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In classrooms and across campuses, education leaders are reevaluating the skills, systems, and tools students need to succeed in a changing world.
The traditional approach to education has been to teach students knowledge and then evaluate whether they understood it. Knowing the information is important, but students also need to communicate what they’ve learned, adapt, participate, and think for themselves. Now that old model is evolving alongside changes in technology and workforce expectations.
As emerging technologies, such as AI, move into the classroom, educators are facing new challenges. Students already have distractions like personal digital devices, but now they must learn to use powerful new tools without becoming dependent on them. Educators are reconsidering their approach to teaching and what it means for a student to be successful.
Students Need Foundational Skills
Though technology can be a helpful educational tool, students need a foundation of skills that helps them navigate not only the classroom but also the world. They need to learn critical thinking, problem-solving, resilience, adaptability, and how to work through problems.
Rosie Riveters is a nonprofit organization that helps K-5 students develop these skills. The programs are 30-45 minutes long, aligned to standards, and require little prep time.
“What we’ve really done is retrofit our product, our programs to fit into those constraints so that they actually are plug and play for classroom teachers,” says Brittany Greer, the founder and Executive Director of Rosie Riveters.
As AI has become a part of the educational landscape, Greer doesn’t regard it as a replacement for foundational thinking, but a tool. She sees it as useful only after students have the cognitive building blocks to use it.
“The response to AI: it’s not AI skepticism, it’s the appropriateness of a tool that’s answering a question,” Greer explains.
Rosie Riveters’ programs help students through what Greer calls “productive struggle.” They are taught age-appropriate lessons in problem-solving and resilience instead of relying on technology for every answer.
“Building that ability for everybody to have access to that productive struggle, the ability to build that confidence, the muscle of that confidence, is what we really work on in classrooms with teachers.”
Technology Can Make Learning More Active
While foundational cognitive skills are important to develop in students, many educators still ask how to use technology to inspire them and encourage participation.
PIPPA is an AI-powered animation platform that is designed to make animated content accessible to everyone. Anyone can use the platform; no professional animation skills necessary. As educators look for ways to integrate technology into their lessons, the question about how AI fits into the classroom has been looming large.
“I see this as like the Napster moment for AI where people were pirating music, and then Apple came out with the 99-cent song. We figured out an economic model that worked, and we shifted,” says Sean Wright, co-founder of PIPPA
PIPPA is creating a space for using AI in the classroom. Modern students consume digital content daily, and PIPPA lets them become creators, translating what they have learned into animated shorts.
“Instead of a teacher saying, ‘Write a one-page paper on what you learned about the American Revolution’, they can say, ‘Go create a one-minute animated cartoon.’ There is a more tangible feeling in creating something, and so it’s stickier,” says Hogan Shrum, the co-founder of PIPPA.
Retaining information is essential to learning. By giving students an AI tool to translate what they’ve consumed into visual images, they reinforce what they have learned, making it “stick.”
“There’s a stickiness to it where it speaks to them in their language in a way that’s entertaining that they also want to rewatch,” Shrum explains.
Helping Students Build a Healthy Relationship With Technology
Students already have access to technology, often using digital devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops every day. To keep students’ attention focused on learning, schools often have strict phone policies. Many educators question if this is the right approach and suggest that schools should help students self-regulate their time on devices.
“Our goal is really about the skill development. How do we help teach healthier habits with phones and help students kind of move from this pre-contemplation stage into awareness that they might be using their phone more than they know and that they shouldn’t,” says Shannon Godfrey, the co-founder and CEO of The Commons.
The Commons is a “behavioral science-designed app” that blocks distracting apps on smart devices. Students can access only approved learning apps and emergency communications. Instead of a full phone ban, The Commons supports geofencing that activates “school mode” when the students enter the campus.
“The Commons is really about how do we make it easier for students to just keep their phones in their backpack, and easier by eliminating those distractions or those dopamine hits of getting onto their phone,” Godfrey explains.
The app isn’t about punishing students, but keeping them focused and learning self-regulation. This will prepare them for the workforce. The app is designed to block dopamine loops, forcing students to find activities other than scrolling on their phones, and has in-app reminders.
“It shouldn’t be about, did you activate the solution? It should just be, we don’t need to see it out because we’re not using phones today.”
Preparing Students for the Workplace
A student excelling in school does not necessarily mean they will be ready for the workforce. Maria Hedian is the founder of Into the Fashion Industry and VP of Career and Internship Services at LIM College. In her experience, she has noticed a gap between academic excellence and workforce preparedness. She believes that students often aren’t taught the practical, unwritten rules of being in a professional environment and communicating well.
“Communication’s a giant, giant issue. It’s basic fundamentals: eye contact, body language, strong handshake, posture, confidence. I think mindset’s huge, especially in this industry because you really have to have thick skin,” Hedian says.
Hedian teaches students how to interact professionally from their cover letter to communicating on the job, and how to “create their own opportunities.”
“A strong cover letter that gives me you in a little bit more of a storytelling form, but also why should I see you in this role? That’s what’s going to set them apart,” Hedian shares about the first vital step of entering the workforce.
Another area that she wants educators to be more aware of is the power and importance of mentorship. Hedian feels modern students don’t grasp how much they can learn from experienced professionals in their chosen field.
“The very first step that should be happening is that more and more educators should tell students what mentorship is. I don’t think students at this age understand what that is.”
Making Education More Accessible
For students to achieve success, they have to understand their lessons. As classrooms become more diverse, more classrooms are multilingual. Language barriers make it difficult for students to understand lessons and participate with their classmates, creating an additional cognitive burden.
“If you’re being taught in a language you don’t understand, then you’ve got two things going on at once. You’re trying to process and understand the language; that’s taking a part of your brain, and then the other part of your brain is trying to learn the subject. The comprehension is slowed because things simply aren’t as clear,” says Dave Deasy, the CMO at Worldly.
Technology can help overcome the language barrier. Worldly is an AI-powered live translation and captioning platform. The platform can provide live translation and captions in over 50 languages. It is easy to deploy and scale and can be set up for a large event, or individuals can access their preferred language on their own device through a QR code.
“The setup with a tool like Wordly literally takes less than five minutes. There’s one audio cable that comes out of whatever the sound system happens to be, that gets plugged into a laptop, that laptop logs into our system, and then that’s where all of the translation happens; it all happens in the cloud,” Deasy explains.
Worldly not only helps students, but also gives parents the ability to interact with their child’s teachers and school administration more easily, to the student’s benefit.
“By allowing them to learn and participate on an equal basis, it helps them feel more part of the school and of the community. And I think everyone benefits from that, not just the students who need the language assistance, but it improves the overall classroom experience for even the students who don’t need that because everyone is kind of learning and participating at a more consistent pace.”
Education is changing as technology does, giving students more ways to retain knowledge, learn critical skills, and develop their cognitive thinking. The goal of education is not just to prepare students to function in today’s world, but to give them the tools to navigate the world that will come next.
