Kinwise: AI Insights for Educators

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Sandra Jin, Senior Director of Innovation and AI Strategy at Leading Educators. Sandra has spent nearly a decade designing professional learning grounded in three tenets: agency, advocacy, and belonging.  This conversation is about what it looks like to bring AI into schools in a way that honors what edu...

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with the Pine Lakers,  Aankan Das, Gillian Keith, Prakyath Shankar, and Cooper Brown, second-place finishers in North Carolina's first-ever AI Solve-a-Thon and students at Pine Lake Preparatory School in Mooresville. What began as a resume builder turned into a real working app, real conversations with state...

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with three members of the Byrd Brains to learn about how they build the Jade Book.  Key Takeaways for Education Leaders -The most powerful solutions come from lived experience. Chris Butler experienced homelessness three times, including during COVID while sleeping in a car. That personal stake shaped how the...

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Education Leaders, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Satviki and Anwita, the first-place winning team from the NC AI Solve-a-Thon, and their coach Nina Darnell, Spark Lab leader for Cabarrus County Schools. Together they built NC Connect Link, an AI-powered app that helps people across North Carolina find jobs, housing, food, healthcare, and legal aid in o...

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Educators, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Vera Cubero and Matthew Mayo, the NC DPI leaders who designed and ran North Carolina's first-ever AI Solve-a-Thon. Together they built a statewide student competition where teams spent months identifying real community problems and building actual AI-powered solutions and what students produced exceeded every ex...

In this episode of Kinwise Conversations in AI, host Lydia sits down with Priten Soundar-Shah, educator, philosopher, and author of the forthcoming Ethical Ed Tech, to challenge the question most schools are asking about AI. Instead of starting with "Does this tool work?", Priten argues schools need to build ethical reasoning skills first, drawing on a framework adapted from bioethics to help educ...

In this episode of Kinwise Conversations, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Steven Priest, Digital Learning Consultant at the Wyoming Department of Education, to dismantle the myth that rural districts are lagging in the AI revolution. Priest, a former agriculture teacher and principal, brings a unique "place-based" perspective to digital transformation, arguing that Wyoming’s high-trust, low-bureau...

Scott Kern, a veteran AP US History teacher at North Star Academy, didn't enter the AI world looking for a shortcut. Instead, he sought a way to solve the "great sadness" of teaching: the fact that there is only one of him and thirty students who all need a mentor at the exact same moment. By building custom "feedback bots" that mirror his own instructional voice, Scott managed to do scale his pre...

If you walked into a high school classroom and saw a teacher running daily stand-ups and communicating via Slack, you might think you’d stumbled into a tech startup. For Ivanna Gutierrez, that blur between education and industry is exactly the point. A former software consultant turned educator, Ivanna experienced a surreal "full circle" moment when she returned to teach at the very high school sh...

Join us for an inspiring conversation with Babak Mostaghimi, Founding Partner at LearnerStudio and the former Assistant Superintendent who led Gwinnett County Public Schools' pioneering AI readiness initiative. Babak guides us through the necessary shift from using AI merely to make broken systems faster, to using it as a tool that unlocks human potential. He shares LearnerStudio’s "Three Horizons...

Join us for a candid debate between two colleagues who view the future of AI in education through very different lenses. We are joined by Dr. Jason Margolis, an AI skeptic who worries about the atrophy of critical thinking, and Dr. Nicole Schilling, an AI optimist who sees these tools as essential scaffolds for complex problem-solving. Together, they model the concept of "Critical Friends," engagi...

Join us for an insightful conversation with Dr. Dana Riger, UNC's inaugural Faculty Fellow for Generative AI, as she guides us through the rapid paradigm shift brought on by AI in higher education. Dr. Riger shares her journey from a "fear-driven" assessment redesign, after discovering ChatGPT, to developing a nuanced, values-driven framework for integrating and avoiding AI in the classroom. We di...

In this episode from the archives, Montana science teacher and district AI lead Connor Mulvaney joins host Lydia Kumar to share how he turned fishing photos, traffic-light rubrics, and a healthy dose of curiosity into AI leadership in Montana and across the nation. Fresh off announcing aiEDU’s largest Trailblazers Fellowship expansion, Connor shares stories about leading students and educators to...

K-12 EdTech coach Danelle Brostrom joins us to talk about bringing curiosity, guardrails, and humanity to AI in schools. We dig into what we should learn from the social-media era, how librarians are frontline partners for information literacy, the real risks inside edtech privacy policies (and how districts can negotiate them), and concrete ways AI can expand access, like instant translation, rea...

In this episode, we’re joined by Ahmed Boutar, an Artificial Intelligence Master’s Student at Duke University, who brings a rigorous engineering focus to the ethics and governance of AI. Ahmed’s work centers on ensuring new technology aligns with human values, including his research on Human-Aligned Hazardous Driving (HAHD) systems for autonomous vehicles. This conversation is an urgent exploratio...

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Sawsan Jaber, a global educator, equity strategist, and author of Pedagogies of Voice. Dr. Jaber’s work is rooted in her lived experience as the daughter of refugees and her profound belief that classrooms must be healing spaces that nurture student voice and radical love. This conversation is an urgent exploration of how K-12 leaders can balance the adoption o...

In this episode from the archives, we’re joined by Vera Cubero, the Emerging Technologies Consultant for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) and a co-author of one of the nation's first K-12 AI guidelines. Vera shares her frontline experience transitioning from a classroom teacher piloting 1-to-1 Chromebooks to leading a statewide AI initiative. This conversation is a cruci...

In this episode, we’re joined by Kris Younger, a longtime technologist and the Director of Education at Zip Code Wilmington, a nonprofit coding bootcamp. Zip Code is on the absolute frontier of technology, helping adults from diverse backgrounds, who often earn between $30,000 and $35,000 per year, rapidly transition into tech careers with salaries in the mid-eighties, all in just 12 intense weeks...

In this episode, we’re visiting Duke University to meet Vihaan Nama, an AI engineer, researcher, and teaching assistant helping shape how AI is taught and built for the real world. From roles at PS&S and JPMorgan to graduate courses on explainable AI and product management, Vihaan brings a rare combination of technical depth and educator insight. If you’ve ever wondered how to make AI educatio...

In this episode, we're joined by Brian Jefferson, a professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Brian shares his incredible journey from a 20-year career as a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers to becoming a recognized innovator in higher education. Listen in as we discuss how to move beyond AI anxiety by fostering "awe and whimsy," why the goal should be "cognitiv...

In this episode, we're joined by McKenna Akane, an award-winning STEM teacher and the Frontier Learning Lab Ambassador at the Montana Digital Academy. McKenna shares her incredible journey from being a first-year teacher in a rural Montana school to becoming a nationally recognized leader in educational technology, winning accolades like Discovery Education's "Educator of the Year" and a state cha...

Mike McGuckin, a Computer Science Teacher at Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, joins us to share his on-the-ground perspective on navigating AI in education. Mike's passion for technology led him to become the only North Carolina educator in the inaugural AIEDU Trailblazer Fellowship. This experience "skyrocketed" him into a leadership role where he now helps shape AI curriculum and guides fel...

Susan C. McLeod, VP of Data Center Market Development at Hitachi Energy, joins us to explore how large organizations can successfully navigate AI adoption. Drawing from over 20 years in enterprise tech, Susan offers practical insights for turning complex technology into a wins for people on the ground. With a background leading global support and success at Hitachi Vantara, Susan now works at the...

Angeline Corvaglia, founder of Data Girl and Friends and the soon-to-be-announced SHIELD, joins us to explore how AI education can equip the next generation to stay thoughtful, self-aware, and socially grounded in an age of algorithmic influence. With a background in global finance and digital transformation, Angeline now works at the intersection of AI literacy and youth empowerment. In this expa...

William A “Bill” Brown, former Chief Architect at IBM and founder of Application Engineering Services, joins us to explore how AI can drive access, equity, and innovation when guided by human intention. From wiring office networks in 1980s New York to building AI agents today, Bill’s career is rooted in curiosity and continual learning. In this expansive conversation, he shares how he navigated ea...