The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

Well, good morning, and welcome to another edition of the EdGate podcast. Today, we're here with Mark Masloski. Did I pronounce that right, Mark? 

Mark Masloski

Great! Perfect. 

Rich Portelance

Excellent. He's from Jefferson County out in Ohio. I'm going to let him introduce himself. And just a reminder to everybody, this is all leading up to our Edtech Product Adoption webinar, which will be coming up on June 20th. Mark will be there, as well as some other educators and edtech providers to help us dig into why some innovative K-12 products succeed, and others fail. So, without further ado, Mark, could you give us a little background? 

Mark Masloski

Thanks, Rich. Yeah, my name is Mark Masloski. I work at Jefferson County Educational Service Center located in Steubenville, Ohio. We're in the tri-state area from Steubenville–we're in West Virginia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Also, my title is the VLA (Virtual Learning Academy) director here. I've been in education for 32 years–I was a classroom teacher, intervention specialist, social studies high school teacher, and a special education coordinator for the first 24 years of my career, and then for the last eight, I'm part of an educational service center (ESC) here in Ohio that provides services to our local schools. 

But as well, we have a niche where we're able to provide an online education platform for all the schools in Ohio that need it. And our thing is to work together with other educational service centers to bring a robust service to the schools that need it, because we have some communities–rural communities–where maybe they need a speech therapist only two days a week, and, you know, they're not able to afford that, so that's where educational service centers come from. Our niche–not every single ESC has it–ours is an online education system, which I'm in charge of. We're a public entity; we're nonprofit, you know, we're part of the school system in Ohio, and I'm really looking forward to this podcast and being big– with the bigger picture, meeting other people on our panel. 

Discussion

Rich Portelance

Well, thank you, Mark. That was excellent, and, you know, first question that your description of the program brings up is, you know, why do students need an online education center? You know, you talked a little bit about some specialty things, but more broadly, you know, why do you guys exist, and what type of classes do you offer? 

Mark Masloski

Yeah, so, our– 20 years ago, Jefferson County saw that there was a need for an online platform for students that are homebound or need an alternative placement in their education. And a lot of people, when they think of alternative, they think just that's a place where bad kids go, but it's not. You know, we have non-traditional students–we've had them for over a hundred years–we're just recognizing more and more now with data and research. So, our online education platform, we're here to serve schools in our community and elsewhere as well, so the schools we– every single day, we're getting contact from schools in Ohio that maybe have a student that's homebound, or maybe the student transferred to the school district and they notice there's one month of school left and they didn't take physical education–they don't have physical education credit. This is where we were able to come around and complete that. We have a K-12 curriculum with over 300 courses in our catalog. The majority of our students in schools that use us are high school; the second would be middle school, and then we have a small amount of elementary school, as well. 

I think the big services that we provide are that we're a public entity, just like most of our schools that we provide services with, and that it is a very functional tool. I think, you know, we created 20 years ago our own LMS (learning management system) with a partner in ProgressBook, which is now Frontline. We continue working with their tech specialist within our LMS, and within our LMS, the student data–the student information system–and the content, the grading, and the data is all in one place, so it's really easy to train schools and our students. You give them a username and password, and they can just go to work. They don't really need any training–they're really good. Now, the parents, on the other hand, more– you know, they'll need the training. So, we're able to provide that to all of our schools at any time. They don't have to wait, they could call us today. We can enroll a student, we could provide tutorials for them, we can meet them through a Zoom meeting, we can meet them face to face… You know, we're not going to wait for their paycheck to come to us to get that kid started. We understand that when students come in, and they're in a different placement, things need to go smoothly, so when that student gets their username and password, we need to make sure all the parts are working so that student feels successful. And I think that's one thing that we do well because we're– A lot of people maybe look at us as a company, but we're just made up of educators. So, I was a teacher, right? Now I need to know some fiscal stuff, right? I need to know how to manage a staff, but I still have that teacher lens, and we have our weekly Wednesday meetings, and we always wanted– I like how you used the word in our pre-talk there, Rich, about being “for thinkers”. We always want to know– be kind of ahead of what's going on in the future, and make sure things are relevant. So, I think that's something that we can offer– that what we have offered this school year, and really the past 20 years. 

Rich Portelance

That– I think that's a great description and great opener, Mark. You gave the audience a good understanding of why you exist. How many students now are using the platform on a regular basis? 

Mark Masloski

Oh, we have over 10,000 students in Ohio that use it. We're also in other states–we do have some students in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Arizona. And then, with the help of EdGate, we had to create an online application to provide for students in Virginia, which was a year-long process, and EdGate’s really helped us with looking at standards, helping us understand what's the lower-level and the higher-level standards, and now we're approved to be in Virginia for the next three years, as well, and we're pretty excited for that. 

Rich Portelance

So, you know, you bring up the idea of standards, and, you know, as our audience probably knows, to be adopted, you know, it's kind of like a baseline must-have, right? So you're going into new states with your curriculum even though the curriculum’s existing, and if someone wants to utilize that course, you now have to make sure it meets the standards of that local authority.

Mark Masloski

Correct 

Rich Portelance

So, how do you go about doing that? So, you mentioned you worked with EdGate, but how do you get the standards for the state that you're moving into, and kind of work that process? 

Mark Masloski

Yeah, so, you know, I think just being in the educational field, we know that where standards are located, you know, in Ohio, obviously, we could go to the High Department of Education. We here at the Jefferson County ESC, we have a professional development staff that has to know those standards and has to relate those standards to our local teachers. So, you know, me going into this project, I knew that Virginia had standards of learning; I knew that Virginia standards were really different from the rest of the country–they are a commonwealth, so some of the things that they're learning in math and English might be at different levels. So you have to kind of do that crosswalk. So, you know, that's what we did, so we had a partner with EdGate looking at our curriculum, then we're looking at the standards of Virginia, and then I'm getting with our team–and our consultants are teachers in Ohio, they're not on staff, so when we need help, we'll purchase a service from a teacher in Ohio to help us. And then we're kind of looking at that, and then we're creating that curriculum based on that standard. And then what's nice is that when you have that third-party vendor that's able to look at it, like EdGate, they're able to let us know what we're missing there. 

And sometimes there's a gap there, right, with a certain standard, so they're able to let us know where that gap is–what we're missing–and then we could go back and fix that. And it has been a– it's been a– it was a long process. So, you know in Virginia, we had– what I did is, okay, my superintendent and RC over at the ESC (education service center) wanted us to get in Virginia, so when I'm looking there, I looked at incoming ninth graders for next school year, what they would need to have a common diploma, and we looked at the courses that they need, and I'm like, thinking, “Let's just tackle those courses.” So there's like 28 courses, and I know you just heard me; I said 250, but we're a small entity, right, so let's just concentrate on those 28 courses, and we were able to do it within a year, which I'm pretty proud of. 

But it was a long process, because as an example, in Virginia, in biology, they're really big on watersheds in Virginia. Well, in higher work, you know, I never really understood what watersheds are, so we're working with our biology teachers figuring out what watersheds are. You know, they’re all big on the regions in social studies, and then really, in American history, a lot of the American history is based in Virginia, as well. So, you know, I think Virginia standards was a challenge for us compared to other states, but, you know, we rely on partnerships, and I think having a partner, like with EdGate, we are partners with the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools accreditation; we need those to be able to do our job, just because we're that public entity.

Rich Portelance

So, I want to dig into the tech part of that a little bit. One of the things that we've heard at– the folks at EdGate have heard is that the Gap Analysis is actually one of the most powerful tools that is offered through the ExACT platform, because it does exactly what you said is, you know, kind of be able to crosswalk and see what's missing from a piece of curriculum so you can become adopted. And from your usage, did you find that sped up the process? 

Mark Masloski

We could not do… we couldn't do it if we didn't have that Gap Analysis or the ExACT product, because the first thing that we were able to do is, okay, let's just… let me give you the 28 courses. Right now, give me a percentage of where we are if we’re based on SLO (student learning objective) standards. So, we didn't have to totally reinvent our content, our curriculum, our engagement, or our courses. So we saw where we were, you know, if we were at 65%, math courses were really low at 20-25%, and some of the history and sciences were at 80-85%. 

So being able to see that gap is, okay, now we kind of know which direction we need to go into. And the biggest thing is having flow. So when you're doing content and standards, you want to make sure that there's a flow from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year, and making sure that everything relates to one another–and we were able to do that. There's no possible way we could have done that ourselves without that– without being able to get on the ExACT and being able to run those reports and get that Gap Analysis. I worked with a great lady, Naomi. She has been a blessing to us and to our students, and because it's really– it helped us see where those gaps were. 

And, you know, right now, Virginia threw us in a loophole because they have new standards for English that literally came out in March, so everything that we already got approved, we gotta get– we have to get it looked at. So, ExACT helped us, so right now, we're only short one or two standards for the new standards that are in Virginia right now, which is great. So we worked on it all week; it didn't take us long–it would have taken us a month just to do those standards prior, but having all that knowledge, having that platform, it really helps us. 

Rich Portelance

Now, I want to dispel what I think is a rumor going across education, and that's, you know, some people are fearful of the use of AI, and most people probably don't even know that ExACT actually has been using AI and machine learning for four to five years now, and doing some of the processes–it's overlaid on top of the taxonomy so that we can speed up the process of crosswalking and aligning. So, you know, things are done as quickly as possible because speed does matter, right? But also precision matters, so there's, you know, it's about getting that balance. To you, does it matter that it's using the technology, or, you know, is there any downside to that? 

Mark Masloski

For me, we're able to get things done quicker, and we're able to manage it better using AI. I use AI every single day on course alignment, on item analysis of questions that are in our courses, and we've been able to engage… have more engagement in our activities. So it's really important– if you looked at courses five or 10 years ago, you're going to see a lot of online courses with a lot of text-based stuff–just text and maybe a picture. You know, our staff, even me, I had no idea what coding was till about two years ago, and I have two people on staff that– we use Adobe Dreamweaver, we're able to provide code, we're able to create these unbelievable, neat engagements for these students to go in and manipulate their content so it's just– it's more real to them. So, they're part of that learning process. It could be clicking on something, and it opens up with a definition, then the kids have to type a term to see if they have it correct or not, but it's not– there's no assessment base, so it's just the learning process, right? 

And then we have the assessment part, where we are going to grade and score, but we're able to give those kids a lot more real-life scenarios. One thing I like to do with AI, and I've taught– we have interns in the summer–education interns–which is great, because these guys are young. They see our course and say, like, “Oh, that image is old. We need to do something different.” But I have them bring in, “Let's create some scenario situations for our kids that are real life,” right? For us and our staff to create these scenarios on our own… Say I'm going to create 10 scenario questions, all right, on a financial math unit on the difference between savings and checking accounts. It could take me a whole day to do that. I could ask certain prompts in an AI product and get that very quickly. Now, we know we shouldn’t take its word, so we look at it, we dissect the output that it gives us, but the prompting is the most important thing when you're working with AI. It gives you a lot; it gives you a quick response. You're able to read that response, you're able to show other people, get other people's eyes on it, and the work is a lot quicker. And, Rich, just to let you know, we work with schools; we talk to… every school that we have, we have a point of contact, and each school we talk to on a weekly basis. Some schools are embracing AI, some schools are not, because they want to make sure the students are authentic, but it's really helped us to do our job in a positive way. I'm not nervous about it at all, because we could create questions and activities for kids to show how they can be authentic in their learning, as well. So I think that is gonna be important; of staying ahead of the game. 

And Rich? Cut me off, because I don't know if anybody told you, I love talking, so… My background– my mom was a Head Start administrator, my dad was a teacher, I have a twin brother who's a teacher, his wife's a teacher, and my wife's a teacher, so we're used to talking a lot! 

Rich Portelance

That's terrific. It's a whole family full of educators, and I hear your– at least one of your daughters or two of your daughters are going into education too, right? 

Mark Masloski

Yes, correct, yeah. My oldest daughter is in El Paso, Texas, and she is a health science teacher there in Texas. It's kind of neat how trends are in Texas–they have a really good CTE program where schools are going and having students look at their freshman and sophomore years through kind of some career pathways, so she's doing that. My youngest one is a second-year student at a local university, Muskingum College, where I went, and she's gonna become an intervention specialist, so we're pretty excited for those two. 

Rich Portelance

I'm sure you are, I'm sure. And we share the fact that my wife's a teacher, as well. She's been a high school art teacher, mid-career switch for just a few years now, and she's just– you can tell when someone just finds their passion; it's amazing–she’s just so happy. And it's a great profession. 

Mark Masloski

It is. 

Rich Portelance

So, as you develop your curriculum, what are the central components and practices required for you to go from drawing board to the classroom? So, you talked about a little– you know, a little bit of, you know, kind of getting there fast, but what– if you had to break that down into some steps for the audience, how would you do that? 

Mark Masloski

So, when we're developing a course, and we work with our consultants–and consultants are just experts in that field–we always ask them to write a scope and sequence of that course. So, we expect the teacher and our consultants to know the standards, come up with a scope and sequence, and basically, we want 36 units in a course–one unit per week for the students. So, basically, we receive that. Once we receive that, we have them work with a tech instructional designer who will go ahead and put in interactives for the teacher. So, we really need our consultants to give us the content, right? You know, if we're the first, make sure every unit has at least three or four subheadings, give us some activities that you want the students to be able to practice before they get to the assessment of that unit, and they work hand in hand together through that process. We have been doing some courses in-house as well with our interns–they have really good eyes of seeing what's going on. So when that teacher sends in that Word document, our instructional designer will create a code–we have to do a CSS style, we want to make sure it's vibrant for our students, we put in subheadings, and then now we're going to do some interactive stuff, so they might have some bullet points. Instead of us making it into bullet points, we're going to do something where it's a box, and it's going to say, “Click here,” or, “Hey, try this out,” and when the students click it, content appears, so it doesn't seem like there's so much information there. So, once we create that unit and we add the questions, our instructional designer sends it back to the consultant, and the consultant looks at it, and kind of gives it approval–do you like it or not like it? 

What I usually do is I'll let them do the first two or three units, then that's where I come in, and I look at it and think, “Yeah, I like the format. I think we need an activity here and here.” Basically, what we want to do is we want to make sure we have a big unit title, something that stands out for the students. It could be a video; it could be a cartoon caption, something that's going to catch their eye. And then, we want subheadings, and [Inaudible] there's a heading, and then we have text, we have an image, and then we have something called a “let's practice activity.” Once we have those together and we move on– so that process is going on, and to create a course, some courses take a month, some courses take six months–it depends on what field and what consultants we have. Once we create that, we have an alternative school, which is called a “Quest Center”. We usually let those students– some of those students try some of those courses out for us. And they buy in because they feel like they have some input–”I like this”, “I don't like this”. We're asking them, “Look at unit one, what do you think about the video?” “Oh, it was old. Nobody's talking like that.” Or, “How's this image?” “Oh, this is a pretty cool image,” or, “Nobody uses Facebook anymore. Do an Instagram example instead of Facebook.” You know, something like that. And then once we have put that all together in our course catalog, we send out an eblast letting everybody know, “Hey, we have a new course, we updated this course,” and we're able to just put it right into our LMS system. Schools don't even have to do anything. A lot of times when we update a course, schools don't even know that we even updated it because it's so seamless; it integrates so smoothly. So, that's kind of our process; we are creating courses or updating courses every single day–we want to make sure things are fresh. 

Rich, just a quick story: we have an intern; this is her third year. She is a theater communication major. She was in a course that taught her Dreamweaver, and I wanted all our interns to bring something to our last meeting–something they wanted to work on this year besides just me giving them Q&A to put up. And she said, “I think I have a code,” because there are certain colors you use for backgrounds for science, social studies, and math. She was able to create a code and create activities where we could just send her Word documents–just text–and she could upload that with images and videos. I mean, it's pretty impressive, and she has used AI, but it's really good. So, now she's able to do that; we could keep eyes on it and kind of move forward. 

So, once everything's put together, once we meet with the consultant, everything's been approved, and that course is live, okay? This is the biggest part, Rich; whoever was a consultant for that course, we want to make sure that they are our teacher for that course as well. So, some schools use their own teachers, which is great, but say a school doesn't have a Spanish teacher or doesn't have a history teacher that has time to grade that and look at that work. We'll have– we'll hire the consultant who created that course, because as they're grading and acting with that course like any teacher–and your wife will tell you, “Oh, I wish I did this instead of that in unit one,” or “Unit two, I think that question wasn't very good.” And what's great about that is that the consultant now works with the same instructional designer that created that course, and they can email each other and make changes seamlessly, like, at that– we can make live changes at that time. It's not going to affect the students’ data, but we're able to make those things at time. We don't have to wait till the end of the year; we're able to do those things there. 

I know I kind of drew that out pretty long, but that's basically our process when we're creating courses. 

Rich Portelance

Wow, it's a huge undertaking; it's an amazing endeavor, and here you're doing this in parallel to what's going on in the regular schools, you're offering it up to so many different districts and states, which is amazing. It's funny, because up here in Connecticut, we call the Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York area the “tri-state area”, but you referred to Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio? Or Pennsylvania?

Mark Masloski

Yeah, I said Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania; that's kind of our tri-state area right there. And we're small, you know, two of us are urban, but pretty much everybody in our area is a rural community.

Rich Portelance

Okay. 

Mark Masloski

And, you know, there's some places in Ohio that really have what they need, but there are other places in Ohio that… you know, as an education service center, our job is to provide them a way that they can benefit and get help for their students, because there's a lot of work, right? We know that everything's changing, right, like you just said, AI, right? How are we going to deal with that? You know, my thing is we need to embrace things, but like anything in education, we're gonna be careful on how we present it, we're going to vet it, make sure that it's doing what it needs to be for that learning process. 

Rich Portelance

So, if– Let's say there's a student at a particular school within your jurisdiction that, you know, gets injured or can't make it to live classes. Are they then enrolled in your program, and do you– how about pulling curriculum from what they're currently learning? How is that..?

Mark Masloski

Yeah, yeah, so we probably have, you know, on a weekly basis, we'll have somebody that will become a homebound student, and a school knows that we’re able to provide that curriculum for them. So, our curriculum, they can utilize it in any way. So, they see the scope and sequence, they see the units, and by going with the standards in Ohio, our week should match with that school's week, just because of the scope and sequence. That's why lining your curriculum to the standards is so important. But that school can choose what that student does, so if that student's… Now we need to enroll them in algebra, history, chemistry, and some electives; that school can then see what units that student needs, and then the student only has to complete those units. We also train teachers in those school districts, so that if they want to have their own teachers do it, we train them and show them how to utilize it. If not, we have over 125 teachers that we are responsible for, so our teachers know how to engage that student, how to send them daily messages, and how to provide intervention for the student. So that's, I think, something that we do really well. 

A school will call us that we never talked to before, like, so I'll get a phone call, and somebody will say, you know, “Mark Masloski from Steubenville City Schools,” and I'm like, “Oh, hey, it’s Mark, what's going on?” And they'll say, “You know what? I asked somebody about Jefferson County Educational Service Center; they said you would pick up the phone right away!” And we do. I think that's really important, because things happen with students, right? So, our staff knows when we get a phone call, if there's a situation at a school, whatever we're doing stops, and we make sure that school's getting everything that they need. So if that student is injured, and so forth, we don't want it to be something, another parameter that you have to worry about–we want to make sure it's a very smooth transition. I have a great assistant director, [Inaudible], who works with the parents, talks to them, lets them know everything's going to be fine, and we're with them throughout the whole process. 

But, you know, we have some schools that have a thousand students on our platform; we have some schools that only use us with four or five students, so it does not matter to us. And what's nice about our curriculum is that we have so many courses; the student could really have their own individual plan. You know, what we've done the last two years–what we’ve noticed with COVID–some students have struggled with algebra, geometry, and chemistry, so we've created multiple types of courses. So, we have our regular algebra, we have our credit recovery algebra, and we have our modified version of algebra. So, you know, if a student is failing a course, why would you give them the same course over again? It's not going to work, right? You’ve got to modify it; you’ve got to make accommodations for that student. So I think that's one thing we've had– we've done the last couple of years, and I think a lot of schools appreciate that for us. 

So they know when time's running out, and they need a situation; that's why we're here. But I would say in Ohio, that's why all educational service centers exist. We have 88 counties in Ohio, and I think that there are maybe 38 educational service centers. Every public school in Ohio has to belong to one by law. We have seven, but that doesn't mean we don't work with the other schools in Ohio, because, like I said, other ESCs might not have an online platform like we do, so, you know, it's important that we help meet the needs of these schools. It never fails, Rich; we always get a call mid-May that a student, like I said earlier, “Hey, a student needs a quarter credit of a health course,” or, “A quarter credit of English,” and we're there; we're able to help them do that. And that kind of makes us feel good, and they let us know–they'll send a picture of that student graduating and… you know, those are really good stories to hear. 

Rich Portelance

Well, that's why we do what we do, right, is, y’know– 

Mark Masloski

You're correct. 

Rich Portelance

–is helping these students along. I mean, you have to be an innovative person, and at the speed in which you operate, clearly, I mean, just from your descriptions, you know, there's a lot going on–it's a fast-paced environment. I'm curious about your impression of gaming in education, and how that may affect what you do over the years? 

Mark Masloski

Yeah, I think… Did you say gaming? 

Rich Portelance

Gaming, yeah. 

Mark Masloski

Yeah, you know, we're working with a vendor from Scotland on gaming and the functionality of that, and we are– It was said before earlier; it is so important that we have activities, gaming activities, or engagement activities in our courses, so we need to be forward thinkers. You know, we have a course called “Gaming Throughout the Ages”, you know, and kids really like that course. They talk about the earliest games, and even the newest games, and we had a consultant that's working into our– We just created a gaming [Inaudible]; it's called “Game Plan”, and we have Game Plan for middle school, Game Plan for high school, and when I get on it to practice it, I'm like, “Oh, I hate this background, it's–” I couldn't handle this background. Then she was able to change it, which is nice. I loved it because of my age. It's weird, just seeing how, for her, that was like, not a big deal at all, but being able to work with a group that could create and link social-emotional learning standards (SEL) to gaming is impressive. 

Teaching students the right etiquette for gaming, understanding the frustration. So, there is a very– that is a place where kids love. You know, esports is big in Ohio right now–we have courses in esports, but we're able to say, “Hey, we need to talk about etiquette; what's appropriate, what's not appropriate.” How do you do that so kids are going to listen to them? Well, in that gaming course, that's where you could do it, you know? Having– Those are things that are where you can meet where the students are at, because you're kind of in their comfort level, and now they're like, “Yeah,” you know, now they're a little bit more open to talk about it. You know, if those students were in the English course, they might not really want to discuss that, but in that kind of course? Yeah, they're more willing and free to talk about some other things like that. 

I think what helps us with the gaming aspect is our education system provides us interns for the summer, and I usually get one or two during the year–they're the ones who come up with those fresh ideas to keep us as forward thinkers. But that is probably one of the most popular courses we have is our Game Plan, and our Gaming Throughout the Ages, and the Gaming Throughout the Ages we're updating constantly. Why? Because new things, new technology, right? 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. 

Mark Masloski

You know, coding's really big, and it's kind of neat to see kids use Scratch and some different things of coding, as well. And then we'll ask students once in a while, “Can we promote,” you know, “Can we share your information on our website so other people can see it?” And the majority of the time, they do. 

Rich Portelance

Oh, that's great. Things are changing, right? And either you are someone who accepts, understands, and kind of goes with that, or there's others who are resistant to change because they think the status quo works. I think clearly you fit into that first category, so if you're going to talk to an audience about the pace of change, what would you say to them in terms of what's happening in education today, Mark? 

Mark Masloski

Yeah. I just think that… structure is still important in education, you know? But structure could look totally different–structure doesn't have to be five rows of seats, students making sure they have a book and pencil out–it doesn't have to be that way. Structure can look chaotic; structure can look… with teams working together, and it could look like, okay, I don't want kids on the computer. It's how you– It's the strategies you use in the classroom for those students on how to use technology. So, a lot of people think it's really fast-paced, but it's not. It's about buying in, it's having empathy, and I always tell this to some of our staff that works with some kids who are struggling: “You have to have empathy, and if you don't have empathy, fake it,” right? You gotta buy in, and then other people will buy in as well–it's not really difficult. Once teachers get over that hurdle of using Google Classroom or creating assignments online, they realize how valuable that tool is. They realize, “Wow, I have all of these paper-pencil worksheets; I could download them now as PDFs, and I don't have to make copies; I could just send it to a student?” I think they realize it could be that it could be that easy, right? So, you know, I think us as staff, when we go into these schools, you know, I could see staff's faces of who got buy-in and who doesn't, and what I usually try to do is, as I'm speaking, walk over to the people that might not have buy-in, and let's work together on just assigning an online unit, online thing, and they realize, “Wow, this isn't that hard,” right, “This isn't that tough.” 

But I think everybody, I think schools are doing much better jobs now of supporting teachers, providing more professional development for them to be able to do this. I don't want to put all on the teachers, because they have a really, really hard job, but you have to understand what's going on in education today, by listening to the podcast, looking– making sure that you're doing your professional development, paying attention to your department of education or your– whatever state you're in, read things, see what the trends are doing, right? Your school district will let you know, right? You– As a teacher, your wife knows; she knows when she did an effective lesson or not, or she knows when something is rewarding for her, right? So, you kind of figure those kinds of things out–what works, what doesn't work, you know? 

I would just say right now to students, parents, teachers, and adults is to just try it, and, you know, once you try it, you're going to realize how much more time you're going to be able to spend on other things. What we try to do, our goal is, we have so many schools that have coaches and mentors that work with our kids. We want them just to spend time with those kids one-on-one in group work. We don't want them to have to invent a content curriculum or anything like that–that just gives them more time to work with that student. So, teachers, you don't have to spend time on finding a video on the Federalists and Anti-Federalists–we have the curriculum; just use our video, you know? I tell this story; when I– during my last four or five years of teaching, I remember spending my whole planning period finding a five-minute video on the difference between a Federalist and an Anti-Federalist. Was that a good time spent? Probably not. I could have had students come in, I could have worked one-on-one with them, you know? Now, we– People that utilize our content, we have worksheets and videos that you could just pop up and see, so when you look at that scope and sequence, you look at, “Oh, wait, they're talking,” you know, “They're talking about pre-Constitution. I bet you they have something on Federalist and Anti-Federalists,” and we do, so that saves people time. 

But I think it’s just– the main thing is having a buy-in approach, having an attitude, and trying it. And this is what I see with students, and I saw this as an educator. If you're doing an assessment with 10 questions in it, and we know our top students are going to do fine, we know our lower students might not do too well, but if your first two questions are attainable for all students, students have buy-in and they’re like, “Okay, I can do number three now. I could do number four,” right? So, you have to start at an approach where it is attainable for everybody to feel comfortable with the technology and the content so they have some buy-in going in, and I think that's really important. When you throw something at somebody that's never heard of it–who has never seen AI–all of a sudden, they're overwhelmed, the anxiety is there, so now they're unable to think very well. So, it's important that you start slow and then build up. 

Rich Portelance

Well, that's clearly an empathetic approach, Mark, and I think a lot of people will appreciate the way you're going about, you know, educating the educators, providing materials, freeing them up to do the best part of their job, which is actually teaching rather than developing curriculum all day long, you know, in a rapidly changing environment, and an environment in which it's fairly hostile for teachers and difficult. You know, they're not the highest-paid profession in the world, and they work very long hours. I know, I'm sure you do; I know what I see when I'm home: my wife, she's at it for 12-14 hours a day usually–it's a tough gig. So, you know, the more we can be supportive and the more we can utilize technology to do that, I think we're better off.

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

I do want to remind everybody, on June 20th, we have the webinar coming up–look at the details below; please sign up and register. You're going to get more of Mark, you're going to get Principal Michael Rubin of Uxbridge High School, we're going to bring aboard Dave Berg from Big Picture Learning, who's going to talk about their platform for internship management, and we have a special guest from ORIGO Education, which is another great company that's leveraging the ExACT platform to really speed the process of alignment for their curriculum, as well. So, Mark, before we close it out, are there any last-minute ideas or thoughts around this topic of smart edtech and adoption that you want to cover? 

Mark Masloski

You know, I would just say that, you know, people that are listening to us–educators or non-educators–we want to be lifelong learners, right? It's amazing; when I, you know, I was an intervention specialist and social studies teacher, when I came over to the ESC and started to be in charge of online curriculum, I am learning every single day. When I'm seeing the content and the questions– We're creating a conservation science course. We have an expert on staff, he's sending me stuff to check, and I'm thinking, “Wow, conservation science started when Teddy Roosevelt was president?” I mean, we're constantly learning and understanding things and, you know, I just think that we need to have an approach that everyone can learn. Everybody learns at a different pace, and it's our jobs as educators to engage them to learn the best that they can, and to realize for everybody else that teaching is a very hard profession, a very time-consuming profession, and teachers deserve unbelievable support from your community. 

The last thing I would say is that the schools that are successful around the United States, if you look at them, they have great community support, and I think that's where you have buy-in–from the superintendent's office, your support staff, your teachers, your students, and your community. And when the schools– the major part of your community could be public or private, you have a really good situation there. 

So, I'm really looking forward to the panel; I'm really looking forward to hearing other people speak. I promise I won't be long with it and take everybody's time away from it, but I really appreciate, Rich, you giving us–our educational service center–a platform to come on and do this. EdGate has been a huge help and supportive of us with our endeavors going into the Commonwealth of Virginia. It’s making us look at our content curriculum so much better, and it's just going to get better from now till we keep on doing this great job we are doing with our students, from not just Ohio, but across the United States. 

Rich Portelance

Thank you for saying so, Mark. I love working with EdGate, too–there's a lot of empathetic people over there, and clearly there's like-mindedness in what you do, and it's just been a pleasure. I could talk to you all day long, and don't worry about it– about, you know, this is why we bring you on, because we wanted to hear your impressions and point of view. I think it's been valuable for me and the audience, and we’ll look forward to June 20th, okay?

Mark Masloski 

Yeah, thank you. Hey, have a good day. 

Rich Portelance

Hey, you too, Mark. Thank you.