to be able to have a more broader impact that you need to do that research.
Elana Leoni:
And it's a really interesting question. Sometimes I ask people in startup methodology around, would you rather have something that goes deep and narrow within ed tech or something broad? And typically a lot of EdTech will start deep and narrow if they have that product market fit that we were kind of warning against, but then they're forced to grow and the way they grow sometimes broadening it out where it shouldn't be too. So it's a real interesting conundrum, but really making sure when you do grow intentionally, making sure your product still has that product market fit. And a lot of times when you launch, you might assume a product market fit, but they use it exactly the opposite way, right?
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, think about Twitter itself. Twitter was never meant to all the hashtags and all that stuff. I mean, that was created by the users. There was no, that wasn't how the company originally envisioned people using it. And I think it's the openness to either A be the pivot where it's like, oh, people are using this differently, or I'm getting this feedback and actually listening to the feedback. I think what I've found is, sadly, not all the time, but there's a small percentage of folks who don't look to teachers as professionals. And so when they get feedback from teachers, they overlook it, they say, oh, they just don't understand, or they just don't get it, or something like that. So I think understanding teachers are extremely professional and know hell of a lot more than you do. Sorry, not sorry that if they're giving you feedback, listen to the feedback and it can actually improve your product or what you're doing.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, and that's what I heard from you is that it's not like a one and done thing with feedback too. So if you are, for those of you listening that are fans of Steve Blank or Eric Re for the Lean Startup, Steve Blank really talks about making sure that you're integrated and doing 70 plus deep interviews of stakeholders all across the ecosystem of where you're jumping in, but it's not a one and done thing. It's consistent because your product's going to evolve and your users' needs are going to evolve, and who knows what's going to happen in this academic school year and how needs are going to be changing and things like that. So I hear from you consistently listen and integrated in your day to day with educators, and that's a theme no surprise we hear across our podcast guests. Yeah, there's nothing worse
Mary Beth Hertz:
Than a company forum that offers you to give suggestions and upvote suggestions and then completely ignores it when there's like 475 thumbs up, we want this feature.
Elana Leoni:
Ouch. Ouch. So let's talk a little bit about AI because I think there's a parallel what you were talking about way back in the day when tools were, we had this onslaught of freemium tools on EdTech and we're like great free tools, but you said the product was us, and I wish I would've asked these critical questions. So when it comes to ai, what are you seeing people not ask? What questions are they not asking, and what do you hope vendors actually are more mindful of when they integrate AI?
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah, I mean, I think the first piece that I get concerned about is just the legal piece. Kids need to be 13 to use these things. And if you're putting in the hands of young people, that's only if your API is chat, GPT, from my understanding, the Claudes and the mid journeys and all those other generative AI tools require even a higher 18 and over. So making sure that whatever you're using is compliant in that way. But then also thinking about if students are using it, why are they using it? Are they using it because it's cool and it does cool stuff, or are they using it because it's actually giving them a value add to whatever's happening in the classroom? And I think the hard part is that it's shiny, it's new, it's exciting, and people don't quite understand it. And so it's easy to want to be on top of what's shiny and new and not to fall behind.
But I also think the questions that people should be asked, the number one question people should be asking is, what are you doing when my students log into your platform, especially if they're talking to your bot or they're uploading their files to be scanned, what are you doing with that information? Because for instance, Snapchat has their little AI friend of her pal, I forget what that thing is called, but it has a little AI friend that you can talk to. I mean, if a kid is, and I say this only because a lot of kids are used to, at this point, many kids are used to talking to ai. It's a person. And the kinds of things that kids could say or enter into those tools could be very personal in nature. And we have to be thoughtful about what companies are doing with that information.
This isn't just like, it's not just a Google search, these tools talk back and talk back in a very human-like way. So I think there's also, I don't know if schools are using a readiness rubric either. How ready are we for doing this kind of stuff with putting these tools in the hands of teachers and students? And I don't necessarily know if it's the job of EdTech companies to support that, but I feel like transparency is really important that folks should be asking, what kind of support do you offer when we are going to use your tool? Is it just simply it isn't working, or is your company offering any kind of professional development workshops or things like that on what AI actually is and what these tools are actually doing? So I don't even know if I answered the question, but
Elana Leoni:
That's a questioning first of all. I would say that, like you said, when it comes to privacy and knowing age limits, that's a huge thing. And I would say that there was a moment at Isti where I had a friend shared with me. She went around and just asked people about their privacy policy and as it relates to AI and the data sharing. And a lot of vendors could not talk about it in an intelligent way because it's something that not everybody on the floor might be familiar with.
But the worst thing was is that they actually, as they were discovering one of the vendors, they realized as they looked in their privacy policy that they weren't even supposed to be selling it to the grade levels they were once they looked in the privacy policy. So these are things that we need to be, this is hard stuff and it's changing all the time. We need to have extra care as it relates to privacy and our children's data. And the guidelines are changing all the time. Like you and I were talking about, they just released some guidelines around ai. If you are incorporating AI into your product, this is your job. You should know about these things.
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah, there's a loophole too that a lot of companies use that for me as a former tech director, and for me as somebody who'd be looking at a product, and it's killing me that I can't remember what it is, but people, it's specific language you can put in a policy that means that it basically offloads the responsibility for all this stuff to the school instead of the vendor. And to me as a tech director, that's a red flag that you are saying that you are not taking responsibility for this, that you're offloading it onto me. It's fairly common practice, I think, but I think if you're, and it depends. Some folks in districts and schools are more versed in that kind of stuff than others, and it may not be a red flag for them, but that's just something that I think you had mentioned the privacy policies and sometimes the privacy policies are intentionally vague.
Elana Leoni:
And sometimes I look at tech companies and say, gosh, what kind of staffing do they have to really help navigate these really ever-changing and nebulous policies? Do they have someone that has a data privacy or those type of, we had somebody on our show that was the head of Remind at the time, and they had their entire job was to navigate the data and the privacy and the safety of the data around it. So those are the things I look at is like, are they well staffed? Have they made a commitment? Are they learning as quick as they need to because it's happening every day, right? Yeah. Well, your budget is your priority. That's what I always say. Well, there's so much. Your budget is your priority, and if you find that language or that data, what you were talking about in contracts, we can put it in the show notes so people are a little bit more aware.
It's a really good red flag to look out for as well. We talked a little bit about AI and some things to avoid. I think just on a high level, you talked about, gosh, this is such a new field. How do we start with some education and just AI literacy and just general digital literacy? I know that's a huge bigger umbrella topic, but we need to move with some education. So I don't know if you have thoughts around that proactively is how do we move with the industry and get our kids excited, but in a knowledgeable way, right?
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah, I think the word that always comes to mind is fear. I think that there is a fear that if we even bring up this stuff with kids that they're suddenly going to cheat or they're suddenly going to be using this stuff. And so the reality is they're using it already. Teachers are already, they are struggling with figuring out what, did the kid actually write this? Did they not write this? Or they're struggling with how to parse out all of this stuff when they're in their classrooms. So when all this started coming out, I guess, was it last year? Is that 2022, I think? Anyway, yeah, 2022 I think was when it was first coming out. My goal, you mentioned digital literacy, was to treat AI in my classroom. I teach ninth graders digital media literacy and digital citizenship as a digital literacy piece. And so we literally watch code.org videos, which are actually also, so code.org has some very quick, easy to understand videos about literally how the tool works, the mathematical probability, the way it lumped groups probabilities together of strings of words and letters and how it doesn't actually understand anything it's saying, it just looks, it's a really good predictor.
Basically it's a mathematical predictor. And also pulling it up on my screen in my classroom or my smart board in my classroom and showing them how I asked it to write me three paragraphs and it kept giving me four paragraphs and I'd say, that's four paragraphs. And they would say, you are correct. Here's three paragraphs. Except it was four paragraphs again. And so they were like, really? So just having them understand that it doesn't, I think what the teachers and I, teachers and I, when we spoke during the school year, we feel that many of us feel that students think that it's smarter than they are, and so they trust the tool more than they trust themselves. And so I think the approach that I have found to be most helpful is to really demystify it. And that's why I kind of have an issue with the idea of the magic school thing because I think it perpetuates the myth that this stuff is magic and that it's magical.
There's also the human element. I mean, just like Facebook and Instagram have literally underpaid people in countries on the other side of the world being paid to look through harmful content and flag it. AI companies are doing the same thing. And so I think for me, the approach for me has been maybe it's just very concrete and real of just like, this is how it works. This is how it doesn't work. This is what it can do, this is what it can't do. This is what's happening. This is the larger implications, whether it's the people that are doing the content flagging, whether it's the amount of water that's being used. Every time you generate a fun little picture on Dolly, the water is being wasted and the power that's being spent, the amount of energy. So not really long-winded answer, but I think to me, the approach is just demystifying it.
And I think that's not that hard, don't necessarily, and I think that keeping it simple of just giving folks examples, and then I do like the magic school tool for people who are not ready to use just a chat GPT screen, like a blank screen to have them understand, oh, I'm dropping down filters and it's generating this. And then I had teachers in a workshop where they were like, but I don't really like that. Cool. They copy paste it or download it, put it into this other tool, and now you can tweak it and you can talk to it and you can do those kinds of things.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, what you said, sorry to interrupt. It's just like how do we truly, especially with kids too, you said that because they don't understand it, they may talk to it like a human. So we need that to front lo education of this is a tool, here are the back, here's how it operates. And not only for kids too and the students in our classroom, but for the teachers too. How does this fundamentally work? So then you can kind of take the bull by the horns and figure out how do you want to customize it, right?
Mary Beth Hertz:
Yeah. I think it's the power, right? Who's in control? And I think that's just kind of been the whole story honestly of tech is I think we've been pushing back on who actually is controlling this, whether it's the algorithms that are, it's crazy. Does culture drive the tech or is the tech driving the culture? And we're kind of hit this point where it's like chicken or egg. And so I think that the idea of you're smarter than it and you're the one in control is important because otherwise we end up with kids just copy pasting crap from chat GPT that isn't even accurate and trusting it more than they trust themselves.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. And I will end our episode on AI and digital and media literacy and all the things around ed tech with that kind of mic drop moment because it is something that you all should rewind and listen to is it's a fundamental question that comes up over and over again when we are introduced to new tech is how do we understand it? So we're a little bit more in the driver's seat and not vice versa. So Marybeth, thank you so much for your time. I would say that at the end of all of these heavy topics that we do need to talk about, we can't be afraid to talk about these things. I like to end our podcasts with a fun kind of uplifting, but also really practical question for the humans that are listening, which is all of us. But when you are feeling like you just kind of need to escape a little bit and get inspired, are there things that you read or are there something that you've read recently or watched recently that inspired you that you want to share with our audience?
Mary Beth Hertz:
I read a lot of sci-fi fantasy because it's fun to escape. So when I read the Raven Boys series, it's a wonderful series and I'm now in her dreamer series, but just, I like to explore just whole new sci-fi world to kind of escape. And I love watching, we watched Legend of Cora, which is the second inner airbender series, but there's a lot of fun dynamics around the complexity of friendships and families and siblings that my kids are old enough now where we actually get something out of it where we can have conversations about like, yeah, you see how they weren't getting along. And so-and-so was this. And that's been fun to kind of use that as an avenue to have those conversations. So I like to escape, but I also like to use, get to engage with my kids around cartoons essentially. I guess
Elana Leoni:
That is awesome. I've been on a bit of an escape fantasy kick myself, so I'm glad I'm not alone. For those of you that are like, I'm not sure what those titles were, we'll put all of the links to 'em in a show notes. Don't worry. You can attend two with for all of your thoughts and for really just letting us hear what we truly need to be talking about. We can't be afraid about talking about these typical subjects because this is a pattern we will see over and over again, Ed Tech. So I thank you so much for your time. I thank you for being a guest on all things marketing and education.
Mary Beth Hertz:
Thanks so much for the opportunity. It was great talking with you. Good to see you.
Elana Leoni:
Nice to see you too. Take care everyone. Thanks again for listening to all things marketing and education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes@leoneconsultinggroup.com slash podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter, at Leone Group or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoy today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on all things marketing and education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
MaryBeth Hertz, Guest
Mary Beth Hertz has been teaching young people in Philadelphia since 2003. She has been at the forefront of technology integration in the classroom. She was a 2010 ISTE Emerging Leader, a 2013 ASCD Emerging Leader, 2013 PAECT Teacher of the Year, and is a co-founder of EdCamp Philly and the Edcamp Foundation. Her book, Digital and Media Literacy in the Age of the Internet: Practical Classroom Applications shares her experience and expertise teaching digital and media literacy in K-12 classrooms. She is also the Executive Director of Walkabout Education, championing experiential and work-based learning experience and purpose-driven experiences for young people. Mary Beth believes that young people can do more than we give them credit for and that education serves as the launch pad to young people realizing themselves and their potential in the context of the world and community they inhabit.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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Transcript: Navigating EdTech Trends to Drive Real Impact
This interview was originally recorded on September 29, 2023, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests who range from educators to ed tech entrepreneurs to experts in the field, will all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week I chatted with Thor Prichard, he's the president and CEO at Clarity Innovations. Clarity Innovations is a mission-driven K12 education-focused professional services and consulting firm, which means they really provide everything from education strategy to content creation, to engineering services and even design solutions.
You may remember Thor from our last conversation about the challenges of creating effective ed tech products, and that is a conversation to not miss. We'll put the episode link in the show notes for those of you that haven't had a chance to listen to Thor.
In this conversation, Thor talks about some fascinating trends in innovations and education technology. Selfishly, I feel like I just got to pick his brain. He's been in the industry for decades and I said, "Just talk to me about what you've been seeing over the years." We talk about the impact of Generative AI. We talk about the shift towards making products an essential part of educators and students everyday practice in ed tech, which is key. We also talk about the different business models in the industry, and how that really shaped the innovation and the moving and shaking as ed tech as a whole.
We also explore the role of family-to-school partnerships and the future trends in product development. So, so, so much, every single thing he talks about, I rewound and I listened to again. He is full of wisdom. I loved how he ended with some deep thoughts on what he thinks are the keys to creating lasting and impactful products in education. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Enjoy.
So, Thor, thanks so much for joining All Things Marketing and Education. It's very rare I get to talk to a... I don't want to boil you down to a brain like yours, but to someone who's uniquely... You describe yourself geeky in terms of product design, product innovation. You also have a hand in implementation, in professional development and you've worked over almost three decades in the industry within ed tech with a variety of different small brands, big brands. So this is my selfish attempt to talk to you about just ed tech in general. What's the industry like? I think for anybody who's listening to this show, you could be a novice just coming into ed tech of what the trends are, what are the unique value propositions, what are the differences between getting into ed tech versus we'll get into some nitty-gritty stuff and some nuances of just what the industry's like, maybe some prediction. But thank you for coming.
I think maybe I'm not going to throw a big general ball of questions at you like that to start, but why don't we talk about just what we've seen in this year alone in education technology as it relates maybe to product design or however you want to take it, but just a high level of we're kind of after the pandemic. Everyone says that each year is going to be easier and easier, but what we're finding is it's actually we're dealing with different ramifications and challenges as a result of the pandemic, but also just as a result of changing and learning in new atmospheres. So maybe talk to me about what you've seen working hand in hand with clients this year in some trend?
Thor Prichard:
Yeah. Well, one trend or change, and sort of a meta trend that's changing is the pace of change in technologies overall in all different verticals, whether it's education, finance, manufacturing, healthcare, you name it, has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. When we first got started doing the work we do in product development design, content and engineering, is other industries would pick up new tech about three to five years ahead of education. The idea of using mobile devices in education really happened after the iPad was well out in the field. That happened in 2010, but it was 2013, 2014 before we finally saw a lot of iPad apps and things like that in education. It took a couple years for it to happen. And that's true for a lot of different technologies over the years where they would just be in other fields before they come to education.
And so we really look at what are other people doing and seeing what their uses are and what the use cases are and using that lens to help figure out what it would look like for education. But in the last year or last couple years, we've seen that differential trait to the point where other industries and education, education is not lagging like it used to. It's really right there behind it. But it was this last November that everybody all got hit the same time with a brand new idea for what technology could do, that would be the Generative AI, and that was really an explosive on the scene kind of thing of wow, this can transform everything all sorts of different ways all at once. And it wasn't unique to one industry or another. Everybody started rethinking what their industry could be like with this kind of technology.
Now, there's all sorts of different kinds of AI, and there are all sorts of different kinds of ways it's going to affect things, and still obviously early product mutations about what that could look like. So I won't really go into making predictions or anything, but it's going to change. Everything's going to change. Certainly, the only constant in the universe is change.
But the other thing we've seen really is that, coming out of the pandemic and the education space specifically is just thinking about, it's really that focus on how do you make it part of their essential practice? Because there's a realization of the S or dollars for temporary funding, their one type funding, historical level of funding for education to invest in and support the student needs and the educator needs to help recover from a pandemic. And there've been a lot of different kinds of models for that, a lot of different kinds of technologies used for that.
And thinking about tutoring, thinking about online support, education resources, interactive assessments and pieces like that. There's half a dozen different things. In fact, there's a taxonomy that HolonIQ, H-O-L-O-N IQ put together. It looks like it's got 28 different kinds of categories of product that exist nowadays. From robotics to site tools to apps to content resources or open education resources and everything in between. And that's what we saw in the pandemic. Everyone and their brother had something out there to offer. But now it's that sort of, I hope it's not going to turn into Hunger Games where it's like fight to the last dollar is left kind of situation. But I have that uncomfortable feeling it might be where we're really trying to figure out what is those kinds of products that really do have an essential practice in the classroom. How do those products really become part of the regular educator's experience or the learning experience for students?
Which one of those things really make a difference and move the needle in student outcomes? That's going to be really a test that we have to figure out, and products need to be and you should always be thinking about that. But I think what we're realizing is a lot of startups may not have had that as their primary focus. And so that's okay, that's market dynamics. The stronger will prevail kind of thing, the weaker will be cast aside or recycled. That sounds very dark, but that might be what happens. But I think we're going to see some interesting things come out of it.
Now, the whole AI disruptions last fall is going to change a lot of things and it's a whole different undercurrent about what is product development going to look like? What kinds of products to be built with AI? Is it about making artificial intelligent tutors or automating the educator? No, teaching and learning is a human experience. It's a human interaction based on the relationships you have between your educator and students and students among students and educators, among educators. Everybody's a learner, right? So you're not going to be able to automate that out of a job kind of thing. So, it's going to be interesting to see what's ahead and honestly, I think.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, and there was a lot to unpack because there are so many little nuances and trends that you put in there, but technology is speeding up. The adoption of technology and ed tech is speeding up, and that was something that you illustrated. But the kind of narrowing down and kind of casting off technology that doesn't turn or complement essential practice with the educator, that may take longer, but that also would you say it's also speeding up. Even though I've talked to you in the past and you've talked about education really moving at a glacial pace and that metaphor is moving around now with climate change, but I think that sometimes there is a misconception that people jump into education and say, "Well, I get into a district, hey, I get into LAUSD or some big district, right?
The stickiness of that, I really have to mess up for them to take me out of contract, right? There might be a little bit of truth to that, but I don't think that that's something that you can bank on your business model on either. You're saying, "Gosh, there's a lot of innovation being injected into education that potentially is creating a lot of competition. It's presenting a better way to do what your product is doing in a quicker way.
Thor Prichard:
Yeah, yeah, and that's quite possible. I mean, the thing is is that as much as the technology is changing, this is the other sort of lesson learned over the last 30 years is we've seen technologies come and go. How many people remember clickers? How many people remember Second Life in education, how many people remember... Well, blogging thankfully is still around. It's still strong. Podcasting coming out in 2003, still around, good thing. There are some tech that sticks. There are other tech that doesn't. We make the joke about interactive whiteboards. What is the interactive part about them, right? So it's not the board is interactive, it's about the learner or the teacher using that technology. It's all about how they interact with it, right? So even though the technology is transforming quickly and rapidly and it seems to be more and more and faster in that sense, it's also still, like you said, the glacial pace of change in education is still there.
And the fundamental intersection between those two is the pedagogy. Pedagogy does not transform rapidly. It is about the human science of learning, and it's about how we interact and how we convey information. How do we model? How do we practice skills? How do we conceptualize ideas? How do we synthesize that information?
There's some basic fundamental ways we learn and the technologies that do that are timeless. That's the kind of stuff to focus on. Even though the cycle of technology seems to go really fast, you could have a cool technology or actually a very simple technology, but if applied in the right way will make a lasting impact in the education space. And that's what I think is important to take away from that uncertainty of, oh my gosh, AI is going to disrupt everything. It will, but it won't disrupt necessarily content knowledge or the pedagogies involved and how you convey that knowledge and those skills.
Elana Leoni:
Mm-hmm, and maybe let's talk about business models in education. And I think that that can directly correlate with product design and prioritization of needs and things like that. So high level overview, we got B2B, where we're selling to schools and districts. Sometimes people characterize that as B2G, so selling to governments, whole entities.
We have B2C, where it's that direct to consumer, which some people call it D2C. So we throw out all the acronyms to people. But that is if I have a freemium product going to teachers, or if I'm actually selling out to parents for the learning experience around that. Or if I'm selling just directly to teachers, instructional coaches, whatever it may be, complimentary curriculum.
And then there's a combination of both, right? And we see the ebbs and flows of what becomes more fundable in the venture capital space, and what rises to dominance in ed tech right now. Can you maybe talk about what you've seen and maybe tie it to product development because ultimately they need to prioritize the needs that pay the bills and keep it financially sustainable? So how is that trend affecting you all?
Thor Prichard:
Yeah, it's a great questions. It's interesting because sometimes it's part of those questions are not ones we're really as much involved in, but usually have a lot of opinions about. So when we talk to clients, we ask them questions like, "Why are you picking B2C for B2B?" For example, they might be thinking, "Oh, this is we're going to make this cool widget that's going to be for educators, and we're going to sell it to teachers." I'm like, "Okay, that's valid." But why if it doesn't have a way for teachers to work with our teachers, which we know is a great way to improve practices if you have teachers co-teach or collaborate and planning together. So if you were to make it a B2B type product, now a district or a school could have a way for those teachers to collaborate and work together using your product to improve their instructional practices.
Maybe it's a tool for helping organize and delivering lessons or it's a tool that helps students organize their thoughts into a multimedia presentation. Well, that's something that you have different users, like as a student login or a teacher login. If you're doing B2C, you're not going to get that audience if it has any kind of student facing material because the district needs to be the owner of that license, not the individual educator, right?
So we often have those kinds of conversations. But there is also the other thing about is it's interesting to see with the pandemic, B2B has been the bread and butter of the kind of stuff we've worked with. All of our clients are more B2B, but the opportunity the pandemic made was basically every parent became an instructional assistant overnight. And that's amazing. But the industry had not woken up this opportunity of, well, how can we leverage that?
How can we help parents be better instructional assistants, and what kinds of products or services could parents use to help their children? And feel more connected to their children's learning, and ask the right kinds of questions. So instead of asking your kids when they come home, "What'd you learn at school today?" And they say, "Nothing," you actually have information that you could use to say, "Oh, it looked like you learned about isosceles triangles today. Tell me what's the difference between isosceles and an inclinable triangle." Or, "What's one of those in our house today right around us," right?
So a way to help parents be more empowered and capable of asking good questions that their children might actually be interested in answering, right? So that's an opportunity in the BDC space that I'm surprised we haven't seen in the local Walmart, Target, etcetera, of this is software or this is a package or a subscription. Parents could have to do things to help them feel more connected to their child's learning or supporting their educator's work at home, right? But it's also that's new to the institutional side of education. That side just doesn't think about parents as customers.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And I think that with some of these recent reports that come out and reinforce whatever we want to call it, learning loss, academic recovery in certain subjects that we've decided that are most important to learning, which is debatable for the future of our learners but-
Thor Prichard:
Absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
... I would say that the emphasis on family, school, learner partnerships I've seen pop up more. And I think you're hinting at that as it relates to product development. I mean during the pandemic, I've certainly saw people go, "Oh my gosh, we're going to sell to parents all of a sudden," and did not change their product, which is a big no-no people.
Thor Prichard:
Big no, no, yeah, saw that.
Elana Leoni:
And you're saying, "Hey, there's also opportunities for other players to come in because market is quite huge too." But I've also seen ed tech companies say, "Okay, great, we have this great product. We're going to introduce all these features and then just charge a subscription model for parents to follow along." So we're seeing a lot about that, but overall, people are recognizing more so than ever that recovery efforts to this scale. If we truly care about the math or reading scores from A-P-E and things and so forth, we're not going to be able to do it alone as educators. And there has to be effective parent, guardian, family type of partnership.
Thor Prichard:
Yep, yep, connect because it takes a village to raise a child. It's not just the educators, right? We're human systems, and human groups don't follow clear boundaries, so students aren't the only learners, right? So all of these things are true, and we don't have good systems that... Because even if you had something for parents, that's great for parents, but how do you get data to and from that Jack to schools?
Well, that's a whole other sticky can of worms to work out because you've got student data privacy. You got to make sure you're getting right access to the right people, to caregivers. Who's authorized, who's not, and what kind of information are you exchanging, and how is it being exchanged? How's it being stored? All those are kinds of questions think about too.
So it's evolving and it's changing, and that's what's exciting about it too, is trying to question some of the assumptions. Some of them are not assumptions. Some are good policy and practice and law about privacy and security, but other things about why is it that the student doesn't own their own data and can take it to use it wherever they want, right? Now, if you're a fourth grader, that's probably not too practical, but if you're an eighth grader, a 12th grader, maybe that is, right?
Elana Leoni:
And can we have the flexibility and ownership to decide what to do with it so it doesn't follow us along too, because there's negative aspects of data, too.
Thor Prichard:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Elana Leoni:
So many things we could talk about with trends in education, but why don't we move, and I'll use a Germany word called pivot. We can pivot towards the future a little bit, or you can kind of take it more of what are you most excited about, because we certainly got some really exciting technology, but when I talk to you, you always ground it to, "Yeah, so what. How does it map to pedagogy, and how does it really embed into an educator or a student's everyday learning pattern?"
But with that in mind, do you have certain types of technology? We certainly have the Generative AI that you're talking about hitting us over the head. We've got immersive learning accessible and available to us more so than ever. What are the things that you're like, "Oh, yeah, I could see our team designing learning experiences this way or whatnot." Do you feel like there are some signals to some trends you might see for the future in terms of product development and innovation? Or are you just excited about a certain trend you want to talk about?
Thor Prichard:
No, no. That's great. Yeah, there's lots of things, but I think the things that excite me are it's the confluence or the sort of aggregation of several things we've seen emerge in technology, in education over the last say decade. There was the big idea of personalized learning and recommendation engines, and those were really hard to get off the ground, and they were kind of clunky and not quite great. But they were the right idea, like how do we personalize learning towards just in time, the right kind of level on adaptation, etcetera.
Well, I think with the kinds of AI tools we're getting out there and starting to look at AI analysis and a longitudinal data of a student's learning, that might make for better predictive recommendations. So that's interesting to see what might happen in that. But there's also the aspect of using kinds of tools that do that kind of analysis to not necessarily make really colorful dashboards for administrators and teachers who don't have a lot of time to look at dashboards.
But if it could just boil it down to say, "As an educator, tell me who are the five students who have improved the most in the last two weeks? Tell me who are the five students who have struggled the most in the last two weeks?" That kind of tool that just did that would say, "How much time for an educator who'd have to go to four or five different products to log in, check a dashboard, measure the results, see the difference, create our own spreadsheet to try to figure out is that actually a difference or not, and report that back to their principal or to their co-teacher." That's a lot of effort that one product could solve by doing and looking at that. Now, a lot of that's like, oh, well, how could you do that, Thor, there are so many different data systems and vendors, etcetera.
Well, that's kind of doable. A lot of those tools are using interoperability standards. A lot of the tools that are already doing data sharing and data warehousing. It's just a matter of building very simple front end to it that makes it easy for educators to interact with. An example of this is one tool that was sort of under the radar for the longest time, but suddenly popped up and got lots of exposure because people think of it as an AI kind of product, and that's TeachFX. TeachFX is a very simple product. You turn it on when you're ready to teach, it records what's happening and does the audio recognition, the auto... not translation, but recognition to know how much time of that period. If you're, let's say a middle school science teacher, how much time would you spend talking? How much time were students talking, which students were talking? So you can get feedback immediately.
You say, "Hey, you talk too much teacher," or, "Hey, you're calling on the same student all the time. Here are three different instructional strategies you could use to avoid that," right? So that kind of tool, which is very simple, doesn't have some big AI behind it other than just speech recognition to know and recognize the different voices it's hearing is a great way for an educator to get that sort of private feedback from an app to tell me, "Oh, hey, I didn't think about that. That's great coaching advice. Here's some things I can do."
Elana Leoni:
I know-
Thor Prichard:
So that can...
Elana Leoni:
... think about, sorry to interrupt, but around-
Thor Prichard:
No, please?
Elana Leoni:
... video and the role of video playing in the classroom, it felt like it was a exception to the rule definitely 10 years ago. And really the only type of educators that were using video to professionally develop were national board certified teachers because it was required in the process, right? At the time, it wasn't even embedded in their phone. They had to bring a camera. All things, think about how easy it is to really get real time feedback that can contribute to those light bulb moments that you're talking about of like, "Gosh, if I'm using a Harkness circle and we're doing a reading discussion, what are the types of students that are fundamentally always raising their hands and which voices are not being heard? And what am I doing to create an inclusive environment to encourage them."
They can alter the trajectory of a student's life. It's powerful stuff in the way that you're talking.
Thor Prichard:
Absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
And TeachFX when they... Even just that light bulb of we think it common sense, but once you put the data in front of you, you're like, "Oh, geez, I talk too much."
Thor Prichard:
Exactly. And it's great insight. It's actionable insight. Its makes it part of your essential practice, right? We're working with a client teaching channel, if a renaissance coming about video coaching and thinking differently about it now where the technology makes 10,000 times easier. We now have technology can start to do thing like TeachFX to record the audio, recognize the difference talker speakers. And doing more analysis and looking at, okay, the Danielson framework and what does that look like for teaching practices?
And gosh, this video is showing you doing it not quite right, and here is where, and having it ways... Not necessarily AI doing the recognition, but easier tool sets for you yourself to evaluate your own teaching or a co-teacher or your principal. It doesn't have to be evaluative. It can just be simply mentorship and coaching actions that you can act on as a professional, as an educator. That's amazing feedback to get.
Elana Leoni:
And tools like that. Sometimes it feels overly simplistic, but within education that things do tend to move slower and there's a lot more built in. There's a lot of nuances and challenges and roles that you would think of. Even the relationship potentially between an administrator and a teacher and the role of professional development as an educator. We really need to hit the ground, kind of dispel the mist there and say, "What would professional development look like if I took ownership, and I really wanted to develop and had goals and I wanted to use tools like video. And what teaching channel is doing is quite exciting around that." So sometimes we talk of overly simplistic things, but there's reverberations into identities and nuances and stakeholders in education.
Thor Prichard:
Yeah, it's an interesting thing you mentioned about oversimplification because it's an aspect of the most effective products are the simplest and easiest to use. And sometimes we think in education and technology that you have to have lots of bells and whistles to equate to a high price tag or a high value product. It has to slice, dice, julienne and chop all in one thing.
Well, no, if it's a really good knife, the user, the educator or the student under good adult supervision, can do all those actions themselves with one really good knife, right? So thinking about the tools and technologies, I think sometimes the product development we get worked up into, we got to have lots of bells and whistles. And really if we just took three of them and made them really well, really well crafted and really well-designed and aligned to the needs of educators, that product will have legs for a long time to be in the field forever. So it's interesting to see, when we think about trends, it's really not the buzzy trends. It's these lasting trends that will make a difference.
Elana Leoni:
And then the irony, sometimes there's the more technology we have, the more we are fundamentally reminded of the power of the relationship and the expertise and the supportive nature of an educator. There hasn't been a technology that can replicate that. And nor are we trying to do that. What I like about what you've said in the past too, how can we make sure that that gets to shine, that maybe we have more time, and we alleviate the nuances and mundaneness that sometimes they're embedded in the profession of education, so we can let that shine, that relationship-driven aspect of what truly works in education.
Thor Prichard:
Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
Well, I know we could talk about trend, ed tech, all of the things, but we'll definitely have you on. Maybe we'll dive into more implementation and professional development and the role that that plays in ed tech.
Thor Prichard:
Oh, yeah.
Elana Leoni:
But to end this episode, I would love to ask you, because you run an agency, you've been doing it for decades now. It is very rewarding. I love how I can have a dotted line to, okay, I know that I'm fundamentally making a difference in this world, but it doesn't mean that it's not draining. And so when you have those days where you're like, "Don't talk to me. I just need to look at a blank wall or whatever it is." How do you get up the next day and come into work and get excited until recharge? What are those activities that nourish you to get you back up to speed?
Thor Prichard:
Oh, that's a great question. I mean, the ones that sort of do the best recharging is when I'm on a sailboat. The technology in a sailboat is very different than the technology in a classroom, obviously, or in an office space. It's being one with the ocean, being one with the water and the wind, and that just helps clean the mind, so to speak, right? And that's really important. But I usually end up sailing on my buddy's boat, so it's not my boat. Which is even better if you're a sailboat owner, you know that it's better to be on someone else's boat than you have to have [inaudible 00:28:17]
But the other thing is thinking about that I like to do is just try to get in touch again with educators. It's really when I hear the stories and whether it's the trials and tribulations, the joys and the times of just drives into tears. I want to be connected to educators as much as possible. And it's one of the reasons why we as a policy as a company that anybody on staff wants to go work in classrooms. They got at least, I think it's a day a year we do with that.
Probably more like once or twice a quarter maybe, that you can do a volunteer in the classroom because we want that. A lot of times we do partnerships with schools where we want to help beta tests or just do focus groups and be connected. Do some what we would call ethnographic research, be in the classroom, monitor, listen. Probably act as an instructional assistant because we can't help it. We love it.
And have that partnership and relationship with a real-world classroom teacher and seeing and interacting with the students to better ground our work to make sure it's still aligned with those needs and interests of educators everywhere. So that's always a way I fill my cup is just be inspired by what educators... I think my job's hard sometimes, but then I see what they're doing and dealing with and it's like, "I've got it pretty easy compared to that." So I'll strive harder, I'll work harder to make their job easier every day.
Elana Leoni:
A hundred percent. Sometimes on my toughest days, I go, "Gosh," I go and I listen to our... We help manage a community of teachers that every day just help support each other. But also are honest in their challenges and their struggles. And I embrace that and go, "Gosh, they just go through so much and they give their heart and soul." Being able to ground myself to that really also gives me energy. Is why I love how you framed it with the educator voice.
Well, thank you so much, Thor, for all of your wisdom. I've learned so much. I know our audience will walk away with at least five things, and anyone that's super inspired into education, technology, the future, the trend, we will put in some related podcast episodes as well into the show notes. And I'll connect with Thor if there's any other resources he wants to put in the show notes to really just say, "Gosh, we are moving quickly, but also slowly, but we need to move in with intention at the same time," right?
Thor Prichard:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Elana Leoni:
Also-
Thor Prichard:
All about the teaching.
Elana Leoni:
Thank you so much, Thor. Everybody, we will see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Thank you all for listening and take care.
Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter, at Leoni Group or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoy today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Thor Prichard, Guest
I lead the team of technology-savvy learning experience designers and education-savvy product designers and software engineers at Clarity Innovations. We create solutions for our clients that help improve the process and practice of teaching and learning. My professional interests are focused on the intersection of technology and learning. I keep current on emerging policy, instructional, and technological trends to inform when a combination is right for potential emergence in the K-12 education market, generally 3-5 years from now. Having worked at this for over two decades, I’ve seen the work of education happen from multiple perspectives. Whether that’s for clients the likes of Intel, Adobe, Sphero, NWEA, PBLWorks, Kindercare, Common Sense, Math Learning Center, littleBits, AWS, Microsoft, or ISTE, it all comes down to improving pedagogy to enrich the lives of learners everywhere. And in my free time, I enjoy offshore sailing.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
Rate, Like, and Subscribe
Let us know what you thought about this episode by rating and reviewing our podcast. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let us know what you loved most about the episode! Also, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the podcast to be notified when we have more content to share with you.
Transcript: Myth-Busting for EdTech Marketers
This interview was originally recorded on October 27, 2023, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome, everyone, to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests, who range from educators, to EdTech entrepreneurs, to experts in the field will all share tips, strategies, and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week, I got to chat with Lawrence Korchnak. He's the founding partner of Bloqq, and that's spelled B-L-O-Q-Q. It's a consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations scale specifically in the education market. So I was just thrilled that he said yes to my little invitation of coming on our show and sharing his specific advice for EdTech in education organizations. Lawrence is a friend, and I could instantly tell from our conversations that he just really cares about making a difference in education, and doing it in a way that matches his expertise. So he's all about how do I use proven strategies? How do I teach people to do things around best practices that typically do work in EdTech, to grow and scale education businesses?
So you might remember Lawrence from our last episode with him where we covered the challenges of EdTech go-to-market strategies. And if you haven't listened to that, take a moment, go back into your Apple iTunes or wherever you listen for podcasts and star that, save it for later because we get into all of the good stuff around what a marketing plan is, what isn't channel strategies, and so much more.
In this episode, Lawrence and I did something a bit more lighthearted, and honestly, I just asked Lawrence, I said, "Hey, are you game for this?" Because it's fun, and beyond it being fun, it is very, very helpful. It's the things that people don't talk about in EdTech that should. So we talk about, in this episode, the myths in EdTech and we do a little myth busting and have some fun at it as well. So we talk about myths like marketing to a single decision maker in EdTech, what is a premium model, and does it guarantee B2B sales cycles, and product market fit? We talk about the nuances there and the myth.
And the good old myth of once you sell to schools, the churn is low and you are in forever. It's good as gold, right? So there's all sorts of fun myths that we were able to myth-bust together. The conversation is just so, so good. Lawrence does not sugarcoat things and I love that about him. He does not hold back, and this was just so much fun to talk about. So please enjoy the episode everyone.
Welcome, everybody, to All Things Marketing and Education. Today I am speaking with Lawrence. So glad to have you here, Lawrence.
Lawrence Korchnak:
My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Elana Leoni:
So today, we're going to talk about something quite broad and big, but I thought our two minds together could talk about something fun. And one of the things I like doing on this show is talking about the unique characteristics of selling within K-12 and higher education in particular. And a fun way to do it is really dispelling some myth around it. So I'm going to throw some things at you, and you can add some more if you'd like, but I think this is whether you are an educator in the classroom. I think that this fundamentally speaks to your importance if you're ever thinking of jumping into EdTech, because you can be that voice of, "Hey, no, it doesn't really work that way, and I didn't realize that people thought that, potentially," or on the other side, if you are just jumping into EdTech for the first time, this is a great episode to get started in too, because whether you know it or not, you might have some biases, you might have some assumptions based on your previous work experience that may be outside of education technology.
So here we go. Why don't we jump into the first one that I think is the biggest one. Whatever channel you're marketing in, wherever you're going to, and this isn't unique to education, but the stakeholders in education are quite unique. But there is a myth that I market... Where I market to, a hundred percent, that stakeholder is going to be the sole decision maker. You see what I'm saying? In education, there's a big complex ecosystem of people, and depending on the type of school and your product or service, you're never just talking to a decision maker.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Yeah. You put it up on a tee for me. I appreciate that. No, you're absolutely right. You're not selling to a single person or a single individual. One of the things I'm fond of saying is nearly everyone you meet in education can tell you no, but no one is going to give you an unequivocal yes, and understanding that selling in the education space is not a single point of sale, it doesn't work like the consumer market, that it's literally an exercise in coordinating and helping people who are interested in your resources, your products, your services, your intellectual property, bringing those people together in a way that unites them, and that is typically done from top down and bottom up.
You've got folks at the building level, at the administrative level, the district office level. Whether you're public education or private, there's some organization to that who control budgets that you should care about if you're selling into this space. But if your product doesn't make a difference for teachers, if it doesn't improve instruction, it doesn't improve outcomes for students, you're going to have a very difficult time connecting the top with the teachers and the users and practitioners in education, getting those people to speak to each other in a common language and in a common tone around what you do that's unique and valuable for students' learning in schools and communities and families [inaudible 00:06:44].
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. I took a design thinking class in MBA school, and the first thing... I was working on prison reform, and the first thing they had me do is map out all of the stakeholders in the ecosystem and what their relationship is. And if you all listening to this don't know, I think it's a really good foundational activity to get your internal team involved on too. Who are all these players? How do they change based on the different institutional type, and maybe your different product lines too. Because it's kind of cool, I don't know, I nerd out on that stuff, but you have to make sure that your marketing planner, when you're talking to them, really involves all of those stakeholders. You can't leave them out because it is somewhat of a consensus. It's not like I'm sitting out at a bar at AASA and I see a superintendent, and I'm like, "Hey, buy my stuff," and he's like, "Great." Like, he needs-
Lawrence Korchnak:
Yeah. Done. Not a problem.
Elana Leoni:
... [inaudible 00:07:45], he needs buy-in, he needs to make sure that the people, the instructional coaches, depending on what your product or service is, have the buy-in. There's a lot of things involved.
Lawrence Korchnak:
And I think you just touched on a really important thing, and this is something that I've seen lots, and I had to learn sort of the hard way in some respects. I had the advantage of being... I'm still a recovering classroom teacher. My father retired as a superintendent of school, so I had a little bit of some background working knowledge because education was the family business. My mother graduated or retired from the classroom, so that's what we talked about until I left the house for college.
But this idea that a superintendent is going to say yes to what you do, that just doesn't happen. There might've been a time and a place when it did, it doesn't any longer. Understanding what success is to and for the folks that you are speaking to is critically important. So a few-minute conversation that, you know, success, and this might be hard for folks to get their head around when we have pressure around the business, success, if you bump into that superintendent somewhere is, "Oh, I see what you're doing. That's really interesting. That's a critical area of at my district. Please call on my director of English language arts."
"Oh." That's success. Getting that nod of approval from a superintendent, that's about the best you could ask for until it comes time for board approval or some level of equivalency. So just understanding that no one's going to give you an unequivocal yes. It's going to be a process of one person saying this looks interesting, or one person saying this is changing the lives of students, and bringing those people together in a way where they're talking and listening to each other meaningfully is part of the art of working in the industry.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. I'm excited to send you this next myth, and I'm not going to give it away this time. How about the myth of people saying relationships are overrated. If my product truly improves student outcomes or future effectiveness, everyone should just buy it. I actually don't even need to do marketing. And I don't really need to know anyone in the industry because this works, product works.
Lawrence Korchnak:
I would ask those people, have you ever bought a product or service from someone that you didn't know, like, or trust? Probably not. Whether it be a car, and you walk into a car dealership, how many people hate that process and they hate that process because they don't know, like, or trust the person they're talking to? I would say when you have a favorable experience buying a car in your personal life, you probably have established a real rapport with that salesperson, or you at least like them and trust them to some degree.
No different than in education. Education probably, as much or more than any other market or industry that I know, it's imperative that people trust you, that you come across as somebody with a degree of authenticity. Your company should demonstrate its authenticity, the people who represent your company should demonstrate their authenticity in the market. And there's lots of ways to do that, but understanding that or being able to engage people and have them understand that you are sympathetic and empathetic to what they're doing and their situation and their circumstance is going to be really, really critical to success. This is a person-to-person business. That's just the reality of it.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And I'll link to our show notes, but I got to talk to Dan O'Reilly who runs a business around really training sales representatives, specifically B2B and K-12, and he said it best too. He's saying that it's very relationship-driven, obviously, and they're connecting individually to people. And in education, a lot of the times, the consortium of people making decisions are basing it on emotion and gut. And very rarely, a lot of the times, it's not this ROI-driven thing. It's do I like the person? Do I trust the person? Do I have a word of mouth market around me that I trust? There's all of these concentric circles going around, but they're all based on relationship, going from like-
Lawrence Korchnak:
Yeah, a hundred percent. And there's an impact. This is a qualitative aspect of working in the market, but there's a quantitative aspect to this too. People buy from people that they know and trust. It is a person business, and the corollary to that is they don't always purchase a product or service from the lowest-cost provider. There are mechanisms in the business or in the market that facilitate purchase for the lowest-cost provider, but very, very rarely is it strictly a purchase based on this is the cheapest, least expensive thing that satisfies our needs. It is a combination of understanding, authenticity, person-to-person interaction, and value, and there's lots of ways to demonstrate value. So within that human dynamic, there's a corollary around... That human interaction supersedes and trumps being the lowest cost provider in what it is you do.
Elana Leoni:
All right, here's another one. So this one myth is really about sales cycles and product market fit. And sometimes, I see people come in that may be working with a similar type of product, but now that product is for the EdTech market. And they may come in and say, "All right. This is what worked for me over here, my sales cycle. This is what worked for me in terms of my channels. Here's how I can create budgets and figure out my expected outcomes." And they use that as a base. I know I'm setting you up here for a home run, but what's the myth in that?
Lawrence Korchnak:
The education market doesn't behave and act like a consumer market. And I'm not sure if this is the answer you're going for, but this is how I go after it. Someone who came from another industry, education doesn't behave like healthcare, doesn't behave like finance, doesn't behave like real estate, and it certainly doesn't behave like a consumer market. The education, it's about demonstrating authenticity. It's about human touch, and it is largely about quality. It's not a quantity gain. You shouldn't come to market and thinking about go-to market strategy. Develop a go-to-market strategy that incorporates all of these things, but think about it in terms of quality of opportunity, not necessarily quantity opportunity. You're looking to drive high conversion rates that support your business. Very, very difficult to go at from a consumer standpoint of a massive body of people who have signed up for a free trial and a very small percentage of them who actually convert to purchase. You want to create mechanisms and process and structure to identify the quality in that quantity and focus your time and attention on the quality, and perpetuate that cycle.
Elana Leoni:
Your answer leads me to another myth. If I just have a really great freemium model that, say, teachers can use in their classroom, that'll be the building blocks to have all of the districts sign on. If I just have a great freemium model that teachers can use free, that'll immediately be something that'll translate into big B2B sales with the top districts.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Yeah, probably not. And I'm saying probably not because with enough time and with enough money, you could literally make anything happen with enough time and with enough money in the market. So if you have an incredible amount of money and lots of patience, maybe that will play out for you. I've worked in and on businesses where we had hundreds of thousands if not millions of users, and were confronted with difficult decisions about this freemium model isn't working. The conversion rates are nearly high enough to support the business. We have to move this to a paid model in some way. Having to re-engineer that strategy and that decision is a difficult one to make.
So anyone who's in the market and thinking about freemium, yes, you need to give... There's an expectation in the market that users have the ability to test what you do, but you're going to want to limit that in some way, not in perpetuity, maybe not everything that you provide, but you don't want to limit that in some way because ultimately, you're going to need for them to pay for your product.
And you're going to need them to pay for the product, and when they purchase your product, there's a necessity and imperative for them to use it too. And so it becomes a symbiotic relationship of you want to support them well because they want to use your product to meet the needs of learners or students or families or communities. So how do you do that in a complimentary way? And that also plays back into the point we made earlier about you don't do that stuff with people you don't know, don't like, or don't trust.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And when we think about freemium models, I think you can look at the models in EdTech, the startups in EdTech, and you can say, "Oh, so and so, they did start from a freemium and they are successful." So to your point, there are ways to be successful with a freemium model. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of runway, and in this market of less investment, I don't see it being the most practical approach, like you said, and the people converting, the users, and say the users are mostly teachers, the people that are converting to potentially paid are teachers with the lowest amount of disposable income around, and that's never a good business model.
And then I see sometimes EdTech people pivoting to go, "Okay, well then parents can do it." And I'm like, "Whoa, slow your roll there," because that's a completely different marketing strategy, and a completely different product to the consumer market. So there is a misalignment of stakeholders sometimes when we get into the freemium model.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Absolutely. One of the challenges that in the freemium model that I've seen consistently, if you have a product or service that's providing something up to a certain point, and you provide it free in perpetuity, a teacher will use that. A teacher, an educator, someone in the space will use that. And then what they'll do, they'll find another product that fits their need that offers the same sort of proposition to the market [inaudible 00:18:17] I could just use this [inaudible 00:18:18]. Where you leave off, they'll find another product. And so getting folks oriented around the idea of using your product, having them understand the value of what it is and what it does and what impact it makes, is vitally important, because it's only when many of those things align is when you tip the scale to a purchase. And the point you made is spot on. Teachers traditionally, in most circumstances, don't have enough buying power to support a business at scale over any period of time. They just can't do deals large enough to support a business in the US education market.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. I'm going to sneak in one more question and then we'll get to a fun question. But this one's kind of hard because it's kind of true, but it's kind of not true, is once I sell into schools, and sometimes people would call this B2G, so I'm business-to-government a little bit. Once I sell into a government entity, I'm golden. They're never going to get rid of me. There's going to be really low churn. All I need to do is get in. And schools really have a hard time reducing their tech and things like that. I just need to get in. So I know it's a little bit tricky on that one, but what would you say to that?
Lawrence Korchnak:
So, yes, if you're... What I'm hearing there is a couple things. The first thing I'm hearing is the single biggest challenge in the market is getting in, is getting into the walled garden. But it's also a challenge to stay there. Schools have shifting priorities, schools have shifting budgets. There is always money in schools to purchase things. They're consistently turning the lights on, buses are running, teachers are being paid. There's money flowing in and through schools, but you can quickly find yourself below a priority line of funding if you are not supporting teachers, you're not supporting students, and you went out and you over-promise and under-deliver. You're far better off under-promising and over-delivering. That will keep your renewal rates at a level that will consistently support your business. But yes, it's tough to get in, but it also takes work to stay in. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it in cruise control. It does take some of that human touch, or of course in some cases a considerable amount of that human touch after you've sold to stay a part of their decision-making and their solutions for students in schools.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And I think in the market, we're seeing continuous acquisitions. So if we're seeing a brand that they already have a contract for, an LMS or an SIS or throwing a fun school acronym, but say they have a technology around that and they purchase a similar technology under their umbrella of brands, we're also seeing a consolidation of the tech stack within school district. Although schools move very slow, so that may take some time for them to consolidate, but I think some of the industry in terms of acquisitions can help fuel that too. And then we also saw that pandemic bloat of all the tech too, that they're like, "Oh, we don't really need this anymore or that anymore."
Lawrence Korchnak:
Yeah, that's right. There was a huge pendulum, a huge shift in the market relative to EdTech, both in terms of schools purchasing EdTech and then purging EdTech on the other side of COVID, but also investment in EdTech from the investment in the education sector and companies in EdTech because they saw and understood that there was an unprecedented flow of money from the federal and state government to spend on these things to address the educational needs and an unforeseen emergency catastrophe with COVID. Things have shifted back now. So some of those monies are... We can see the horizon of when those monies are going away. Schools are already being confronted with making difficult decisions about well, what stays, what goes. And to the earlier question, being involved with them hands-on and being part of what they do is going to give you a much better chance of remaining part of the solution.
On the VC side, I think things are still shifting a bit. The rush to invest in the education market I think has... All of the data shows that it has slowed massively. Investors, private, institutional, et cetera, are really looking for folks to have a proven-out solution, a proven-out business model, an understanding of the market, and they're really being much more discriminating about where they allocate investment dollars. They're looking to add accelerant to your rocket, not help you build a launching pad. And that's a really important distinction and something I would encourage folks to really think critically about when they come into the market, if seeking investment is part of your strategy.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. We should do a whole nother episode on that, because there's a lot of nooks and grannies on that. But I want to thank you, Lawrence, for your time. I have thrown every question at you that are super hard, and really, I just said, "Let's go with it. Let's talk about the myth." So I thank you for being at the good sport on all of this and just jumping in with me. And for those of you going, "Gosh, there's so many other myths," maybe I'll do another episode of some other myths that we forgot, because there certainly are. And the goal is just for you to pause and think critically about the assumptions you are making as we're jumping into education technology and specifically in the education market. And again, what we're saying now changes all the time because the market needs are changing. The investment landscape is changing. There's a lot of things ebbing and flowing, and it's just important that we talk about them. And hopefully, we've gotten you to pause before making assumptions, or just thinking critically about what are you doing and why.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Indeed.
Elana Leoni:
So to end this, I'd love to just ask you one question, Lawrence. I know you work hard. You are running a business just like me. You're also kind of doing that double bottom line that you talk about. You're making money, but you're doing it in a way that has that impact. You get to work with really great companies that make a difference in education, and I feel very lucky I get to do the same, but it doesn't mean it's not challenging and that you don't have those days where you're like, "Don't talk to me. I just want to stare at a wall," or those draining moments. Because our heart and souls are in this industry and in our work too. What do you do when you are just totally drained? What recharges you?
Lawrence Korchnak:
It's really interesting. I've got a variety of answers. The really simple answer is, and this is something that I was not really aware of, thought about, on my horizon. I'm of a generation that this wasn't a thing. But just this general idea about self-care. And some days for me, that's just unplugging. Some days for me, that is taking an hour out of my day and killing all the notifications on my devices because if I answer it now or I answered an hour from now, there's maybe not that big a difference. It can be different things. It can be silencing my notifications. It could be prioritizing getting to the gym today because I know I'm just going to feel better if I do that. It could be prioritizing making sure the dogs get two walks, because getting out and getting that fresh air and just moving around a little bit is good.
But understanding, embracing, and making time for some self-care when I realize that I'm running myself a little ragged is how I handle it. Sometimes I have to be reminded by, I almost always have to be explicit and purposeful about like, "Okay, I'm going to take a few minutes for myself here." And I would encourage anybody in a stressful situation or even not a stressful situation to prioritize taking care of yourself. It's very much a put the oxygen mask on yourself first because it's really hard to take care of others if you're not at your best.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. Sometimes ironically, I think about if I'm really stuck or I'm just feeling low, I have to completely detach, like you said, so then come back and then it's a whole new picture. It's a whole new productivity. You might get inspired, and even though in your head you're saying, "I'm losing time walking the dog," or whatever it may be, you can come back and go, "Wow, that really made a difference."
Lawrence Korchnak:
Yeah. I've never expressly done it and regretted it. Every time I've been like, "Okay, that was what I needed. I needed to take that hour at the gym this morning. I needed to take a few moments for myself and listen to some music or something and come back to this thing, and think about it differently with a slightly different lens. This idea that work is always sitting at your computer banging away, or responding email or on the phone, I think is, for me, not always the most productive. For me, I find I have breakthroughs on the other side of taking time for myself. I think more clearly about something. I have a revelation about something I've been pondering, but I've just given myself the opportunity to clear my mind a bit. So just reorienting myself about what is and how I define work for myself too has been an important step.
Elana Leoni:
Great. Well, thank you again, Lawrence. I've learned a lot. It's been fun to kind of go back and forth on these myths with you and learn and see what truly is a myth, what truly is fact, and what is that in between, as if there's no right or wrong answers. So thank you for spending time with us in our audience, and for all of you listening, have a good day, and we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education.
Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter, @LeoniGroup, or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoy today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Lawrence Korchnak, Guest
An experienced C-suite business and non profit executive bringing over 25 years experience leading people, departments, and organizations toward stability and growth. Throughout his career, Lawrence has been consistently drawn to and effectively led new product and organizational growth.
Since founding BLOQQ Lawrence has led market entry, B2B channel development, revenue strategy and management, and CEO advisement projects. Lawrence is a believer in first principle problem solving, seeking to understand first, and collaborative solutions.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
Rate, Like, and Subscribe
Let us know what you thought about this episode by rating and reviewing our podcast. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let us know what you loved most about the episode! Also, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the podcast to be notified when we have more content to share with you.
Transcript: Guiding Principals in EdTech
This interview was originally recorded on March 15, 2024, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement and ultimately grow their lead. Every week my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field, we'll all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.
Hi, everyone. You are in for such a treat for this episode. I was so lucky to sit down with my friend Kristina Ishmael. Kristina is now an education strategic advisor of her own shop, Ishmael Consulting, but was most recently the deputy director of the Office of EdTech. You might remember Kristina from our last episode where we covered the challenges and priorities of the national EdTech plan, and if you haven't listened to that, that's definitely worth a listen. We go into all of the important things, but in this episode we take a completely different turn. Kristina and I reflected on her unique journey within education and EdTech. I know many of you listening have had unique journeys yourselves, and I hear from some of you that you find hearing about these different career paths and EdTechs so inspiring, and Kristina’s is that and so much more.
Kristina opens up about the one thing that's helped guide her throughout it all, and at the end we get into some super juicy topics such as what EdTech vendors should and should not do when partnering with school districts and what truly excites her the most in EdTech. I know I said Kristina’s last episode was not to be missed, and it's not truly. You need to listen to it. It's all about the national EdTech plan, but this one makes my heart swell with pride that there are awesome human beings in the world like Kristina who throw literally their body, their heart, and their soul into improving education. And we do some soul-searching together even, and I hope that this conversation helps you do some soul-searching of your own. So please enjoy this episode, this EdTech version of what I'm calling the Chicken Soup for the Soul. Enjoy.
Welcome to the show, Kristina. I'm so excited to have you on.
Kristina Ishmael:
I'm so excited to be here.
Elana Leoni:
Well, awesome. Let's start with a little bit of trip of, I know sometimes we get into podcasts, and it's talk about this or this specific topic, but this episode I'd love people just to hear and connect with you as a person because you have a fascinating journey of what it could be like to work in education on all levels. So I'd love to hear from you of just what's your journey to date professionally and personally in education? I know that's a huge bomb, but whatever you want to do within that. There's so many listeners here that sometimes in our mind we say there's a linear path whereas people in education that might are trying to dip their toe in the water out of education and go into EdTech, there's maybe vice versa happening too.
So I want to talk a little bit about your background and where you started and where you are. We're all on the journey.
Kristina Ishmael:
That sounds great. We're all on a journey. It's true. I actually really like to start this story of my profession journey in education in particular by talking about mental health because my first degree is in business and mass communications. I had every intention to go into PR and marketing. When I got to Omaha, Nebraska, I moved from my home state of Arizona at the ripe old age of 21 and went for my first interview. After I was done with my interview, I had a very, very significant panic attack, and it was one of those moments where I was, "But I've been in school for the past four years working on this, and this is what I'm supposed to do," and my body viscerally was telling me no.
And it was that day that I went home, and I really spent some time thinking about what I was supposed to be doing. What was the universe telling me at that point? And so I looked into some post-baccalaureate programs and knew that I had always wanted to be a teacher and was like, "Maybe I go do that now." And so that's how I even crossed that bridge into education and started working at a child development center where I was a preschool teacher while I was working on my actual certification and then moved into my first school district, which is Omaha Public Schools in Omaha, Nebraska. A lot of folks think, "Okay, Midwest Omaha is small." It's actually not. Omaha Public Schools is 54,000 students, which is equivalent to the size of Boston Public Schools and San Francisco Unified, and they also recognize 115 world languages.
So we had a lot of multilingual learners, we had a lot of refugees. They have a significant partnership with Lutheran Family Services and Catholic Charities, and so there was a huge EL or whatever acronym raising for the day. It was ESL at that time, it's EL. Now we're hearing multilingual learners. Majority of my students were Spanish speaking and multilingual learners themselves. I taught kindergarten, second grade. I taught in a second grade dual language Spanish classroom for a year, all content in Spanish and then was back into a regular second grade full EL inclusion classroom. Then I moved school districts and was an ELL teacher kindergarten through sixth grade. I was working on a second master's at that point in EdTech. I had started to do that statewide scan of, "What do people have access to as far as professional learning for EdTech?"
I was using it in my own classroom. I had written my own DonorsChoose, putting iPod Touches in the hands of my multilingual learners and seeing what it did for academics but also for their language acquisition. And so really wanted to look at that state perspective, making sure that others had access to things, knowing that Nebraska is a relatively rural state. Was I in the minority over here in a highly populated area in Omaha and Lincoln where I had access to things but others didn't? And while I was doing that, there was a state EdTech position that opened as the digital learning specialist. So I applied for it and then moved to the state level, so not where I thought I would be. I was classroom teacher early childhood forever and ever, and then found myself at the state level and working with all 310,000 students and the 40,000 plus teachers. Half the job was internal and working with state folks that had no idea what EdTech was.
So getting to push in and be a part of conversations around standards and around CTE programs, around federal programs impacting our students that are experiencing homelessness, our ELs, our migrant populations, you name it. And then the other half was serving the state itself, like I said, all of the teachers and students. So I would have friends that would call me and say, "Hey, we're going to put iPads in the hands of 30 kindergartners tomorrow. Can you come help?" I'm like, "Yep, I am there." To leading full workshops on blended learning, on open educational resources, et cetera. Then in 2016, I had a friend who recommended me for a fellowship at the US Department of Education at the Office of EdTech, and I actually got to see you the day I accepted that job at Skywalker, where I was there in February of 2016, and Joseph South was the director of OET at that time and offered me the position. Two months later, I was out in DC.
But it really changed my life. It truly changed my life. Moving to that national perspective. I worked on a project all around open educational resources for a full year, so I bridged administrations. The Hewlett Foundation, who had funded that project, believed in the work that I was doing, and so they offered to continue funding my work, in particular on OER over at New America, which is a bank tank, an action tank as they like to call it. And I did. I got to do things that were very different for New America, which had traditionally focused on policy analysis as well as research and making all of these recommendations for policy. And I got to go over and play. I got to go and continue to lead professional learning for people across the country and really engage with educators and leaders as they were making these decisions to move away from traditional materials to OER.
And from there, I was there for four years, I was then asked to be a part of the Biden Harris transition team where I was on the agency review team led by Linda Darling Hammond and going in. And looking at what the department had done in the previous administration, what were the recommendations specifically focused on technology? And this is where I had severe imposter syndrome because my title was the technology strategy and delivery liaison. So a lot of people thought I was coming in as a technologist, programmer, coder, et cetera, and I was like, "I'm a practitioner, let's start there." And then people also were very keen. In November 2020, they wanted to have some dashboards of schools that were still remote or that had gone back in person. They needed to know that information, and we just didn't have that.
And so I spent a good amount of time just trying to understand who had those data to be able to aggregate them and bring them together to provide any recommendations for policy that the new administration would be coming in with. And then knew I wanted to go back into public service and would love to be in the office of EdTech. Fast forward to October of 2022, and I was appointed the deputy director of the office of EdTech once again, starting with mental health and, I think, ending with mental health, at least for me. I was in that position for two years and three months, and it took its toll. It really did. It was an incredible opportunity, and I would not change it or treat it for the world, but it was a lot. And I recognized when I went out on medical leave in November from burnout that I needed to take care of myself.
And so that's what I did. And so I left at the end of 2023. I really wanted to reach a couple more milestones along the way, but I didn't have the chance to. I'm still incredibly grateful for my chance to be there and the opportunity to lead that team, but right now, I'm taking care of myself and still staying plugged into the conversations that really matter to me.
Elana Leoni:
Thank you for sharing that journey. It's so inspiring on so many levels. I think I'll just point out on a funny level to start is when you saw me that day at Skywalker. I will never let down when Joseph wanted to see Skywalker Ranch, and I couldn't let him because the power fees were so strict and you're like, "Do you even know that this man was?" And I'm like, "I know." But Skywalker security is already side-eyeing me. If you know me and when I was at Edutopia, I love doing tours, but I had to abide by the rules, and sometimes it was very embarrassing moments for me.
But you also said in the journey that, and I know it's a through point through what helped guide your decisions and your gut and your intuition, and that's really important for me, and I have a similar story. You know when you rationalize things so much in your career, and your mind wants you to do this, but then your body says, stop with that? And it physically will stop you. And what I heard is that your path to business was like, "Stop silly, just stop.
Yes. And then I did it again, right? Where you're like, "No, you haven't been taking care of me and this is not going to help you in the long run to be who you need to be in this journey." And that is so powerful. All of you educators that are listening sometimes too, and people in EdTech that come in to make a difference in education, always have that gut check with yourself.
When I think of people that have modeled that, even though you will say and reflect back that you learned the hard way, we have to learn the hard way to be able to say, "How can we respect what our body is telling us?" I always get on myself. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way, and we just need to give ourself grace.
Absolutely. The other thing I loved is that when you got into the Office of EdTech and you had that title, you owned your own lane. Sometimes we're put in positions where here's this title, but, "Hey, here's what I do. I'm a practitioner." But it's not like you're saying, "Oh, that's a bad thing or that's less than," and for you educators that are coming into EdTech or thinking about it, the skill sets you have are different. Sometimes they are very transferable, but they are very unique and own it. And you did that. You weren't like, "Hey, I am this technology coder, but I am a practitioner, and here's why it matters." And I just wanted to underscore that for everyone listening.
Kristina Ishmael:
Yes, I talked a lot about that, especially I think since quarantine has ended thinking about teachers that are in complete burnout and they're like, "I've got to look at something different. I've got to take care of myself." And they're starting to think about transitioning into something else. And I said, teachers have the most incredible transferable skills. They just do. I spent a lot of my time as a deputy director dealing with bureaucracy, shocker. Y'all have dealt with bureaucracy as well as a teacher in a cool district, in any institution, being able to make multiple decisions on a daily basis. Yep, you're going to need all of these things no matter what you're doing. And so these are definitely transferable skills. And being a practitioner will lend itself to so many different avenues.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, hear, hear. I think I'll put in the episode in the show notes, we talked to a former program manager at Meta who came in directly from the classroom. We also talked to Serena Robinett who came from Soundtrap for Education and came directly from the classroom. So I'll bring that perspective in too.
Kristina Ishmael:
That's great.
Elana Leoni:
During your journey, there was one moment where you were like, "I want to apply for the state position." What gave you that confidence? Because sometimes we need that little to say, those skills are transferable and, yes, I'm going to do it even in my mind I don't think I'm going to get it. What did it take to get you there?
Kristina Ishmael:
I think I've always just been open to failure, and so I was like, "If I don't get it, I don't get it." And then I stayed doing the things that I still loved to do, but I'm thinking it was also because of the research that I was doing and making sure that my colleagues across the entire state had access to the type of professional learning that I was hoping for. I saw that there was a need, and I wanted to help meet that need, and so I was willing to go ahead and apply for it. A dear friend of mine, Tricia Parker, was the ELA director, the English Language Arts director for the state, and she was the one that had sent it to me and was like, "I think you should apply for this."
And even just having that one person say, "I think you should apply for this," made the biggest difference. And I did, and I'll never forget my interview for that position. I lived in Omaha. I was supposed to be in Lincoln. It's about a 45 minute to a 60-minute drive. There was a massive snowstorm there. My street had not been plowed yet, and so I'm frantically trying to contact the director and I was like, "I can't make it to Lincoln. Do you have a video option, a video conferencing option?" And this was back in 2012. They're like, "Yeah, yeah, we can use this." The very first day that I worked in that office, he pulled me aside, and he said, "We interviewed five candidates that day, and you were like a Camaro versus VW Bugs the rest of the time." And I was like, "That's really interesting. Okay." And he even put it in my head, he was like, "I know you're not going to be here long, but we are so excited to have you while you're here because you're going to make a difference. And then whatever you go do in this field is going to matter in the long run."
And that, it's when people speak those words into you that you really start to own them, and it helps defeat that imposter syndrome, which I cite on a daily basis.
Elana Leoni:
And that's a really great point too is, one, you said just do it. What's the worst that could happen? And maybe we're in a state in our lives that we're expecting failure, and that's fine, but if you don't try... And then you also said, "Hey, once I got there, I had positive reinforcement. I had somebody who maybe pointed out things that I'm not willing to see yet in myself." I personally work on that on a daily basis. I'm like, "Gosh, if I could just see myself the way others see me, you know?"
Elana Leoni:
It would make things so much easier. Yeah, having that Yoda person that's like, "Hey, you're the [inaudible 00:17:52]."
Kristina Ishmael:
I do want to say I also fully recognized my privilege in this moment. I am a white woman. At the time I was married, so there was a second income. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to put themselves out there. And so I do want to fully recognize that. And sometimes it may not be possible for you to do that, and I don't want to discourage anyone from trying by any means, but I'm happy to talk to anyone that wants to talk that through because it is hard, and you can't always find the people that are willing to help push you through and cheer lead you on, but I am happy to do that for anyone and everyone.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I think that's important because even if you're not willing to make a big risk and do these things, sometimes I work with people, and maybe it's more about what are the small little things that you could do. So my friend Lily Jones, for example, she has a whole community around how to empower educators that are still in the classroom to get some extra income, be curriculum designers. We're not saying you're full-blown going to create your whole big company, we're saying start small and see if you like it, and reflect consistently and work within what you feel comfortable in the beginning doing. And I think that's such a really good point. You can't just sometimes do these big moves, but small actions over time add up just as quickly too.
Kristina Ishmael:
And I will also say some very wise advice shared with me by Kristen Swanson, the founder of EdCamp or one of the founders of EdCamp, that when you get into a position that you think is dreamy or ideal or whatever the case may be, and it ends up not being that case or maybe it might be harming your mental health or whatever the case may be, the difference between most folks is that they will stick it out, and the people that leave sooner and then take care of themselves are better off in the long run.
Did I listen to that most recently? Probably not, but I can think about that and pinpoint certain things. And so even if you do put yourself out there and try something different and you realize this isn't the right fit for me, there are still other opportunities for you.
Elana Leoni:
For context on who Kristen is and her path, I think it's fascinating because she came from an educator background, a researcher, PhD author, and then jumped into the for-profit world and to stack, and now Okta, right? She's an Okta. Talk about different vertical and lateral moves that are significant and really owning what you can bring to the table and know that the sky... We limit ourselves so much. And I love surfacing up stories like yourself because sometimes life is a little bit about timing, luck, and a little bit of privilege, but you also have to have some self-belief. You have to take some risks too. All right, so much we can talk about you. I think I would learn volumes. And what I love about people with their background is, one, people don't get to talk about it as much, and it gives me so much context of who you are and the passion you bring and then your journey going forward.
So Kristina, 10 years from, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense," because of the podcast. I want to be selfish and be able to pick your brain around just what you've been able to experience in EdTech for decades and decades from all of the different vantage points. I guess from a national perspective, from a local perspective, when we think about EdTech in particular and its role, and you can take this specifically or broader, but I'm just curious about what products or types of EdTech have you seen make the most impact with teachers and students or that you're most excited about given you just have such a great perspective of, "Yes, we tried that 20 years ago and here's what happened"? Maybe you want to talk a little bit about what you've seen in EdTech and what you're most excited about or what you think really... I mean, I don't want to say what you think really works because that's the golden quest [inaudible 00:22:22].
Kristina Ishmael:
Right, right. I'm an elder millennial, or, as some folks like to say, the Oregon Trail generation because there's a couple of years right there where I grew up without the internet. By the time I was in high school, we had AOL. Yes. And then from there, obviously the technology has improved and proliferated, I should say. And so I think that that's an important contextual piece for even myself. I was always willing to try things. In high school, I quite honestly learned how to keyboard because I was on AOL instant messenger, and you had to keep up with the conversations. I didn't take a keyboarding class.
So I think it's also important to, again, know those types of things. I think my favorite use of EdTech is putting voice and choice in the hands of learners. And so whether it was in my early childhood classroom when I wrote my first DonorsChoose project and I got iPod touches so that we could do our center's early childhood, we were all about the station rotation and blended learning model from the very beginning. And so students were using that for a variety of purposes for reading our literacy block versus our numeracy block, our math block, seeing how they could use that for fluency and accuracy in their reading. And, again, those are the tools that helped them along the way. And so I think of that, again, that active use of technology that the national EdTech plan calls out, how can we leverage them as the tools?
Yes, there are plenty of tools out there for remediation for tutoring and helping kids get back up to certain grade-level expectations. But when I see inquiry-based or project-based instructional practices in a classroom and then the technology used to support that, that's where I get really excited because that's real learning, and it's not just going through the textbook or going through the scope and sequence, it's really putting the learning in the hands of the learners themselves and being that guide on the side. Or as Dean Tureski once said, and I love it so much, "It's the meddler in the middle." And so, how do you get to help kids in their learning journeys? And then which tools are you going to bring in along the way? Sometimes it's paper and pencil, sometimes it's paint, sometimes it's an iPad, and it just varies. So being able to see that from that classroom perspective and then to zoom out to the state perspective and you see little pockets of things happening as well.
I'll tell you that rural schools, small rural schools, are some of the most innovative schools because they are nimble and they are flexible, and they can try things and quickly iterate and then see if it's going to work or not. And then they make changes. And so that's not always something that we talk about in general. But I will always advocate for my rural schools because I worked with so many of them. When we talk about equity, we often think of our students of color and more urban-centered or even suburban, but rural definitely needs to be a part of that, as well as our title lands, for that matter. And so being able to see the technology as a tool to help them actually learn the traditional 21st Century skills, the collaboration, the communication, the creative thinking or the creativity and the critical thinking, and then throw in the problem solving as well. I think if your EdTech tool can support any of that, it is of value.
Elana Leoni:
Hear, hear. A recent podcast I had with Thor who is the CEO over at Clarity Innovation, so their team designs EdTech products and partners with EdTech to do that. And I was thinking he would be all about, all right, you got to have this bell and whistle. He talked about them last time. He was like, "Whoa, hold on. Let's talk about the pedagogy first." How does this integrate in? How does this complement what you're doing? And that is a complete shift. So if you are in EdTech listening, know that it's not just about your product, You're working within, how does this support innovative practices that you've mentioned like UDL, like PBL? How does it work? So think of that first and then use EdTech as an efficient way and almost look at the TPACK model or the SAMR model, and we could put links to what those are in the show notes. But how does it integrate in a thoughtful way? And I love how you said that.
Kristina Ishmael:
Well, still, again, it's 2024, we will continue to see the effects of the pandemic for many years to come, but the majority of public school districts, all 14,000, were back in person by 2022 for the most part, I'll say the majority. And so when that return happened, I was in my former position at the federal level, and I remember conversations where it was my biggest fear, the thing that keeps me up at night, is that we come back to in-person learning and everyone goes, "Put those devices away. We are done with those." And knowing that they can be so fruitful to learning, again, that would keep me up at night.
And how do we shift some thinking, what are the supports that need to be put in place for that? And it's not just the substitution, it's really not. And if you're thinking of simply helping digitize a traditional instructional practice, you need to think bigger than that. And so, how are we actually engaging this generation of learners in different ways? I mean, the stories that I'm hearing from teachers right now, it's wild. You had mentioned SEL already. We need to be looking at that whole child because we are in a very unique position as educators to be really thinking about the learner in every part of the learner.
Elana Leoni:
There's a lot to unpack there. And it was funny enough, one of the questions I was like, "Maybe I should ask her what keeps her up at night," but that's such an intense question, and you answered it anyways. And it might have evolved slightly because we don't want to just shelve what we learned in the pandemic. And we have certainly now nuances on top of that. But there are a lot of things that keep us all up in EdTech, and it's hard to choose. But I'm glad that you answered that without me asking you.
All right, so I feel like EdTech is in a hard spot always. They are tirelessly trying to figure out, "How do I align with district and school needs?" We have long buying cycles, we want to make sure that we're actually making an impact in the industry. You've been in the schools itself as a teacher implementing technology, you've been on the state level really trying to figure out how technology plays a role and now on a national level. What have you seen work from, I'm going to call our EdTech folks professionals.
Kristina Ishmael:
Vendor.
Elana Leoni:
A vendor perspective, those types of companies that come in and just get it and they're able to really jump in and make a difference. You want to talk a little bit about characteristics on what they do?
Kristina Ishmael:
Yeah, the very first thing that comes to mind is that they have engaged educators from the beginning. And we have many EdTech folks that may come from tech specifically that remember a problem in their K-12 experience and they say, "I think that's still happening." And then they go right into the solution for that, and then they create their tool, and they have not engaged educators in the process. There is a likelihood that that is no longer a problem or there are other solutions that are already in place that are working. And so when we think about EdTech having had the conversations, is this actually a problem in K-12 today? That's a great place to start.
And then engaging the educators that are potentially going to help pilot or try things out in the classroom and give you feedback, we also need to compensate them for doing so. I know that this is a district-by-district thing, especially with different unions and all of that, but we cannot expect free labor. And if you have teachers that are taking time to use your tool, use your product, especially with students, hopefully, that we are aligned in student data privacy, all of those considerations, but that is giving you really explicit feedback, they deserve to be compensated for that. And so that would be another thing that I would strongly suggest.
And then I go back into the evidence based decision making. If you are an EdTech tool or an EdTech provider and you have not looked at your theory of change and helping develop a logic model and saying, "We really believe that if we put this tool in a classroom, we will see X growth or increase or whatever the case may be," put that in writing, put it in a logic model. You don't know what that is, Google logic model. There are plenty out there, and it's an if/then statement, and then what are the outcomes and the outputs that you want to see? Because when you can go and lead the conversation with a district saying, "We've worked with educators to co-design this," and then we've really listened to their feedback to help shape the product, and now we're going to come in and say, "We've actually put this in some classrooms and here's the evidence that we have to show," you're going to be 10 steps ahead of other EdTech companies.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, great advice. And we'll throw some resources in the show notes around logic models and theories have changed because we don't just jump into this industry because we think we can make a difference. You should come into it strategically saying, "Here's exactly how, here's what we're trying to do and here's how we're going to measure it," even if it's a dotted line. One of the inputs you are doing as a company to get these direct outputs and then maybe societal outputs of the system as a whole will measure success. And that's important because there's a lot of choices in EdTech. We're feeling like there's a bloat. People have signed on to too many EdTech products. What's truly going to differentiate you in the midst of this cutting when we see this fiscal cliff coming ahead with ESSER funding, shutting down all of the appropriated funding. So that's a really great point.
Yep. Let's go on the flip side. You've talked a lot about best practices on what EdTech should do and you've seen done successfully in our industry. What are some things of, please, for the love of God, don't do these things?
Kristina Ishmael:
Oh gosh, where do we start? That's a really good question. I think the way that I actually answered this last one was the first thing that comes to mind is everyone, for the most part, of course, there are always exceptions, everyone has had a K-12 experience. And so that is their frame of reference, that is their schema that they bring to all of these conversations. It does not matter if they graduated five years ago or 40 years ago. Everyone had a K-12 experience. And so what's really important to note is that, yes, the industrial model is still very common in schools, but that's not 100% saturation across the entire public school system. Or if you want to throw in private parochial charter even, it's important to, I think, go and actually look and visit schools. I think we also see that as far as EdTech solutions coming in saying, "Sure, we have your solution, and go do it," but they haven't seen it in practice, or they haven't visited classrooms in which that would actually be used. And with your own eyes, you can see, "Oh, maybe this isn't actually what they need." And so I think that's really the biggest thing.
I also think back to the Pepperdine program that I did for my EdTech program. We went and walked the expo hall at FATC in 2013, and we weren't allowed to go to any of the other things. We just got the expo hall pass or whatever for the day. Our professor charged us with going to not every single booth, but going to as many booths as we could and asking the folks what the learning theory is behind their EdTech solution. That was so eye-opening for me. And though I know that many folks that are in those booths are on the sales side and may not have that background, I can tell you out of the at least 20 different EdTech vendors that I talked to, three of them might've known what I was even referring to as far as the learning theory.
And you have a lot of things that are out there that continue to perpetuate inequities, whether it's through behaviorism and we're going to reward X behavior versus Y behavior. Or we have constructivism, which my favorite, these are the things that I'm interested in and I'm going to construct my knowledge on that, and here's the tool that's going to help me along the way. And so I think knowing the learning theory behind your EdTech is also really helpful in the conversations with districts and with states. If you don't know that information, you might want to look into that because people will ask these questions, and you should be prepared to answer them. And I think the other thing is continuing to just look at the relationship between EdTech and schools as very transactional, and I know that we have thousands of EdTech tools to choose from.
In fact, learn platforms report from the EdTech top 40 last year, I think it was 9,000 EdTech tools. And then, a school district, on average, is using 2,500 EdTech tools with a teacher and a student accessing anywhere between 40 and 45 of those tools on a daily basis or on a regular basis. So that's 9,000 to 2,500 to 40, 42, 43, I think. To funnel that down, where are you going to sit in all of that? I mean, that's a valid question. Where are you going to sit in all of that? And so it's more than a transaction, it's developing that relationship. It's having that co-design opportunity and having the conversations with the practitioners who are actually using it. Will this help inform the newest iteration of your product, and the relationships matter in all of this as well.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, and everything you're saying, I'm like, "Yes," and we can talk about this for hours. And, yes, did you think about this? And I'm like, "All right, calm down, Elana, because she's saying nuggets of wisdom here," right? Seriously, I think that sometimes we say things in EdTech that you may have heard before, but now you're hearing from somebody with such a deep background, from a local perspective on the ground, from a state perspective, from a national perspective, really saying, "Here's how you should approach it thoughtfully and with the most impact in mind," because that's why we're all here. So I appreciate your candid answers for my bullet questions to you of what shouldn't they do. I had you in the hot seat here.
Kristina Ishmael:
That's good.
Elana Leoni:
Thank you so much, Kristina, for sharing your thoughts, your background, your journey. I know it will inspire so many people listening today, and thank you for the insight for all of you EdTech folks that are listening, I hope it provided you some clarity and a little bit of a change. Sometimes I challenge you all to think about what's one thing you'll do differently as a result of this episode. So thank you, Christina, for sharing your time and your wisdom with all of us. I really appreciate it.
Kristina Ishmael:
Thank you, Elana. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Elana Leoni:
All right, take care. Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter, at Leoni Group or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Kristina Ishmael, Guest
Kristina Ishmael is an innovative educator and advocate, leading the charge in promoting digital equity and opportunity in education. With a robust background that spans education policy, professional learning, and classroom instruction, she is deeply committed to empowering educators to effectively leverage technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), in the classroom. Kristina stands out as the lead for AI in education policy, focusing on ensuring AI applications are accessible, equitable, and enhance learning outcomes for all students. Her expertise also encompasses fostering inclusive learning environments where diverse voices are heard and amplified. As a thought leader and speaker, Kristina champions digital inclusion, edtech best practices, and meaningful professional learning. Her work, characterized by a passion for advancing education through technology and open educational resources, has made a significant impact on educators and learners alike, driving forward conversations on ethical AI use, digital equity, and the future of learning in a technology-driven world.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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Transcript: Demystifying the K-12 EdTech Buying Cycle
Transcript: Inclusive and Engaging Learning Spaces
Transcript: Civic Education for Classrooms and Community
Transcript: Tools and Tips for EdTech SEO Success
This interview was originally recorded on October 13, 2023, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Tatum Moser:
If you're trying to gauge whether or not your content will rank, they have this acronym called EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. That's how they're grading your content and your site.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field will all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.
Hello friends. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week I'm so excited to share this conversation with my friend, Tatum Moser, about all things SEO, search engine optimization. With all of you. Tatum is the founder and principal at Moser Consulting Solutions, where she helps clients improve their SEO health scores. She's also a co-founder at Mindly Games, which is a fun free educational gaming site for K-3 students to level up their math skills.
Tatum is one of the most knowledgeable people I know with SEO, and she's also one of the few that complements her skills with SEO, with a deep background in education in EdTech. She was a teacher for eight years. She spent six years at the head of content at education.com before she launched her own consulting business and startup. I had the pleasure of collaborating so closely with Tatum when she was at education.com. And a bit of a fun fact, education.com was a client of LCG's for four wonderful years, and my team just loved Tatum so much. She has this thirst for knowledge that is just infectious. We knew our paths would cross again, and now Tatum collaborates with LCG to help improve our clients SEO presence and health scores. So I am so excited for this chat because SEO is something not talked enough about in EdTech, and it always gets pushed aside like, "Oh, it's not really going to help," or, "Oh, that's for this type of company."
But what I found is that in EdTech specifically, I have not met a brand that hasn't improved significantly and differentiated themselves from their competition using SEO. It is a game changer. So during this conversation, Tatum talks about all things SEO, and for those of you who think this might be a bit too technical over your head, I promise that Tatum has a beautiful way of breaking this all down in such an easy to understand way. We talk about practical ways to leverage SEO in your daily marketing and content efforts, and specifically, we talk about tips on how you can improve your SEO health score by doing things like conducting keyword research, optimizing user experience, and using some really cool SEO tools. So SEO isn't always easy, but if you do it right, it is contagious, it is infectious in a really cool, nerdy way, and it will completely change the way you approach your content strategy, marketing and so many things, so enjoy everyone.
So welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, Tatum. I'm so excited to have you on this show today and to talk about all things SEO, because when I talk about SEO, not only do you light up, but you get me so excited. So I am more than excited to talk to you about the wonderful magic of SEO, search engine optimization. Welcome to the show, Tatum.
Tatum Moser:
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I do think SEO is pretty magical. I think some people out there think I'm pretty nerdy, but I get really excited talking about it too, so I am excited for this conversation.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, and you've shown me if you just do this and you do this, then you do this. And it's very much piecing the puzzle together to then make it all work. And in the world of social media and community where I have to deal with humans and algorithms, this is a beautiful alternative to that. I'm not saying SEO isn't hard, because it is, but I think what we're going to be talking about are some fundamental tips, tricks to increase your health, your SEO health score to make sure that you are ranking for the terms that you care about that are aligned for what your target audience searches for and all of the things in between. So to get started, Tatum, why don't you talk to the audience around, just how would you define SEO and then let's get into the role it currently plays or what you think it should play in EdTech.
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, so my definition of SEO would be very simple. It's what you see at the top of your Google search result. So anything that you put in to Google search box, those first couple of results, Google has deemed as doing the best job of meeting your intent for that search that you did. So that's usually the way I explain it to people. Yeah, that's again, search engine optimization. You're trying to make it so that you can be discovered and you're trying to make your content great.
Elana Leoni:
To clarify too, it's not paid. This isn't paid media placement.
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, that's true. This is free.
Elana Leoni:
This is all free, it's organic, and it's all about trying to figure out how you rank when people search for certain topics and things and names and brands. But how do those little crawlers out there rank you in all of the search engines? And we know that Google is the one that dominates.
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, definitely. It is free, but I think you will see in organic search marketing, there is a parallel to what you deal with in social media where a hybrid strategy is always the best, one where you're able to use search engine marketing and Google Ads in collaboration with your organic efforts. That's where you're always going to get the quickest return on investment, but the effects are so lasting. Once you've supported your organic efforts with a little bit of push from the paid side, it's not like that's not going to stay there. Oftentimes, your ranking, if your page really is quality in Google's eyes, it'll stay there. So the benefits just last for such a long time after that.
Elana Leoni:
Nice. So why don't we talk a little bit about search engine optimization, SEO, as it relates to EdTech. Do you feel like this industry is doing a decent job? Or what role does it play, especially as it's a long buying cycle in EdTech, there's a long period where districts and schools are just gathering information? So maybe let's talk a little bit about the role that SEO can, should currently plays.
Tatum Moser:
SEO plays a couple of important roles. Just to go through the different kind of roles that I've played and how SEO served my needs in those roles, I first got interested in SEO as a content developer. And I was coming from an educator background. And we would have the SEO team. They would come to us with these promising looking keywords, and that was amazing because SEO, in that sense, served as a proxy for user interest.
So if you're trying to decide what to build next, it's a really great practice for you to go and check, is anybody looking for this? If nobody's looking for it, do you really want to spend time building it? So again, that was always a tried and true method that we used as we would do brainstorms and come up with different ideas for initiatives that could come next in the pipeline, and then we would go and check. Again, search volume is a proxy for user interest. How many people are searching for this? How are they searching for it? What does the current results tell you about the intent of that search and what that person is looking for? So that was really, really great.
Elana Leoni:
So for the users that are very tactical like myself, they're genius, light bulb moment, search volume can correspond to user interest or buyer interest, but how do you do that? Maybe let's drop some tools really quick.
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, sure. There's lots of tools available. You've got Semrush and Ahrefs are two great ones. I used Semrush for a long time, but have recently made the move to Ahrefs, and I do really love Ahrefs, but you can go in and on their tool, they've got... It's actually a pretty robust tool that you can use in lots of different ways, but they have a tab that says keywords. So you're just going to go in and type in the keyword that you think. And again, if you're thinking from the user perspective, or you could even do this in user interviews before you even try to go look up keyword volume, you could say, "Hey, we're thinking of building X, Y, and Z. Have you ever looked for something like this online? If you did look for it online, how did you search for it? What did you actually enter in Google search box?" That's the easiest way to go about it right there. So Ahrefs is an amazing tool for keyword research.
Elana Leoni:
Great. And for those of you going, "What is she saying? I can't understand." Ahrefs is actually a pun on actually how you view code links, A-H-R-E-F. And so for any of you that were in HTML code like me way back in the day where you were hand coding stuff, that's what she's talking about. But we'll put all of the links in the show notes too. So you also talked about Semrush, SEOMoz and some other things. We'll put in the show notes, too, that people can take advantage of free and also paid tools. So jumping into keyword research is key before you even think of, "Okay, I've got this idea for content, but are people searching for it? And am I using the correct terminology?" Because in EdTech, one of the things we love to do in education is name one thing, five different things.
Tatum Moser:
That's actually such an important thing that you just mentioned. So I would say this, things are oftentimes rebranded over and over again in education. And sometimes when people are building products or starting marketing initiatives, they will intentionally want to say something a different way or a new way. I would put back to just question that because if nobody is searching for that new way that you're saying it, you're going to have a harder time getting it in front of users that are actually searching for exactly what you're making, but you're just calling it something different.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. So we talked a little bit about some tactics, some tools and the general role that SEO plays, but within education, in particular, do you want to talk about how you see SEO complementing goals that EdTech companies may have?
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, absolutely. Just with marketing in general, again, this is free traffic. When you make this investment and you are creating quality content that really truly is going to highlight what you do as a brand, how you meet users' needs, that effect is lasting. If you are ranking well for that topic, if you have a lot to offer in terms of expertise and authority on that topic, you're going to be able to really have a conversation with potential users, people that don't know who you are yet. And that's really, really powerful.
And in terms of just the overall importance, I think, let's say for instance that you are a founder of an education company and you're doing really important work. You're really meeting some unmet needs of potentially disadvantaged communities. This is how you can get your important message in front of more people than you ever would've been able to otherwise. And it's not going to come at the expense of what might be draining your already small budget for paid advertising because we all know startups can just throw money at the wind with paid advertising, whether it be on social media or Google Ad words, but this is really an investment that you can make to get more people to see and be exposed to your content and to what you do and what you stand for as a brand and the problem that you're trying to solve in the world.
Elana Leoni:
And as you were talking, I was thinking about, oh, you know what SEO plays as a role too, is that sometimes we are trying to market towards people that are actually hiding from us, that we can't find them and they're intentionally ghosting us because the school year is tumultuous. They have a hierarchy of needs they're trying to serve, but at the same time, they have to stealthily be looking at other products and look at their unmet needs as they start planning for the future school year tech needs. But they're not ready to talk to people. And if they're on Facebook, there's no way to find... They will just kind of make sure that people cannot get a hold of them during that time where they are lights out, okay, here are my primary school needs, but I also need to start researching EdTech products.
SEO fills that need really well because they're gathering and searching on the web for information. They might be going to their PLNs or their PLCs, their professional learning networks and communities to get word of mouth, but it also helps, what's your website presence, like you said. Do they talk about the terminology? Do they feel like they look like they could be a thought partner in this and not just a vendor?
Tatum Moser:
Absolutely. I completely agree. I think that ability to be an researcher without having a sales team trying to hunt you down just because you did a search is a really great... Yeah, it's just such a benefit to the users who, again, aren't ready to have those conversations yet, but still are looking around. And it's important for you to ask when somebody is doing research, what are we doing? What are we doing? What are the things that are important that we are doing that we want to show up for? So that pre-conversation, I guess, that you're having is so important.
Elana Leoni:
And then to your previous point, what are they doing? What's their behavior? And then what's the search volume? Am I using the right terms and optimizing that? And once you have that, you can garner another channel of interest while you're trying to be value-driven on social media, listen to them on the communities, build up your email marketing, all of your press, all of those things. What I hear from you all of the time is that things can't operate in silos, and if they do, they're never as effective as they could be.
Okay, so let's get into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty. What are some things EdTech brands can do to understand their SEO and in particular, their SEO health score? And again, if you use any of those tools, we'll put in our show notes, they'll pop up an SEO health score. So Tatum is going to talk to you about what they can do to understand their SEO health score and just some really good quick hits that you can do to improve that score. So she's been able to work with a lot of brands now and built up a startup that completely rocks at an SEO. When you talk to her, I saw where they started and where they're at. And maybe if you want to talk a little bit about your journey at Mindly Games, Tatum, to start this out, then let's get into what are the things that brands can do to understand their health score? And then maybe some quick hits of if you just do this or this, or 90% of companies do this.
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, so just to talk about when you're trying to understand your SEO, it's really a great reference point if you understand what Google's looking for. What they're looking for, if you're trying to gauge whether or not your content will rank, they have this acronym called EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. That's how they're grading your content in your site. So what you were just talking about is directly related to the user experience on the site. That's whether or not pages load. Well, that's whether or not when they come to your page, if it's actually aligned with the search that they did. Because sometimes when Google is testing what it should rank for a certain search term, your keywords actually might not be completely clear. Does your title actually match, say for instance, what that search term is and does the content that they come into contact with after they've clicked still reflect alignment with that original search?
So sometimes that can be really, really off. So if you're wondering, why am I ranking position 80 for this term that I'm going after, just ask yourself those couple of questions as a first line of defense in terms of how you're presenting your content. But again, experience, page load times, you can go on Ahrefs or you can go Semrush. There is another tool that my SEO coach recommends because of course I have a coach from Mindly that is just really helping us so much, and he uses something called Screaming Frog. And so oftentimes, what we are doing lately is we will compare and contrast the site health scores that we are getting from multiple different tools just so that we can see if anything was missed.
We actually have an example today where on my Ahrefs report, it didn't pull up anything about duplicate title tags, but when he ran his report on Screaming Frog, he got 80 of those. And that makes sense because we just published a bunch of category filter pages and we have specific skills on our site, like addition or multiplication or number sense, and then we have grade specific filters. So now you don't just have addition games, you have addition games for kindergarten, addition games for first grade, addition games for second grade. And so what was coming up is we had a bunch of pages that had duplicate titles because they were all derived from that first page that we had created. And he was like, "Oh man, if you go and fix this, this is really going to give you an amazing ROI on your time investment because these duplicate title tags really matter to Google." So just being able to look at those small things and see like, "Okay, hey, we're going to fix those."
And the example that you just used, which was, I think, looking at the actual errors that are on your site. So this is really impacting user experiences when you have, say for instance, links on your page that are going to pages that don't exist. So the user's interested, they're like, "Hey, I'm actually going to click in further and see what's going on here." And then they hit a broken page. So these tools will help you actually see if you have any of that going on on your site. And Google cares about that user experience. They want to ensure that the users are getting a good experience. And you have to differentiate, is the experience the same on the desktop versus mobile? So oftentimes, you're going to get different site health scores for your desktop versus your mobile experience, and you have to pay attention to both of those.
Elana Leoni:
I love when you talk about this, you frame it in a way for the content marketers listening and sales and marketing and even if you have a product that lives on your website and your website should, even if you have an app, should be able to be optimized to convert them to do your goal, whether it be a download an app, contact us, sign up for a demo, a webinar or whatnot, but you talk about why would you ever build on a broken frame? What was your analogy that you talked about?
Tatum Moser:
That's the foundation of everything. You don't want to build upon a cracked foundation, so you really want to make sure.
Elana Leoni:
You don't want to have a content marketing strategy and even have a content marketing strategy built on a cracked foundation, plus you're not being SEO informed while you're creating the content marketing strategy. But I was like, "Ding, ding, ding." If they have a low page load time and they don't even have a site map or whatever it may be, why even create content that no one's going to see?
Tatum Moser:
Right, exactly. Yes, absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
And I was like, "Ding, ding, ding, light bulb moment."
Tatum Moser:
Totally. And this is especially for the marketers that are certain that they approach the topic correctly. They're like, "Man, I wrote this thing and it's so good. It just matches the intent of this keyword so perfectly. And we interviewed experts, and there's just such good information here, and I don't understand why it's not ranking." This is when you look at the site health and you say, "Hey, is there anything going on there? Is our foundation cracked? Is Google going to not rank this because it takes over three seconds to load?"
Elana Leoni:
Tatum, that reminds me, would you mind talking to the audience about Google Search Console? And specifically I've learned from you is that when you launch content, being able to check and make sure that it's being indexed well and there's no errors being formed and things like that, that was new to me.
Tatum Moser:
Actually, again, I just met with my SEO coach from Mindly today, and he's an advisor for us, and we were looking at why does this page that we did not intend ranking for this keyword when we intended another page to rank for it. And so the example was it was like rounding numbers to the nearest 10 was the skill. And we have a page that's dedicated to rounding numbers, and we're like, "That's the page we want ranking." But it's an individual game and we don't want individual games ranking for that. We want the category page because there's so many games available for that skill. We want somebody to see all of them, not just the one game. And what turned out, he went into Ahrefs and he was like, "Oh my gosh, that's what's going on. This page didn't get indexed." So we use a tool that is an API where you can push updates to this tool and it should push all of the indexing to Google at the same time.
Well, this is a different content type and it looks like that's not happening. So we now need to go in and reevaluate how that API is handling the indexing for us. And so in the meantime, I think this is what you were getting at, there is a manual way to do this. So if you go into Google Search Console, you can manually submit URLs to be indexed by Google. And this is a really important step if you are trying to get a specific page to rank for a certain term. It's really also important if you have multiple pages that are dedicated potentially to that same topic. So it's okay to have pages that are dedicated to the same topic, but you want to make it really clear to Google what the hierarchy is in terms of the importance of those pages. So indexing the most important one first is actually a great strategy, and then waiting until that one is indexed before you index the supplementary or supporting pages.
Elana Leoni:
And for those of you that are like, "Whoa, I didn't understand half of what she said-"
Tatum Moser:
Sorry.
Elana Leoni:
No, and it was good because you're super technical and to be in SEO and do it really well, you got to be doing it every day and you've got to have this passion and curiosity. So I would say the term Google Search Console, we will put links to it in the show notes, but if you're a marketing leader or a sales leader, know that you should have access to it. You should know about it. It is a free tool. And it's all about really looking at how your website user experience is positioned and the foundations of what Tatum was talking about with SEO too.
I didn't know it existed about a year ago, and I started getting emails and it was telling me, oh, my mobile experience isn't as good, and things like that. So you might get emails if you're in your GA, for instance, as an admin or a content manager within Google Analytics for. But just to even back up on what Google Search Console is, it is a great tool. You should be aware of it. Your team, if you're creating content, should understand it. And it also creates those errors too, right, Tatum, that you can go in-
Tatum Moser:
It does. If you look under the section for Core Web Vitals, that's what it's called. So those are going to be actually your most important things to keep an eye on.
Elana Leoni:
Core Web Vitals?
Tatum Moser:
Mm-hmm. Core Web Vitals.
Elana Leoni:
Okay, great. So there is so much we can talk about with SEO. I hope those of you that are listening at least pause, whether you're sales, marketing, you're leading the entire company, a website is a huge part of what you do. I don't care what you're offering and people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. So what we want to get across to you is don't build on a bad foundation and make sure your foundation is solid. And how do you do that? You have to at least do an analysis.
We've given you some free tools. We'll put them in the show notes to start, but start there and be intentional and think about how you can be SEO-minded of what are people actually searching for. When are they searching for it? Am I coming across and providing information that people search for and not just talking about my product? Is there anything else you want to add to that, Tatum, to wrap up the cliff notes of this really practical and useful episode? I want to pick your brain so much and I know I can, but I want to highlight it out to the other people that I've had these light bulb moments, so I want to share it with others.
Tatum Moser:
Yeah, just that it's actually really fun. I feel like as a content marketer, someone who's just been producing so much content in my previous roles, it really is such an amazing way to be able to measure the effectiveness of your content. And sometimes that's hard to do. And that's why SEO, if anybody developing content or products that are attributed with specific URLs, you can actually measure whether or not it's resonating with people in such an effective way based on whether or not Google is ranking it. And the only reason Google will be ranking it is if users are responding to it. I love it.
Elana Leoni:
Awesome. Well, Tatum, as you know, we love to wrap up episodes with a fun question, a human question, beyond the wonderful world of EdTech. But I'm curious because you are such a curious person, you learn all the time, I've talked to you and you're reading and you're listening and you're doing things, what's one thing that you've read or watched recently that inspired you?
Tatum Moser:
One thing that I've read or watched recently that inspired me, so I'm actually reading the book of a really close colleague of mine that was just released, and it's called Do Your Lessons Love Your Students? This book, for anybody out there that is familiar with thinking routines, thinking routines come out of Harvard Project Zero and it's frameworks that you can use them with anybody. They're, of course, geared at students for the most part in helping teachers to learn how to use them, but you can use them anywhere.
I think she intended in the beginning of her book, she built a framework off of the word love. I just love it. I cried because she's actually a dear friend of mine and she's somebody that I loved learning from so much when I had the opportunity to work from her. So just the fact that she wrote a book and now I can learn from her again, I messaged her and was like, "Thank you so much for writing a book." It's so full of heart. I'm only at the beginning, so that's why I'm so excited about it. But everybody go out and check out her book. I love it.
Elana Leoni:
What's the author's name?
Tatum Moser:
Mariah Rankine-Landers and Jessa Brie Moreno. So they run an amazing group called Studio Pathways, and it's all about bringing equity and social justice to the work that we do as educators. And they're beautiful, amazing, mission-driven people that are just so inspiring. I'm very excited to be reading their book right now.
Elana Leoni:
It's funny. Leave it to you, Tatum. I say, "What are you reading outside of education?" And I know that you love education.
Tatum Moser:
Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not reading anything outside of education. I'm sorry.
Elana Leoni:
But that is awesome. And it also reminded me to give a shout-out to all the educators listening too. As we talk about technical topics like SEO, I know many of you are creating or thinking about creating and do not create blogs, do not create portfolios or really anything without this SEO in mind. So course creators, all of the things surrounding it, I want you to be intentional about what is SEO, especially for all of you educators, thinking about navigating into the workforce, into the technical workforce, into EdTech, got to be familiar with what SEO is, how does it help with one of these key marketing channels about getting that message out clearly and targeting your target audience through those keywords and key phrases that they are intensely searching for to get information on, right?
Tatum Moser:
Absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much Tatum for coming on this show.
Tatum Moser:
Thank you so much for having me.
Elana Leoni:
It's such a joy to learn from you. And for those of you going, "Gosh, Tatum knows so much about SEO," know that she is self-taught. It's not like she went to SEO school. She just happened to realize that there's this beautiful marriage when it comes and it collaborates and the more you learn, the more you can do more. So for those of you thinking that you can't learn this, know that Tatum started at ground zero too. And that's what I love about her is that curiosity took over. So thank you, Tatum, for displaying that to our audience and sharing your knowledge. We'll put all of those tools and anything else that you think is valuable for our audience, we'll put them in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for coming on the show, Tatum.
Tatum Moser:
Thank you so much for having me. It was so great to talk to you, and I really appreciate being able to chat about these things.
Elana Leoni:
Great. Take care.
Tatum Moser:
Bye.
Elana Leoni:
Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter @Leonigroup or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Tatum Moser, guest
Tatum Moser is currently the Founder and Principal at Moser Consulting Solutions and a Co-founder at Mindly Games. At Mindly, she is one of four co-founders and responsible for all of the educational components of their product as well as business administration and marketing. Before her work as a consultant and co-founder, she served as the Vice President of Content and Curriculum at Education.com. During her time as an educator, she held teaching, research, and leadership positions in Oakland and Berkeley Unified School Districts for more than a decade.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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Transcript: The Role of Communication in Education and Beyond
This interview was originally recorded on April 5, 2024, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Ilana Kurizki:
Help other people build their voice. As a communicator, you're skilled at writing and speaking, but not everyone who has an incredible vision and a wonderful idea is as comfortable conveying that.
Elana Leoni:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education!
This week, I sat down with Ilana Kurizki, the Vice President of Communications at BrainPOP, a 25-year-old EdTech brand that reaches millions of learners worldwide.
First off, Ilana shares my name..well kind of.. Her first name is spelled with an “I” and mine is with an “E” but regardless I felt like I found my EdTech doppleganger. Ilana leads with her heart. She’s passionate, strategic, and takes time to reflect and give back as much as possible. Ilana has spent almost 14 years at BrainPOP within different communications roles, and we talk about so many valuable things within communications and marketing, such as how you make the case for comms, what role should it play internally and externally, and best practices like how to integrate it within the entire company (and not let it be a siloed effort).
Make sure to stick around to the end when Ilana shares some really great nuggets of wisdom to anyone starting in comms or thinking about communications as a profession. To top it off, we get into an inspiring conversation about how to integrate educator voice into your day-to-day.
This conversation is such a breath of fresh air that made me smile and head nod throughout the entire conversation. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Welcome to the show, Ilana. I am so excited to have you on All Things Marketing and Education. This has been a bit of a long time coming. When I got introduced to you, you were someone that always I wanted to talk to, because you've had such a depth and breadth to your career in edtech. So I am excited. Welcome to the show.
Ilana Kurizki:
Thank you for having me.
Elana Leoni:
Awesome. So you are a little bit of an interesting guest, and interesting is, I always try to find people that are a bit different than what we've had on the show in the past. We like to talk about all things marketing and education, and that beautiful intersection, but you have a great seat around PR and comms and impact and what it's like to have a seat internally at one of the biggest brands in edtech.
So I want to kind of pick your brain around that, because that is such an interesting angle. And for the audience listening today, we have a couple of podcasts you must listen to if you're interested in comms, in edtech. One of our most popular podcasts ever is Thomas Rodgers from Whiteboard Advisors. We'll put those in the show notes. We also have Katie Test Davis from Forthright Advising, and she does a beautiful job of talking about the art of storytelling and how you can weave that in naturally into your organization.
So let's get started on internal. I'm so excited about this. So why don't we get started into the nooks and crannies of your role? So let's just start with, what do you do now at BrainPOP?
Ilana Kurizki:
I would describe my role as a mix of storytelling and brand building and executive thought partnership. So it's funny, I sometimes joke, my daughter gave me a great little moniker. She calls me an exposer. And that actually came out of a school project that she did where she had to write a short bio of what her mom does, and she said, "My mom works at BrainPOP. She's the exposer for the company." And exposer is someone who tells people about a company, and she likes to talk to teachers a lot, which is true.
I found that very insightful, because when you distill what communications really is on the external side, you're exposing the outside world to all of the dimensions of your brand, your organization, so your mission, your vision, your values, your product, the people behind the work that you do. And when you talk about internal communications, you're focusing on how you expose the people, the employees, the colleagues that work with you to what they need to know about the organization in order to do their jobs. What are the strategies? What are the operational plan? How do you give people a sense of connection and belonging and empowerment and engagement and continuous learning? So there's that dual exposing factor that comes into play.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And to pause there, I think sometimes people go, "Communications? Oh, that's PR. That's just pitching to media outlets." And what you're talking about is this beautiful duality of, "Yes, I have a position, a senior position within an edtech brand, but my role is equally split of making sure that the public, our users, our buyers know about us and our beautiful story. But also, how do we keep everyone informed internally?" And I don't feel like we talk about that as much, maybe because it's not as sexy or something. I don't know, but it's so valuable. Right?
Ilana Kurizki:
It's so valuable. It's also really important, the more you grow as an organization... And when I say grow, I mean grow in size, grow in terms of what you are doing, like your activity in the outside world, because the internal alignment has to happen before you take your message to the outside world. If everybody is speaking a different language, it's difficult to build a consistent brand story.
And even more importantly, you want your people to feel empowered, that they can talk about the work that they do, that they can feel proud of it and excited. And when you have a strong internal communications function, you really are ensuring that everyone's moving in the same direction towards the goals of the business.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. That's well said. Because you mentioned when the organization grows in that sentence, how has your specific role evolved over time? When you started at BrainPOP, how many people were working there?
Ilana Kurizki:
I want to say it was probably less than half, significantly less than half.
Elana Leoni:
Wow. Okay. So how has your role evolved over time? Were you just kind of starting out, "I'm doing external comms at first"?
Ilana Kurizki:
I had a very interesting journey. There's always been a thread of communications in my work, but I actually started out as the right hand to our founding CEO, Dr. Avraham Kadar. And so, my work encompassed a lot of corporate communications and project management, relationship building, and I had quite an evolution in the organization, really an intrapreneurial sort of journey.
But in the last, going on five years, when our new CEO, our current CEO, Scott Kirkpatrick, joined BrainPOP, he tasked me with the role of building out the first full-service communications function at BrainPOP. So that was an incredible challenge, a really wonderful sort of pinnacle to a lot of the things that I had been doing in a lot of places where I saw opportunities for growth.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. That's interesting. And I want to just double-click on the intrapreneur word you used, because a lot of you listening might think, "Gosh, I need to move around in order to figure out edtech and get the most experience." Edtech moves so quickly. One, our industry, our audience, our expertise, whether it be comms, social media, all of that is moving all of the time, that you don't necessarily need to jump around to get so much experience, because I bet you, if you looked at where you were at 14 years ago, you were doing something completely different from what you're at now, and the organization was completely different.
Ilana Kurizki:
Completely different. And I think sometimes that's the benefit of working at a startup or kind of an earlier-stage organization where there's sort of the upside and the downside. Right? You maybe have fewer hands on deck, but you also can spot opportunities and say, "We have a gap there. We don't necessarily have a person filling that niche, but there's a need." And if you have receptive leaders, which I think is key, that really has to be a huge part of the equation, that leaders are willing to give you opportunities. They see your passion. They see your talents. They see your ability to contribute to where the company is going.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. And later on, we are going to be talking about how to make your case, how to really think about the ROI, and make sure you have a seat at that table, because sometimes if people don't understand what you do, they don't know how to value it. They don't know how to measure success, and they don't even know the definition.
So we're going to talk into that. I'm excited about it. But this is a little bit more of a theoretical question, so getting into the real nooks and crannies around comms. But I'd love your take on what is the relationship between communications and other leaders and departments within the organization. Right? So how do you interact with the executive team, with marketing, with all of these other things?
And you talked about the benefit of them being all on the same page and empowering them, but how do you see yourself collaborating, and what's your ideal way for you to empower all of the different departments that are all working towards the same goals?
Ilana Kurizki:
So it's interesting. For a period of time, the communications function was housed within the marketing department, which was a really important period, because it allowed me to build really strong, symbiotic relationships with colleagues in that department. Communications and marketing have to really work in lockstep. There's so much overlap, and there's so much essential work that's done together.
So that was hugely important. Currently, my department sits within our office of the CEO. So it's further upstream, I would say, which I think is really important. And that's not to say that there isn't extensive collaboration still with marketing. There absolutely is. Multiple times a day, I'm collaborating with colleagues in marketing, and sometimes that looks like consulting and advising on different aspects of the work, and sometimes it's operational and executional.
But I believe that in order for the communications function to really zoom out and have a holistic perspective on the needs, opportunities, challenges, potential blind spots of the organization, the further upstream and the more you have a seat at the table as a comms leader, the better you can serve the organization, the better you can see where dots need to be connected, the better you can help your executives.
Tthat goes for everyone, from product to marketing, to sales, to the people, leadership, HR, across the board. And I strongly believe that every organization should have a chief communications officer. Whatever you call that role, you need someone who is really driven by the sense of ownership and responsibility that it takes to look at a brand holistically, to be proactive, to protect the brand, to innovate, and to also integrate a lot of the different voices across the organization and help to surface that for the executive team.
Elana Leoni:
I'd just be curious around... because you've been at the brand for so long. When I first met you, I was like, "Gosh, your perspective is so unique." I don't meet many people. I mean, there sure are longevities within one edtech brand, but your brand grew so rapidly as well and is so teacher-oriented. So you're really in the hot seat, and you get the opportunity to really adjust your messaging and positioning, probably like no other. And I'm wondering, where did you start with your branding and positioning, and where has it evolved, and how did you get those inputs in there?
Ilana Kurizki:
So I might start from what a lot of people associate with BrainPOP, when they hear the word BrainPOP. So you might think of the movie, the animated movie and the characters. And that's, of course, a core experience that students have, and that is at the heart of the experience. But there is so much evolution that has happened on the product level, which has also informed the narrative that we tell about BrainPOP.
I think when you think about a brand, I like to look at a brand as a promise, which means, every touchpoint and every experience that you have when you come into contact with that brand, what holds true? And for us, it's about BrainPOP being the highlight of a student's day. It's about the long-lasting impact of that student and that learning experience and how they carry that with them. It's about being a trusted partner to the educators that we serve.
When I think about our mission, which is to empower kids to shape the world around them and within them, how do you empower kids? How do you empower anyone with knowledge, with engaging them in knowledge? So that's where we started. And actually, our founder, he's a pediatric immunologist, and he developed BrainPOP as a way to really demystify the mysteries of life, complex ideas for kids.
That's always at the heart. Right? So when we have a movie, we are building background knowledge on a topic. And as BrainPOP has evolved in terms of the product and the offering, it's now an opportunity for students to apply their knowledge and to extend what they're doing. They can build their own BrainPOP movies. They can do coding projects. We have newer product offerings. We have a new product called BrainPOP Science, which is for middle school.
It's a different experience. It's built on inquiry, and there's engineering projects. And so, students are able to really lead their own learning process in science. And we've also really evolved in terms of giving teachers even deeper and more actionable insights in terms of how students are performing and where they need more practice.
When you think about the story, I think about it as chapters in a book. Right? So we're adding new chapters to this book, but we're still true to the heart of the narrative, and we are bringing in new voices and new proof points and new visual expressions of that brand over time. It's interesting, because one of my favorite things to do is to have conversations with people who use BrainPOP and, increasingly, people who grew up using BrainPOP.
I think when you look at the growth of a brand, to be able to see it grow with kids, and also to grow with educators and administrators, because you have to kind of continue to evolve to meet the ever-evolving needs of that community. So I think we've continued to do that. We've continued to make that a priority, and it's really about elevating all of those dynamic aspects of the brand that people may know less.
Elana Leoni:
When you first started with that messaging, I was like, "Gosh, that's a great foundation for you to build on." And when you talked about the book unfolding, it's really true of, "Gosh, it made me smile hearing your messaging," because it evoked emotion, and it really got at the center of what you're trying to do, where like, "Let's be the highlight of someone's day. Let's empower kids to really believe in themselves and learn in a way that's fun and just doesn't feel like a chore, and it is approachable and all of those things."
So I loved how you were able to say, "Let's start with the foundation." But I know this, as edtech evolves too, is like, "Okay. Now, we have more data. Now, teachers' needs are changing. Now, administrators' needs are changing." How can we fold that in? Or to your analogy, how do we add those chapters to your book? And that's so beautiful.
Ilana Kurizki:
Thank you. It's funny, I see BrainPOP through the eyes of a person who works at the company, but also through the eyes of my daughter, who's almost 10. And she's been using BrainPOP for as long as I can remember. And sometimes she'll come to me and say a fact or some interesting bit of information, and I'm wondering, "Where did she learn that?"
In many cases, it's BrainPOP is a go-to. It's not a chore. It's something that is fun and engaging, but also meaningful and has depth. And so, I think that seeing her use the product has also given me an interesting perspective on it.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. It's like having your own little user tester all the time, right?
Ilana Kurizki:
Yes.
Elana Leoni:
You mentioned that you get to talk to teachers. So let's jump in. I wanted to definitely talk to you about your listening tours, because one of the things we can't emphasize enough in this podcast and all of my guests talk about is really making sure that you're talking consistently to your users, to your buyers, to the people that influence the purchases, to the ecosystem, the community of like, "What are the parents experiencing?" All of those things.
So when we were prepping for this show, you're like, "Well, I think I should talk about my listening tours." And I'm like, "Let's do it." I also think that something like listening tours can be approachable for whether you're an edtech startup or you're a big company too. So I always look for those. Maybe it's the Edutopia in me of being in that organization for eight years.
We always looked for things that no matter where you are and what your resources were, you could look at it and say, "Oh, I can do this part of it. I can adapt it." And that's what I look for. So let's talk a little bit about your listening tours, how you started them, maybe a little bit of step-by-step for those people that want to look at your recipe, and why? What are the benefits you've seen?
Ilana Kurizki:
This really is one of my favorite things to do, and the reason is that I believe in this role, and really in any role, you have to constantly be listening and learning. My rationale for this listening tour approach, which is not anything I invented, it's something that anyone can do in any organization, whether you're just starting out or whether you're already a veteran at the organization for many years.
We all have a story. We just need someone to invite us to share it. And this is true whether you are... We'll talk about the educator community. This is as true of your colleagues as it is of your customers, of educators, of administrators. Everyone brings knowledge and perspective and wisdom, and most of that is just living inside their heads, because they do it every day. And to them, it's probably quite obvious, right? This expertise is just something that they activate, but it may not be as obvious to the outside world, and there are some gems there.
I think that's where being a partner and a pioneer really comes into play within your organization. I approach these conversations from a place of curiosity. My goal is, as I said earlier, to listen. I want to build a foundation where we have a relationship so that when someone has this conversation with me, they know that I will then approach them if there are any interesting external opportunities for storytelling.
By the same token, it's an open door for them to come to me if they have an idea that they want to share so that we're able to find one another. And with colleagues, I might ask a question as simple as, "What does your department do every day? What are you working on that's exciting? What are you hearing from customers if it's a customer-facing role? What drives you in your work?"
I try to come with no real agenda, really the only agenda being curiosity. I want to just hear how people express themselves, what excites them, what lights them up. With educators, I might ask, "Tell me about a day in your classroom. Tell me about a challenge that you have. Tell me about what success looks like." And I want to really just take it all in.
There are actually some incredible moments that I've had with colleagues and with educators where I've just sat there and said, "That's it. What you just said, that's the story." So I think when you can say to people, "I think that would make a great story. I would love to help you tell it. I would love to help you hone your voice and find a place to serve that up to the outside world," that gives them a way, a vehicle to educate others. It also gives them a way to showcase the great work that they're doing, which many people may not have a chance to do.
I look at it as a gift that you are giving each other in that respect. And you mentioned parents. Sometimes I will look at comments on our company's social media pages, and somebody will say something just incredibly insightful or very moving. Sometimes it's a homeschooling parent. Sometimes it's an educator, and I'll reach out and say, "I loved what you wrote. I'm just curious. I'd love to learn more."
Many, many people take me up on that. And sometimes there's an immediate opportunity. Sometimes there isn't. But it's a great way to sort of build a connection with the community that you serve to really more deeply understand their needs and their challenges and their pain points, and then also for you to come back ideally with opportunities for them to showcase that.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And for those of you that are thinking about, "Gosh, that was great that she provided those questions," I want you to think about what those questions had in common and what they were missing. She didn't comment and say, "Hey, what do you think about this specific feature? What's wrong? Pick it apart." It's more of, "How do I understand you as a human? What are you dealing with? What are your challenges? What are your goals?"
And then you might fold in, naturally, BrainPOP and really see that role it plays, but it's not overly pointed. And what I found working in evaluation and edtech and specifically working with educators is, you do need to build that trust. You need to make a comfortable environment for them to actually speak their mind on, "Hey, this feature doesn't really fit my needs," or whatever it may be, because educators are just so darn nice. They're such nice humans, and sometimes they'll sugarcoat things, and they're used to a lot of things not being perfect. So they'll say, "Here's what I do," or "Here's how I use it instead." And even that insight is really helpful to see how someone does a workaround and how they actually use your product.
But I wanted to point that out, because in education, you always have to think about the different stakeholders involved and what their life is like day-to-day, what are the challenges that... because knowing the environment in which they operate is equally important as the little features and the feedback. And we're not talking about specific focus groups where you pay people to do that. Ilana is going in and talking to them and getting to know them as human beings. There's relationship as well.
Ilana Kurizki:
That really lights me up. I have to say, if I'm having a day where I'm feeling sort of not as motivated as the day before, kind of low energy, and I get on the phone with an educator for half an hour, and by the end of it, I'm just smiling from ear to ear, and I've opened a door and someone feels seen. And I think that that's part of it too. I mentioned earlier we all have a story and we just need someone to ask us to share it, but we also all want to feel seen. We're going about our day-to-day and doing so many things, and sometimes what is not seen are the things that are most exciting to you, that you really just want to give the world a window into that.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And you and I might have parallel things that fuel us and give us joy. Some of my best joy is when I can really empower voices and tell them, "Yes, you have a beautiful story to tell. Your story is very unique. It's very inspiring. And just because you can't see it because, traditionally, your position might be isolated or you might be in a position where people don't see you as much, let me see you. Let me highlight your voice as much as possible." And doing that at Edutopia, making sure that brands do that now collectively in social media as much as possible within our firm, that's what lights me up. And I saw your face light up when you talked about it.
Ilana Kurizki:
Yup.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. So those are a little bit about listening tours. You can tell it's just very simple. It's just picking up the phone and making time for it, because there's so many assumptions that we have in the day that we hold, and if we're not close to the source, we are going to be just moving in a path that might be not directly aligned with our audience's challenges, hopes, and dreams.
Ilana Kurizki:
I will also add, Elana, one other thing, and I think about this a lot when I talk with educators and homeschooling parents. I try to be very clear that I don't need them to prepare anything, and that's part of the reason why I keep the questions very, very low-stakes, because I've had teachers ask me, "Do I need to put anything together?" And I say, "No, I really just want to have an informal conversation. I just want to hear what you have to say."
I think there's a bit of a relief there, because we know how busy educators are. They don't need one more thing on their plate. So when you make an ask, whether it's of a customer or a colleague, just trying to be as conscious as possible of the lift, and making it a positive experience for them.
Elana Leoni:
Yup. So I mentioned we're going to talk about ROI. I think sometimes it annoys me that we do have to talk about ROI in positions that really bring so much value to the organization. But where I like to step back is just based on people not understanding in the beginning. So it's an opportunity to educate. But for organizations that are evolving in their communication needs, and you evolved within one organization, how did you kind of make the case for the growth and the emphasis for communication in this organization?
Ilana Kurizki:
I was fortunate that I didn't really have to make the case. I think there was a natural understanding from both CEOs that I've worked with that we'd gotten to a point in the organization where we wanted to be even more intentional about the stories that we were telling, and start to look at different channels and ways to tell that story, because we knew we had so much incredible material to share that had never been shared.
I will say, even on a very basic level, there are so many people that actually don't know who the voices are behind some of the characters. And we have a great social media team, and on a couple of occasions, they've highlighted our chief creative officer and our chief product officer. And there's this unbelievable windfall of excitement on social media when people see, "Oh, wow, I didn't know that."
There are a lot of best-kept secrets that we don't want to keep secret anymore, that we really just want to share those stories more widely with the world, and then that opens up an opportunity for people to see, "Oh, you're open to telling stories." So there's a push and a pull that happens, that people can then approach you and say, "Oh, they have what to say. There's some thought leadership there. There's some real industry understanding and some real interesting connections that they've made with their community that they can then educate others."
On the internal side, there's a real importance as you grow as an organization, as I said earlier, to really ensure that there's a smooth flow of information, that people really have a sense of what success looks like, that people feel that there's a strong kind of cultural glue at the organization. And communications is critical for that. I mean, communications infuses everything that we do.
If you remember recently, LinkedIn put out their list of top skills, most in-demand skills for 2024. What was number one? No surprise to us, communication. And so, everyone knows that communication is a critical function. I think the question is, do people allocate enough to that investment, whether it's with people filling that capacity or just resources to get it done? But wherever you can start with building out more communications in the organization, it's important to start somewhere.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And just hearing you speak around where the messaging was foundationally and where it's grown, and how you're tightly weaving in things like impact and different use cases, and now, how do you use it for this or that? It's so important. And I liken it to, there's a lot of edtech out there that you might ebb and flow or pivot per se and say, "We're all about combating absenteeism, because that's the best word, topic." Right?
And then they move and say, "No, we're really about student engagement." Keeping your message core is so critical, and making sure that you are differentiated, and it aligns with what you said your job internally, is like, "Let's make sure it's empowering our entire team, and we're talking about it the same way too." So for those of you thinking of, "Well, gosh, I want to switch up my messaging again," I want you to hear this story and say, what's your foundational message that you can build upon using and listening to educators as much as possible?
Ilana Kurizki:
Yes. And brand building is a team sport, and we have people in the organization that have been there much longer than I have. Our chief creative officer is employee number one. And so, we have real historians within the organization. So it's an incredible privilege to be able to go back to people and kind of look at how the brand started, how the brand evolved, and sort of benchmark against that, and pull out some of these incredible stories that have not been surfaced. So I would just say, as you're thinking about communications, it's always important to build a brand together.
Elana Leoni:
And speaking of building a brand together, I know that BrainPOP is celebrating your 25th anniversary. Oh my gosh, a quarter of a century. And in edtech, that is even longer, when we see all the ebb and flows. But as you think about this milestone, how are you balancing evolving this brand? And we talked a little bit about that, but preserving its core identity. And we've talked a little bit, but I'd love for you to get into a little bit more of the details as you think about the 25th anniversary.
Ilana Kurizki:
Yeah. It's funny, we had a kickoff this week on social media announcing the anniversary, and it went viral, and people were just incredibly excited about it. And a large part of that is identifying with the characters and feeling a certain affinity to the brand in that way. I think it really goes back to what we talked about of staying true to your mission, and what is it that your greatest value is to the outside world?
And that value may be augmented. You may need to kind of build that out to continue meeting different market needs. Right? You may need to go deeper into evaluation and assessment, and you may need to go deeper into all sorts of different aspects of what it is that you do, but always coming back to what lights people up and what gets the job done. So in this case, what engages students, what makes learning more meaningful, more differentiated, giving students more agency, and then for educators, what makes their job easier, what enables them to deliver standards-based instruction and to showcase the impact that they're making to their administrators, and to continue making the case for why a product that they've had and loved for so long is still so essential to them.
I think the more that you can do when you build a brand, it's not just saying, "I do this well, and I do that well, and I'm so great, and I have a beautiful logo, and I have great imagery and all that." It's, what can you do for the people that you serve? That is really, when you come down to it, thinking about a brand as a promise, as we talked about, this idea that, "Here's what I can expect, and I'm always coming back to you and I'm feeling like there's a familiarity, but there's something fresh. There's something new and exciting that I'm encountering with the brand every time." And that can come out in your messaging, and that can come out in new product iterations, and that can come out in so many different forms.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And as you were talking, I'm like, "I need to point this out to my audience," because it was nuanced, but see how she flipped the script a little bit? She flipped it and said, "I am not that person that goes to a cocktail party and it's like, 'BrainPOP. BrainPOP's awesome. It's all about me.'" Actually, no one cares about your product. They care about how your product might help them with their challenges, and you've flipped it on this human-centered approach.
That is the true test of a real marketer/communications person, is really, "How do I get the spotlight away from the actual product?" And really say, "How do I highlight you and your journey and your growth? And hey, guess what? You might be using our product to do it."
Ilana Kurizki:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
Great. So I know we've asked you a ton of questions. I know everyone, from educators who are thinking about, "Hey, what is communications? How it might fit in my role, how my skill sets might contribute to being a communications professional down the road in edtech." That was super helpful, and all the things that you said also as it relates to edtech professionals. Maybe you're a startup that hasn't quite yet invested in communications. Maybe you are more of a junior communications person and trying to level up.
Everything you said, I'm like, "Yes. Yes, underline." We will provide a transcript in the show notes as well for those of you that like to read and highlight. But I am wondering, what are the pieces of advice you have for our listeners around communication, and maybe just lessons learned or what advice you would give to these aspiring communication leaders on how do you get them to really move forward in their journey, find their power, find their purpose?
Ilana Kurizki:
There are so many lessons. And this is actually very top of mind, because I just volunteered at my daughter's Career Day at her elementary school a few months back, and I shared a number of the reflections and lessons that I had learned. And I'll backtrack a little bit by saying that I've always been a writer in some form or fashion for as long as I can remember I've been writing.
When I was in elementary school, I had an English teacher who submitted some poetry that I wrote to a national competition, which I won and ended up getting a letter from the poet laureate at the time. And that was an incredible moment in and of itself. But reading her letter, those beautiful words, I understood really keenly the power of words to create an emotional resonance, to express big ideas, to kind of take a lot of what you're feeling inside and thinking about and really crystallize it and refine it and present it in a certain way.
It took me time to really understand, how do you apply that creative passion and that creative instinct to something that is a career? Right? And when I was in college, I had this dream to become a magazine editor, and I would intern every summer at every magazine that I could get a job at. I didn't eventually pursue magazine journalism post-college. I had tried other fields, PR, marketing, business development, and I sort of slowly expanded my perspective on what it was possible to do with communications to be strategic in your communication.
And that's important for communications professionals. Don't think about this the way that some people think about a liberal arts degree, like, "What can you do with it?" You can do everything with communications, talking about the LinkedIn top skill that we just mentioned earlier. So I think it's important for folks rising in their career to understand that no career will be linear. There's no dotted line that you'll follow, and that's okay.
I've learned how important it is to go through that process of self-discovery to understand where your passions meet a market need. When I met the founder of BrainPOP, I had no professional experience in education. Everything I learned about education, I learned at BrainPOP, I learned from the people that I worked with, I learned from the teachers that I talked to, I learned from parents.
At any job, you may start out a little bit more behind the scenes, or you may be kind of quiet in the beginning because you're taking it all in. But be patient with yourself, and give yourself grace. At the same time, as you understand that you're ambitious and that you're hungry, just stay a little bit humble and optimistic.
Another related lesson is the importance of giving yourself permission, and this idea that you will see opportunities in an organization, as we talked about before, where there's a gap. And you may be able to jump in and, in a very specific way, highlight your skills and highlight how you're able to meet a need, and then build awareness among the leadership of that organization that you're both interested and capable. And in the process, you build your confidence. We build confidence by doing step by step by step.
The other major lesson I would say, and this has just been an interesting one that I've learned as somebody who's worked with many executives over the years, help other people build their voice. As a communicator, you're skilled at writing and speaking and doing all sorts of things to varying degrees, but not everyone who has an incredible vision and a wonderful idea is as comfortable conveying that.
So, if you can help other people distill and package those big ideas externally, internally, communicate urgent messages in the right way, communicate difficult messages in the right way, people will start to see you as a value creator. They'll start to see you as a partner. And the more you do that over time, the more people begin to seek you out and just appreciate the work that you do to be able to support them and support the organization.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And even from the beginning of this podcast, you said it's a team. It's a team sport, and marketing in general. I would say that you need to make sure you're bringing people up with you, not only because it may help our hearts soar, like you and me, we light up talking about mentors and how we've really seen people grow and be seen. It really helps make sure that you're not siloed. No one will survive if you're like, "Oh, that's Ilana's job. She's the only one doing that in the entire organization." Everything will fail.
Ilana Kurizki:
Absolutely. That is so important, and I can't actually overemphasize that enough. I've built some incredible relationships across the organization. I've been very intentional about it, but it's not just because of me. There are people that are incredibly open to collaboration. And so, when I approach someone and say, "Hey, I'd love to pitch you for a podcast," or "Hey, we should work on an op-ed together," or "I'd love to interview you for the blog," I mean, 99 times out of 100, it's a yes. And if it's a no, it's like, "I can't do it this week, but I'll do it next week."
And I think that in a case where you might be in an organization where you may get some more nos or some more conditional yeses, a great way to proceed there is to... You're coming with an offer. Right? You're coming to someone and saying, "A, I want to learn from you. B, I want to share your knowledge externally, but also, C, let me help you. Let me help you get there."
And so, it's not putting all of the onus on them. And then I think that helping them sort of manage the time to kind of carve that out, and helping the organization share its message, they're also building their own personal brand. They're building their external awareness. And so, I see that as a double bottom line, and I think that's very compelling to people.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And I am just consistently head-nodding over here, like, "Yes, she's speaking my language. Yes." We could talk about communications for so, so long. I appreciate all of the nuggets of wisdom that you've shared with our audience so far. For those of you that are interested in learning about BrainPOP and Ilana, we'll put all of her contact information in the show notes as well. You can catch her on LinkedIn.
But before we go, I want to ask one question. It's a closing fun question that we ask a lot of our guests. And not really related to education, even though I feel like people in this position in edtech, we wear our heart on our sleeves, and we might need this a little more than others. What are the things that you do after maybe even a rewarding day, but it's a long, hard day? And I always say sometimes to my listeners, is like, "You'll see me just staring at a wall. Don't talk to me." How do you fill your cup? What are the things that energize you and bring you back to like, "Yes, I can tackle it again"?
Ilana Kurizki:
The notion of filling up your cup is very on point, because for me, it's as simple as sitting in my car with a great latte and a wonderful podcast, and just kind of embracing that moment of quiet. And when I say quiet, obviously the podcast is playing, but I mean internal quiet. I'm able to sort of reconnect with myself.
And I really think, as a mom of two young kids, the beauty of that is really just some me time. I will go to the gym and sort of reconnect with my body, and that also makes me feel a little bit more centered. Sometimes it's going for a walk outside. I live in Florida. And so, my neighbors are peacocks and iguanas. And just kind of taking a walk outside and sort of seeing nature and feeling refreshed, and looking up beyond my computer screen is really all it takes. It's interesting how, with time, your needs become a little different, but that really does fill me up.
Elana Leoni:
Well, and maybe you have deeper appreciation for them too, being a parent of young kids too, of, "How do I get that silence? How do I appreciate these moments in life with nature?" We've got my latte. We've got my podcast. And maybe as a bonus, are there a couple podcasts that you like to listen to?
Ilana Kurizki:
I enjoy a mix. I enjoy some podcasts that are focused on parenting and some that are focused on culture, and some that are more focused on world events, and some that are focused on education. I tend to do some searches based on people that I want to hear from, so I'll just kind of put the name in the search. But yeah, it's a mix. I try to step outside of the zone in which I work. In addition to listening to podcasts about education, I want to sort of immerse myself in something that maybe enabled me to kind of just zone out a little bit from the day-to-day, and also reconnect with some of the other aspects of life and culture.
Elana Leoni:
Makes sense. Well, thank you so much, Ilana, for coming on the show. I know so many people will find this valuable, and I'm always the one, as the host, going, "Rewind." There were so many moments in here, I was like, "Genius. So well said." And I wish that I had this advice when I started my career. So I really hope that we get some comments and saying, "Yes, this gave me the confidence to do X, Y, and Z," because it was so spot on.
And I just appreciate your service to such a powerful brand in education for so long. It's really commendable. When I met you, I was like, "Gosh, immediately, you have to be on the show." Well, thank you for being such a wonderful guest. Everyone, we will put her contact information in the show notes. Have a great rest of the day, everyone, and enjoy.
Ilana Kurizki:
Thank you for having me. This was a pleasure.
Elana Leoni:
Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter, @LeoniGroup, or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Ilana Kurizki, Guest
Ilana Kurizki is a communications leader, strategic brand builder, and executive advisor. She serves as VP, communications and social impact at BrainPOP, the iconic edtech pioneer whose learning solutions are beloved by millions of kids and trusted by educators and parents worldwide. A lifelong storyteller, Ilana thrives on identifying and exposing the dimensionality of brands and the people behind them, and bringing their stories and voices to the world.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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Transcript: Crafting Your EdTech Go-to-Market Strategy
This interview was originally recorded on October 27, 2023, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field, will all share tips, strategies and insight in either social media, content marketing and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week I got to chat with Lawrence Korchnak. He's the founding partner of Bloqq, spelled B-L-O-Q-Q. And Bloqq is a consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations scale specifically in the education market. And that my friends, is why I wanted to have him on the show. Not only is he a good, kind soul with a ton of tips and advice that is approachable but also quite candid. He is somebody that can really tell you what works and what doesn't specifically to education and that's so important. Over the years, I've personally learned from him after, "Picking his brain," through multiple times. After the last session I said, "You got to come on the show," and here he is. In this episode, Lawrence and I talked about the unique challenges of a go-to-market strategy.
What it is, how do you start it, how do you prioritize certain channels in a marketing strategy? How do you do things like backwards planning? We get into all of that good stuff. He talks about the seasonality and budget cycles in education, and we even go into a market channel strategy too about how do we use trial and error within it, give ourselves some grace, really understand that we don't know everything in education.
And then also one of my favorites is how do you diversify your channels within a marketing strategy as well? And last thing, don't miss the end of our chat when we talk about some important intangibles on building an EdTech go-to-market strategy. And I know I'm being brought on purpose, but it is very, very good. He throws down some really candid pieces of wisdom that you don't want to miss. For any EdTech marketer, but especially those who are new to the industry or marketing profession, this episode will help you set a solid foundation for your next go-to-market campaign, maybe your overall marketing strategy. Enjoy.
Welcome Lawrence to All Things Marketing and Education. I am excited selfishly to pick your brain. You know when you get those emails of like, "Hey, can I pick your brain?" At least this, we're on a podcast, but I get to learn just as much too. Welcome to the show.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Elana Leoni:
Let's jump into it. We're going to talk about all things go-to-market strategy, and for those of you that don't know what it is, don't worry, we're going to define it. For those of you think that this is boring, I swear to you this is something that fascinates me and it's got all sorts of nooks and crannies specific to EdTech too. Whether you're an educator and you don't know what this is, I guarantee you, you will learn something about what it is, why it's different from edtech and why you should do it. If you are someone who's a seasoned marketer, a seasoned sales leader, or an executive, I guarantee you'll learn something different as it relates to EdTech, no pressure Lawrence, but I've learned so much from you. Why don't we get started and just start from the top, what is a go-to-market strategy and why would we do such a thing?
Lawrence Korchnak:
It's a really broad question. I'm glad to dive in though.
Elana Leoni:
Just going to throw something big bomb at you.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Great. Let's get after it. Working with companies, we think about go-to-market strategy as an effective way to scale the business. There's lots of ways to go at the market in a very ad hoc, very opportunistic way. Our goal is to help people and we encourage folks whether we work with them or not, to develop a go-to-market strategy that is built on the truths of the market, the way the market operates, and that you build your business around the elements of the market to ensure that the business is successful. And if you do a go-to-market strategy well, that strategy is scalable as the company grows as well.
Elana Leoni:
I am hearing parallels almost for the educators in the room is around, people generally don't do parallels to this, but it feels very user-centric. It felt very market-centric and very design thinking, UDL concepts as well. But what I like about you is saying, "Hey, let's figure out how your product fits in the market." And every go-to-market strategy is inherently different because of that. Do you want to explain a little bit more about maybe how it's different in EdTech specifically for a go-to-market strategy?
Lawrence Korchnak:
Sure. I'll back up to a really important point I think you just made. There's lots of ways to do this and every business is unique and a little bit different, and I encourage everyone not to look to a one size fits all model, but to understand the market movers, the seasonality, the cycle of the market, and use those elements of the market to the advantage of your business, understanding that your business is unique and different. Your question was around... I'm sorry, repeat the second half of your question for me please.
Elana Leoni:
No worries. It's more about EdTech in particular. This beautiful industry of EdTech and what you're probably going to also provide nuance to is that it really depends on your product and service for the product market fit and how it aligns to your user's buying cycle. But with that said, there are some generalities within EdTech that if you are a seasoned marketer or executive jumping into EdTech for the first time, what are the things that you could say are unique/love-hate relationship about EdTech?
Lawrence Korchnak:
I like to think about these things as market advantages and the first thing that I would encourage everyone to understand and hopefully anyone listening to this is at least has been introduced to the idea of the seasonality of budget cycles and K-12 as well as higher education, that there are certain times in the season to support schools. There's certain times in the season to sell to schools. There are certain times in the season that you should expect to realize a larger percentage of the revenue. And if you understand in some general terms the seasonality and what that means, even fall, winter, spring, summer, you can orient your business in such a way to focus on things, and this is an idea around first principle thinking, what are the things that I need to solve for solve that help me down the road?
You can apply some first principle thinking to the seasonality of the market to say, "One really obvious one, August, September is back to school time." You should be thinking critically and should have thought about critically before that time gets there that there's some support mechanism in place, that you have a training function, you have a support function when teachers need you, when they have questions about your products. That's a really basic fundamental one, but there's other nuance within the market too. The very first thing I would encourage anyone thinking about this industry or immersed in this industry is to think really critically about what business functions you're standing up, at what times of the year, relative to the market, relative to your business.
Elana Leoni:
As you were talking, I'm thinking, "How would they know this?" And you can piggyback off of some things that I'll say, but I would look at your previous sales cycle history. When is your peaks in revenue? When is your sales team outselling giving information? When is your buyer actively seeking information? Maybe you do some stakeholder interviews with your buyers, with your influencers. You do all these things to get up to speed to understand that information that Lawrence is talking about because although K-12 and higher ed have their own purchasing cycles that do follow some trends each business, whether you have a product or a service is going to have some nuances in there.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Most certainly. You draw out a really good point and an important distinction. There are times to market to schools. There's a time to expect schools to actually purchase your product. There's times to expect to be paid and trying to circumvent that process, budget sale purchase cycle, you're going to set yourself up for a lot of hardship and disappointment and difficult times trying to circumvent or hack that market cycle. I've really not seen anyone do it successfully.
Elana Leoni:
Step one is to really do some research around the market itself, understand generally how it fits or aligns with your product. Smart people like Lawrence would call that a product market fit, how does your product fit within the market and align with needs and challenges and all of those things. But let's say we got some fundamentals in place now we want to put a plan in action and some people would call that a go-to-market plan and you can do a go-to-market plan for launching your entire new product out. You can do a new products line. Sometimes people use the term go-to-market just for any plan like, "Hey, 2024, it's a plan, it's a go-to-market plan." But how do we begin this planning process and why is it so critical?
Lawrence Korchnak:
Great question and I have a standard answer for this for nearly everyone that I speak to with apologies to Stephen Covey. This is an exercise and begin with the end in mind, understanding when you're starting relative to the cycle, but also understanding and having some clear definition around what success looks like. And success can come in a number of different ways. It can be a revenue number, it can be a valuation for your company, it can be the number of students served, it could be the number of teachers on your platform. There's lots of ways to evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively what success is.
And we encourage everyone to at least develop a business hypothesis around what is your definition of success 12 months from now or 10 months from now? And then it's an exercise in a bit of backward planning. What do we do today based on the time of year, the uniqueness of your business, what has been successful, what more needs to be done and how do we begin to refine the good stuff, layer in some additional things that give organizations, give companies resources, products and people the best opportunity, the best chance of hitting that goal of where we started with beginning with the end in mind?
It's an exercise and let's begin with the end in mind. What is the goal? Let's look at what the current status quo of the business is and then let's begin to backward plan about how we get to that goal based on where we are today in the cycle with a company with a product.
Elana Leoni:
Cool. Backwards planning, and you work with a variety of different EdTech companies and maybe let's just say the B2B space, usually the backwards planning is around some type of conversion goal. It might be active users, it might be signups, it might be revenue, like you said, it also might be valuation. But what do you think is truly typical when people have a go-to-market plan with someone at the helm? Is it revenue?
Lawrence Korchnak:
We believe really strongly in a double bottom line that you can do good and do well at the same time. Then whether or not you're hyper focused on doing well or doing good in the market, your company's going to have to do well in order for you to do good, if I didn't confuse the metaphor. As capitalistic as it might sound, we encourage most folks to start with what's a revenue goal? What is your revenue goal and what are the internal pressures on that revenue goal? How does pricing, deal distribution, opportunity size, pipeline, how do all of those things need to look in order for the company to do well in order for them to do good?
Elana Leoni:
I like the double bottom line because it specifically talks about, yes, we are in EdTech, there is mission-driven aspects to everything that we do, and that's why we are all in it and we love it, but you also need to survive. And whether you're a nonprofit organization or an EdTech startup, you should have revenue goals or if you do not charge for anything, I work with a lot of nonprofits that have just sign up goals or usage goals, something to be able to go back to the board and say, "Yes, this is resonating with our market and they're using it and there is a need that we are hitting that's unique that no one else can hit." And I love that you hit on that. We have a plan in place and we've looked at all, say we've identified all of our marketing channels on how we're going to go to market and maybe we've created a budget for each of them.
And they've made assumptions on, when I used to do this stuff, I would jump in and say, "Hey, I don't know anything about all of this stuff, I'm just going to bring in experts that can give me some estimates on what paid can get me for $20,000," or whatever. Is that how you advise companies when you're thinking about channel strategies within your go-to market is how do they even begin to know what channels are available and what they can do? A lot of it's trial and error and some piloting in the beginning.
Lawrence Korchnak:
There's a whole lot to be said about failing fast and failing often because there's a lot of value in getting at what works. Nearly every company that exists in the space has already begun to do some trial and success, trial and failure. Where we typically start with folks is not to attempt to reinvent the wheel, tear everything down, but how do we look to refine, create greater efficiency of current process, whether that be a LinkedIn strategy or an email strategy or a website strategy or a webinar or a blog, whatever happens. How do we look to improve whatever metric is being used to evaluate that strategy? How do we look to improve and refine and create more efficiency there?
And then looking at how do you stage and layer in additional channels that drive scalable growth for the company? And it's simply an exercise in what works, how can we improve it, what do we do next? Because nearly every company that we talk to and we work with at Bloqq, there's not a limitless amounts of resources. There's not a team of 15 people dedicated to just social media. There might be 3, 4, 5 people all wearing multiple hats. It becomes an exercise in prioritizing what works, figuring out what works, improving what works, and then layering in additional channels that all contribute and add up to the objectives KPIs that we have behind that goal that we talked about from the beginning.
Elana Leoni:
And I think that's a really good approach for those of you going, "Gosh, this sounds hard." It's not hard, it's just anything that you do in marketing and sales in particular in an ever-changing industry with an ever-changing product because it's aligning with your ever-changing audience needs, it's just going to take a little bit of trial and error and really leaning into what you said, what works, and jumping on that and saying, "How can I tweak this a little more? How can I do a little bit less of what's not working?" I think one of the bigger flags I see when I work with companies is they just have one channel. If a go-to-market strategy, you should at least have five different ways you're getting out the message and reaching people and engaging. And sometimes you just say, "I'm just going to use social media," or, "I'm just going to use email marketing." And you can never just hang your hat on one thing. You want to talk a little bit about the importance of diversification?
Lawrence Korchnak:
Absolutely. I think understanding who your customers are, where they interact, where they engage is important because that can help you determine what channels you use and what those various methods that you want to use to reach those folks. It's a silly example, but we've yet to encounter any substantial group of buyers on TikTok. We're not actively, it doesn't mean they won't happen at some point in the future because you never know, but currently not directing people or supporting people with a strategy on TikTok because folks who can buy products and services at scale, just they don't live there. They're not there. Being thoughtful about choosing those channels based on your customer profile, based on your persona, to give you the highest likelihood possible of reaching the folks need to reach with your specific message, your unique value proposition.
Elana Leoni:
And they might be on TikTok, they're just watching cat videos.
Lawrence Korchnak:
I don't know what goes on TikTok. My kids are on TikTok, I'm not on TikTok. I don't know what's going on there. And I think I'm better off for it, probably not.
Elana Leoni:
I know you've got a great download. It's called Intangibles When building Your EdTech Go-To-Market Strategy. I know you talk a little bit within that download around some key questions people can ask when we're thinking about product-market fit, unique value proposition and really just go to market. We'll put that link in the show notes everybody and link the show notes at the end of the episode, it's a pre-download, Lawrence and his team have developed too. And it's just helpful for guiding your planning around this, making sure that you're asking critical thinking questions around these certain aspects of a go-to-market plan. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what it is?
Lawrence Korchnak:
Sure. Happy to do that. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we've developed some strict methodology about doing this. I think what we've developed, what we've learned over the years of having done this numerous times with more companies that I can count right now is that there are some consistent things that you want to know or want to think about or reflect on. There's not a one-size-fits-all, this is the go-to-market strategy. I think we touched on that a little bit earlier, but to get below the surface of some of these things, we group them into buckets. One of them happens to be product market fit. And this is really a critical thinking exercise and some amount of research or some about engaging with experts to help gain answers to these questions. Things like, who are you innovating for? Are you innovating for the school board?
Are you innovating for the chief academic officer? Are you innovating for the librarian? Who are you innovating for? What problem do you solve? Do you have a real firm handle on what the problem is that you're solving for these folks? Or do you have a notional sense of the problem you're solving because your kids had a difficult time checking out library books?
That may be very true and there may have been an isolated problem, but there may not necessarily be a market for that. And the final hoop that we ask folks to, or guide conversation or ask them to ask themselves, is there a budget for this? What problem do you solve? And is there a budget to solve it? And this is a real critical piece because anyone who's watched the news, who has kids in school, who's been in school recently, I think would universally agree, schools are overburdened and understaffed. And if what you provide is not contributing to the efficiency of instruction, learning or operation in a school, it's not solving a problem and there's not a mandate and a funded mandate for it's going to be a difficult time for you. Answering those questions around product market fit, we found help folks really get to the heart of the matter.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, pause folks, rewind what Lawrence just said and listened to it again, because I had to learn later on in my career that, and it took a while. I thought if I had something that was novel and unique, of course people would buy it. But what I have missed is they didn't really talk about it the way I was talking about it and they didn't have budget allocated to it. And really aligning it to what are those budgets? That helped me so much more, frame it in a way that I can easily say, "Yes, here are your funds available. Here's how you can buy it." And like you said, "Here are the challenges it's going to meet."
And the challenges that are important to them may not be as important to you. And that's where you have to make those concessions. Maybe you created a product that'll fundamentally increase student engagement or them being a well-rounded citizen for this world and they don't have keywords they search for it or budget around being a well-rounded citizen. They do for improving test scores, improving attendance, saving time and efficiency, professional development. How do we map those together and do it in a way that is a win-win? That took me a while, to be honest. And it's still something I look up and try to align every day.
Lawrence Korchnak:
One of the nice advantages to this market is funding sources and budgets, even if you can't find this year's budget, it's all publicly available. You can see it at least historically in broad buckets, what's being funded, how money is being spent, what it's being spent on. And there are even some resources out there that allow you to drill even deeper on high-level stuff. You can really gain an understanding within the market. Understanding the budget cycle, but then having visibility into what gets prioritized and what money gets spent on, I think that's a massive advantage of the market. That level of transparency can be a real advantage if you choose to use it.
Elana Leoni:
I just learned that and it's silly, and people are like, "I can't believe she didn't know this," I just learned that school board minutes are available online, and I know that's silly, but I didn't know that you could find them and search them, and you can also use them to align with future forecasting of needs as well. And I was like, "Gosh."
Lawrence Korchnak
And if you are listening to or reading board minutes, you might need to also Google, "Robert's rules of order," to understand what's going on, what are people actually talking about here, and what is the function that's big for four. You can add that, "Robert's rules of order," is a good Google search term. I'm sure Google AI will give you a nice succinct exclamation of that.
Elana Leoni:
We will put this download in the show notes as well. It'll surface up some key questions around how do you start to align your product with the product market fit and come up with a plan that really complements all of the ecosystem within education. Really looking at product market fit questions, unique value proposition questions, go-to-market questions, all the good stuff. We'll put that in the show notes. Before we end this episode, Lawrence, I'd love to ask you one fun question, one human question, Lawrence is a human, what is one thing that you've read or watched, we know we have some binge watchers, some binge readers, if we're lucky, the educators are like, "Yeah, right?" But what is something that you're doing that's inspiring you in terms of consumption? Whether it be reading, watching something that you're like, "Wow, people should read this or watch this because it's inspired me," or, "It just made me zone out" and that's good too.
Lawrence Korchnak
One of the things, I'm a big music lover and I think a happy place for me is to go and just listen to some music, like good music, a story that we probably don't have enough time for today, but going back and re-listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, and understanding much like the education market, the nuance and complexity to the music that they're creating and the themes and the musical threads that they pull on is just, it's simultaneously fascinating to me, the genius of it, some ways, the simplicity and the complexity of it is absolutely intoxicating to me, but I also find the whole exercise very therapeutic. I think it satisfies another portion of my brain, the other side of my brain.
Elana Leoni:
That's nice. I love it. For everyone listening, I hope you were able to be satiated a little bit on the go-to-market, wonderfulness in EdTech. There will be more resources in our show notes. And Lawrence, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. I know you get to work with a lot of EdTech companies and it was beautiful to be able to just pick your brain around what are the trends you're seeing and what are the things to avoid. Thank you.
Lawrence Korchnak:
Awesome. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.
Elana Leoni:
Take care everyone. Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter @leonigroup or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoy today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. We'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Lawrence Korchnak, Guest
An experienced C-suite business and non profit executive bringing over 25 years experience leading people, departments, and organizations toward stability and growth. Throughout his career, Lawrence has been consistently drawn to and effectively led new product and organizational growth.
Since founding BLOQQ Lawrence has led market entry, B2B channel development, revenue strategy and management, and CEO advisement projects. Lawrence is a believer in first principle problem solving, seeking to understand first, and collaborative solutions.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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Transcript: Decoding the National EdTech Plan
This interview was originally recorded on March 15, 2024, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Welcome, everyone, to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field will all share tips, strategies, and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This week, I was truly blessed to sit down with Kristina Ishmael. She's now an education strategic advisor of her own shop, Ishmael Consulting. But Kristina has formally served in the classroom, at the state level, and at the national level. Most recently, many of you may know her as the Deputy Director of the Office of EdTech. Given she's been working at the local level, in classrooms, at the state level, at the federal level, she'll get into all the nooks and crannies of who she was, where she served.
It gives her such a unique perspective on so many things. But in this episode, we specifically talk about the National EdTech Plan. Kristina, she will not brag about this, but she was instrumental in creation of the National EdTech Plan. There were certainly, what I call, the X-Men behind the National EdTech Plan, but she was one of the driving forces of gathering all these beautiful experts together. Because of this on the ground experience she had, she was really able to give us the good stuff about the National EdTech Plan. We talk about what it is, we talk about how you can use it, whether you're an educator, an education administrator, or an EdTech professional, and we chat about what's uniquely different about this plan from other previous versions.
Many of you have seen the other versions and say, "Okay, why do I need to pay attention to this? What's in it for me? How can I use it?" Kristina gets into all of that, which is awesome. And stay tuned at the end, where I ask her one of the hardest questions, and just threw a bomb at her and said, "So, how do you see this adapting for the next plan?" Really the next planned National EdTech Plan I believe is in 2030, so I was pretty much asking her to be a fortune-teller and say, "How do you see this plan evolving to be ready for the unique needs of our students and our educators and everyone around in 2030?" She has some good things to say about that as well. I love this conversation so, so much. I hope it makes you smile. I hope it makes you laugh as much as Kristina and I did in this episode, so please enjoy. Oh my gosh. Welcome to the show, Kristina. I'm so excited to have you on my podcast. This is-
Kristina Ishmeal:
I'm so excited to be here.
Elana Leoni:
I would say it's a dream come true. But post or pre-show, I was saying I was scared to talk... I know we're friends, but I know how busy you are, so I appreciate you coming on the show. Today, we're going to be talking about the National EdTech Plan, which I don't say that phrase without thinking of your name and your influence in it, so I couldn't think of a more-
Kristina Ishmeal:
Thank you.
Elana Leoni:
Appropriate guest to talk about it. We're going to talk about what it is, why do we even have it, what's its evolution, what's different, and then how, if you're an EdTech leader, you can use it, and if even you're in EdTech, how do we use this to navigate what's going on in the industry in the field? So, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yes, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Elana Leoni:
Well, all right. High level, I think sometimes people go, "Gosh, how does our government support public K-12 education and higher ed education?" I think sometimes people go, "Well, I never heard of the Office of EdTech." Do you want to talk on a high level of what the Office of EdTech is and maybe how it relates structurally to the government?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So obviously, the US Department of Education is its own agency within the federal government. It was actually not established until really, the mid-60s. It used to be with other entities, so then it separated out on its own. There are a variety of offices that are within the department, including the Office of EdTech, that was established by Congress, shockingly, in 1996, who I guess had the foresight to think that technology was going to have an impact in education.
So the main charge of that from 1996 was we need a national landscape or a plan of thinking how technology will come into education. That was the main charge of the office from the very beginning. Expanding all of the things that have happened since then, but there have been five versions of the National EdTech plan since then, and the most recent one was in 2016 with a few updates in 2017, and then the one that was just released in January of 2024, which I had the pleasure and honor to help oversee during my tenure at the department.
Elana Leoni:
So helpful structurally, because I'm like, "I know y'all." At Edutopia, it was nice to interact and collaborate with the leaders and understand how we can best support them in their efforts, but I felt like you all were like this not as well known, just roll up your sleeves, startup style department, just doing awesome things. So I wanted to start out just people, hey everyone, there is an Office of EdTech.
Kristina Ishmeal:
There is, there is.
Elana Leoni:
They do lots of amazing things, and we're not even talking about the other resources, like your artificial intelligence guide was awesome. We'll put all of these links to the National EdTech plan, the AI. Was it the guide? Are you calling it a toolkit or a guide?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah.
Elana Leoni:
We'll put that in the show notes as well and listen to the end of the podcast. We'll drop the URL where you can go. But you talked about the National EdTech Plan, and I want to pause and ask a high level, because you said there's lots of different revisions, and it started... On a high level, what's the magic wand it was trying to do of like, okay, is it get all the districts on the same page? Or put our stamp on what we think is right? Or just surface up research? On a very layman's term, you got me 30 seconds in a bar, what is the National EdTech Plan? Little different than an elevator pitch, right?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Oh, goodness. So it is the flagship publication that comes out of the Office of EdTech, and it really did start as, what you mentioned, servicing the existing research and the research for the past couple of years as well as this. What is happening in classrooms? What are some of those bright spots that we're seeing that you could help uplift that? Then let folks know how other school districts are integrating technology to really impact teaching and learning. That's how it started.
Again, there have been five versions so far. This is the sixth version. This one feels a little bit different already. There has been that focus, I think, more on the research and more on the hypotheticals. This one feels much more actionable, if you ask me, with that call to action, and then being able to actually take it and then implement it in your respective districts or states, for that matter.
Elana Leoni:
For those of you going, "Okay, I've heard of this plan," know that it is free, it's accessible. We'll put it in the show notes, or you can just Google it. The idea is to surface up the research, the trends, really look critically on what are our biggest challenges in K-12? I know I'm going to foreshadow what's different and you're going to get into it even more, but I love how it makes it a lot more inclusive this time.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Oh, I love that you noticed that.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, because I talked to a lot of the UDL folks. One of the things, Kristina, you haven't mentioned is that, gosh, I would think I was talking to Julia and she was saying that... She listed all the partners and experts that went into this. So this is not just the EdTech creating this. I was like, you truly gathered the X-Men of education and anyone who was an expert in anything you brought in and all they weigh in on it.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yes, they did.
Elana Leoni:
So I want to know how much effort and expertise went into this?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah, yeah. In fact, the timeline is also really interesting, I think, just to even think about. It's similar to if you think about kind of textbooks or instructional materials in classrooms. It's on a cyclical basis that people replace those or upgrade those, it's every 5, 6, 7 years, or if there's money for it. I mean, I've worked with school districts that have not upgraded in well over 20 years, so I don't think that that's universal across all districts, but it really is that, and so this was the moment for this 2024 version to look at things that obviously had changed since 2017 and then to also help ease some fears about technology post lockdown. Our biggest fear was that people were going to come back into in-person learning and put all the devices away.
I am still hearing stories about this, and that makes me incredibly nervous because we know that we can do good things with technology, and so it is a little bit different as far as the call to action and calling out specific divides. The team that helps write this, I mean, this has been a project well over 18 months since it really started. It started with the research. Zac Chase at the Office of EdTech was the one that was leading all of this work and still continues to lead this work. He spent hours and hours just reading, trying to boost up his background knowledge and his schema for the things that had changed since the last time he'd actually been in the office and helped write the previous version. Consultations with experts like you mentioned, there is a formal technical working group that gets together with representation from higher education from K 12, from research, from practitioners, a wide, wide variety.
It's also very gender inclusive, as well as racially representative. It covered all of the bases, but also recognizing there is deep expertise in the field and that they could contribute their expertise to this flagship publication. There were plenty of listening sessions, there were surveys that went out. So when you talk about building policy, in general, there's always that little bullet point that was include all of your stakeholders. That was a huge part of this for us. It's harder on a national level when there are 14,000 public school districts, 50 plus state agencies plus the territories and all of that, to make sure that there is representation. But this one feels like it really does represent the country. So the current challenges that we're facing, the efforts and the action that can be taken to reach every single learner.
Elana Leoni:
And so just special kudos for you for really taking that check mark of include the stakeholders and actually doing it in a comprehensive way because in education, I think sometimes we get used to people not including each other and just saying, "Here. No, this is the way we approach it." People might have that idea of the government of like, oh no, this is the way they want to tell us. That's the exact opposite what this plan was. You had so many stakeholders come in and just look at your... Is it a contribution area on the page?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah, the acknowledgement. Yes, so many people.
Elana Leoni:
Lots of experts went into this. Let's talk about a high level. What do you love about this plan and what do you think is critically different about this plan?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah, so in previous versions, they've really looked at different domains within teaching and learning and how technology impacts that, whether it's teaching and learning assessment. These are the five domains from the most recent one, leadership and infrastructure. This one really moves away from domain specific and it calls out the divides that we see across the country. It started with the digital access divide, knowing that pre-pandemic we had, with President Obama's Connectivity Initiative, there was an increase from 33% of school districts, all 14,000 public school districts, and 33% of those districts in 2012 that had high speed reliable internet to 99.9% by 2019. So that's significant. Let's celebrate that. Then the pandemic hits, and then we start to get numbers that are varied depending on the source.
This was obviously a hot point at the beginning of the pandemic because we didn't have the most accurate data to tell us how many households actually had access to reliable high-speed internet. So of the X amount of households, there was an estimate most often that we use between 16 and 17 million households with K 12 students that didn't have reliable high speed internet. That's significant. And then we also know that not every school district with one-to-one with any sort of devices.
So at the beginning, people were sending home paper packets, all of these types of things, just for that continuity of learning to let people know that we're still in it together, we still care about you, all of these things. But that access divide became very, very apparent during lockdown and during quarantine. It's not just reliable high speed internet and devices. It's also accessibility of the instructional materials. We had seen a huge switch to digital materials, whether they were from traditional publishing companies, whether they were openly licensed, like open educational resources. They were not always accessible to every student. So any sort of universal design for learning that we were including in that was not always there. We had to account for all of those pieces when it comes to access. Then in the 2017 version, it called out how we want to see technology used in an active way, and that is students that are creating and not just simply consuming passively.
We know the research shows in a lot of these cases, we put kids on a computer or an intervention or for remediation, and they're sitting there passively consuming that information. They're on X tool for X amount of minutes, and then they rotate through or whatever the case may be. So we wanted to figure out how we get from talking about this digital access divide, we know that there needs to be an increase there, to get to the point where there is this increase in digital use divide, this active use of technology. So what was missing in the middle? Digital design divide. It is talking about giving time and professional learning and ongoing coaching. It's not a one-stop PD to teachers and educators to help them understand what is universal design for learning? What do these types of unique learning opportunities look like so that you can create that active use of technology?
So that's how the three divides came to be, knowing that this was missing in the middle. We continue to talk about professional learning. I remember doing my action research in Nebraska in 2012, and I was surveying across the entire state of Nebraska if we had enough access to professional learning around EdTech integration. Nope. Twelve years later, we're still in that same space. So we know that technology is so powerful when used the right way and actively use with students to create and to apply their learning. So we still need to focus on that. I think the other thing to say whenever I mentioned Universal Design for Learning is that that's actually been in statute since 2015 through the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is ESSA. That is the underlying thing that we use for education to help us know what we need to do to stay accredited as a school district to help us receive funding.
We've had universal design on the books since 2015. It's been around for 40 years, but on the books since 2015. I would still have conversations with district leaders, teachers that had no clue what UDL is. So we really wanted to make sure that we call that out as part of the overall digital design divide, saying when you design for the margins, when you design for students with disabilities or your multilingual learners, you're designing for everyone. They get to benefit from that. So that's how the three divides kind of shape out in this new version. It feels, again, much more actionable of like, oh, we can work on these three divides simultaneously and then work towards improving our overall teaching them learning.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. And what you you're doing is... I feel like because you have so many people looking at this critically and looking at the last plan and looking at the trends that affect the plans, you can look at a high level and say, what are the biggest things truly affecting education?
You shouldn't just be myopic and look at one, right? It's like we're moving all of this together and what did we learn from the pandemic, right? There's a lot of haters out there that say, "Gosh, we got everyone one-to-one and then we just rolled back." There was a lot of learning that happened. And yes, have we fallen back a little bit? Sure. But you are able to say, "Here are the priorities. Here's how you can keep them a priority," and move them all in lockstep. That's something I think as a school leader or an EdTech person, we wouldn't have the time to really identify the trends, on a high level, give you the research. And then there's some actionable things and resources that you can use. So when you're talking, I'm like, oh yeah, that bubble just got bigger because of families now. We were just so focused on schools for a while.
Kristina Ishmeal:
I know.
Elana Leoni:
It gave me a little acid reflux talking about it. I'm like, oh gosh, it got bigger and it's harder.
Kristina Ishmeal:
It is harder. And then you look at terrain and geography and who has access and who doesn't have access. That also kind of goes back to the digital equity work that the office did as well. Digital redlining, that's also a thing that no one was really talking about before all of this where we were hearing from districts in urban cities and urban locations where one side of the street, their students had access to some form of high-speed internet, and then across the street, there's nothing. Just for a full block, there was just a blank, no coverage whatsoever. Knowing that that's a reality for a lot of households is terrifying, just knowing that that even exists, and then how do you really start to think about addressing that from a school district perspective?
I'm not saying that the illness is completely on the school district by any means, but even being able to identify that is the first step, and then how do we bring all of that forward?
Elana Leoni:
I think just on a personal note, I would say that I'm so proud of having people like you being able to have such a significant part in a plan like this because I know you champion for that. I know that you critically and passionately care about equity issues, about who's not showing up, who doesn't have that access, and sometimes I feel like we have stereotypes of the government going, "Oh, maybe that's the majority. It's the easiest way path, let's move forward." But what I knew from you personally and I see in the plan is every single person matters and let's design a plan, even if it's harder to understand sometimes, and there's another thing you have to be worried about. I just applaud you personally for always being that champion. So thank you.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Thank you, thank you. I've learned a lot from my time in state government as well as federal government and colleagues, that this really matters. So to be able to even be that champion, it means a lot to me.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. Well, we've talked about the plan, what's different in the plan. Of you are a school leader listening, if you are an education advocate of any kind, if you're a teacher that's just super interested in this, how would you ideally like them to read and just say, "Okay, here's how I can implement it or learn from it?" Are there specific things that you'd like to point out in the plan that they can take advantage of?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most proud pieces of this whole thing is that there is an example from every single state, as well as every single territory. That again goes back to inclusion and representation because we know that it means a lot for folks to see their state in a national publication. So to look for those examples, they're all in the appendices, so it's not like you even have to read through the actual document itself. Of course, that is encouraged. But to go in there and look for your state example, I think, is even just one way to start. There's also an executive summary, so if you just want to scratch the surface with it, the executive summary certainly helps with that.
Then digging in from there, being able to talk about the three divides is the first step, and then being able to share that with others because when I talk about the divides, especially with classroom teachers, they're like, "Oh yeah, we see this every day." I'm like, "Yeah, I know. District leaders don't always see this, so are you telling your district leaders this?" So being able to advocate for that is actually really important as well.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I see this almost as a checklist, like accountability gut check too of like, are we thinking and talking about these things critically? When we're having school board meetings, are these things coming up? So that's really helpful. If you're an educator listening, know that if you see your own district or something that's similar state level, like Kristina's talking about, be that advocate and reach out and let's have that conversation to make sure that these are the high level issues that will not necessarily make or break us. We need to learn forward. We need to fail forward through them.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yes, fail forward, a hundred percent. If-
Elana Leoni:
And if we're not talking about them-
Kristina Ishmeal:
Go ahead, yeah.
Elana Leoni:
But it's interesting that you said sharing because I have had a couple of presentations recently. Most recently, I was thinking of the University of Florida. I was there for a policy summit, so it was the Future of Florida Summit. This was two weekends ago. They asked me, "How do you first get started in education policy?" And I was like, "Well, I have a very unique path," and having to talk more about that. But then the classroom teacher to any sort of person in our community, go to school board meetings. They matter. They are public meetings. They matter because they're the ones that are making the decisions about what is happening in the classrooms. A lot of folks still don't understand that. We elect these positions. We elect these people to sit in these places and make the decisions that will then impact our children in classes. So it starts at that community level and this local school board level, but then my experience also at the state level was like, oh, guess what?
There's a state board of education. That's also a public meeting, and that is where a lot of people need to also be there to share in public comment, to share through testimony. They hear the great things that are happening because what is happening in most of those meetings is all the bad stuff. It's all the negative stuff. It's very partisan. We had folks that would show up with anti-common core badges. It's a very real thing, and they were most likely in a place where they were retired and had more of the flexibility to be able to do that rather than a classroom teacher. But it's so important that we're making sure that there's representation at these meetings as well. We need sane people at these meetings, and that would be very helpful.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yes. I think when you talk about school board meetings in particular, and all of these meetings, they are public record. If you are an EdTech company and you're like, "Gosh, I want to get into so-and-so district," I wonder what they care about most?
Elana Leoni:
Guess what? You can find those meeting notes. From a strategic perspective, you want to make sure EdTech is being as value as possible and really listening and doing your homework on your perspective schools and districts. And shout out, I'll put a resource in our show notes to Burbio from the EdTech scene, but they provide a lot of data around school board meetings. The data nerd in me, they can even tag percentage of conversations nationally and school boards are happening around XR technology, for example. So I think it's-
Kristina Ishmeal:
That's awesome. That's super helpful, yeah.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, because then you can kind of understand how do you, as EdTech, become a partner in helping with these major challenges that the EdTech plan has surfaced up too. We're not just vendors here.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Absolutely.
Elana Leoni:
We're trying to figure out how to navigate the system.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yes. Yes. You can also, I mean, because of the public records, you can also look at the procurement side of this. I know that that is the least sexy thing to talk about is procurement, but you can also see how people are investing the money that they do have at the district level and at the state level for that matter. But at the district level, what are they investing in? Again, back to your, what are the priorities? What do they care about? Because if they're investing X amount of dollars for a remediation program, does that mean that there are other ways that would also meet the needs of these types of learners that may cost less or we may have a better EdTech solution for X? And so that is super helpful as well.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, and those of you listening, pause, rewind and repeat what Kristina just said, super important because it's not sexy procurement, but that is the number way and not even a dotted line. It's a solid line to your revenue success and your sustainability as an EdTech company. So speaking of EdTech, if I'm an EdTech company and I'm reading this plan, how would you ideally like me to use this resource and put it hopefully into action?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes back to looking at the three divides, seeing if your tool or your EdTech company helps with one of those problems, honestly. Can it provide a solution to the access divide, to the design divide or to the use divide? I mean, if you can't answer yes to any of those, that's a problem, but hopefully there's a yes to one of those. But just seeing how it aligns to the plan itself and then how can you take advantage of that? Going out and having conversations and leading with, "Hey, have you read the National EdTech plan?"
Because the three divides that it discusses, we meet the needs for 1, 2, 3 divides, and that's an important piece in all of this procurement. Then you get into the evidence-based decision-making as well for EdTech companies if they have... This goes back to ESSA again in 2015. Schools are supposed to be making decisions around curriculum, around EdTech tools, you name it, that they are procuring based off of evidence and research. Now, EdTech has always been a hard one. I will say that because you can't do your traditional randomized control trials with EdTech, with fidelity, like you can other things. Curriculum that stays stagnant, that is not dynamic, that stays. If I go to do a two to three year research study all in an EdTech tool, that's going to change. There's going to be versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in that time. So there is an easy entry point for EdTech tools in particular, creating a logic model and then getting that first tier, which is actually tier four.
It's a theory of change. If you can go in and say, "Hey, we believe that using our EdTech tool will help X," then that level of evidence or that tier, you can also go into the same conversations and say, "Hey, we also meet as a tier four with our EdTech tool, and so we would love to talk about partnering with you to help increase overall achievement or growth in your school district." So it's bringing both of those together. We know that we need to pick tools that are actually research-based and are showing their effectiveness and their efficacy by looking at the three divides from the national EdTech.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, and I love how you kind of said, "Let's start out with, hey, we meet two out of the three of the challenges within the plan. By the way, we also are aligned with what your school board cares about and what your strategic plan says are your priorities for the district," boom, boom and here's-
Kristina Ishmeal:
And then maybe there's practices around a district that looks and feels like you, right? So there's your recipe, but really approaching it as a thought partner and someone who truly cares and listens into the challenges. We have deep-rooted challenges that aren't going to go away any time soon in EdTech, but it's helpful to listen as much as possible and really come from, there's some really great resources like the National EdTech Plan that we can leverage and help inform how we position our messaging going forward.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we talked about how school leaders can use it. We've talked about how Ed tech can jump in and use it, and those are really tactical, inspirational. I'll try to summarize that in the show notes for all of you that are jogging or walking your dog right now as well. And when you were talking about logic models, theories of change, you are speaking my love language there. We've had three guests on our show, so I will put them in the show notes for anyone that says, "What's a theory of change, what's a logic model?"
But Jason [inaudible 00:30:51] is somebody that talked about how you can do it in a very cheap, bootstrapped way. Katie [inaudible 00:30:56] as well, and Shelby Danks. So we had three people on all about evaluation, so I'll put that in the show notes as well.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Great.
Elana Leoni:
Question to wrap this all up, because you've given so much helpful information about something that... I think when people think about the National EdTech Plan, they're like, "Oh, I just don't know where to start," and you've really demystified it. But if you were tasked with updating this in the future because it came out and as soon as it came out, it's already expired, right? There's certain things that-
Kristina Ishmeal:
I know. I know.
Elana Leoni:
That's the thing in the world of social media too. I was just looking at something, I'm like, yeah, TikTok is no longer serving up 110% of their... Things like that is.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Yeah, of course. Everything changes, of course.
Elana Leoni:
What are some things that gut-wise, you're like, I think the future of the plan maybe at this point in time should also include X or Y?
Kristina Ishmeal:
That's a really great question.
Elana Leoni:
It's a hard one, yeah.
Kristina Ishmeal:
It is a hard one because if we think about it in the terms of the most recent version from 2017 to 2024, we're looking at 2030 and beyond, which is really hard for me to even wrap my head around. I would like to think, fingers crossed, I would like to think that the digital access divide is better, in general, with all of the federal investments through the Affordable Connectivity Program. Now, I know that that is also in limbo right now with Congress to continue funding it because it really started during the pandemic and not everyone supports continuing to fund it. But there are 52 million households in the country that all qualify for it, and about 21 million of them are signed up for that stipend right now.
So there are still a lot of households that don't have that access. So if we can continue working on that, you also see through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, I have literally driven across the country in the past month or so, and so I have seen signs in multiple states now that have infrastructure things through President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. So we know that fiber and actual pipes and wires are being worked on across the country. Of course, we want to make sure that tribal land is also included in that and making sure that the companies see the incentive to go work on tribal lands to make sure that they're also connected. But I would really like to see that that has advanced for the next version so that we can do a hat tip to it and say, "Hey, we continue to think about this," but it's not nearly as a big priority as it has been in the past.
So I would love to think about that. I would also love to see more, I think the digital design in particular, providing more ongoing professional learning and making sure that school leaders are really actually using their dollars to support teachers. I know it seemed like such a novel concept, but whether they are in-service teachers or even working with ed prep programs and making sure that pre-service teachers are also coming in ready to teach with technology and actively engaging students. So I would like to think that there may not be three divides. Maybe there will be two. Maybe things are just going to progress in some way that we don't even need to talk about it's divides. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have my crystal ball, but I would really like to think that things are just going to overall improve. That's also optimistic.
Elana Leoni:
For people that are watching this on video, sometimes my head goes out and glances out to the sky because I'm thinking hard because this is such a hard question about truly, if you have this crystal ball at 2030, I would imagine that we're probably continuing to deal with student mental health crisis on a level that we've never dealt before.
Kristina Ishmeal:
A hundred percent.
Elana Leoni:
There has to be, at some point, some intervention on a nationally recognized level of how do we build in supports throughout, that truly work? How do we bring in an effective conversation around social and emotional learning without weaponizing it, to be frank?
Kristina Ishmeal:
Exactly, exactly.
Elana Leoni:
How do we meet students where they are learning-wise and acknowledge and try to activate their prior knowledge of wherever they come from? So for me, that's where my head is, especially as we start automating things with AI and all of this stuff.
Kristina Ishmeal:
100%.
Elana Leoni:
What's the world of 2030?
Kristina Ishmeal:
I know. I know. So wild to think about.
Elana Leoni:
Oh, well, Kristina, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time with-
Kristina Ishmeal:
Thank you.
Elana Leoni:
I would say little old me, because I have this small little podcast.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Oh, stop it. Stop it.
Elana Leoni:
I just feel really blessed to have you as a friend over these decades, and I'm so proud of everything you're doing.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Thank you.
Elana Leoni:
So thank you for coming on the show.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Oh my gosh, thank you.
Elana Leoni:
For anyone that wants to keep up with Kristina, I'll put all of her contact details in the show notes. But really quickly, Kristina, what's the one place you'd love people to reach out to you at?
Kristina Ishmeal:
You know, I have officially deleted X/Twitter, so that feels like a loss in my life, but I have moved over to LinkedIn and so that is really one of the best ways to engage and stay connected there.
Elana Leoni:
Perfect. All right, well thank you Kristina. Take care.
Kristina Ishmeal:
Thank you.
Elana Leoni:
Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter at Leoni Group or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoy today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Kristina Ishmael, Guest
Kristina Ishmael is an innovative educator and advocate, leading the charge in promoting digital equity and opportunity in education. With a robust background that spans education policy, professional learning, and classroom instruction, she is deeply committed to empowering educators to effectively leverage technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), in the classroom. Kristina stands out as the lead for AI in education policy, focusing on ensuring AI applications are accessible, equitable, and enhance learning outcomes for all students. Her expertise also encompasses fostering inclusive learning environments where diverse voices are heard and amplified. As a thought leader and speaker, Kristina champions digital inclusion, edtech best practices, and meaningful professional learning. Her work, characterized by a passion for advancing education through technology and open educational resources, has made a significant impact on educators and learners alike, driving forward conversations on ethical AI use, digital equity, and the future of learning in a technology-driven world.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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Transcript: Academic Integrity in the World of AI
This interview was originally recorded on August 18, 2023, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Hello and welcome to All Things Marketing And Education. My name is Elana Leoni and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing, or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience. And now let's jump right into today's episode.
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing And Education. This episode I got to sit down with Ian McCullough. He is the Director of Marketing for Global Campaigns at Turnitin. And Ian isn't your typical Director of Marketing. You can tell immediately that this man comes from Broadway. He has a boisterous voice, he is passionate about education in his job, and he's just a funny human. A side note of how I know Ian is I met him through a mutual friend in the Haas Business School where I got my MBA, Monica Brown. So we talk about her a little bit and it's just fun to be able to have these lighthearted conversations, but really dive deep into things that are quite timely. And with Ian in particular, we talk about ChatGPT and AI writing, and specifically how do we deal and navigate with all of these tools and tech innovation in the world of academic integrity and plagiarism.
So he dives into all the nooks and crannies around that. If you're an educator, this is an interesting one because he talks about a little bit of where plagiarism came from, and some tips and tricks to understand is this plagiarized or not. So lots of fun things to unpack in here. But before we get into the episode, a little bit more about Ian. So Ian McCullough has built a 20 plus year career in educational and creative technology. He has been in consumer marketing, corporate training, institutional market. He's led the North American K-12 marketing team as the academic integrity leader for Turnitin for the past five years. And this year, he has seen his team's scope expand to bring greater focus to serve secondary institutions globally. I always am curious about leaders that are expanding EdTech in a global perspective too, and he brings a little bit of that in the episode. So enjoy this episode about all things ChatGPT, AI writing, and academic integrity. Welcome Ian to All Things Marketing And Education, we're excited to have you on.
Ian McCullough:
Thanks, Elana. A pleasure to be here. It was great having lunch with you the other week. Great seeing you at ISTE and really excited to be able to chat with you and everyone else who's listening in.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I will have to say that the one thing that... There's so many things that keep me in EdTech, but the thing that warms my heart is just how collaborative we are and friendly. And you got a random intro from a beautiful human of ours in common, Monica Brown, and she said, "Ian, you should meet Elana. Elana, you should meet Ian." And just on that knowledge we had [inaudible 00:03:41]-
Ian McCullough:
Yeah, well Monica and I collaborated. So we're talking about that 20-year career. I consider the backbone of my career of LeapFrog toys, which is not only where I met Monica, but where I met my wife Laura, who was Monica's quad mate. So Monica has quite literally followed me for quite some time. And as I was making a career transition from product development and supply chain and various other pieces and started contracting and taking on more marketing projects, it was none other than Monica Brown who brought me back to Leapfrog and brought me into a product marketing role, and really played a key part in that transition. And so yeah, if Monica introduces someone to me, of course I'm taking the call.
Elana Leoni:
And a proper lunch now we're post-pandemic. I was like, "Yes, I want to see some human." And we had a good conversation. I think life is really for me summed up based on connections. There's certain amount of timing in your career and luck, but it's who you surround yourself with, how open you are, and how selfless you are to also introduce other people to connections. There's [inaudible 00:04:51]-
Ian McCullough:
Amongst my other accomplishments, I was a member of the pilot class of Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Entertainment Technology Program. And being the first through anything, I feel a certain responsibility to students who have come through since, that program is celebrating its 25th a year, but they routinely make trips out to the West Coast and do an LA and San Francisco Bay area visit. And one of the points that I make to them, and as far as the professional side of it is that there are words... Especially for those of us who do this, anybody who spends any time on LinkedIn, when we talk about networking and selling, they become these really loaded emotionally kind of fraught words. And the point that I make to the students based on my experience is when we talk about networking and self-promotion and selling your services, having that sort of mindset, all we're really saying is, "Make friends and make fair trades."
So networking is just a really... An adult professional code word for make friends. And then when you have to make a case for yourself, whether it's a job interview or you're working as a contractor consultant and you have to highlight your value, it's make fair trades for your time. And then just go Robert Fulgham on it because kindergartners can make friends and make fair trades. And so the more that we unload it and approach it with the spirit that you just highlighted, yeah. So it's a pleasure to have become your friend, Elana.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, same. And I would say that people describe me as this... I'm most proud of my superpower being I find joy in connecting other people. I'm a connector. I thrived in the connected educator movement of being able to have this wonderful world of social media and connect with people all around the world doing innovative things in education. It's full circle with creative professionals such as yourself. Now, let's dive into ChatGPT, AI writing, plagiarism, you are in the thick of it when it comes in your [inaudible 00:07:06], in your company, Turnitin. Let's back up before ChatGPT and specific in AI, let's just talk about the evolution of plagiarism. I think it would be interesting from an EdTech professional standpoint, but also from teachers, they're probably tuning in and going, "You know, this is a problem for me, but I don't know where it started. I have never thought about it or how it's evolved."
Ian McCullough:
In terms of... It depends on how far back we want to rewind the clock. We're going for a 20-minute episode and I could take two hours going into the history here where we can trace back to Ancient Greece, we can trace back to the enlightenment, where fundamentally and really coming out of what we have historically referred to as the European Enlightenment, or at least that's how it's headlined in most history. Fundamentally at the heart of it is this need to advance humanity through original thought. And so when people are thinking originally, then human society advances, there is progress. However, when people are in a position to take expressions of ideas or ideas that have already been expressed and claim them as their own, that's a problem for all of us, where that stunts the growth of humanity. And where things start to get really into the educational sphere, plagiarism has been a concern in academia for centuries.
It was really at the dawn of the internet that we started getting into the barriers to doing so becoming that much easier and more tempting. And especially in the K-12 space, a lot of it is... There's a confluence of social factors that's really worth digging into because it also ties into social media as well where we talk remixes and memes and how do things go viral? Well, you do trace back and there is sources of ideas and there's a balance between cultural evolution and credit where credit is due. And if we have to look at the history in terms of academic plagiarism over the past 25 years and where Turnitin comes to it, the easiest thing to point to as a precursor step would be Wikipedia. Where if we think about this from the point of view of a student who has an assignment due the next day, it's always the next day. That's that time dependent story that always comes into any EdTech conversation.
And they're up against a wall and they're exhausted and it's really just tempting to copy and paste from a webpage [inaudible 00:10:02]. Wikipedia being the classic example. And then you just present it, you just turn in the paper and you get through the assignment. And that sort of copy and paste plagiarism is really where Turnitin, which we're celebrating our 25th birthday this year, started to gain traction. So Turnitin's history as an organization, Turnitin was founded in 1998 by a couple of teachers at the University of California Berkeley who actually started as a peer review tool.
Elana Leoni:
[inaudible 00:10:34] Bears, I didn't know that.
Ian McCullough:
Yeah, no. Turnitin has multiple ties to Berkeley, so we'll get into that in a little bit as well. But it was founded out at Berkeley and the founding generation, John and Christian and we celebrate our founder's day, they really tried to build a peer review tool that just made handling peer feedback easier. And what they learned really quickly is they put this tool out there, but a lot of student assignments had an awful lot in common. And so two years after that, they introduced the original originality check service that Turnitin has become synonymous with for any student who's graduated over the past two decades or so. Where having tools out there that can rapidly match up against an array of sources, paywall journals, other student papers, tens of billions of internet articles both current and archived, that became a value to teacher. And having something that as they evaluate whether or not students are actually doing the thinking required for learning, having the ability to do so at scale and somewhat concrete.
Where things get interesting, we'll get into this in the ChatGPT conversation is, in an ideal case, depending on how large the instructional environment is, it's really hard in an 800 person college lecture hall for the professor to know the voice of every student. TAs better off, but TAs also have less teaching experience. In the K-12 environment, I get to work with educators who can know and feel when something's off, but it gets really hard to have a conversation about it and have a teachable moment if you can't [inaudible 00:12:31] to it and say, "Here is the issue I [inaudible 00:12:33]." And so when we look at a tool like Turnitin, it becomes a diagnostic tool so that teachers can intervene. Where at the end of the day what matters, and what gets me out of bed in the morning is that you have students who have any number of struggles where this may have been a choice that they [inaudible 00:12:51]. And less often than you would expect, it's not mal-intent where students are necessarily trying to get away with something for the sake of getting away with something.
It's an incredibly stressful world where there's pressure and confusion and the expectations are ever shifting. And educators need tools to identify where there's an issue so that they can sit down and help a student with that. And certainly that's the case in secondary, and the position of turn it in, we firmly believe that that should be the case in higher education as well. But we also recognize that in higher education, the consequences for intentional academic misconduct can get really serious really fast. So some of something that I take a lot of satisfaction in working in the secondary business on is being able to work with institutions to set the skills earlier so that students can thrive later on in their career.
Elana Leoni:
You said all sorts of good things. I know that humans only have the attention span of a goldfish rather than... If they're even listening in [inaudible 00:13:58] the car. So let me recap what you said, and I'm going to potentially oversimplify and you're going to correct me. But you brought plagiarism back to the days of Socrates and I love it because you got bigger and said this is how we advance humanity. If we keep using... If there's plagiarism, you're doing a setback and gosh, I never would've thought that. So thank you for this philosophical angle.
Then you said, "Well a lot of the times when they were evolving this product, it was really a cut and paste type of plagiarism." So I found something cut and pasted, it might've been back in the day when we're going into the Encyclopedia Britannica's for those of us that enjoyed the physical encyclopedias. Then it went to Wikipedia and all those sources of cut and paste plagiarism. So why don't you take me to now we've got AI, we've got ChatGPT, [inaudible 00:14:50] complicated the world of K-12 and higher education as it relates to original thought to progress humanity as you so boldly and nicely talked about?
Ian McCullough:
I have the benefit of working with really smart people who pay attention to what's going on. And so we have to look at the release of ChatGPT as a milestone event last November, late last November. However, OpenAI has existed since 2016. The GPT language model technology underlying all of it... Actually really I think GPT-3 got released in 2020, so it's been around for a while. And our AI innovation lab has been looking at this for several years. And so when we talk and really fast-forward to the present, Turnitin was very well-equipped to deal with this new challenge where tools were popping up in generative AI. And maybe you remember last year there was a lot of stuff about AI generated art starting right about this year, 12 months. There've been tools that use this, Jasper as an example, that have been out there for a while and people would pay for the services and have been getting better.
And then ChatGPT comes out, where OpenAI releases itself, where all of the sudden as a showcase for what this technology is capable of, they put ChatGPT out there and suddenly it's free, it's simple, and it's amazing. And so I brought up Wikipedia earlier and there's multiple types of large language models, but ChatGPT is the definitive place that people are going. And the challenge in terms of helping educators identify when students are or aren't doing the work, and then asking why. Why is really important. It is one thing for Turnitin to be able to have huge student paper database of all of the papers that have been submitted to Turnitin and a global student paper database where we can crosscheck.
We have our own proprietary search engine, we have relationships to have access to paywall journals, that at the end of the day is if we can find matching texts, we can present the matching texts and the teacher can say, "That doesn't look like it should be the way it is." It's a little bit more... It's a lot more sophisticated than that. In the case of generative AI, the educational challenge is that in essence what a large language model is generating has never been published, it's unique.
Elana Leoni:
Do you feel [inaudible 00:17:42] it is unique, it's still moving along humanity as you said?
Ian McCullough:
Well, the challenge on that one is who's doing the thinking? So philosophically on this, at some point the advancement of humanity requires human thought and action and AI is moving forward. We're not at a point yet where AI themselves are sentient. And I think one of the things that we need to be clear about this current generation of large language models, which is people far smarter and that I have been very clear on is, when you go to ChatGPT, it doesn't know any [inaudible 00:18:21]. And that's a common kind of popular misconception where if [inaudible 00:18:26] and ask ChatGPT for an answer, what ChatGPT does is it has its trillions of tokens and it's astoundingly good figuring out what's the next most likely thing in response to the prompt.
But it doesn't know anything and it's not thinking anything about the information, it doesn't have that concept. So in terms of advancing humanity and original thought, I think that the people who are thinking about how to build large language models, that is absolutely advancing humanity and advancing thought, and I think that that's worthy a lot of scrutiny. But in the case of a student who submits the prompt that their teacher handed them and gets five paragraphs of text and then submits that as their own, for whatever reason that is, I think that's something worthy of intervention because the student hasn't internalized any of that information. And there's the broader community and social impact, but they're just shortchanging themselves in their own education at this point.
And one of my caveats to educators to pass along to students is if you are using this technology to take shortcuts... There's multiple ways to look at the purpose of education. On one hand, we can take the humanistic point of view about well-rounded human beings. On the other hand, we have to have the economic conversation. And from an economic point of view where there are lots of people who are motivated to get an education because they want a better job, if you are using a large language model to generate your work and not developing the skills, that large language model will do the job that you think you're going to be able to get a credential for, cheaper than you can. And so students today have a challenge where the jobs of tomorrow, it's all evolving so rapidly.
And so for teachers, it's in the student best interest to identify that and know that something's going on, and sit down and have that talk about what are the real consequences here, both in terms of academic norms and standards for potential higher education career, whether that is trade school, professional school, or Bachelor's, Master's. And then getting into the world where you can just see all of the headlines of all of these major companies that are rushing to adopt AI technology as quickly as they can. And so if AI cannot think at this point, cannot generate original thought, that's something that students should be really focused on making sure that they have those muscles well-developed.
Elana Leoni:
Yes, and I can't imagine the retention of knowledge is superior to somebody just becoming good at prompt engineering. Like, "Oh, okay, I'll get these prompts five times in a row, I can get something and then maybe copy and paste it," and then we're in a different type of copy and paste plagiarism for sure.
Ian McCullough:
Yeah. No, it is. Well, I think the evolution of the academic norms around large language models is there are matters to be settled. There's huge legal questions around the use of training data. Saw an article this morning in Ars Technica about a potential lawsuit from the New York Times towards open AI based on asserting copyright infringement because of the use of New York Times articles in the training [inaudible 00:22:07] potential use. And when we look at that original proposition that ideas and expression of ideas have value, there are matters around this in relation to that proposal that are being tested in a number of ways already. There's the high profile strikes for the Writer's Guild of America and the Screen Actor's Guild, SAG AFTRA in terms of Hollywood production where one of concerns that have that has been a part of the strike is writers don't want their scripts used for training data and putting them out of a job.
And so this idea ownership is pretty crucial. Then we get into the piece here of since it exists, what's the bare minimum student's should do? And the one thing that seems to be a consensus point, if nothing else, first and foremost, teachers, you should have clear academic integrity policies, honor codes, however you want to talk about that. But the bare minimum best practice that seems to have emerged over the past several months is if students are using ChatGPT, cite it as a source so that you can trace [inaudible 00:23:24] and have that conversation. And the simple thing, when we look at where Turnitin has been of service over the past 25 years and students go to... There's all sorts of articles out there about how to trick Turnitin, and it's almost an annual ritual of writing the counter blog post up [inaudible 00:23:46] those articles because we can't identify those particular things. And the harder you try to just not do the work, you might as well put the energy into doing the work.
Elana Leoni:
Slightly ironic, right?
Ian McCullough:
Yeah. And it's slightly ironic when the key to all of it is when we look at original thought and coming back to that, all original thought is built up thoughts that have come before. Human progress is built on ideas that have come before, cite your sources, that's the magic thing there. Where understand the building block blocks that you're using in your new ideas and recognize them in your work. And for the time being, there's a lot to sort out on the ChatGPT question. But a lot of institutions as a bare minimum if students are using ChatGPT, like, okay, there's value there, cite it.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. So I know we could talk about this forever. I'm going to ask you a couple more questions-
Ian McCullough:
[inaudible 00:24:40].
Elana Leoni:
And then we will give your audience ways to talk to you, get in touch with Turnitin as well. But when I started my career in education, I remember at [inaudible 00:24:52] Utopia, I went to our website and our mission and it said... George was really clear about, I don't care if any student can go to... At the time it was the internet, it was that copy and paste. If they can Google it, we should be aware of it and potentially leverage it, but we should help enable educators to go beyond the Googling. And now we're seeing this conversation come around, around the emphasis on critical thinking and being able to create assignments beyond the copy and paste. And I remember I sent you a quote from somebody I admire in my educator PLN Alec Couros and he's been putting this on LinkedIn and Twitter, but his quote was, "The news is really filled with stories of professors boasting about catching students who've submitted AI generated assignment."
Like, I gotcha type of vibe. But he's saying, "Gosh, why aren't we talking about people boasting about how they've altered assessment strategies? Or gotten to the heart of why students cheat in the first place?" And that still gives me goosebumps because that's ultimately... The technology is going to evolve over and over. Before George was like, "Hey, Google exists. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's leverage. Let's leverage phones that are now the power of computers in a kid's pocket. Let's move it and continue on." But how do we move the critical sinking needle? And at the same time really get to the heart of why. Sometimes when kids are acting out or cheating, there's a deeper reason too. So any thoughts around that? Because I know educators are like, "How do I even... If I don't use Turnitin, how do I catch students from cheating now that there's multiple ways?"
Ian McCullough:
So first and foremost, Turnitin, we provide tools and services, but we also make free resources for educators available. And I will send you the link to the page full of resources we have for educators on how do you redo your assignments? How do you take a look at this? How should you look at your classroom and institutional academic integrity policy so that you can set good expectations, make it so that prompt you've been using for 20 years requires more of the student. And that you are actually upping the level of challenge. And how to have conversation. And those are things that we make freely available to everyone.
We have a wide range of instructional resource packs to that. I think something that we were very excited about... The resource pack we were very excited about in terms several years ago in the lead up... Just in the general politics around the 2020 election, we have a source credibility pack where the nature of fake news and reliable sources was a general topic, and we put together a source credibility pack, which once again in the era of large language models comes back into play.
So I'll send you the link for that too because that's also pulled in. But the academic integrity in the age of AI resource pack really gives educators a lot to start with and think about how they are introducing these topics to students, how they are adjusting their prompts and assignments, and taking a different view of assessment given that these things do exist, and they're not going anywhere. And this is a part of the world that today's students are growing up into. And then in the case of many higher education students, today's adults are seeking support on for continued education. So no, we can't ignore it. We can't pretend it doesn't exist. And there are plenty of appropriate uses out there. One of the first things that came up [inaudible 00:28:36] I value, which I can totally envision is for special education students, imagine being able to use ChatGPT as an accommodation for dyslexic students.
That sounds pretty valid to me. And so it isn't the case where it's all going to be misuse. There are cases where it could be perfectly appropriate, there could be cases where students should generate essays. I think that something that many educators have run too quickly is, "Wow, you can create exemplars all you want." If there's a topic that you're trying to get at and provide an example of, it's perfectly appropriate, as far as I'm concerned, for an educator to generate an essay from ChatGPT or a similar tool that has an issue that they want students to go find. We like saving educators time. But it's all so, so, so complicated and it's the question of how do we navigate the nuance? And where do we get the information so that people can know, it's a nuanced question.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. And for educators that are listening, we will put all of those resources in our show notes. We'll tell you the link of the show notes at the end of this episode. And shout out to some other educators that we'll put in the show notes as well that are talking about how teachers can use and leverage ChatGPT to be more efficient, to save them time. I think that's [inaudible 00:30:04]-
Ian McCullough:
[inaudible 00:30:05]-
Elana Leoni:
... Use but Monica Burns, Alice Keeler, there's so many out there right now. Holly Clark, they have book. I think it's such a fascinating conversation because even at ISTE I was talking to people and they had books that they just came out. I'm like, "How'd you write that book?" And some of them on the side whispered, "ChatGPT helped me with some of it." And so there's these ethical things of like, "Wow, okay, what is original? What great area is plagiarism?" Love how you frame ChatGPT as it really doesn't know anything. It's just like maybe this... I think of it like a hyper-good librarian who's trying to find stuff for you.
Ian McCullough:
The analogy that's most apt is at this point, lots and lots of people have smartphones, and most smartphones have auto complete features. And so essentially the fundamentals of what tools like ChatGPT are doing, it's auto complete at a much more massive scale. And that's it.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, that's interesting.
Ian McCullough:
This has been evolving for a very long time technologically.
Elana Leoni:
Yes. So if you all are listening to this episode and you want to hear more from Ian about this, let us know in the reviews, reach out to us. We can certainly have a whole nother episode, deep dive on plagiarism, ChatGPT, AI, he's in the thick of it. He's surrounded by smart people. He is in turn a smart person thinking about this every day. And the last question we ask, it's not related to plagiarism, hopefully you're not going to plagiarize this answer. It's really about you. And you're like, "Quick, [inaudible 00:31:52]-"
Ian McCullough:
I work for an integrity company?
Elana Leoni:
We always ask people around how... What are the things that you do to keep up with life? What are the things that are inspiring to you? And in particular, I'd love to know if there's anything recently that you've read or watched that has inspired you. I want to tell marketers, EdTech professionals, and people every day in the classrooms that it's okay to be a human. And what are some things that are inspiring you beyond your day-to-day work?
Ian McCullough:
So the top-of-mind answer on this one is I just took a three-week vacation. And [inaudible 00:32:31] travel. Travel is absolutely the answer that comes to mind. And my wife, my now 11-year-old daughter and I, we took a Disney cruise from Southampton, England to Cherbourg, France. We saw Utah Beach and a bunch of the D-Day sites and then sailed to Reykjavik and sailed around Iceland and had a couple of port stops there, which that was the point, going places that you've never been. That's one of my big things in travel. Obviously I want to visit family and whatnot.
And the thing that I keep coming back to that has just filled me with awe and wonder is we were in Iceland in Reykjavik, as the volcanic eruptions are happening. We didn't go see the specific volcano, which I won't try to pronounce, but in Reykjavik they have a lava show that an organization put together and gotten the permits where they take the ash volcano that erupted like 100 years ago and they heat it up in a furnace and they put you in a room to actually experience what it's like to see and be near lava. And they have a whole great presentation about... And that's been the thing that's top of mind where that particular presentation and just the awesomeness of the earth and nature, that is absolutely the most recent refill of my [inaudible 00:34:00].
Elana Leoni:
And when you travel, it flips your whole world upside down. Sometimes we get in our routines whether we like it or not. When you're traveling, you are not in control of anything as much as you'd like to think so. And your senses... For me, my senses just go... And I get more curious about life and things, and I bring that back when I come [inaudible 00:34:21].
Ian McCullough:
It doesn't even have to be a European cruise. It's been a busy summer. So the aforementioned daughter, she's a child of the pandemic era, so there were a couple of years there where things were adoptions. We found a summer camp for her in Oregon. She's got some food allergy issues, so [inaudible 00:34:39] to find a very specific type of summer camp. And so we get back from the European cruise and then the opportunity to travel just beyond your own neighborhood. It doesn't have to be around the world, it can just be out of the boundaries of familiarity. Driving up the coast... Well, not really up the coast, driving up interstate five. Both Elana and are in the San Francisco Bay Area heading up I-5 with a stop in Shasta, which is just-
Elana Leoni:
Beautiful.
Ian McCullough:
A [inaudible 00:35:08] different place. And into Salem, Oregon having a lovely week there where we worked remotely. It's a change of perspective.
Elana Leoni:
Well, thank you, Ian for coming on and sharing everything you're doing. All of your knowledge. As soon as I met you, I'm like, "You've got to be on my podcast. You got to tell people what you are learning around [inaudible 00:35:28] ChatGPT, plagiarism," and it's changing every single day.
Ian McCullough:
Yeah, it is. It's been a really exciting year for me as someone who's ultimately a professional storyteller, to have this rich topic of interest to really explore and to have a great company to represent. I love working for Turnitin, and it's been a blessing.
Elana Leoni:
Awesome. Well, thank you again. For those of you listening, we will put all of the information in the show note. Thank you all for listening.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Ian McCullough, Guest
Ian McCullough has built a 20+ year career in educational and creative technology, with experience in consumer, corporate training, and institutional markets. He's led the North American K-12 marketing team at academic integrity leader Turnitin for the past five years, and this year has seen his team's scope expand to bring greater focus to serving secondary education institutions globally.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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