Burbank's panel on AI and education explores how K-12 schools must prepare students for an AI-native world. Speakers discussed AI reading tutors for preschoolers, warned that pre-digital classrooms are outdated, and urged designers to build pause mechanisms and teacher prompts into AI learning tools.
On behalf of the City of Burbank's Economic Development Division, I want to welcome you to tonight's event. The Burbank Tech Talk events are part of our entrepreneurial programming series to help support industries that are growing and changing within the city, including media and entertainment, healthcare, and education.
From AI to creators to employers, things are definitely changing. So a superintendent, a consultant that works at a large company that you guys are all familiar with, a huge edtech solution provider, but also the higher ed space.
Oftentimes in this day and age, our students coming into our schools being digital natives, the pandemic made everyone cloud native. Now they're coming to our schools AI native. Those are the things that I'm thinking about as a, a superintendent and a school district leader.
At 4 and 5 years old, they're promoting AI reading tutors. I have to start thinking what's best for my son. Should I expose him to AI? Should I get my daughter, who will be 3 in a few months, ready for AI literacy?
Quick tip if you're a parent: if your classrooms for your kids look like the classrooms that we were in, that's a red flag for me because that's not preparing our kids for the future. Because ultimately, the future isn't the future anymore. The future is here.
AI and computational tools, they are very powerful, but the important thing is understanding the workflow. How to steer the outcomes. And this is something we try to instill in students.
At the end of the day, K-12 is about building positive developmental relationships with kids. So if a product can do that and help you along the way, guide you, gamify it, any type of triggers that you can built in to say, hey, check with your teacher, stop, pause, you know, those are the things that, that I think would matter.
