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Exploring AI's Role in Streamlining IEP Development for Educators

Tim Villegas51min

Tim Villegas

00:00

Hey, friends, it's Tim Villegas from the Maryland Coalition for inclusive education, and you are listening to or watching, think inclusive, our podcast that features conversations with people doing the work of inclusion in the real world Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic for a for quite a while in education, but here is what I haven't heard talked a lot about AI in the development of individualized education programs. Now today's guest is Dr Andrea Harkins Brown, and she's the program director for disability policy and systems change and an assistant research scientist at the Center for Technology and Education within Johns Hopkins University and the School of Education, we have a really fascinating conversation about how schools and districts could possibly use AI in the development of IEPs. Now she and her team at Johns Hopkins are working on something with regard to this idea, and I don't think it's fully formed yet, but I think that our conversation will lend itself to just maybe us being open to the possibility that educators could use this for IEP development. So as you are listening to this conversation, I'd love to know what you think about this idea. If this is a bad idea, if this is a great idea, just let me know. You can always email me at T Villegas, at mcie org. That's T, V, I, L, L, E, G, A, S, at, m, c, I, E, dot, O, R, G, before we get into our conversation with Dr Harkins Brown, I want to tell you about our sponsor. For this season, we have a fantastic sponsor. It's IXL. Maybe you've heard about it. With IXL, you get a personalized online learning and teaching solution that helps educators improve achievement, track progress and empower the teachers at your school. This one platform is for kindergarten through 12th grade, and it really just helps teachers accomplish what would normally require dozens of other tools with just the one platform teachers can personalize learning for every learner, and iexl gives teachers the tools they need to enhance and differentiate instruction without adding work to their plate. As students practice the skills in IXL, IXL automatically adapts to ensure each learner is always supported and challenged at the right level. IXL also provides every student with a personalized learning plan to help them close knowledge gaps effectively. If that sounds interesting to you, check out ixl.com/inclusive that's ixl.com/inclusive so Okay, after a short break, we will be back with my conversation with Dr Andrea Harkins Brown, see you on the other side. You

Tim Villegas

03:53

Andrea Harkins Brown, welcome to the think inclusive podcast.

Unknown Speaker

03:56

Thank you,

Tim Villegas

04:00

Andrea How are you connected to special education? I see John for those of you watching on YouTube, there is a Johns Hopkins University flag right behind you. Yeah. So, how are you connected to special education in Maryland and Johns Hopkins,

Speaker 1

04:25

well, I thank you for having me. I am an assistant research scientist in the Johns Hopkins University School of Education in the Center for Technology and Education. And my background is that I was a special educator. I worked in public schools in Maryland, actually serving students who have autism and other significant cognitive disabilities. But now the work that I do, and a lot of the work that we do at CTE, is about supporting some. States and local school districts to provide high quality special education services for children who have disabilities. And

Tim Villegas

05:10

could you the you mentioned an acronym, CT, CTE. Can you explain what that is for our audience?

Speaker 1

05:17

Absolutely, so CTE stands for the Center for Technology and Education. We are a research center in Johns Hopkins School of Education. And all of the work that we do is funded through external funding, so grants and contracts and things. So we do work related to early childhood education, readiness for school and also special education, both research and implementation, right?

Tim Villegas

05:50

So you were a special education special educator early in your career. What, how? What was your path to research?

Speaker 1

06:01

What was my path? Well, so I started out teaching elementary age students with disabilities. I also taught three and four year olds with autism and a really, what I think was unique at the time program, sort of reverse inclusion model. So we followed a model that was being used at the time by Kennedy Krieger Institute. And so about 80% of my students were students who had disabilities or communication disorders, and the others were typical peers. And so after that time, I transitioned to central office position providing instructional support and compliance support to schools throughout pretty large district in Maryland. And then I was afforded the opportunity to come to higher ed. I worked at Towson University for close to 10 years training pre service teachers and working in our graduate programs, and then transitioned to Johns Hopkins as a researcher. But while I was at Towson, I did my doctoral degree in instructional technology, so I've always been kind of a technology geek and really excited about the ways that it could be leveraged to support students with disabilities in really unique ways, and how teachers think about using technology as one tool right in their arsenal. Not that technology replaces the teacher, but it's another tool that he or she can use to really reach learners who who maybe wouldn't even be able to access learning without it. So I'm not sure that I intended to come to higher education and academia, but I'm glad I'm here, but I really like sort of the applied aspect of, you know, how can we do work that's meaningful, right? Like, not research, just for research sake, but how could we actually do it in a way that, like, we can move the needle for all kinds of kids? And so that's what, that's what I love about see being at CTE, is that I get to go out and spend time in classrooms and schools and working with with leaders to make a difference. Yeah,

Tim Villegas

08:25

that must be really rewarding to be to have all that experience as a teacher that in in a classroom and in a school, and then go to a place where you can do some research that benefits people, that that that you are interacting with, whether that's in a school building or in a classroom.

Speaker 1

08:52

Absolutely. And to see, I think, to really sort of get ingrained in the culture of a school district, or even working with the state agency, like, what are the contexts there that are happening that are sort of keeping, keeping things we want to happen right from not moving at the pace we want right? Like, what are the systems in place that prevent students from making growth or prevent them from being included, right? And so I think a lot of that work I've learned has to do with just having relationships with those leaders, having relationships with folks who are making decisions, even in an IEP team, right? Like a lot of the work that we do is attitudinal, right, sort of trying to shift hearts and minds. For me, I think, you know people, people's hearts and minds get shifted toward inclusivity in a whole variety of ways. Some people need sort of qualitative information, and then some people need, like, quantitative like. Right? They need, like, show me the cold, hard facts about the fact that it works. So to me, I think that that is fun, being able to show them results from rigorous studies that say actually students who spend 80% or more of their day in the general education classroom, regardless of their ability level, produce or realize far better outcomes than students who have lesser degrees of inclusion. Yeah,

Tim Villegas

10:31

yeah. Well, yeah. And the research proves that over and over and over again it does. So thank you for bringing that up. So Andrea, you and I have known each other for a few years now, but we've really only connected in real life at CEC, which I think is interesting. So we were at so Andrea and and I were on a joint panel. Well, well, it was a joint concurrent session. I can't remember how you say it, but it was a session at CEC in Orlando a few years ago. And then Carolyn teaglen, the CEO, our CEO, and myself attended a session that you, you did at CEC in San Antonio just this last year. And so we, we started talking, and I was kind of asking, like, hey, what do you do? Like, what are you doing? Like, what kind of projects you're working on? Johns Hopkins, you know, I'd love to have you on. And you mentioned something about artificial intelligence, and I thought that was a really interesting topic. So would you mind sharing the project you're working on? And let's just see where that goes. I think that our audience would find that really interesting. Yeah,

Speaker 1

11:51

well, you know, I think that we, like a lot of people, are still in this sort of fact finding mission and asking questions about what is the potential here right for artificial intelligence to help us be able to, frankly, from my perspective, maybe remove Some burden from teachers as it relates to compliance paperwork, right like and so I wouldn't suggest that we have all the answers to those questions yet. I think we're still very much like in the conceptual phase. But one of the things that we hear from teachers and that we see being produced in the research, the qualitative research right now about teacher burnout, especially those who are serving students with disabilities, is folks are leaving the profession largely because of what they perceive to be the working conditions right, and oftentimes they cite the burden of paperwork right, not just attending the meetings and being involved in the conversations, right? I think that many of us would agree that that's valuable and time well spent, right? But because so much of the law is related to procedural compliance, I, as a special educator, would spend a lot of time making sure that I had dotted my eyes and crossed my T's, right? So that element of procedural compliance, right, whether we have all the boxes checked, whether we've done it in 60 or 90 days, whether we have sort of taken the time to make sure that we've got all of the assessment information loaded into the IEP in a comprehensive way that takes time, and I think at least what I'm finding in the districts that we're working with is as the number of special education teacher vacancies have increased, and that burden of workload has become even greater amongst those who are still there, right? So it's sort of like reaching this fever pitch of you know, I am taking work home with me. I think this has always been there, because I remember doing this as a new special educator, right? I was taking my work home. I was taking my lesson plans home. I was committed to it. I was working in, working on it all weekend. But what I hear teachers describing right now, it feels like a pretty different season than when I was in the classroom. Right like the workforce is really changing and and they're stretched. So I think the questions that we're starting to ask at CTE are, you know, what are some ways that AI can help you from help you be able to, you know, do so much I dotting and T crossing right to. Allow you to spend your time on having really good, rich discussions in an IEP meeting, right? And really get back to the work of focusing on what's most important, which is implementing the IEP right? And so, you know, we have started working, particularly in Maryland, talking to the folks who are developing Maryland's or have developed Maryland's online IEP platform, to say, what are some ways that we might be able to automate some elements of writing the actual IEP, right? And, you know, I think some of the conversations that we've had about that is, gosh, folks are going to feel apprehensive. People may feel as though, well, wait a minute, right? Andrea is the special educator. It's her job to develop this part of of the IEP, and it is right, like the law says it is right and not the knowledgeable providers are going to be the ones making but could AI make some suggestions to make, right and then I could approve or decline that suggestion? Could AI Tell me about some evidence based practices that may really be a great fit for this student based on all of the assessment information that I fed the system, right so without me having to spend hours looking for that. So those are the kinds of things that I think we're asking ourselves and testing and trying and maybe maybe even piloting in

Tim Villegas

16:43

the future. So at this point, it's really just conceptual. We're just figuring out what, what are the questions that we need to be asking on how to support an educator with with just the task of writing the IEP, and I'm right there with you. I remember writing my first IEP. This was early, 2000s and the practice at the time was handwriting, handwriting the IEP, and I felt like I was on the cutting edge because I got a fillable PDF.

Speaker 1

17:31

Tim, I remember taking floppy disks home, okay, and putting them actually. I remember that my students files had floppy disks taped with masking tape to the inside of their folder. And yes, that felt kind of cutting edge at the time. We've evolved

Tim Villegas

17:49

a little bit a little bit. Yeah, I can definitely see how how an educator would become apprehensive about even entertaining this sort of thing. Because, I mean, you just look, you look at the culture, right, and how society is very split on the usefulness of artificial intelligence in our in our own lives. And I think that, I think it could, it could. There's potential, you know, for harm in a lot of different areas, but as a way to cut down on paperwork. And I'll give you an example in in, in not in education, but in my line of work, which is communications, so, and specifically this podcast. So we have an AI tool that we use called decipher. And you know, before we use this tool, I would listen to the podcast episode interview over and over again, and pull out different things and summarize the episode myself and kind of when I'm promoting it when I'm doing the show notes, when I'm when I'm writing copy about the episode. That took a lot of brain power for me to do that. Now I can take the audio of the episode, put it into decipher and decipher, analyzes the episode and creates a model or a template of show notes, summarizes the contents of the of the discussion, pulls out some key takeaways, even pulls out quotes. Also I can as as the communications director. Director can look at the content and say, Oh, I like that. I don't like that. I don't think, I don't think the summarize, I don't think the summary is quite right there. And I can edit that summary, and then I can use that content to publish our episode. And that saved, that saves me hours of work. And I think that in a similar fashion, AI or an AI tool could analyze a bunch of different information, either about a student or about service, about services, and either make suggestions or pre write some of the, some of the the text that needs to go into an IEP. And I think, you know, best practices aren't we're not just going to copy and paste, but that it's a way to save and streamline the process so the educator doesn't have to spend as much time with it. So do you see that as a parallel?

Speaker 1

21:06

I do, and I think you know, for those of us who are ready to take an honest look at the way we write IEPs, I think we've got to ask ourselves whether the ways that we're doing it right now are, in fact, better, or even best practice than what we're looking at with AI, right? You know, most folks aren't going to widely publicize, gosh, you know, when I run out of time I copy and paste the child's last IEP from last year. But the reality is that we do that. We do that when we are stretched to of the time that we have right like we're trying to, you know, balance, balance our responsibilities. So, you know, I think one of the things that is important to us, right, we're a Research Center, one of the things that is important to us is, right? We're not building a tool just to build a tool, right? We're not building building a tool because we want to be able to make money on a tool, right? There's plenty of companies out there doing that. The questions that we are trying to ask ourselves, are first of all, the reality is that if, if we aren't, this is my opinion, if we are not doing this work, someone else will do this work, and might those algorithms for how to develop IEPs be programmed In a way that we believe are not ethical, right? How do we ensure that those algorithms mitigate bias, right? And so to me, I think we have a responsibility to be involved, right, researchers, those who have knowledge about the law, we have a responsibility to include ourselves in the development of this, so that we know that it comes out right. And so if we don't do it, someone else will, right? So that's one idea, and the other is that, you know, we've got to be able to really ask ourselves some honest questions about, Gosh, when, when I'm writing, we're getting ready to start a research study this upcoming year that looks at, you know what, what is the professionals implicit bias that they bring to developing the IEP, right and, and whether that be information that I have, and maybe, maybe I've got some ableist biased that I'm not aware of, right? I've read your evaluation results. I've seen your I does that impact the placement that I'm going to recommend for you? Right? I may recommend that placement, just because you've always had services there, right? And I've looked at the evaluation results, and I've been trained in this deficit based model, and I'm going to decide that's what's best for you, right? And so if we can program in a way that allows you to make some other take some other suggestions into consideration, right? To this objective third party saying, Have you considered this? Then I think it really maybe opens the doors. You know, sometimes the argument is, well, the algorithms are going to be biased, right? So my answer to that would be, they could be. But so are people, right? And so the other thing that I you know as it relates to sort of the ethics of using AI, you know, I think we are pretty too. We need to test. Something and make sure that it's working, or that, frankly, it's even working better than the old way before it would be something that we would use large scale, right? So from an evaluation perspective, I'd be interested to know how does a group of IEPs that people have written, right, the typical process, what's the quality of those IEPs right, both procedurally and right. Like is the child making progress, receiving driving benefit, right? What is the quality of those IEPs look like? And then, how does that compare to the quality of IEPs produced with AI sort of as the tutor, right? And I think we've got a responsibility to sort of make sure that it's we're actually driving some benefit out of the tool, before it's something that goes large scale. What worries me as a researcher is that that's not always how ed tech companies function, right? It's sort of build it, deploy it, maybe check later to make sure that it works. But as a as a sales approach, right? To me, I think it's important that we do that evaluation on the front end, right? So the we are doing no harm to the families and students and providers that we're supporting with the tool

Tim Villegas

26:30

and with the state of Maryland having an online IEP infrastructure, this seems like an ideal. There's there's some runway, of course, but, you know, just in the next few years to be able to test and then possibly even implement this into that state system, right?

Speaker 1

26:54

Absolutely. I think that there's interest in the state of Maryland to sort of explore what this could look like. And my sense is that this conversation is happening all over, right, all across what folks are sort of asking themselves, also like, how can we be responsive to to teachers and to the users of these systems who are asking for pretty, pretty seismic changes, right? Help, help make this system work for us and facilitate this process for children and families. I mean, I know I've sat in just interviews or focus groups with parents, and heard them talk about, Gosh, sometimes when I'm in an IEP team meeting, I feel like the person that I'm there to talk to is staring at the computer, right? And and the the process itself, um, is intimidating enough, right? And so how could we get folks you know, could, could we do something on the technology end that you know, to your point with decipher, right now, instead of spending three hours, I can spend five or 10 minutes, right? Instead of looking at the computer for an hour, can you be looking at the computer for 10 or 15 minutes in the context of an IEP team? I mean, think how that would change. Oh, the facilitation, it would like, the richness of discussions,

Tim Villegas

28:31

yeah. What if you could? What if you could take because, since AI is a it's, you know, it's a language model, right? So what if you could? And it's funny, because, like, that means you're, you really should be recording IEP meetings, right? Because imagine if every IEP meeting was recorded, and all of that language was was documented, it could be analyzed, and then that way discussions are actually like you said, rich, deep, and take into consideration all of the voices at The table, right? And then there's less there's less time with a person trying to remember everything that was said. Pull out all the key points and the key takeaways. I just see, I just I see that this could be a powerful tool to help IEPs with documentation, but also to really pull out and highlight all the different things that we talk about in a meeting. Now I'm sure not everyone would like meetings recorded, but. Right? I mean, parents have the right to record meetings, and so do districts so

Speaker 1

30:07

well. And I'll tell you, in my own experience, I mean, I use the AI note taker companion in Microsoft Teams all the time. I mean, I've some folks that I work with who sometimes we'd actually prefer to use teams instead of zoom, because we like the way the AI tool summarizes our notes for us. And my experience has been that it actually does a really good job of summarizing the notes. And then I can ask, oftentimes, you know, I can't if you're like me, right? Why? I have a lot of notes, a lot of agendas, like rolling agendas, and I'm forever going back through meeting minutes and agendas to find the thing that I said I was going to do, right? And now I find myself doing things like, um, what day did I say I was going to email Tim about the podcast, right? And it will, it will tell me. Now I also want to say that as a new AI user my I don't know if this has happened to you, but my experience is I have fallen into the trap of believing that what it tells me is accurate, and I have gotten burned a few times, right? Like, I mean, I'm a researcher, and here I was working quickly, right? And I just accepted it as fact and it was wrong, right? So I think those experiences that you then realize, right, that you need to do your own due diligence, and I've got a fact check, but to check on something versus finding it and developing it from scratch is it's a different cognitive load, right? And it takes a lot less time. But I have learned that it's important to not just take it, take it as fact, yeah, yeah. Sometimes, sometimes that that incorrect information is masquerading itself as something that looks like the right answer. Logically it should be, but sometimes it's not.

Tim Villegas

32:18

Yeah, well, and I wonder you brought up about doing a research that examines if what we're doing right now is actually, you know, better than if we were to use some sort of AI tool I can, I mean, how many times have have we both been in IEP meetings where somebody wrote something down that actually either wasn't said or was misinterpreted, you know? And then, after the fact, a parent or an educator like, actually it's, it was this, you know, and so, right, I wonder, I wonder if, if the difference is, is significant, I, you know, I, I don't know, but I think that that's definitely worth exploring,

Speaker 1

33:17

sure, well, and I think what I would draw from what You just said is that people make mistakes too. We make mistakes all the time. I mean, idea that is hundreds and hundreds of procedural compliance elements, right? I mean, you're almost never not missing something. But is there a way to to improve it, right? And so,

Tim Villegas

33:51

yeah, yeah. Anything that you want to share with educators who are maybe thinking about AI for the first time in in this way, and we have a lot of teachers, principals, district, bulk that that listen so anything from your perspective that you want to make sure that that they hear or have a takeaway.

Speaker 1

34:27

Well, I think an important takeaway. You know, we've spent a majority of this conversation talking about how the IEP gets developed and how it gets written. My experience in working with teachers or administrators is that all that is also what we spend a lot of time on. Right is how the IEP gets written, and we spend so much less time talking about how it is going to be implemented and how we're going to. Make sure that the child is is making progress, right? And so my appeal would be, let's be open to the idea that maybe some of the new technology allows us to have a greater focus on implementation, right, to get back to the business of teaching and really focusing on the implementation of the IEP, because without that, it almost doesn't matter, right, how we developed it. It doesn't matter if I took four hours to write a beautiful IEP that's procedurally compliant, or whether AI helped me do that. The whole purpose behind the endeavor, right is to make sure that the child is meeting with success, right? So at some point we've got to then pivot in our conversation to, is this working, getting what they need? Am I? Am I providing the services in a way that they were intended to be provided? Right? Hopefully, technology allows us to better, sort of re focus on those things, because that, that is, I think, ultimately, what really matters. It's why most of us are writing an IEP in the first place?

Tim Villegas

36:33

Well, I know I am, and I'm sure our audience is looking forward to what Johns Hopkins and your team will will find out about this, about bringing AI into the the writing of IEPs So Andrea did, I don't know if you saw the last thing is the mystery question. Where are you up for that

Unknown Speaker

36:59

mystery question? Sure. Okay, let's

Tim Villegas

37:01

do it. Okay, so I pick a card, and then we both answer the question. So I mixed up the cards before, oh, this is a good one. Okay, okay, sometimes they're deep, and this is, this is not a deep one, not, I don't think so. Anyways, okay, so which activities make you lose track of time? I'm holding the holding the card up to the camera, so if, if you're watching on YouTube, you can read the card. So which activities make you lose track of time?

Speaker 1

37:40

Oh, gosh, personal ones or professional ones. I

Tim Villegas

37:43

mean, you could, I mean, you could answer both. It's really up to you, and if you want me to go first, I can,

Unknown Speaker

37:52

yeah, you go first. Okay,

Tim Villegas

37:54

well, so, because you brought it up, we'll do one professional, one personal. So professionally, I lose track of time when I'm editing. So if I'm if I don't have any time constraints, and I just am sitting at my computer and I'm listening to a conversation, or I'm adding music or doing any sort of editing, I completely lose track of time. I could, it could be five minutes or an hour, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's,

Speaker 1

38:30

you're so in it, you're so in it

Tim Villegas

38:34

that, you know, so there's that. And then, personally, I would say probably listening to music. Music's a big part of my life, so I will, I have, like, lots of ways to listen to music. You know, on on the computer. I have a record player with albums, with LPs, and even when I go on runs, I have my my headphones. So usually, if I'm listening to music, I am not paying attention to how much time is going by. So those would be my two.

Speaker 1

39:17

Okay, well, I'm sorry to admit this, but I think my personal one is scrolling. What is that like? The Doom scrolling? Yeah, like, right? Like, I meant to go to bed 45 minutes ago and I'm still scrolling. It contributes to sleep patterns. It's and then apparently it's not good for your brain, right? To be like looking at a screen before you go to sleep, but that, for sure, is my personal one. It might be like a method of, like procrastination too. So I'll just go all down a rabbit hole with that. I think. Professionally, I so I read a lot, and sometimes I'll read one thing, and then that leads me to another, and then another, and then another, right? And I was just supposed to sort of find one thing, and now I can't stop myself, right? And I feel like, oh, gosh, I gotta know all the things about that. And probably everybody knows about this thing, but me, I'm behind, right? Yeah, yeah. So I can lose a lot of time trying to bone up on something or so, you know, in some ways, that might mean that I'm in the right job, but just sort of getting lost in something that's sort of happening in other folks writing is really interesting to me. I could just lose a half day on that.

Tim Villegas

41:00

That's great that, yeah, I I feel that, I feel that, I think the it's like the Curiosity just gets the better everything, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1

41:11

yeah, that's right. If I only have more, if I finally had more time to do those things. And I think for me, that's one of the things that I really enjoy about meeting folks like you at CEC and getting to see the work of others, either in other nonprofits or in other universities that are committed to the same mission. So I appreciate your interest, because I you know, I think ultimately we're trying to serve the same mission that you all are. And so to me, it's fascinating just to hear what other people are doing, what kinds of things they're they're trying,

Tim Villegas

41:52

yeah, well, thank you, thank you, and thank you for being a guest. I totally forgot to ask where people can find you, and if they want to follow you or your or CTE or anything. Did you want to drop any links? Or, you know, talk about social media or anything like that.

Speaker 1

42:14

I'm glad to share some links with you. CTE jazz, we are on social media, so we are on Twitter and Facebook, and I have to say I am on Twitter as well, but I have a different last name there. I'm on Twitter as Andrea H. Parrish, P, A, R, R, I, S, H, but would be glad to share links and encourage folks to follow us and learn more about what we do.

Tim Villegas

42:40

Andrea Harkins Brown, thank you so much for being on the think inclusive podcast. We really appreciate it. You're

Unknown Speaker

42:46

welcome. Thank you for having me.

Tim Villegas

42:51

Welcome back everyone. It's time for three for me and two for you. So that is that I am going to provide three reflections on the conversation that I had with our guest, and then two calls to action for you to do. Okay. Number one, I don't think that I am as scared about artificial intelligence as other people. I'm not exactly sure why, but I've always seen AI as a tool, and I don't think that we should be afraid of tools, just like any thing that's a tool. I'm going to talk about social media because I think that that is a good parallel here social media, to me, is a tool. It's a communication tool. A lot of people misuse the tool, and so would our lives be better without social media? I think our lives would be different, but you can put regulations in place so that people don't misuse tools, but some people are gonna misuse them. And so it's the same thing with AI. I think that AI is a tool. We shouldn't be afraid of the tool. There's certain things that we can put in place to help people not misuse the tool. And so as an as educators, I feel like we should embrace AI. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is, if there's a tool that can help educators cut down on the paperwork and just the red tape and bureaucracy of education in general, I'm going to open up my computer here for a second, because I made some notes, and I want to make sure I have access to them. I actually looked up the definition of red tape and where it came from, because I sometimes I just, you know, sometimes you just say things and you're not really sure why you say them. It's just a phrase that you've been using for years. And I did not know this. So I'm gonna share this with you, and I haven't 100% fact checked this, but apparently, according to this source, red tape. The reason why they call it red tape is it's an expression from the early, early 16th century, when the king of Spain used actual red tape to bundle important documents that needed immediate attention. So the king had to actually physically cut through the red tape to read these documents, which I think is really that's a really interesting effect, if it's true. So anything that we can do to cut down the red tape, cut down the just how hard it is to keep up with the paperwork, I think is a good thing. I think AI could help with this immensely. And then the third thing is, I'd like for you to think about the possibilities that could open up if we as a field, allow AI to do some of the things that we've been doing manually. I think you've seen that a little bit with IEPs being online. I said this when I was talking to Andrea, but when I first started, the common practice was to actually hand write the IEPs. I mean, there'd be forms and like lines, and you would actually write in IEP goals and your notes and everything like that. It just took so much time. So I think that now that things are on line or people are using software, it's definitely cut down, but the content generation is really what I'm talking about. So if it was a way that we could possibly cut down on that part, then we could be spending as educators more time figuring out supports with students and teaching and collaborating. So okay, there's two calls to action for you. I want you to check out this resource, and full disclosure, I have not watched these videos that I'm about to share, but I am confident that they are at least worth checking out, because they are produced in conjunction with educating all Learners Alliance, which mcie is a part of, and it is from AI for education, and it Looks like it is a four part webinar series designed to share information about generative AI for special educators. So the series is harnessing AI in special education, a four part series, and I will drop the link in the show notes. It looks like this was done earlier in 2024 and they are for one hour webinars, maybe. So looks great. I'm going to put it as a resource. I think you should definitely check it out. So that's number one. Number two is, I'm is a request about the podcast. So if you're listening on Spotify, there is a section underneath the episode where you can put a comment or respond to a question or a poll. So what I'm going to do is, when this publishes on Spotify, I'm going to ask a question, have you ever used AI to help with a teacher task? So that's lesson planning differentiation. Maybe it's to come up with ideas for an activity. I just want to get a yes or no. I think it'll just be a poll, so I'm going to put that on Spotify. So if you are listening on Spotify, definitely check out the poll, and we'll share the results on social media. If you listen on Apple podcasts, I'd love for you to answer this question in the review section. So if you haven't reviewed our podcast on Apple podcasts, it would be fantastic if you would leave a five star review, or whatever star you feel like it's we are fitting for. We actually haven't had a ton of reviews recently, and it's probably because I haven't been asking. So I'm going to ask specifically, if you list on an Apple podcast, you can do it in the app, or I think that you can do it on the web now, since they have given so you can list. Into episodes on a web browser using Apple podcasts. But please, if you haven't given a review, check it out. It is a way for people to know that this podcast is beneficial, and then also that we are continuing to grow our audience. So we really appreciate it if you did that. All right, that's it for this episode of Think inclusive. Time for the credits. Think inclusive is written, edited, designed, mixed and mastered by me Tim Villegas, and is a production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. Original Music by miles, predic, additional music from melody. Thank you so much to our sponsor for season 12, IXL. If you want to learn more about IXL, go to ixl.com/inclusive and thank you to our listeners and viewers. So whether you listen on your favorite podcast player or you are watching us on YouTube, please follow, subscribe and share with your family, friends and colleagues. We appreciate every time you hit play on one of our episodes. It really means a lot. And if you liked what you heard or saw today, please let me know. AT T Villegas, at m c, I, E, dot O R G, that's t, v, I, L, L, E, G, A, S, at mcie, dot O, R, G, thanks for your time and attention and remember inclusion always works.

Tim Villegas

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From mcie, org.

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