EdTech Week 2025

A lot has happened since Sal Khan’s Brave New Words sent me on a journey. Shortly after I released my blogpost, I began talking to everyone I had access to. I talked with the head of Yale’s math department, who introduced me to some of the ongoing research and players in Math Education and AI. After each conversation, my list of people to reach out to exponentially grew. I’ve loved hopping on Zoom to hear the perspectives of seasoned educators across the nation, learning their different pedagogies and takes on AI.

Earlier this week, I skipped class to volunteer at EdTech Week 2025 at Columbia University. The process was hectic with Columbia’s increased security. Nearly 800 people squeezed through a single entrance of Lerner hall, and each volunteer had to hectically shuffle plastic badges to find the name of several irritated investors or founders that were stressed with being late to their talk. As soon as my shift ended, I was given full access to the conference, and my world quickly opened up. Here are all of my takeaways:

Educators are kind. After sitting down at my very first session, I made small talk with the woman sitting next to me. We quickly found many shared interests: we’re both from Bergen County and we both love teaching math. The only caveat was that she was 30 years later in her career——she was training for her assistant superintendency and finishing up her directorship with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The speakers walked into the room, and before I could ask her anything, she offered me her contact and said some exciting words: “I can hook you up.”

She, like many others that I met at the conference, was eager to support a new educator. While you’d assume being more experienced, rich, or famous would these professionals less inviting, it felt inverted at EdTech Week. I felt this especially after shaking hands with Sara DeWitt. She’s the reason I could watch SuperWHY and Sid the Science Kid, and she offered up her personal email in seconds.

My favorite LinkedInfluencers are even better in person. I got to meet a bunch of people I’ve been following for a while:

• Aaron Cuny, Founder and CEO of AI for Equity
• Amanda Bickerstaff, Co-Founder and CEO of AI for Education
• Adeel Khan, Founder and CEO of MagicSchool

What surprised me most is the sharpness and sophistication of their discussion. Maybe I got used to all of their public-friendly, interaction-driving posting, but their discussion amongst professionals shed a different light on their voices online.

Modern Conferences are fantastic. Long gone are the days of printed Business cards—we now have Whova app QR Code scanning and dot.cards Digital Business Cards. Its nearly dystopian how easy these conferences make it to follow up with anyone you brush shoulders with.

Moreover, EdTech conferences one of the best ways to get to the frontiers. Google Searches, LinkedIn, and Substack were counterintuitively not enough (though, I realized I should be going to Twitter/X for AI+Ed news as well). However, walking around the career fair showed me a more more accurate sample of where the frontiers were. I kept on feeling “I need to skip class more” because I was learning so much so quickly. I’ll be embarrassed if I never make a corresponding NCTM, ASU+GSV, or SXSW EDU post.

Silicon Valley and Classrooms Don’t Mix. Theres a huge gap between the tech and schools. San Fransisco is all about build fast, get customers later, but in EdTech there will never be a fast, winner company. Neither a startup nor OpenAI’s Education Department will permeate every classroom because teachers and administrators want safe, slow, personalized and well researched products. They don’t want to have to constantly update their tech when a new model comes around. I felt this divide every moment at the conference: Founders disconnected from teachers and teachers disconnected from the frontiers. The classroom will evolve eventually, but it will be painful knowing the gripes of both sides.

Create your own. In the meanwhile, and possibly even further to the future, I’m convinced the best solution is CustomGPTs. One of the best ways to have teachers buy in is for the product to be their own, to know the ins and outs of what they’re letting into the classroom because they created it. This is why, anecdotally, the best teachers are the ones using their own lecture notes. In the current state, the technology is not far out enough to beat out your specific use case and classroom that only you know best. Obviously, this is easier said than done—Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), CustomGPTs, and Open vs Closed Models will be the subjects of future blogposts.

A lot of work needs to be done to support the AI Native Teachers of the future to get their classroom to pre-AI tech standards of today. With vibe-coding and and time saves from AI, I hope all teachers can make more interactive and personal materials (A great example is Cruz Godar’s Webpage). I hope that lifeless Schoology and Canvas pages become a thing of the past. Indeed, this “create your own” section may be just my idealistic ramblings on the type of teacher I want to be. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that personalized materials and technologies will make teachers happier and better at their jobs, and I want to create the infrastructure that can help teachers quickly improve their classroom and pedagogy by using AI, with or without student-facing AI tools. The learning curve will always be nontrivial, but shared, scalable tools are disappointing teachers, and its only getting easier to have the tools of your dreams.