“We want students to thrive throughout their whole life, and we want them to have the educational experiences that lead to that thriving,” said Professor Susanna Loeb in the opening panel of the 2024 Accelerate Edtech Impact summit at Stanford. “We want that for all students. We don’t just want that for students from well resourced families, and we don’t just want that for students who are motivated and engaged in school right now … we really have to think about the broad range of students.”

The learner experience was at the center of the second annual summit, hosted by the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Before Loeb took the stage, the summit kicked off with four student speakers, ranging from a middle schooler to a doctoral student, reflecting on how artificial intelligence has influenced their learning. And earlier, eight Stanford students showcased edtech projects of their own creation.

The convening gathered 400 edtech leaders, researchers, funders, educators, and students in a space designed for insight sharing, connection, and inspiration. The 10 sessions, ranging from panels to interactive workshops, showcased effective uses of edtech, explored the role of research, and put the key players in conversation with each other. Each panel included at least one educator, Stanford researcher, and edtech leader, and conversations were grounded in a shared vision of effective, equitable, and responsive learning enabled by technology.

Key takeaways from the summit included:

Successful educational technology puts educators in the driver’s seat, supported by school and district leadership.

Speakers across sessions emphasized that the most effective educational technology tools empower teachers rather than making their job more difficult. Tech leaders, in particular, reflected that with accessible entry points to a tool and space to experiment, teachers often come up with better uses than were originally imagined.

“When the teacher is enabled with this technology, understands it deeply, they will be incredibly creative in how to use it with their students,” said Adeel Khan, founder and CEO of Magic School. “We have seen these use cases that people come up with because they understand their profession, they understand the context of their students much more deeply than I will or anyone else will.” Magic School aims to support teachers with AI tools that help create assessments, lesson plan, and differentiate instruction.

Lane Dilg, head of strategic initiatives at OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, said teachers will create the best uses of the generative AI program, and when used right, sees potential for the tool to improve teacher job satisfaction. “We hope that our models … will be as beneficial and useful for teaching and learning as they can be. But in terms of actual deployment, we’re focused first, in K-12 in particular, on supporting educators.”

Richard Charles, Chief Information Officer of Denver Public Schools, demonstrated the role of leadership in empowering teachers when it comes to using technology. He monitors how teachers in his district are using tech tools effectively and elevates their work to other educators. He also participated in the creation of a K-12 AI readiness checklist, in collaboration with four other districts and school consortiums, providing guidance that allows teachers to let their creativity soar.

AI tools should do more than tedious tasks – they can help improve teaching.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, education technologists have explored ways that it can help reduce human work hours by assisting with repetitive and time consuming tasks like grading, creating schedules, or attendance, allowing teachers time and energy to focus on their students and saving schools money and staff resources.

However, a theme that emerged across sessions was the possibility of AI to augment and improve the practice of teaching. With an enormous amount of data available to collect about learners, AI can help process and translate it to provide useful insights to teachers, students, and parents.

Examples cited included:

• Giving in-the-moment formative feedback to a student on their writing, before they turn it in to the teacher;
• Differentiating learning experiences in response to student needs;
• Using cameras, computer vision, and sensors to collect student-teacher interactions and identify patterns;
• Making learning data understandable and relevant to teachers and parents.

With new tools available, the assessment industry is also evolving. People are “challenging the notion of a traditional standardized test,” said Amit Sevak, CEO of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), known for creating and administering assessments like the TOEFL, GRE, and Praxis. ETS is expanding its business to focus on personalized rather than standardized assessments, those measuring performance rather than knowledge, and those that evaluate 21st-century skills. Their work includes expanding both the technology and methodology of assessment. “We’re really moving to a new era … we’ve been going through a massive transformation,” he reflected.

Education research remains key to designing effective edtech.

It’s widely understood that edtech needs to be evidence-based, but new tools are being developed faster than traditional peer-reviewed research. Researchers, technologists, and funders ideated on how to ensure the latest insights are informing the latest solutions.

Some ideas that emerged:

• Increase funding, decrease the cost, and build infrastructure for edtech research and development, so that it can better keep up with the pace of technological developments while remaining rigorous;
• Understand the incentive structures of private edtech companies to show how it is advantageous to use research, starting in small ways;
• Understand the science behind the process of learning and cognitive development, and use it to inform the crafting of edtech tools;
• Build partnerships involving teachers and schools directly in the development of tools that will work for them.

Technology can expand how and when learning happens, and what is taught.

In a closing fireside chat, Stanford University President Jon Levin, ’94, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, ’96, MBA ’05, reflected on how technology has expanded learning beyond formal, K-16 classroom settings. YouTube has evolved from an entertainment platform to one that contains a vast amount of open-access educational content, demonstrating how learning has become lifelong and broadly accessible across the globe. In response to these trends, YouTube has built features like “YouTube Courses,” which allow educators to organize their teaching material on the platform, and “Player for Education,” which enables teachers to show ad-free videos in the classroom as a teaching aid.

“One thing that’s so interesting about having a platform like YouTube, which is basically a way to … deconstruct education into the individual lessons and contents, is it sort of forces you to think about, what are the essential components of education?” said Levin.

Both Levin and Nico Kornell-Quintero, a seventh grader who spoke in the opening session, identified the need to determine the most important skills learners need to develop, and figure out the best ways to help them get there.

“I think AI will change more what we learn rather than how we learn,” said Kornell-Quintero. “The importance of writing a five-paragraph essay, memorizing history facts, or keeping a science journal is lessening, because AI can do all of these things. Instead, we should focus more on how to think, how to critically reason and make decisions.”