Episode # 58

The Cutting Edge of the Learning Blade with Joshua Sneideman

October 1, 2024

About This Episode

On this week’s episode, we are joined by Joshua Sneideman, Vice President of Learning Blade and an Albert Einstein Distinguished Fellow, to discuss his educational journey and the impact of Learning Blade on students.

Guests

Joshua Sneideman

Joshua Sneideman is Vice President at Learning Blade focusing on supporting thousands of schools implement career education in the middle grades. An Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Department of Energy in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, he received recognition from the Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, for his efforts to increase minority participation in STEM education. Sneideman is an award-winning author of 7 STEM titles and has created TED ED cartoons that have amassed over 1,000,000 views.

Transcript

Kara 0:01
Hey, is this thing on? Are we recording? Can I get a tech person? Oh, for the love of Ed Tech.

Joining us today is Josh snyderman, who is vice president of learning blade, as well as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Fellow and author. So Josh, thanks for talking to us today.

Joshua 0:29
Thanks. Kara, Thanks, Matt. I’m excited to chat with you. Yeah. So

Kara 0:32
we always kick off our podcast by having our guests tell us a little bit about what led them into education, how they decided to become a teacher, and then ultimately, for you, what led you to learning blade.

Joshua 0:44
Okay, love that. So, my mom was a principal, my dad was a theater director, my grandfather was a math teacher, my uncle was a history teacher. Always wanted to be a teacher since the day I grew up, I taught swimming lessons when I was 1516, and still think that’s the best job ever, because you know when you’ve transferred the skill that they’ll never lose it for the rest of their life. And so I love that, but I got a degree in geology. Love Rocks, love geology, but always knew I wanted to teach, but I was too immature to go into the classroom in my early 20s, I just could not put myself in front of kids. When I was about 29 I started teaching. I did a career switch, and then my first year teaching, I cried a lot. I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I got through it using mantras, right? Like I would open the school door. I said, Kids got issues, so let’s like, let’s accept that and not get frustrated by this crazy experience, and then I got and then I really had a dream to teach overseas. So I taught in Trinidad and Tobago was my first overseas position. And then I taught in Costa Rica for three years, met my wife, had my first child there, and then taught in California. And so always a middle school science teacher. So love science, science geek, science nerd. We could science out anytime together. And then what led me to learning blade was when I was in California, I was nominated to be an Albert Einstein distinguished education fellow, which is an incredible program if people are looking for chance to grow in STEM education did that for two years, and I led the Department of Energy’s Renewable Energy Education literacy program to try and get schools to really get kids to understand energy and renewable energy. And during that time, I met the founders of learning blade, and happened to be giving a speech to preschool teachers on why preschool students are the best stem stem cohort on the planet because of their curiosity and and when I was down in Chattanooga and met the founders, I’m like, I want to move to Chattanooga. And it worked out. And so that was the first year learning blade was really launched in one state. We now have, we’ve had 19 Statewide Contracts, and one of them is Ohio, where learning blade is a free resource to all students in the state

Kara 3:09
and very cool teachers. Yeah.

Matt 3:12
Great journey there.

Joshua 3:13
And I want to just before we dive in into learning blade, specifically, just kind of touch again, on the Albert Einstein, the distinguished fellow honor that you have and and just a little bit more about what that is and how that worked. Yeah, it’s a very cool program. It started under Bill Clinton, I think in 92 it was. The idea was that federal agencies do a lot of education programming. They offer resources and education toolkits, and NOAA and NASA are clearly doing a lot in education. And they said, Well, why don’t we bring you know, expert educators to DC to learn from them, but also to guide some of the work that’s happening. So like a true collaboration with classroom educators on a one year fellowship. And so they place fellows in Congress. They place fellows in the Library of Congress in NASA and NOAA in Department of Energy at the National Science Foundation. And so it’s truly it’s been going for what, 2032, years now, 33 years, it’s about 10 or 15 teachers a year get placed in federal agencies to lend their support, their expertise, and to grow and bring that stuff back to their communities as well. So I absolutely love it. I think the Albert Einstein fellowship was the best PD experience of my life, and I highly encourage others to go and apply for it. I love that that’s a, you know, there’s so many things I feel like are that get to teachers at the resources and so forth, get there from people who either haven’t taught for a long time or never did. And this opportunity, and teachers don’t get an opportunity to go out and really share with with the outside world, we’ll call it from from school, what it’s like, and that connection between the. Too is awesome. So I’m really super happy to hear that that’s that’s out there still. Yeah, and you know, Ohio’s got some of the greatest STEM teachers on the planet, so check out this opportunity. But that’s exactly what it was for me. It was wildly eye opening how much educational contents being created by program managers that sometimes had and hadn’t been in the classroom. I mean, they’re doing great stuff, but, I mean, the teacher that’s taught for 10 years can give you their bent on how it’s going to land, right? And so let’s right, let’s Tinker that. Yes, absolutely. That’s really cool. Can you talk a little bit about what learning blade is before we dive into some of the things you guys are doing? So elevator pitch, here we go. So learning blade is focused on this concept students can’t be what they can’t see. And so many students are interested in STEM topics, but don’t truly understand what STEM means in the real world. So, and I would say teachers kind of as well sometimes. So stem being it’s not just PhD rocket scientist and people working at CERN stem are electricians and welders and phlebotomists and X ray technicians and and all the PhDs that you’re familiar with. So our goal at learning blade is to bring really relevant career exploration to the middle grades while enhancing core academic scan standards. So I like to say our secret sauce is that when you go and learn about a UI, UX designer and learning blade, we have a math lesson, a science lesson, a social studies lesson and an English lesson about that career. So that way, we’re approaching all the full picture, the interdisciplinary cross connecting the silos, and those lessons are only 10 minutes long. So it allows Ohio teachers, or teachers in the other states that we have that have free access, a chance to add little chunks, chunking strategy, bell ringers, early finisher career exploration, to their classroom. And I will say that in the last 10 years that we’ve been doing this, 10 years ago, career exploration in middle school, not a hot topic right now, completely on fire every state. What are we doing in middle school? For careers we need to do more. And learning blade is, quite honestly, a wonderful and awesome solution to that. And then one other thing, the way we approach it with that interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary lens, we have online lessons, reading, answering, learning, building vocabulary, but we also have projects. So we have hands on projects, stem projects, engineering design projects, 3d printing projects. And then, as well, coding course and our new AI unit, which I know you guys are excited to talk about, yeah, for sure, and we should also mention, be sure we make this loud and clear for all our Ohio teachers. It is a free resource learning blade, free com, forward slash, O, H, or go to the Ohio STEM Learning Network, which is the funder, and just type in learning blade and Ohio STEM learning network, and you will find access to this in Ohio thanks to the partnership with the osln.

Matt 8:12
That’s great, yeah. And in looking through this, I really like that there was that cross curricular connection, because it’s easy for for some people to look at STEM and say, well, that’s, that’s for the teacher, that’s for the math teacher, that’s for the science teacher, and it’s not at all. It’s more than just subjects. It’s, it’s, it’s a way of looking at everything. And that’s really impressive, that it has those components that are all standards aligned for all those grade level all those subject areas, too. So not only does it, does it include them, but there’s those connections to standards.

Joshua 8:46
Absolutely, you’re reinforcing Ohio, sixth, seventh and eighth grade math standards as you learn about careers or English standards. And just once again, kids can’t be what they can’t see, especially when you talk about low income students. And you know, I think there’s, there’s less propensity to seeing STEM careers, and yet, stem are the highest paying jobs that can totally transition and transform a family. And so making sure all students have access to the opportunities in STEM is critical, and the best way to do that is through exposure. So let’s expose the AI yeah module, the AI component, to learning blade. That’s that’s there now, obviously AI has been hot, hot topic for, you know, going on about 19 months now, since November of 22 when I like to tell people that, you know, for a long time, AI was using you, and now you get to use it. I love that. I love that. So let’s hear about how we’re using the introduction modules and how learning blades introducing this. Yeah, so we recognize through some of our state partners, they were really asking us, what are, what’s? What can learning blade do to help us in AI, in our states? Because we’re statewide like we can, we can reach every student across the state. And so what we decided, what we landed on as a team, and learning blade is a product of e dynamic learning, right, which is the largest CTE content provider in the country. And so our curriculum development team, Lisa Ron and Lisa Dotson and their team is amazing. And we sat down and we said, well, we don’t really want to tell kids to go use AI, because that’s still fraught with district level decision policy, and we don’t understand which school it’s hard to get we don’t want to get involved with that, quite honestly. So instead of telling students to use AI, we want to help students understand what is AI, how like, what are the different elements within artificial intelligence? How is it being used? Like the whole idea that, you know, machine learning really started around pictures of cats and teaching, teaching machine to identify cats versus other things, and then how that morphed into a stronger machine learning platform. And through iterative design, we want kids to understand that. We want them to understand really, truly. I called the black box thinking, you know, we talk about digital natives and kids understanding everything about technology. No, they know how to use it, but they don’t know what’s built, how it’s built, what’s inside of it? What are the dangers? And so through our what is AI unit, we’re trying to explain what’s inside that black box. What is a GPT? What is narrow AI versus general, AI, really, most, I’m incredibly excited about our AI ethics lessons. We have a lesson on the career of AI ethicist, right, explaining that the creator of the AI you’re using, or the team that built it may have had their own bias, and that can come out, and therefore, using multiple sources is still a great idea. And so, you know, we do talk about how AI can be creative for your future, generating creativity with AI, solving problems with AI. But more importantly, as you know, I think Salman Khan, you know, Khan Academy talks about AI being leveling the playing field, so everyone has their own personal tutor. I like to think of AI in the career space, because that’s what learning blade does. There’s going to be those who know how to use it and those who don’t, and those who know how to use it best will be those who understand it best, and through that core foundational layer understanding what is AI, I think you’ll be able to apply it better in your future, applications in the classroom, in your life. And so that’s what the learning blade AI units designed to do. If I can just add one other quick note, like, I’ve read books on AI, same with you. Matt. Like, literally 18 months ago, 19 months ago, I logged into chatgpt. I started creating my own websites with it. I got excited about it instantaneously, and that faded a little bit. But when I did this unit that this curriculum team at edynamic created, I was learning all sorts of new stuff, and that’s for someone who’s been spending time reading about it. So it’d also be awesome for teachers that are like, I just wanted the foundational elements. They’re going to learn a lot of that in this as well. So it’s, it’s really building everybody up as I look through this,

Matt 13:01
I thought what you said there at the end, like, this isn’t just, this is for anybody. This is not a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade kind of thing. Like this could be easily used for adult. PD, for for people who are just getting started. I think this is wonderful for that.

Joshua 13:17
Yeah. And I would say, you know, it’s the reading level, and the types of questions we ask are designed for middle school, but at high school, this would be also, yeah, I wouldn’t probably go down below fifth grade because of the Lexile scores. But I think going into high school for kids that really don’t understand AI, and for adults, spectacular. I should add that it’s only two to three hours of learning, so it’s not, we’re not. We didn’t build out a whole semester. And I we here’s three hours to give you foundational understanding and that we’re hoping, because it’s short, more schools can use it and implement it and learn from it, and rather than seeing the elephant, needed to but take bites of the whole elephant to get through a course. No, this is just the dessert, but it’s foundational dessert. No, I think that’s, that’s, that’s very, very approachable, being that that duration, that’s something that they can see and go, Yeah, I can do that well. And it’s, honestly, it sounds like it’s a good even jumping off point for, you know, digging deeper and taking it further. I’m curious too, is there an environmental aspect in the content? So in terms of, like, how AI is being currently used to, like, do more intense studies on climate change or on environment, like that sort of environment, like the natural environment, are you talking about classroom environment? Well, I guess I’m thinking about like the like, energy use impacts of AI run, like every time you run a chat. GPT like the amount of water it consumes, right? I’m just curious, interesting. So, yeah, it’s, I think, an AI. Now that they’re using AI and Google searches and others, it’s about 10x on the amount of energy per question you ask the thing. I’m sure that’ll scale down. We. We don’t go too deep into the environmental consequence of it in our unit, okay, yeah, yeah. I was just curious. I’m like, that’s another lens like that I find fascinating. I will say the beauty of creating digital, online content, and I’m actually taking a note of what you just said, is that we can make it better consistently on over time. So we’re already talking about, like we just launched it august 1. It’s available to Ohio. Go, get go, check it out. Oh, nice. But by January, we’re going to have some tinkering going on. And I think what you just brought up is an awesome Tinker to some of the pages of learning. Yeah, yeah. Cool. I will be excited to see how it morphs, yeah. So what? What are some of the challenges that you see for teachers and students, like surrounding this whole just concept of AI in general? Yeah, big picture challenge. There’s a few from and I’m and I’m not an expert, but I’ll tell you what I what I’m seeing. Number one, you know, education moves slow, and AI is moving fast, right? So that’s just over the long run that’s going to be a challenge for schools and school systems that don’t adapt, right? I think the bigger challenge is proving its worth right off the gun, how to use it, the implementation strategies. I do think that kids need to learn how to use it. So like, we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We should be adopting strategies to create improved writing through AI. So like everyone’s concerned that AI’s gonna everyone’s gonna plagiarize and no one’s gonna know how to write, well, why don’t you write without technology in class, give a prompt that’s supposed to be iterative design for homework, and then show me your iterative questions you asked to improve your story, and then bring that back. And now I want you to rewrite the intro in class. I mean, there’s so many ways to like implement it, but I think the challenge is getting people comfortable with the fact that it’s powerful. I think I’ve mentioned Salman Khan because I liked his book a lot on the AI revolution, but I think the way he framed it is that we should expect our students work to improve, right? The same way Grammarly makes your or word, spell check made us better spellers. And I have a spelling problem. Everyone knows that in my company, but the spell check made us better spellers, AI should make us just better everything, in a sense, if we’re using it in ways to grow and have growth mindset, but that, yeah, the big challenges, it goes it’s going so fast. How are schools and teachers supposed to keep up? Yeah, I don’t know what? Yeah,

Matt 17:39
yeah. I mean, it is the growth mindset. And,

Joshua 17:41
you know, it’s just like any innovation or any change, where you’ve got your early adopters, who they were in it the day it came out,

Matt 17:52
then you’ve got your, you know, I

Joshua 17:53
think there’s like five stages to this, and then there’s the laggards. I think, I think that’s a Simon Sinek technology, where the laggards are just going to say yeah, but all they’re the Yeah, but people, and because I’ve been doing these, I’ve been using these purple dittos all these years, and they work well, they don’t work anymore. And that’s right. So, you know, in a respectful way, trying to, trying to expose this for the possibilities that it can create, and not the potential problems that it that they first see it as Is there, like an ultimate goal? Would you say, for you and your team with this module of like, what you would want kids to, ultimately, like, kind of understand about artificial intelligence. They’re a eureka so I’m not sure it was designed with the eureka moment, but we’ve already had a few teachers. So Lauren Duris, who’s the state manager in Ohio, and you can reach out to her, lauren@learningblade.com if you want some support. But Lauren did a web training in person with teachers this week, and one of the teachers said, I was really scared to use AI in my classroom. I didn’t want to. I was resistant. Looked through the AI course. That was what the training was for, to dig into it, to understand it. And it was like, oh, right, our AHA is that careers are already adopting this and will forever in the future use this. That’s the aha moment. And therefore, why would you not want to know how to use this so you can get good jobs in the future, STEM jobs and technology, which you know, but even probably every career is adopting in some form. So the AHA is, this is my future, and the more I know about what’s coming in, my future is better. And you know, having that shift mindset for the teacher this week in Ohio is great. So that’s the AHA teacher moment. I have something I can lean on and start using immediately. And the AHA student. Moment is it’s just that, you know, like it’s not going away. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Matt 20:05
No, absolutely, yeah.

Kara 20:07
And I’m sure they’re already exploring all of it, yeah, all of it on their own, yeah?

Joshua 20:11
Well, correct, correct, yeah,

yeah. And, you know, who knows? You know it’s, it’s, there’s someone compared this to almost like Driver’s Ed, where it’s like, you know, we, we teach kids how to drive formally, somehow. I mean, whether it’s with a school or not, yep, in the same way this is, there’s has to be, needs to be some instruction on how to drive this. And so that’s the metaphor. I want to extend it to actual driverless cars, right? Like you’re going my kids will be driving cars that drive themselves, but when that breaks, you still know how need to know how to drive the car. Like there’s fundamental skills that, even though AI is part of your life, like you still want basic core skills to survive. Yeah, absolutely love that. So I know that the AI piece is obviously just came out this month, but are there some other topics you’re already thinking about that, or do you take feedback from teachers to create, have ideas for new topics that you that you integrate into Tony blade? I’d love to say, stay tuned. I’m not allowed to say what’s next. I’ll say that we have something big coming for Ohio in the in October, and so, yes, we’re working on on new stuff. It’s exciting, fully in development. We have a deadline October. It’ll be out. So just, I apologies, but stay tuned. But it does include AI talks about how, how how you know certain processes to in society require AI and and it’s a part of what we’re building for our next unit. Sorry, no, do you have any like So of all of the lessons and career ties that learning blade has. Do you have a favorite? Oh, I love that question. Thank you so much. So I love our fresh food unit. I’ve started multiple gardens at school. Kids that eat, grow a tomato and then eat, pull it off a plant themselves are more likely to be lifelong healthy eaters. The research is just stunning. And so our fresh I’ve had multiple teachers use our fresh food unit, which I have in front of me. I’ll pull it up, where students learn about agricultural engineers, agronomists, microbiologists, veterinarians, farming equipment, hydroponics. And I grew up driving by a farm every day, and I just thought the only job on a farm was farmer. And so like helping kids realize that there’s all these cool careers in fresh food and agriculture. Actually, the US Department of Agriculture says that more than a third of all jobs on the farm are STEM jobs, the mechanic, the diesel mechanic, engine mechanics, all those things the now you’ve seen the videos, probably of like the large robotic, you know, grain harvesters and the and the and the and the weed zappers that are using AI to zap weeds. And so, yeah, I mean, I love our fresh food unit, because teachers have come back and said, my kids are now so excited about food, I gotta go grow some stuff at school. And so that’s exciting, nice. We have other missions, you know? We have a food mission. Car manufacturing is such a big thing right now we have a car manufacturing mission with eight hours of curriculum for teachers. We’ve got an energy mission, an entrepreneurship mission, our computer science mission called Hack Attack really exposes students to careers in CS. We have a like a construction mission based on the story of a orphanage in Haiti that got knocked down during a hurrica earthquake. So we got lots of cool stuff. You know, there’s 12 missions, two modules, and over 100 careers and technologies for students to learn about. Wow, that’s kind of wild. Yeah, yeah. And Ohio is loving it. Just to be to be frank, we had hundreds and hundreds of teachers last year go to learning blade.com/ohio get their accounts, start using it, and we’re canvassing the state. We were out there doing in person events and the trainings free. So when a teacher goes to that link and says, I want an account learning blade.com/o H, we immediately email them and said, Would you like some training during your planning period. There’s no cost. We’ll zoom in just like this, and we’ll walk you through your new system and get you started in one hour, teachers are trained and pretty much ready to start implementing supplemental, career focused lessons into what they do. Do you work with organizations and or schools or so forth, to do like workshops, like, where people would come and get that type of training, besides just, you know, individual Absolutely. So the Ohio STEM Learning Network, which is such a cool organization. They have $5,000 classroom grants. They do leadership cohorts, CS cohorts, teacher cohorts, stem designation. They have so many opportunities at the osln. There’s stem hubs across the state that believe it’s seven stem hubs. So each of those STEM hubs runs stem events for those regions, and we try to work with them to do professional development for teachers. But honestly, you know, we actually love one on one. It’s the best because the teacher can do it from their pajamas. They can do it on they can do it during their planning period. It’s like we try to meet them right where you want to be met, like the easiest way possible. Nice. Yeah. So your vision for what the future of education would look like in 20 years, and I know that’s really hard, because, you know, in 2004 we would not have imagined that we’d be talking about this AI conversation. But just no one’s gonna Nobody’s holding anybody to this, but just curiosity, because of your experience and what you’re doing now, I think you have some really valuable insights that would be interesting to hear. What your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I appreciate you asking. I don’t know that my my thoughts are are too you know the thought after on this topic, but I’ll share them. I’m a I’m a huge fan of like, I believe in constructivism, right? So you learn by doing, and so teaching to the test is not learning, right? In the way that I would if I were building a school, it would be based on connecting with local industries. I love place, based learning real world challenges. So I would think I did so let me tell you. Let me step back. I did a you. So I believe in depth over breadth, right? And I had the chance to teach a unit from it was created in Pennsylvania called the watershed from Radnor Middle School. But what they did for the watershed unit, and I taught this in Trinidad, which is kind of cool, but what they did for the watershed unit was the mass class was about watershed. The English class was about the watershed. The Social Studies was the history of this watershed, and so on and so forth. And at the end of the year, what these kids had was deep knowledge about how to care, for, protect, think about, analyze, talk about share how everything they do in life affects their local watershed. And to me that you can take a watershed and mimic that in any scenario, whether it’s emergency response, whether it’s people who don’t homeless, whether it’s, you know, you don’t have enough food deserts. And so that’s kind of what learning blade does as a supplement for schools. But on the bigger picture, students should be doing authentic local problem solving and actually working with local partners as they get into high school to build models that show, hey, this is I actually, I’m 16 years old and solving real world problems with my neighbors, and now I know I can go and be a part of The of community. So big picture, Matt, for me, I think education is about building citizens, not the voting citizen. It’s the citizen that participates in their neighborhood or in their community to make it a better place. And textbook and a test does not create citizenship. Projects that matter create citizenship. And so that would be my big goal for schools, and schools are doing tha t, but not all schools, right?

Kara 28:05
Thank you so much.

Joshua 28:06
Been an awesome conversation. I enjoyed the opportunity to meet you guys.

Kara 28:13
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope you found our discussion interesting and insightful. Don’t forget to check out the show notes on our website, where you’ll find more information about today’s guest resources we mentioned and information on earning contact hours for listening. Please subscribe. Share it with your network and check us out at for the love of edtech.org, this podcast is produced by SOITA, the southwestern Ohio Instructional Technology Association, in partnership with think TV and CET, the local PBS stations in Dayton and Cincinnati, until next time, keep exploring new ways to empower your students through tech, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.

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