ISTE 2026, AI Assessment & Space Education

Read the full transcript — Part 1: Hot Conversations (S6E10)

Dr. Carmalita Seitz · Steven Swanson · Dr. Mark Wagner

Vicki Davis (00:00)

In today’s show, we’re discussing technologies that education is talking about. This is part of a multi-part ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), EdTech, and AI Super Series. Part one.

Announcer (00:13)

Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tips and inspiration to elevate your teaching.

Vicki Davis (00:26)

First, we’ll hear from Dr. Carmalita Seitz, who leads certification for ISTE and ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) — the big ISTE and ASCD conferences every June. And this year, in 2026, I’m a featured speaker and am so excited. I hope I can see some of you there. Then we’re going to talk to Steve Swanson, a teacher and app developer, about some vital things we all need to know about AI assessment and privacy.

Vicki Davis (00:52)

And then my friend Mark Wagner joins us to talk about space and what we should be teaching our kids about the space economy we’re moving towards. But first, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite conferences, ISTE. Continuous learning and growth isn’t a bonus. It’s part of who we are as educators. And our need is so great to be able to bring new ideas into the classroom and combine them with the old things that work.

Vicki Davis (01:23)

First, we’re going to talk to Dr. Carmalita Seitz. Let’s listen.

Announcer (01:27)

Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (01:31)

Today we’re talking with Dr. Carmalita Seitz. She’s the managing director of online learning and digital innovation at ISTE plus ASCD. Carmalita has spent 20 years coaching teachers and she leads ISTE certification. The big ISTE Live and ASCD conference is coming up in June 2026. As we record this, one of the big things that we’re grappling with everywhere is artificial intelligence. What is it that you need to understand about AI?

Carmalita Seitz (02:00)

AI is new, but the idea of innovation and change in ed tech is not. And so we’ve been through this before. We’ve been through this in Web 2.0 — the interactive and the digital tools in the classroom. We’ve been through this with school closures. The idea of something new is not new; AI in itself is. And I think for educators, it’s embracing their ability to question, it’s embracing their ability to play around with it and test it out and to challenge what is coming in. And to really — I think it all grounds in just good teaching and learning and what’s good for students. And whether or not it’s AI or another digital tool, really just anticipating what’s the best outcome for learning for students, and does this work?

Vicki Davis (02:52)

I just had Justin Reich from MIT on my show, and he said it took us 25 years to get best practices for how to teach with the internet.

Carmalita Seitz (02:52)

Yes.

Vicki Davis (02:52)

And we’re not going to have best practices for a long time with artificial intelligence. So we have to be able to test in our individual classrooms and determine what works.

Vicki Davis (03:11)

That word “question,” Carm, is such a good one. Do you feel like — when you tell teachers to question — that people feel like, oh, you’re trying to assert authority, or like a negative vibe? Or is this something that people realize is part of our world today?

Carmalita Seitz (03:11)

I think they’re starting to realize it more. I’m hearing a lot with school districts opening conversations to include teachers and students and parents. I know that that is the way to go, and maybe we didn’t do it as much in the past, but this is the time to do it. The teachers are in the classroom. They’re right in there — the good and the bad. They hear what’s going on all of the time, and they’re hearing what their students are struggling with.

Carmalita Seitz (03:54)

Having them come to the table to present that, I think, is an important piece right now. No longer is the voice just in the classroom; the voice needs to be on committees, PLCs (professional learning communities), policy work — to ask those questions about does this work? And is this effective in the classroom? Or to show that it does, so that you can help diminish that fear in others, because the change is happening so fast.

Vicki Davis (04:19)

What are educators telling you?

Carmalita Seitz (04:21)

So there’s some great stories, and then there are some ones that still make my heart go, “we’re still here.” So some that I’m hearing is this, from some educators: this is a great time that I can explore and use my talents and allow students to be creative and change the way that my classrooms are happening — and different conversations.

Carmalita Seitz (04:43)

So in one pocket, I hear such joy around the change, which I love. Co-learning is a big thing for me. It’s okay to go in not knowing the tool. Learn alongside your students. Let them teach you; you teach them. So I see a lot of that and it just inspires me. And then on the other end, we’re still hearing burnout.

Carmalita Seitz (05:02)

So many educators are burnt out. They feel like there are just so many new things and they don’t know where to go, how to start. Pockets of “we don’t get enough professional development that allows me to implement it in my classrooms,” you know? So I hear some of that, and then — whether we want to bring it up or not —

Carmalita Seitz (05:22)

there’s the real conversation around tech backlash. Is there too much technology in schools right now? For some teachers, that’s concerning, because it’s less of the seat time in tech and more of how are we using it in the classroom. So again, I’m just going to sum it up: most of the classroom teachers I’m hearing — and even our coaches — they just want to come to the table when these decisions are being made and discuss, be able to have that leadership voice. Burnout is big.

Carmalita Seitz (05:53)

Sustained PD (professional development) is what teachers want. There are so many initiatives going on in schools — and ones that are needed. But how do we balance and ensure that teachers have the time to implement them? And you’ve got some great pockets of educators just doing their thing. So how do we highlight the good of ed tech use when it’s done effectively and right?

Vicki Davis (06:16)

You know, Carm, I couldn’t live without my formative assessment tools and checking every eight minutes. On the other hand, the algorithms that our students are exposed to — and us — I mean, how many of us have been sucked into the endless scroll? If I could turn off endless scroll in all of my apps, my life would be better, because it’s the most addictive algorithm ever invented.

Vicki Davis (06:42)

We have this “hey, I want to teach, I want to use these tools” — and they’re addicted. So what are we going to do?

Carmalita Seitz (06:49)

There’s a couple things there. I just had this conversation with my 13-year-old about the algorithms and changing her algorithm, and she’s like, “what do you mean?” It’s based on how you interact and what you watch and all of that. And it was an interesting conversation with her. And now she’ll tell me when I’m sad —

Carmalita Seitz (07:05)

the next day when I’m not sad, I intentionally look at videos of puppies and cats so it gets the sad videos out. It’s the awareness. Digital health, digital wellness and balance is essential right now in school systems, and it should be something — as a hug from parents and community. In schools, we really have to go back to “it takes a village.”

Carmalita Seitz (07:26)

We really need to go back to that phrase again. This is no longer the school doing this and the parents doing something at home, differently in the community. If we want well-rounded children, we need to come together. So that to me is a big piece. It’s a really interesting time right now where adults and students are on the same platforms.

Carmalita Seitz (07:46)

They’re interested in the same things, they’re watching the same types of videos, which historically wasn’t like that when it came to children and adults. So I think we as adults have to really understand what we’re doing and how that affects our children and students. Then in the classroom — because you were talking about your formative assessment tools and all of this — we have to, as educators, really think about objectives and lessons and what is the learning, what are the outcomes we want, and how do we get there, tech or non-tech?

Vicki Davis (08:23)

I’ve been going to ISTE since 2006.

Carmalita Seitz (08:26)

Yes, yes.

Vicki Davis (08:27)

So what do you think, looking at 2026, that those conversations are going to be?

Carmalita Seitz (08:33)

One big thing that I know we’re also focused on is instructional leadership — around leaders in our buildings and our districts, and even our coaches who support teachers, having a strong instructional focus. We shouldn’t lead with the tool; lead with good instruction. I’m seeing a lot of conversations around that. AI is going to be a hot topic. It’s definitely a featured topic — AI in the sense of skepticism and building trust.

Carmalita Seitz (09:01)

The tech backlash is a big one right now. And project-based learning — because of this — is starting to. I don’t think it ever went away. I believe because of assessments. I just was on a podcast where a teacher asked a question about homework: “Why do we even give homework? Because the kids are using AI to do it.” And so project-based learning is starting to come back up, which I think is great. Passion projects, genius hour —

Carmalita Seitz (09:28)

those things that we dabbled with a few years ago. Now I’m glad we did dabble, because now we’re like, this is where we should be going, instead of something that easily can be answered on the internet. So we’re going to see a lot of that. And then that balance — I see we have a featured session on brain rot.

Carmalita Seitz (09:47)

I love that title — “Brain Rot: Tech Well-Being for Teens” by Megan Tidler. And so a lot of those are also conversations that are happening because of the doom scrolling, as you were bringing up.

Vicki Davis (09:58)

Do you ever feel like that best practices get hijacked by buzzwords?

Carmalita Seitz (10:03)

Yeah.

Vicki Davis (10:04)

Because gold-standard project-based learning is like the way to teach. And a lot of us have been doing it for over 20 years.

Carmalita Seitz (10:10)

Speaking of buzzwords, sometimes I think the buzzwords are just new words for what we’ve already been doing, like you said, for 20 years. And it stirs up some dust where there’s some unease; and then once you realize really what it is, you’re like, oh, I’ve been doing that for 15, 20 years. Maybe it’s just a tweak. I remember doing a professional development in a district probably about 15, 20 years ago, and it was with high school teachers, and one high school teacher comes in at the beginning of the day and she’s like, oh my gosh, I went to a PD yesterday and I just need to tell everybody about this PD.

Carmalita Seitz (10:42)

And she starts describing what the PD was about. And she’s like, okay, you take a group of desks and you put them over here and you have an activity. And then you take a group of desks and you put them over here and you have a different activity. Could be technology or not, but it’s on the same theme.

Carmalita Seitz (10:57)

And then you have a group. And as she’s going — because I’m traditionally from elementary, right? — so as she’s going, I go, “Stations? Are you talking about—” No, no, no, no. And she called it something else. And everybody

Carmalita Seitz (11:11)

was like, “That’s amazing.” And I’m like, those are stations. Elementary’s been doing it for years. And so sometimes we just rebrand something to make it flashy. And it’s really still just good teaching, pedagogical practices. I would hesitate to gravitate towards the buzzwords and just stay grounded in good pedagogical principles. And that’s where the merger of ISTE and ASCD, to me, is the perfect combination, because you cannot have good tech use without good pedagogy.

Carmalita Seitz (11:46)

And in this day and age, good pedagogy also means good tech use.

Vicki Davis (11:51)

If you look at all of us IT directors, for the last 24 years, my closest person I’ve worked with on the admin side has always been the curriculum director. Yes. Many years ago when I got my start at GAETC (Georgia Educational Technology Conference), I talked to amazing educator David Warlick. I went up to him — and this is embarrassing — I’m like, what should I use in my classroom? I’ve heard about this “blicky” thing. I mixed the word blog and wiki. I was in Web 2.0.

Vicki Davis (12:11)

And it was like this “blicky” thing, and he just looks at me, and he was so nice and so respectful, and he didn’t make me feel like a dummy — because I wouldn’t be sitting here today. He looked at me and he said, okay, so back up: what do you want to do in your classroom? And I said, I want cooperative learning, student voice. I want project-based learning. He helped me pick. We never pick technology for the technology’s sake. What are you trying to do? For example, I’ve always been really big on helping my students test and compare different models of AI. What does this model do better? What does this model do better?

Vicki Davis (12:54)

What is this? And they would create scenarios. It’s not using AI for the sake of AI. It’s just compare and contrast and test.

Carmalita Seitz (13:01)

It seems like a simple statement you made, but it is the most important: what are you trying to do? What is your outcome for your learners? And when teachers, educators — anyone in education in the building — can answer that question, then it’s finding the right resources. And I say that very general: whether it’s non-tech, because paper and pencil is still something to use. If you’re choosing technology, does the technology supersede the learning?

Carmalita Seitz (13:33)

Right? So is it going to take so long for you and the students to learn the technology to do the outcome, that it doesn’t warrant using it? Don’t use it. If it enhances it and helps students be more creative with the comparing — the AI helps them critically think, if that’s your end objective; helps them create something at a higher level that they wouldn’t be able to,

Carmalita Seitz (13:54)

helps them connect with other students or adults in other countries to get a different perspective — then it warrants bringing it in. But if it’s going to overshadow the learning because there’s so much to learn about just using the tool, maybe that’s not the most effective.

Vicki Davis (14:11)

I encourage teachers to have a toolkit of, you know, 5 to 7 things. And very early in the year, when we’re teaching our classroom procedures, my tech toolkit would kind of be part of those classroom procedures. And it doesn’t become about the tool; it becomes about the learning. Now, I think that so many of us feel like islands in education. And one of the things that I’ve always gotten out of the amazing tech conferences, like ISTE and ASCD, is that it gets you off the island. You come back empowered, you get those ideas, and you feel like you’re not alone.

Vicki Davis (14:46)

What would you say about getting the most out of a conference?

Carmalita Seitz (14:50)

Talk to somebody in line. Sometimes as we’re waiting to get into sessions, as we’re waiting for our ticket to be handed in — all of those lovely things. Put down your phone. Put it aside. Don’t scroll. Spark up a conversation with somebody in front of you and behind you. That person could be from another country, another state, a different role, and you have the opportunity to just talk to them and ask them, what are you planning on going to?

Carmalita Seitz (15:16)

What is something that’s interesting? The next thing I would say to get the most out of it is: save a bunch of different sessions, even at the same time — things that you’re interested in — because a lot of times there’s a digital backpack with resources. Sometimes they’ll even put in the slide deck. So you might not be able to attend that session, but you’ll be able to get the resources afterwards.

Carmalita Seitz (15:36)

And it’s going to help extend your learning. So definitely do that. Don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. And lastly, don’t let the conference end and not still stay connected. There are other ways to connect on the virtual platform for the conference.

Vicki Davis (15:53)

One thing that I absolutely love is the poster sessions. And these are places where you have just a table and somebody standing there. A lot of times there are students from all over the world that are bringing in the things they’ve done.

Carmalita Seitz (16:08)

The poster sessions are by far some of my favorite. Have you been to the Idea Labs?

Vicki Davis (16:14)

Tell me about them.

Carmalita Seitz (16:15)

I had a group of students trap me with candy. They’re like, “we have candy.” And I was like, oh, I needed a piece of candy at that time as I was walking. Chocolate. Yeah, it was a little bit of chocolate. I am not going to lie — it motivates me. So I actually went there. They talked about what they were doing,

Carmalita Seitz (16:32)

they talked about the learning experience and then had a little activity. But it was great because it was for those that

Carmalita Seitz (16:39)

need that little extra. It really comes into my mind better when I’m applying it. The Idea Labs are great for that — being able to get in and get handsy and get into it. And a lot of interacting.

Vicki Davis (16:53)

Today we’ve been talking with Dr. Carmalita Seitz, managing director of online learning and digital innovation at ISTE plus ASCD. She has 20 years coaching teachers and leads the certification program. Carmalita, thank you for this conversation.

Announcer (17:09)

Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (17:13)

I love that Carmalita keeps coming back to one-word question. Don’t lead with the tool, lead with good teaching and ask what’s best for our students. Nowhere does that matter more than when we let AI near our students’ work. I was recently reading a book about agentic artificial intelligence by Pascal Bornet and his colleagues. And he recommended in this book that strict human oversight remains essential, because AI agents are not fully reliable. The lack of accuracy and control requires close human supervision. For this reason, I strongly recommend against letting AI grade everything without human supervision. As the teacher, we should be involved in that process. And you’re going to learn why.

Vicki Davis (18:09)

As we talk about keeping humans in the loop, Steve Swanson, a classroom teacher who built his own AI grading tool, will share with you why he wants to keep the human in the loop and why he made a decision that most AI assessment tools are not willing to do. Today, we’re talking with Steven Swanson. He is a high school engineering teacher at Whittier High School and also an AP (Advanced Placement) computer science and AP physics teacher.

Vicki Davis (18:39)

You built a tool called ClassLens, an AI grading tool he made because he needed it for his own gradebook. He is unique in the fact that he deleted a feature to automatically return AI-generated grades to students, and that requires that teachers review everything the AI has suggested for feedback. And we’re going to get into that. Steve, ClassLens started because you needed it for your own gradebook. I want you to take me back to the moment in your teaching where you said, “Can’t keep doing this. There’s a better way, and I can build it.”

Steven Swanson (19:11)

I think the very first day that hit me was — I take a lot of days off because I run an academy. I’m off maybe 15 days a year for field trips and different things, and I missed one or two days in a row because sometimes we do our field trips back to back. And I remember I gave one extra assignment than usual to my sophomores, and I did that because they can be a little squirrelly. I thought, this better keep them a little bit more busy. So I gave that extra one, and when I came back, I said, you know what? Let me grade this the night before. I went back, actually, and I started grading. I saw there was like 150 individual things to look at. I started looking at them. A lot of teachers, we try to become efficient.

Steven Swanson (19:31)

Well, sometimes give credit or no credit — like, if they turn this in and they did the work. Sometimes homework is like that; I just check whether they do it or not. And then they have the high-stakes assignments where you’re checking every little thing. But I don’t feel like that was valuable. I felt like, hey, they were doing this.

Steven Swanson (20:00)

They were drawing CAD drawings — computer-aided drafting, for those who were wondering what CAD is. I teach engineering in this class, and I looked at them and I want them to be not only accountable, but mainly I wanted to know what they did wrong. If they were doing something wrong — they spent two hours doing it — I wanted them to know.

Steven Swanson (20:17)

So I started it and I said, this is going to take me all night — hours — if I want to actually give feedback, to think about that, like writing each individual kid. I have 150-something students. So I was like, this is going to take a long time. So I thought, let me try to create something that maybe I could just take a glance at and give them a comment on whether they did it right or not.

Steven Swanson (20:35)

So that’s where it started.

Vicki Davis (20:37)

And, you know, I’ve written lots of things to help me. I always review it, but when you have something and you have a lot of little boxes to check, if it can at least check the boxes for you, then that tells you where to guide, and it just speeds it up.

Steven Swanson (20:52)

Through all my work I did on it, I did find most recently that making them rubrics — so if you build a very good rubric. Not just grading tools, but any AI that you use — the large language models — the more context you give them, the better they can give you output. So if you write a really good rubric, they’ll grade it pretty much spot on to what you’re asking.

Vicki Davis (21:10)

Recently I had Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis, on my show, and he says that when students get feedback from the teacher and aren’t told that AI did it, and it looks like it’s coming from the teacher — he said, quote, “It’s not right. They’re actually being dishonest towards their students, and that’s a violation of trust.” What’s your opinion on what he said?

Steven Swanson (21:33)

I 100% agree. In fact, I talked to an administrator about it, and we were chatting as I was building it. He said, I can see this as a really good tool, and I see it as a great tool for low-stakes, high-volume assignments where you just want to give a little bit more back to the kid, but you just don’t have the time. He suggested,

Steven Swanson (21:49)

I think this is a good idea, but I think teachers who use this should put something in their syllabus that says, hey, I do use an AI grading tool on assignments, and sometimes the feedback may be given back for assignments and whatnot. So, definitely that’s a great idea. And I think that’s always the case. I think even the grade itself — even if it’s assisted — even though I got rid of the auto-return feature, it passes in front of me and I’m looking at each grade and I’m looking at each comment.

Steven Swanson (22:15)

I still think there should be something. I don’t know if it’s per assignment. I don’t know if you need to have every single one say “this was written by an AI.” I don’t know about that. That could be argued either way. But definitely it should be stated somewhere — whether it’s on your website, syllabus, or assigned paper.

Vicki Davis (22:30)

So you just said something that we’re going to dig into. So you turned off the auto-grade. I hate to use the word “grade,” because for me, I feel like, as the teacher, every grade passes through me. Now, feedback — I can have it help me, right? And then I need to adjust it. But I should look at everything, which is basically what you’ve done.

Vicki Davis (22:51)

But most AI-assisted grading tools allow a teacher just to hit a button and just send it back. Take me through the mental process of, okay, I’m going to turn this off — and I know everybody else does it — well, this is why.

Steven Swanson (23:05)

First off, for some of the listeners, it’s called “human in the loop” now. That’s what it’s often called, where some AI tools will have human in the loop or they do not. Does this pass through human inspection or not? I don’t want to say it was a mental thought — it was more of a gut feeling. So in the process of building this, you start building feature upon feature upon feature.

Steven Swanson (23:24)

And when you’re in product development — and this is for any product — what you want to do is just make the easiest environment for the end user who’s using this, a teacher or whoever it is. And then you think, how can I make their life the easiest, where everything is efficient and everything is done for you? Because automation is key to a lot of things.

Steven Swanson (23:40)

As you’re pushing the envelope of development, I could get to a point where I could say, hey, I could just push a button. It sucks all the assignments out of whatever you’re using — a Google Classroom, let’s say. And it pulls the assignments out, grades them all, and then sends them right back to the student. That’s sort of like what you would call a black box.

Steven Swanson (23:57)

You don’t see it happening. Upon creating it, it almost felt immediately wrong — hey, this doesn’t feel right. That’s not only the thinking process; it’s 22 years of teaching as well. Just doesn’t feel right.

Vicki Davis (24:07)

We want help. We want to save time. But we also — I mean, we have a relationship with students. That’s a relationship of trust. Even when I’m not there, when my sub is there and I’m not, I want to know what went on. I don’t like to just hand something over with no supervision. Do you think that’s why maybe it felt icky? Or have you talked to other teachers and how they feel about it?

Steven Swanson (24:29)

I did talk to another teacher about it, but I think if you think of like a multiple choice — I can push a button that grades them all. But you have faith that when I say the correct answer is A, then a student chooses A, it would get it right; and if they chose B, they will get it wrong.

Steven Swanson (24:44)

And you have faith in that. Correct? If you had that same faith with an AI — and nobody does right now — it’s going to do everything right every single time. And that faith doesn’t exist right now. It’s building that way. Could they get to that point where you just go, wow, everything it does is correct? Maybe ten years from now?

Steven Swanson (25:02)

I don’t know, but it’s not here today. It can make mistakes, that’s for sure. And I think you have to have trust that it will grade by the rubric. And for the most part it does. You have to approve a rubric, because it abides by the rubric pretty darn strictly.

Vicki Davis (25:17)

So I want to say ClassLens is not sponsoring this. The reason I accepted your pitch — to me, you’re a teacher, and in your email you said something that I really want to know the answer to. You said there is one question every teacher needs to ask before any AI tool, before they let it grade student work. What is that question?

Steven Swanson (25:38)

When you’re doing it, you want to know what’s happening to it. Like, where does it go? Where is it stored? I know when I built it — just because I know about FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and privacy with student data, I built that from the ground up. That’s where I started. And then I realized, okay, where is this going to go?

Steven Swanson (25:53)

And then I realized, no, it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s not going to even be stored on my server. It goes to a special AI — an LLM (large language model) company that is trusted, made by Google, because Google Classroom created it. I chose that one. And they also are one of the only companies that will approve a zero, where they hold none of your data and it immediately deletes it.

Steven Swanson (26:15)

And I delete it from my server immediately after grading. And the teacher approves it, and it goes back in. And on my end, I don’t need to sell it. I don’t need to collect data. That’s not my forte. I’m a teacher full-time, so I don’t have time to even worry about that. And I definitely don’t have the money to pay—

Vicki Davis (26:29)

for all the server space.

Steven Swanson (26:31)

But no, definitely that was something you should always look at. And for the most part, a lot of districts, before they even approve the use of this, will actually look at that for you. They’re going to look and say, okay — they want to know every spot of where this is stored, what is being stored. Is it their name? What is it?

Steven Swanson (26:43)

The only thing I do store is — it’s like an obscure number that Google assigns to each student. And I only keep that because I’m planning the next feature, which is: if a student wanted to opt out, you would be able to check that box for the student, so when the grades pass through, it doesn’t do anything for that student.

Steven Swanson (26:59)

I can foresee that happening in the future, where districts might allow opting out, or even a state might say it’s required.

Vicki Davis (27:06)

So what does that mean for a teacher in a classroom — that you have done OAuth verification? And there’s a lot of apps out there that people are building, because there is vibe coding, right? So what’s the difference between one that’s OAuth verified and one that’s not?

Steven Swanson (27:19)

When you sign into Google, you can click on it and it would warn you and say, hey, this is not authorized by Google. So Google will let you know, it’ll warn you, and it’ll say you can still proceed, but Google has not verified this app. So definitely that’s something to look for.

Vicki Davis (27:34)

So if you could change one thing about how the ed tech industry sells AI to schools right now, what would it be?

Steven Swanson (27:41)

I haven’t thought too much about that, but I do know that it’s being flooded. They’re adding AI tools to everything. I would say that — and if this isn’t already true for the company — I think they have to have human in the loop for teacher stuff. I mean, if it involves students and their grades, and the grades they’re getting—

Steven Swanson (27:57)

I think human in the loop has to be every part of it. And that’s why I pretty much reached out to you — that you need to have a teacher look at this stuff. You can suggest whatever you want: here’s a comment it should be, here’s a grade that I think it should be, but all of those should be editable by the teacher before they click okay.

Steven Swanson (28:14)

I agree to all this, and then send it to my students. That’s how ClassLens does it. It just lists all the grades, the comments, and you can click on them and see the work and double-check and say — every once in a while you’ll see something that’s a little low grade, and let me see, why is that getting such a low grade?

Steven Swanson (28:28)

Let me look at that assignment and see if I agree with that grade. You definitely want that. Can you have somebody suggest grades? Sure. People have forever used — what, teaching assistants? Colleges use that, where they have somebody grade a lot of their professors’ work. But because we’re the final say in the grade, I think every single assignment, every comment, should pass through our eyes and be editable so we can change it.

Vicki Davis (28:50)

That’s such a great analogy, because I was a TA (teaching assistant) in college, and I graded everything and then wrote my notes and gave it to the professor. But he had the ultimate say — obviously, I wasn’t the professor. So what a great analogy, because we have used people to help us. It’s that most of us classroom teachers in K–12, most of us don’t qualify for any help.

Vicki Davis (29:12)

And so we’re so desperate, overworked, that we want that help. Let’s shift to this. Pretend that a teacher is listening to this in their car, and they’re saying, okay, I think I’m going to try to use an AI tool to grade work tomorrow. Could you give them a 30-second checklist? Like, what should they be looking for as they prepare to do that?

Steven Swanson (29:36)

One, obviously, make sure of the Google OAuth — we talked about that. Make sure that when you sign into Google there’s no warnings or anything like that. Make sure there is a privacy agreement that they’re not doing anything with the data. And I think the best advice I can give them is: the first time you use it—

Steven Swanson (29:52)

and I know this may not be what… hopefully nobody’s using it in a bind and they need their grades turned in 30 minutes. But you should be able to provide yourself with enough time. When you’re using this for the first time, grade it. Read every single comment. Read every — even if you go, hey, this is just as long as grading.

Steven Swanson (30:06)

Yes, but you want to make sure it grades correctly. So look at every grade, look at all their work, look at all the comments, and go, how off is this from what I would have given? Do that. Don’t just trust it right off the bat, and do that for as many assignments as it takes before you start to feel comfortable with it.

Steven Swanson (30:22)

Like, if you passed this work onto a human, like we just talked about, would you trust them right off the bat? I know I wouldn’t — even if the district said, hey, I got somebody who’ll grade your stuff for you, they’ll sit right next to you. I know that’s never going to happen, but… and they’ll grade your stuff — yeah, I would still want to glance through it and look through it and kind of try to grasp whether they were doing it correctly, or the way I would have been assigning them. So I think they should do the same thing.

Vicki Davis (30:45)

So Steve, you’ve been really emphatic — human in the loop. Is there anything else about the movement to try to give us AI assistance for assessment that makes you angry or really concerns you?

Steven Swanson (30:58)

I wouldn’t say angry. This is science in general — I think they’re building very quickly. They’re almost trying to fly a plane while they build it at the same time. I’m talking — the AI companies are actually building them, and it’s like an arms race. I take that quote where he says, “Your scientists are too busy thinking whether they can do it rather than if they should.”

Vicki Davis (31:18)

Jurassic Park.

Steven Swanson (31:19)

Jurassic Park, there you go.

Vicki Davis (31:20)

I love that one too.

Steven Swanson (31:21)

Yeah. And it sometimes feels like that. It’s like, hey, we have stuff — let’s try to figure out, just, how can we use them right now? Where are we going with this? What is the plan next? A lot of people don’t know that. And I know that’s uneasy for everybody, and it’s uneasy for me. And I think most of your listeners — and probably you — would agree: if I could snap my fingers and just go back before AI and say there was no AI, that life was easier.

Steven Swanson (31:45)

It’s only going to get more complex as these AI models get more powerful and sharper and more capable. Now you just take an LLM — a large language model, that’s what they’re called — you give it tools, they can do stuff, and then you call them agents, and then, you know what’s next? So I guess that’s the stuff where it’s uncertainty, and everybody is uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Steven Swanson (32:08)

We don’t know where this is all heading. I know where it is now, but I think the thing that keeps me up at night is, where does this all go?

Vicki Davis (32:14)

So we’ve been talking to Steven Swanson. He’s a high school engineering teacher at Whittier High School and AP computer science and AP physics teacher, and he created ClassLens. Steve, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your perspective.

Announcer (32:28)

Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (32:33)

In the loop. Let’s hold on to that and let’s keep that central. Every grade should pass through the educator in the classroom. Now we’re going to shift to another hot topic right now — space. As we’re recording in 2026, the Artemis II crew came home. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen flew further than any human beings in history. Space isn’t science fiction — it’s now. And scientists estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

Vicki Davis (32:59)

And by some estimates, as many as two trillion. That’s more than ten galaxies for every single one of us on Earth. Now, I’ll never forget a professor I had when I was at Georgia Tech. He drew a big, huge circle on one side of the board and a little tiny X in the top right corner, and this is what he said.

Vicki Davis (33:31)

He pointed at the X and he said, “This is you.” And he pointed at the circle and he said, “And this is the universe. I want you to notice something: you” — as he pointed at the X — “are not the center of the universe.” Now, this was a great point, and it’s always stuck with me, because it’s such a big universe, and we have so many things for us to do and to serve others.

Vicki Davis (33:56)

Our universe is vast, and it’s full of exciting opportunities for us and our students to explore. I hope you’re going to learn some new things about space from my fellow educator friend, Mark Wagner, as he shares what we need to teach our kids about space. Today, I’m talking with an old friend, Dr. Mark Wagner. He is CEO and co-founder of ARES Learning, president of the Space Prize Foundation, and author of Space Education: Preparing Students for Humanity’s Multi-Planet Future.

Vicki Davis (34:33)

Mark founded EdTechTeam back in 2006 and helped shape how a whole generation of us learned to use technology in the classroom. But now he’s turned his attention to preparing students for the growing space economy and for a future that may include the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Mark Wagner (34:53)

When you reached out to me, you were talking about how excited everyone is about the Artemis mission. I’m so excited to see it taking a hold of people’s imaginations in a much broader way than even the exciting headlines in the last couple of years.

Vicki Davis (35:06)

So let’s talk about how space took a hold of your imagination. You spent all this time in Web 2.0, and then you were like, space is going to be big and I need to shift. Why? What was the story?

Mark Wagner (35:17)

It makes my 20-year education technology career almost a side story. I went to Space Camp a couple times as a kid, in sixth grade and again in 11th grade. I originally went to school to be an astronaut engineer, but I realized at the time that the stories — science fiction stories — that inspired me were really important, and I ended up jumping ship and studying literature and teaching high school English, which is what got me into ed tech to begin with. In 2020, right before the pandemic, I really had the opportunity to start thinking about what’s next, and kind of bringing both those worlds full circle, so that I could apply my ed tech career to what was happening in space.

Mark Wagner (35:50)

Between you and me, I saw a lot of parallels of how excited people were in 2006 about Google for Education and how little support there was for teachers. And if you look at 2019, there was starting to be some real excitement around SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, and everything was starting to hit the headlines in terms of human spaceflight and commercial spaceflight.

Mark Wagner (36:14)

Very little support for it in schools. So literally, right before COVID, some of my partners and I were talking about how to use space as an element to engage and motivate kids and teach just about anything, really.

Vicki Davis (36:26)

So you talk a lot about the space economy. Interestingly, there’s an AP course where they had to talk about the issues of lower-orbit satellites and the lack of regulation in that area, for an AP Lit class. That was actually one of the things they analyzed this year. And I was thinking, wow, people are starting to talk about space.

Vicki Davis (36:45)

I mean, is it just Artemis, or is it the fact people realize, hey, this is part of who we are on this earth — is space?

Mark Wagner (36:53)

Yeah. And it’s interesting — not necessarily a funding priority for schools just yet, at least not at large scale, but absolutely, over the last five or six years, I’ve seen that interest notching up and a growing community of educators. Some of them have been there for decades. The Space Exploration Educators Conference, or SEEK, hit its 30th year a couple of years ago.

Mark Wagner (37:13)

So there are some people that have been doing this a really long time, but really seeing a rise in the number of people that are interested in it. And for me, especially coming out of tech — kids learning socially, no matter who you are, what your strengths are, what your interests are, and this goes for teachers and students — space can be that element of engaging, motivating, hooking, being the gateway to all kinds of learning.

Mark Wagner (37:32)

And you mentioned — this is kind of the other big hook, especially at a societal level or a policy level — is the growing space economy. A couple of years ago, we passed a milestone of about $400 billion a year. At the time, they were saying it would reach $1 trillion by 2040. But real quick, those projections look like $1 trillion by 2030.

Mark Wagner (37:52)

And I think we’re still on track for that. The idea that, hey, aerospace is growing — for scientists, engineers, astronauts, there’s never been more opportunities to be a part of it. There’s this growing space economy where, whatever your strengths and interests are, they need you. A lot of people talk about the barista at Spaceport America, where Virgin Galactic flies, but even more so, I play hockey with guys that never got a degree — welders and machinists.

Mark Wagner (38:16)

And their biggest client is SpaceX in Hawthorne. I love telling the story of one of them telling me at hockey one Saturday morning — like, “Mark, those guys are the dumbest smart people I know. I’ve got to teach them the most basic stuff.” Whether you’re a welder or a barista or you’re in marketing — I know space marketers.

Mark Wagner (38:32)

I know people in charge of finances — space finances. I’ve interviewed a space fashion designer and an interior designer who works on luxury spacecraft. These are all real jobs today. There’s a whole lot of opportunity in this wider space economy. I also like to joke that the opposite is true: even if you’re not interested in space, you’d better understand the opportunities that are coming out of space.

Mark Wagner (38:56)

So the same way, you know, in the ’90s we had to convince people that learning about the internet was maybe a good idea, and now it’s just a given. Satellites — particularly GPS, but communications satellites, Earth observation satellites — impact every industry, from agriculture to crime fighting. If you’re not up to speed with what’s happening with space technology, it’s pretty equivalent to not being up to speed with what’s happening with the internet.

Mark Wagner (39:22)

You’re missing out on big opportunities, and you’re not really fully participating in today’s economy.

Vicki Davis (39:26)

Folks who look at all this may say, well, why is everybody rushing to have these low-orbit satellites? But there really is a space race to cover the whole world with the internet, right?

Mark Wagner (39:37)

Also true. Yes. And we’re seeing that obviously the last couple of years with SpaceX and Starlink. We’re already in a world where internet access can happen regardless of borders and despots. They’ve used Starlink in emergency situations after hurricanes, after the fires in LA. They put Starlink base stations out for first responders, behind enemy lines in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Mark Wagner (40:00)

Now you’re in a new position where, like, oh, this big company controls the internet. But we’re certainly in a position where you can sidestep borders. You don’t need the kind of infrastructure you needed in the past. Never mind copper lines — we don’t even need cell towers going forward.

Vicki Davis (40:14)

What are the experts saying about how long it’s going to be to have global internet? We talk about the digital divide all the time — the haves and the have-nots. And there’s still a lot of places that don’t have. So what’s the timeline you’ve heard?

Mark Wagner (40:28)

You and I remember the time of OLPC — one laptop per child. And it turns out, even putting in $1 billion or something like that doesn’t solve the problem. We have come a long way in terms of narrowing the gap of who’s got access to broadband and who’s got access to basic computing — at least handheld computing.

Mark Wagner (40:44)

But there’s no easy solution to that. And today, the kinds of handhelds that are available in countries that don’t have that infrastructure probably can’t talk to Starlink. So there’s still some room to grow. But it’s interesting to me to roll back 13 years or so. We had a guy named Rich DeVaul keynote one of the Google Education summits up in Silicon Valley, and he worked for the X Lab at the time — their moonshot factory.

Mark Wagner (41:08)

He had this great idea that he pitched to Larry and Sergey, as the story goes, and they said, that’s a great idea, but it’s going to benefit the next billion people to get online most — fix that problem first. And that’s when Project Loon was born. And the idea at the time was to put balloons into the stratosphere, basically with 5G cell technology on them, to beam internet down to the planet.

Mark Wagner (41:33)

Great success story there, and a great sort of failing-forward story there. But long story short, Project Loon’s gone, because somebody thought 10x that and thought even bigger. And now we’ve got thousands of satellites in orbit doing that job. Amazon’s coming in with competition. And last I heard, Rwanda wants to launch 300,000 satellites with a similar capacity. But if you’ve got African countries launching their own constellations, that barrier to entry is coming down.

Vicki Davis (42:00)

So, ARES Learning — you talk about the skill sets and the mindsets that students need for the space economy. What are some of those skill sets and mindsets?

Mark Wagner (42:09)

I have four that I like to go to, because they come up a lot. When you talk to astronauts, they’re critical for the way NASA works or SpaceX works. The sort of mindsets that are good for, say, an astronaut or an engineer or scientist turn out to also be good for, say, an entrepreneur or a social-change agent trying to solve big problems here on Earth.

Mark Wagner (42:28)

So I start with the explorer’s mindset. Things like comfort with the unknown, right? The idea that if you encounter an obstacle out there, you might not know the way around it, but you have a degree of faith that you can find the way around it. And there’s a sense of an abundance mindset kind of wrapped into that.

Mark Wagner (42:48)

Also, that there are solutions for all of us out there. And it kind of also tends to tap into that idea that people who are explorers tend to develop a greater sense of stewardship for the environment and for the Earth. And that tends to be true of space explorers, too. But getting people to that point where they can tap into their own love of discovery and comfort with risk-taking, with the unknown, and develop that abundance mindset—

Mark Wagner (43:12)

those are all things that I think are important about the explorer’s mindset. And so we start there. I like to bring in moonshot thinking, which you probably heard me talk about even back in the tech days. And it came from the work we were doing adjacent to Silicon Valley, really. Anyway — we went to the moon the first time in the ’60s.

Mark Wagner (43:27)

We didn’t know how we were going to do it when Kennedy said we were going to do that in this decade. But we did it anyway. And this idea that we were going to learn by failing forward — even though failure was not an option in those days, right — they very much took on those challenges and iterated and pivoted their way forward.

Mark Wagner (43:44)

Moonshot thinking encourages people, encourages kids and educators, to think big, to think outside the box, to tackle problems bigger than they might have tackled otherwise. It was a 19-year-old that solved the Great Pacific plastic garbage patch, right? Most people are capable of much more than they think possible. So it’s maybe not a situation where any kid could be anything they wanted, but most people are capable of much more than they think possible.

Mark Wagner (44:08)

Once you get out of the box, once you start thinking big, once you’re tackling big problems and imagining big solutions, then you can turn to a system like design thinking to iterate on that and prototype and test and improve from there. So to me, those are almost a trilogy, right? It’s like the explorer’s mindset, moonshot thinking, and design thinking.

Mark Wagner (44:26)

I’ve played around with other mindsets that we kind of marry to that in the courses that we do for teachers. But my favorite one now is to go into what Cady Coleman calls “operational mindset.” In the business world, that means something else. But to her, it means: it’s not all about you, but you are critically important to the mission.

Mark Wagner (44:46)

And I think there are some really cool parallels between that and the way a classroom works. Like, for any given kid — or the teacher, for that matter — it’s not all about you, but you are critically important to the learning environment. Everybody is responsible. And if you take even one more step back, or zoom out a step more, that’s what people mean when they say we’re all crew on Spaceship Earth.

Mark Wagner (45:07)

Think of Earth as our life support system and our vehicle through the cosmos, right? If you were in a spaceship, you would need to all get along. You’d need to take very good care of the ship — your environmental control and life support systems. To us down here, that’s taking care of the forests and the oceans and our cities, and being sure that we’re doing that in an ethical, sustainable way.

Mark Wagner (45:29)

For me, getting around to that operational mindset, the way Cady Coleman means it in her book, Sharing Space — those are four that I think are really important to start with.

Vicki Davis (45:41)

Where do you think that schools are falling short out of those four, the most?

Mark Wagner (45:47)

Boy, that has not changed a whole lot, I don’t think, in the time that you and I have been doing our work. And I don’t want to sell things short — you see a lot more project-based learning. You see a ton of design learning in schools, design thinking, design methodology. And that was true a decade ago, too.

Mark Wagner (46:01)

I think moonshot thinking, or thinking big, is really hard. And I think giving kids the freedom to explore is really hard for schools. There’s really cool, innovative stuff happening out there in a lot of places. But as a general rule, schools don’t allow kids to discover on their own, wander in the wilderness a little bit — metaphorically or literally — to find their own way.

Mark Wagner (46:23)

Even something as simple as bringing a map into the classroom — you can tap into that element of exploration without giving a kid the answers, right? Letting them discover the answers on their own. That could be physical problem-solving in a maker space. Or — I love DataBot or MaxIQ.space. They make sensors that kids can use to create their own classroom experiments. They can create their own high-altitude balloon payloads. They can even send them to space with various partners.

Mark Wagner (47:02)

So there’s this opportunity to let kids create the experiment and create the hypothesis and figure out a way to get their hardware up into the stratosphere, up into space even. There are opportunities to do that for kids to actually get their experiments up to the ISS or up into orbit on other vehicles. They’re not necessarily cheap, but there are some great opportunities out there.

Vicki Davis (47:14)

How does the AI revolution intersect with what’s going on with space?

Mark Wagner (47:18)

It’s interesting. I’m a writer, so I’m usually underwhelmed by AI. And it gets better every day, dramatically better every day. But what I’ve found is, whenever I’m an expert in something, I’m pretty disappointed in the AI response or AI-generated material, and sometimes find things that are dramatically wrong. And it takes a little bit of background knowledge to identify those times.

Mark Wagner (47:42)

And even I get stuck in the trap where I just trust it on topics that I’m not an expert in. But if I think about how bad the AI responses are in things that I’m an expert in, I’m like, well, I really shouldn’t trust it for much of anything — other than, it came up with ten good ideas and I can pick the two best.

Mark Wagner (47:57)

I was working on an activity based on something I did at Space Camp years ago, where you throw some chaos at the people participating in a simulation, and I wanted to know how many reaction control thrusters are on a Dragon capsule. So these are the little thrusters that steer in microgravity. And what’s the minimum number needed to operate the spacecraft?

Mark Wagner (48:20)

The AI — I think I was using Gemini at the time, which is great because at least it cites its sources — but Gemini came back and said there’s, I think, 21 on the spacecraft, and the minimum is four or seven in an emergency. And I thought, why would it be more? Why would the minimum be higher in an emergency? Like, there’s something wrong with this data.

Mark Wagner (48:36)

And Gemini does cite its sources. So I went back and looked, and it was from a Wiki page. And nowhere did it talk about the number of thrusters, but off in a side column, the crew was four or seven in an emergency. So it just pulled some other numbers off the page and gave me those.

Mark Wagner (48:53)

So as a general rule, I’m underwhelmed. Also — you remember our friend Chris Betcher, the edu-blogger from Australia. Chris recently posted something about being back in the classroom and being surprised the kids were rejecting AI, and I responded, because my own kids unequivocally, absolutely reject anything AI-generated. Absolutely, hands down, no questions about it. And these are kids that grew up with that tech, and they code and they do Roblox.

Mark Wagner (49:19)

They’re geeky kids. You should see their Linux laptops, right? I came to understand why — one of my kids loves sketching. They both love programming. My other kid enjoys music. And if you’re growing up, if you’re a kid, you’re a teenager, you’re about to enter the workforce, you’re just coming into your own, maybe as an artist or a musician — and here comes this thing that’s going to just do it for you.

Mark Wagner (49:44)

I’m just not impressed, and neither are the kids, and that’s okay. I think AI — like the internet, like Google, like space technologies — is going to be one tool in our tool belt. I mean, there are things I do use it for, but so far it’s not taking away the need for human communication. But I’m seeing in our kids a rejection of not just AI, but also some of the things that you and I fought for for decades — computers in classrooms.

Mark Wagner (50:10)

We’re seeing a big pendulum swing against that, right? I think the ideal classroom has got kids using computers and AI in meaningful, authentic ways to solve problems and help others. But you’re definitely seeing a rejection of that. And my point in bringing up the stories is, it seems like a retcon when you see Star Trek stories from the ’60s and they don’t have gene-modified humans and they don’t have AI like we have today. And then you think, but there is a future where maybe we reject those things.

Mark Wagner (50:39)

Maybe we decide we want humans like us in the next generation. The flip side, I think, is, as we settle the solar system and beyond, I think we will be the aliens long before we run into aliens from other planets. You think about that. There’s a book I’ll recommend — The Next 500 Years by Christopher Mason.

Mark Wagner (50:57)

He’s a microbiologist, and we already have put tardigrade DNA into human tissue to make it radiation-resistant. We already know 247 gene edits or whatever it is — something like that — to cause a human to create their own vitamin C. And if we’re going to survive the trip to Mars and back — just literally a couple years ago, we learned that our kidneys won’t make it, just hands down, won’t make it; the radiation is going to kill us.

Mark Wagner (51:24)

So we need much heavier ships with a lot more shielding, or we’re going to need to modify ourselves genetically. So I’m making two points here. A, I think we’re going to be much more alien than we imagine, much faster than we imagined. But I’m also not going to be surprised if there’s a significant portion of the population that embraces art made by humans, spacecraft designed by humans.

Mark Wagner (51:47)

Even though, of course, it’s great to have computers when you’re designing spacecraft and landing reusable rockets, right? So, not a black-or-white answer from my perspective.

Vicki Davis (51:57)

Your book, Space Education, was written with Frank White — and he coined the term “the overview effect.” For teachers who want to dive deeper into this, what is the first chapter you would point them to in your book, and why?

Mark Wagner (52:10)

It looks at everything from spinoff technologies to avoiding existential threats and achieving our higher aspirations. One of the things that kind of falls under the higher-aspirations category for me — actually, a number of things come from Frank White’s work. One is, he talks about the overview effect, and the overview effect is the title of the book, which came out in 1987.

Mark Wagner (52:31)

It’s in its fourth edition now. Only about this much of it is Frank’s book, and then he keeps all the primary materials — the interview transcripts of the interviews with the astronauts are all in there. It’s just — what a historical record. But in the book, he coined the term to capture the change in perspective that people tend to experience when they look down on the Earth from space, or look back at the Earth from space.

Mark Wagner (52:57)

They don’t see borders, they don’t see tribes, they don’t see our conflict, and they see the stark reality that the Earth is a relatively small and fragile ball of life, hanging in the forbidding black void of space, and that thin, thin blue line of atmosphere. Everybody I’ve spoken to about it says it’s thinner than you think. You can see the pictures of the thin blue line, and it’s thinner than you think.

Mark Wagner (53:24)

And you think about, like, every living thing aside from maybe some things in the ocean are in that blue line. That blue line is what’s protecting us. So people look down, they don’t see borders, typically. Although my interview with So-yeon Yi from South Korea was interesting, because they see a border from space. But typically people don’t see borders, they don’t see conflicts, they don’t see our tribes.

Mark Wagner (53:43)

They see that we’re all in this together on Spaceship Earth. And they kind of tend to come to that realization of, like, we are all crew — or we should be. Don’t be caught being a passenger on Spaceship Earth. And they tend to come back more interested in diplomacy, more interested in protecting the environment. And that changes the way people interact out here.

Mark Wagner (54:00)

And that’s why astronauts have said for years: if only we could pull the politicians up to orbit or up to the moon, so that they can look back on the Earth. So when I talk about avoiding existential threats — it would be a real tragedy if creativity and art and music are all wiped out here on Earth because we did something stupid, or we weren’t prepared for an asteroid impact or a supernova or something like that.

Mark Wagner (54:21)

We’ve got to expand to the Moon and Mars and deep-space habitats. We’ve got to expand to other stars. So Frank’s The Cosma Hypothesis — the third book in his overview trilogy, if you will — talks about that moral mandate to spread consciousness throughout the universe.

Vicki Davis (54:37)

So, the overview effect — we saw that in the interviews with the crew of the Artemis. Tell teachers who are interested some places they can go to get more information and get excited.

Mark Wagner (54:49)

I run a free online space education summit. We’ve opened them all with an astronaut panel to kick off the event. And our YouTube channel — we’ve got about a hundred past sessions up there. If you want to go a little bit deeper, I’ve run a course for educators for several years now: areslearning.com/course. I have a new version of it that kind of embraces the fact that half the people that took my course were not formal educators. So it’s space education for everyone — at areslearning.com/everyone.

Mark Wagner (55:06)

I run an Earth and Space Experience with my friend Dr. Kirby Runyon, who’s a planetary geologist. He was the first person to see the images coming back from Pluto when they discovered there are ice mountains the size of Everest floating in a nitrogen ice sea on Pluto.

Mark Wagner (55:36)

Kirby and I take educators and enthusiasts — I like to say we take them to a simulated mission of ours at the Challenger Center in Las Cruces. Then we head out to Spaceport America and tour Virgin Galactic. The next day, we take them to the Space History Museum near White Sands, which is just rich with nearly a century of space history.

Mark Wagner (55:56)

And then we get them out into the desert, and we explore things like lava flows, sand dunes at White Sands National Park, the craters at places like Aden Crater and Kilbourne Hole — places where Apollo astronauts have trained and Artemis astronauts have trained in geology. A real field learning experience. areslearning.com/earthandspace.

Vicki Davis (56:17)

We’ve been talking with Dr. Mark Wagner, author of Space Education: Preparing Students for Humanity’s Multi-Planet Future. Thanks for coming on the show.

Announcer (56:27)

Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (56:31)

As we finish up all of these conversations — they need your voice. AI literacy is fast becoming a core skill for our students. It will even be measured on the international PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) assessment by 2029. And we teachers and educators everywhere belong at the table, not on the sidelines. I remember what the great basketball coach John Wooden said: “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens. And when it happens, it lasts.”

Vicki Davis (57:00)

So as we finish up today’s show, I want you to pick just one idea you can use in your classroom now. Maybe you’ll plan to go to a technology conference and learn something new. Watch an online course or video.

Vicki Davis (57:22)

Maybe you’ll create your own app like Steve did. Or you could add a little bit of space education to your classroom. If we, as the teachers, are learners, our students will want to be too. You can find this show at coolcatteacher.com/ISTE2026. Thank you for listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk today, and I hope you’ll tune in next week right here on this station.

Vicki Davis (57:47)

I’m Vicki Davis. See you later, educator.

Announcer (57:49)

Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis. Follow @coolcatteacher everywhere you connect.