This EdTech CEO Isn’t Worried About AI. In Fact, She’s Excited.

Amy Mayer didn’t set out to be an EdTech industry leader. The former teacher began by bringing technology into her high school French and English lessons.

“I became interested in how kids were responding to and creating with technology,” she said during our recent interview. Things took off from there. “[EdTech] became my life’s work and my passion.”

Ms. Mayer is now the CEO of friEDTechnology, a professional development services provider for educators across the country. She and her team work to authentically engage their audiences and clearly communicate how technology impacts teaching practices.

Ms. Mayer will be a Power Talk presenter at each of this year’s The National Institutes (TNI). I recently spoke with her about EdTech, AI, and how she views the future of both in education.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You began your career in EdTech by integrating technology into your classroom. How did it progress from there?

A: I started working with teachers of all subject areas and backgrounds, trying to help them understand how technology integration could profoundly shift the way they taught. It can make learning so much more exciting, fun, and connected—not only for students but for teachers, too.

After a time, I think I was overwhelming my school district because I wanted to talk about it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They said, “You know, Amy, you should go to conferences and talk to other people about this!” So, I started going to conferences and meeting other people who were interested in the same things.

Eventually, I began presenting at school districts and training teachers. It grew into a business and now has 17 full-time staff who love teaching and technology. We care about keeping school engaging and making it fun, worthwhile, and connected to kids’ lives.

Q: There’s a perception out there that all students are “tech natives” and are just inherently good with technology. Then there are teachers who feel as though they can never be good at it because they aren’t of a certain generation. Can you speak to this?

A: This is actually a major problem. I was recently speaking with someone from a state’s education agency, and they said something like: “Well, you know, let's just let the older teachers retire because the young teachers already know how to do this stuff.”  And that’s just not true. 

Knowing how to use technology as a consumer has nothing to do with using it to educate yourself or others. For example, I can sit down and read a novel, but that doesn’t mean I can sit down and write one. Those are completely disconnected skills.

Many administrators mistakenly believe that teachers know how to use instructional technology because they know how to use smartphones. And the same thing is happening with students in the classroom. Students lack understanding of technology, and we're not allowing them to learn by assuming they already know.

My son, for example, is a machinist. And he had to come over the other day to get help with a fillable pdf. 

He's technically competent. He can program a CNC machine, but that's a different type of knowledge.

They’re different skill sets but we assume that they’re interchangeable. 

At friEdtechnology, we want teachers to feel confident using and teaching technology after attending our sessions. We try to empower educators and dispel the misunderstanding that people already know technology and don't need further instruction because they're end users.

Q: So, the Fall of 2022 rolls around and Sam Altman and OpenAI release ChatGPT. Clearly there was AI before that, but I'm wondering how you viewed that moment through the lens of education?

A: It's been so hard to fully comprehend the magnitude of that release. Was the world and the public ready for it? The answer is no, we're not, but when does technology ever wait for us to be ready? That's just not how things work.

I think there are a few different ways people in education have responded to generative AI. One is that they're just really busy and overwhelmed with the daily life of an educator, so they're not paying too much attention. 

Another reaction to it is: “Yeah, that's cool. I'll use it to do some of this work that I don't want to do, but I probably don't want my students to use it.” 

And then there's this small group of people that exists when any new technology comes out, and they dive in head-first. They start with it early on, even when they don't exactly know what they’re doing.

We see these same groups emerge with any technical innovation. Educators need to understand technology enough to make informed decisions. If they say "no" to something, they should know why they're saying "no" and how realistic that decision is.

AI really is the biggest technical innovation that will happen in our lifetime, and that makes it something that we can’t fully say “no” to. Even people who live in communities without ubiquitous technology will not be saying “no” to AI. Instead, they’ll just lack an understanding of how it's impacting them. Nobody wants to be subject to a technology without having any understanding of it, but we already are. 

Q: I see a lot of educators who are taking a pretty hardline stance against AI and others who just don’t know where to even begin with it. What is important for each side of that spectrum to understand?

A: I think it's important to consider the ways that AI is already impacting them. 

Let's say you're in a swimming pool, and somebody asks you if you want to go swimming. And you say, “No, I don't feel like swimming right now. I'm not into it. I'm not interested in it.” 

And they say, “Well, look around! You're actually already in a swimming pool!” 

You're way more likely to stay in the pool and splash around once you realize you're already in there. And you are, with AI. You’re already in “the pool” because you're using computers and AI is impacting everything that you do. 

You see online advertisements for baby stuff because you bought a gift for a baby shower. That’s an algorithm that’s powered by a subset of AI. 

My car uses AI to manage the battery. Those new self-check-outs at convenience stores use AI. Google search results use AI to help pull “featured snippets” for rankings. 

We’re already in the pool. Isn’t it better to stay and learn how to swim?

Q: I think some educators view AI as only helping kids to cheat. What are your thoughts on this?

A:  It's so much more than that and it's such a shockingly nuanced tool. Until you've seen a lot of different use cases, it's hard to understand the depth and complexity that exists. 

AI is not a new thing, and bits of it have been invading our lives for a long time. The difference now is that it’s multimodal. It can understand different formats and create different formats. It can create music and pictures, it can analyze images and generate new ideas. 

Today I was looking at teacher shortage numbers. Instead of searching multiple websites for information, I used Google Gemini to compile it for me. 

AI isn’t just just solving math problems or churning out essays, and that’s what makes it so groundbreaking.

Q: Where should a teacher who’s new to AI start? What tool or tools would you recommend they check out?

A: ChatGPT 3.5, of course, because it's what they’ve heard about on the news. I also recommend Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s tool called Claude. 

I encourage new users to check these tools out before they engage with educator-specific AI tools. Just try it out and try out a bunch of different things. When you use your specific tool, you will understand how it relies on the big language model you used before. You’ll see that there’s nothing to be afraid of; it really is just words on a screen.

Q: Do you see AI as an existential threat to either education or the teaching profession?

A: Absolutely not. I have zero fears about that because there’s a human element to education that cannot be replicated by AI. I think that when a new technology like this develops, it makes us even more conscientious of how much we need other people and how important other people are to us. 

I recently received a book about AI and as I read the introduction, I realized AI had written it. It was just soulless.

As educators, as readers, and as people, we value authentic connections with real people. AI is helpful when I need to understand, say, a legal contract. But it’s not going to teach me how to connect with other humans, because it can’t do that. 

The heart and soul of a school are the relationships that are built and maintained. AI might help a student learn something, but I have zero fears about it taking any teacher's job. 

However, I do think it’s possible that teachers who use AI will take the jobs of teachers who don’t. And that’s why I am so passionate about training educators. I want them to work as smart as they can, then I want them to go home and have a life with their family. I don't want them to burn out, leave, and take all the institutional knowledge that they have with them. 

I want AI to help make the profession better, and I think it will.

Q: You are one of this year's Power Talk presenters at The National Institutes. Can you give us a sneak peek at what you'll be sharing during your keynote?

A: For the keynote, I’m planning to showcase practical applications of AI through interactive demos. While I'll provide some high-level context, the focus will be on rolling up our sleeves and digging into specific use cases.

My overall goal is to make AI accessible and remove any sense of it being this lofty, unapproachable technology. AI can be a powerful tool when leveraged correctly.

I want educators leaving excited to experiment rather than overwhelmed.

Hear more from Amy Mayer this summer at Carnegie Learning’s one-of-a-kind educator conference, The National Institute. Her new book, Beyond Worksheets: Transforming Teaching, Empowering Educators is available for pre-order.