AI is here and school communication will never be the same, although we think this is a (mostly) good thing! This webinar explores the opportunities AI presents for streamlining tedious tasks, personalizing communications, and refocusing school leaders' time on impactful work. We also address the inherent risks, including data privacy, security, and the critical need for staff training.
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There can be ethical and practical pitfalls of artificial intelligence in school communications. Here are a few tips to keep things safe.
The Three AI Conversations Every School Leader Needs to Have
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When Virtual Insanity Became Reality
Cristina Capretta, APR shares her experience collaborating with AI in a one-person communication department.
We compiled a mini library of AI prompts from K-12 leaders to assist you with school communication tasks.
Transcript
Brittany Keil: All right, let's go ahead and get started. So first things first, I'm going to introduce myself. So for those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Brittany, and I love research and education. So this slide is all about me and a little bit about how I got to work at Apptegy.
So I actually spent ten years as a special education teacher in Washington, DC, in Little Rock, Arkansas, but my teaching career actually started in Malaysia. So you can see this bottom picture here. I'm doing something called the Zappan dance, which is a national dance in Malaysia. It's very special with one of my very first students from my very first classroom.
If you have a Malaysia connection, please let me know. I know I always say this, I'm still waiting for the day. Somebody's like, I'm connected to Malaysia. I love Malaysia.
I'll make you mare boush, your favorite meal, and I'll bring it to you. It hasn't happened yet, maybe one of these days. Before I worked in education, I actually worked in marketing. So my career has been kind of this like hop back and forth between these two fields.
So I worked in nonprofit marketing in DC.
And then after my ten years in the classroom, I wanted to find a way to use my interest in marketing education research. I did my master's at Johns Hopkins in education policy and Apptegy was the perfect fit. So I've been here for five years now, which seems so wild.
When I started at Apptegy, this big girl here was just a baby and now she's the big sister to this baby. So these are my two daughters, Rosemary and Beatrice, Rosemary and Bea.
Rosemary is a first grader, so I'm a public school parent and very, very active advocate for my school district, Edmonds School District in Washington.
And then this is my younger daughter, Bea. She is eleven months old, and I have very exciting news for anybody who's in the baby's fear, but Bea just learned yesterday while I was at the airport, how to crawl, finally. So go Bea.
Anything else about me? I love to travel. I take my kids traveling with me, which sometimes people think is absolutely insane, but that is something that we do.
I think that it's something that we enjoy traveling as a family, and it's one of those things like, we don't have anyone else to watch our kids, so we've just got to figure it out.
As far as professional interests, I've worked with SchoolCEO Magazine for the last five years. I love my work here. I head up a ton of our research. So if there's research that you've been looking for from SchoolCEO, please let me know. You are our audience. You are who we are writing and working to create for. So please, we're always looking for ideas.
That being said, this is SchoolCEO Magazine. I'm guessing the folks in this room are already familiar, but these are some of our more recent issues.
We are a quarterly print magazine. Everything we do is produced in house. We have a designer who designs all the beautiful visuals of our magazine. We have a team of writers and researchers who work to create the magazine.
As Barrett said in the chat, it is free to subscribe if you already don't get it. A couple of folks I know subscribe to School CEO, but it has a hard time getting to their school address. I know that sometimes we've got some really good gatekeepers. So feel free to subscribe to your personal address if you'd like.
I totally understand. It's a beautiful magazine.
Here is our newest issue, the AI issue, which we'll be touching on today.
We also have a newsletter that we send out every other week. It is also free, of course. It's called the School CEO of Spark because we hope to spark ideas with our content. And what I'd like to tell folks about the newsletter is that every single newsletter you read from us will be written either by me, Barrett, or somewhere else on our team. Like these are thoughts that we're still workshopping, new things that we're coming out with and things that we're not quite ready to put in the magazine, but think are ready for the market. So feel free to subscribe. We have a lot of fun creating and curating it and we send it out about twice a month.
We also, and I know I saw some folks in the chat who subscribed or sorry, who are previous attendees, but we just announced this year's School CO Conference. Couple of big highlights here. First, for the first time ever, it's in Dallas, Texas. If you don't live in Little Rock, Dallas is completely easier to get to than Little Rock, Arkansas. So if you've been thinking about coming to School Seal Conference, but the flights haven't worked out, Dallas should be a much better fit. It's gonna be September twenty eighth and twenty ninth.
And we've got early bird pricing going until March first. Yay, Sarah, so excited to see you. I'll be there.
More likely than not, I may also have my children with me, my family's from Texas. So anytime I travel to Texas, my mom begs me to bring the girls and we figure out a way to make it happen.
All right, so let's talk AI. So I am going to go through our research on AI, but this presentation is really to talk about the human element of AI and how we as communicators can work more effectively with AI so that we're communicating more efficiently while not taking away the important human connection while boosting our efficiency with AI. So first we'll talk about how we got here. What does our research say about AI in school communication currently? And then how can leaders lead well in the age of AI? If you enjoy this webinar and you want more content like this, I'm happy to post a link to our entire magazine where we cover a lot of these resources. I'm sure Barrett's got it.
All right, so first, how did we get here? So I'd like to ask a question for the chat, feel free to respond. But in the past five years, what new or increased stressors have impacted your roles? And so please put your answers in the chat.
While we're getting some responses, I'll go through some of the things I've heard from school communicators across the country. Low enrollment, enrollment is not a fire that seems to be going out anytime soon. FOIA requests are requiring communications attention in ways that were unprecedented ten years ago, budget cuts, lots of expectations around social media, parents, more duties, keeping up with social media as a one person shop, pressure with social media posts, multiple media platforms, absolutely.
So as you can see, the stressors of being a school communicator have inevitably gone up in the last couple of years. ADA, absolutely, we've got some content coming out about that, Ian, I'm excited to bring it out.
However, the expectations that families in your administration have, have not lessened in any way. And for most of you, you haven't actually gotten bigger teams to handle all of these new stressors.
When we think about school communication and when we think about school administration, we think about the shared purpose of these two zones, and that is to build trust with the community. In an era of school competition and in an era where families have stronger preferences than ever, trust is something that is a non negotiable and also something that's not given easily. I think that if you're in the research fair, you probably are interested in some of the trust indices that analyze how families and other people view public institutions and schools haven't been immune to this. But as we mentioned before, you're only usually one person. So forty percent of school communicators roughly are working as teams of one and administrators and communicators combined are under more pressure than ever.
As part of this, you wear a lot of hats. You are the decision maker, the decision communicator, often the operations pro, you have to facilitate all the moving parts. And then you also are stuck with lots and lots of paperwork. As you can imagine with the new ADA laws, this isn't something that's changing. In fact, it's something that I think is going to continue to pile on.
And unfortunately, when you're leading and communicating, and it's only gotten harder, you have outside things out of your control too. So increases in school choice has gotten a lot more polarizing. Families have more options than ever about how to educate their children, including statewide voucher programs that have expanded wildly in the last five years. Homeschooling is on the rise, I was just hearing about how this is becoming a hotter and hotter issue in Texas. And then open enrollment laws are really rippling across the country and influencing states where open enrollment was never something discussed before maybe ten years ago.
Then there are budget cuts, like with decreased birth rates and decreasing enrollment, budget cuts are going to continue to be a thing unfortunately, and that means that every dollar you spend is going to be scrutinized more than ever. And then higher levels of politicization means that no decision goes unexamined. As you can imagine, all of these elements make building trust that much harder.
And amidst all of this difficult environment, we have a new factor, and that is AI. But how is it actually going to change the equation? That's what I'd like to dig into. So I've been thinking about this as sort of a convergence zone. So on one hand, we have all of the increased pressures that I just talked about. And on the other hand, we have AI that is reshaping our roles and expectations about how we do our roles. So how can we as school communicators, and I do believe this is something that we can as school leaders and communicators have some authorship over, how do we take these two new things together and build them into something productive?
So of course, as we do, SchoolCEO turned to research. This is what we did for this study. So this was our first mixed qualitative and quantitative study. We did a survey nationwide of school communicators and superintendents on AI use, and then we did hours of in-depth influencer interviews. We identified these influencers by looking into the school communication and leadership market, see who's speaking about AI, who identifies themselves as an AI powered user, and who has resources and takeaways that can be useful for the broader market. This was our first mixed use study, but it was a lot of fun, and I hope that you find it very useful as we go through some of the insights.
So here's what we wanted to learn. First, we wanted to learn how school leaders and communicators are currently using AI. And while I've seen a lot of surface level data about how the population in general uses AI, I hadn't seen a lot about how school communicators and leaders specifically use it.
Then what tools and use cases are most useful in the office, not in the classroom. I feel like a lot of AI chatter has been about how we model AI for student use and how we create policies around student use. And while that is important, I wanted to dig into how it's being used in the central office itself. And then finally, how is AI changing school administration and communication?
So I'm going go through a couple of findings. First, and this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, AI is popular and gaining steam quickly.
So two years ago, SchoolCEO collaborated with NSPRA to conduct a study on AI use among school communicators. And at the time, AI was popular, but pretty new. So it was used but pretty infrequently, and this is no longer the case. So ninety seven percent of our respondents said that they use AI for professional duties and nearly half said that they were very familiar with AI.
Almost everybody's using AI and in most of my conversations now when I encounter encounter someone who's not using AI, it's usually because one of two reasons. One, they've either decided consciously for one reason or another not to use AI, or two, they keep meaning to use AI, but just don't have the time to figure it out.
So ninety seven percent of respondents across all various roles and districts also say that they have personally experimented with AI for their professional duties.
And this is something, and this was exciting to me, that we saw in participants of all ages. So participants of all ages not only use AI, but they also believe that it's important to the future of school communication. I'll admit, I had some expectations going into this study about how age and tenure would go into AI use, but it was exciting to see that this actually didn't have as much of an impact as I thought it A lot of the influencers that I talked to were actually people at the ends of their careers who are, I realized as I was interviewing them, used to seeing different tools and trends coming into education and have become a master of adapting amidst different environments. And if you've been in education a while, you know that the only constant is change. And this is something that I saw of a lot of our older and more tenured AI users.
So who do we talk to? You can see some basic demographics. These pretty much line up to what is typical across the country.
By and large, if you look on this last chart over here, our respondents were communications professionals. This is something that has become a big point of pride for my work with SchoolCEO. School communicators are the absolute best survey respondents at all. Maybe it shouldn't surprise me and it shouldn't surprise anybody, but you do surveys quickly, thoroughly, and some of the open responses I've read are formatted to be like complete essays, it's absolutely incredible. School communicators, believe are like deep thinkers and they're also really good survey takers, probably because they put a lot of surveys out into the world.
So finding number two, among our respondents, communications professionals were the most frequent users of AI as were professionals in larger districts.
AI is viewed as important among all age groups, as I mentioned, although mid career professionals use it most frequently. This is an interesting little nugget to me and this is something that I like to dig into. So when I talk to professionals at smaller districts, a lot of the rhetoric I hear is that they don't wanna be left behind with AI. And looking at this, I think that there is a source of truth to that. Larger districts are using AI more at scale. So smaller districts do need to work to make sure that they're not getting left behind or they're figuring out how to make this feasible for their own population.
School communicators are also very much the leaders in their districts and some of the earliest advocates for AI, both with when you consider actual useful AI use cases and some of the inherent dangers in using AI.
So today I'm sharing some of the results from our most recent research study. But as I mentioned earlier, two years ago, we collaborated with NSPRA to launch a national survey to explore the relationship between communications and the relationships that they had with their superintendents. And we wanted to understand how many communications professionals have something we call a seat at the table and how this impacts their work. We're going talk about communications directors for just a minute because I think there's an interesting insight into looking at why they're AI front runner, so to speak, and where they've been historically with how they view their work.
So many communicators are dissatisfied with how they spend their time. We asked our respondents to agree or disagree to this statement, you spend the majority of your time doing what you consider to be the most important elements of your role. And most of our communicators unfortunately said no, that they disagreed.
And when we actually had communicators rank what they viewed as the most important task in a typical day versus how they spend most of their time, I think you'll see some interesting trends here. So when you look at the blue and these are which of the following tasks take up the most of the time in a typical day, you can see some things that probably take a lot of time for you, external communications, social media management. I saw this again and again in the chat, internal comms followed by website management, then all the way at the bottom, building long term strategy.
On the pink slide, however, we have things that the communicators say are most critical to their work, and it's almost flipped in some respects. So building long strategy, external communications, and then finally near the bottom, have social media management and website management. What's interesting to me here is that a lot of these tasks that are high time, low priority, are those that are most impacted and probably should be most impacted by AI.
When there is a mismatch in how you use your time versus how you think you should use their time, there is of course burnout. So more than seventy five percent of school communicators said that they were at least sometimes burned out.
So before I move on from that, I do want to call that out. What can AI do to assist with burnout? If AI is able to take off some of the lift from the more tedious tasks from the tasks that are low priority, but high time, can this mean that school communicators will be less burned out in the end? Like I am hopeful.
Finding number three, general AI tools reign supreme. So I asked you all your favorite AI tools. I saw a lot of the same tools in the chat that I see on this chart. So a lot of folks are looking at general AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Clot or similar, followed by AI integrated into existing tools such as Gmail or Canva, then image generation and manipulation tools, and then after that AI meeting note takers.
Respondents also frequently use specific purpose tools. So note takers and other specific tools like slide generators, those kinds of things are definitely gaining speed in the administration and communication channels.
So beyond this, professionals are most likely to use AI integrated into tools that they're already comfortable with, such as Gmail or Canva. And to me, this suggests that some professionals don't realize the AI's potential as a standalone tool because they just view it as another feature or another facet of something that they're already comfortable with.
Finding number four, although our survey respondents were majority communication professionals, the leaders in other roles in our interviews agreed that AI has huge potential for communications purposes, including its helpfulness for personalizing communication, translation, and drafting messages. In the chat earlier, I heard a lot of comments around general demands of parents and social media. The truth is, we are all getting used to media that has been highly personalized for us, be this through algorithm, this through AI, be this through incredibly expensive customer service journey operations.
Unfortunately, those schools don't have the budget to have this level of personalization without a tool like AI that's able to be a difference maker.
So here are a couple of the top AI use cases other than communications that we saw. So first administrative tasks, as we all know, AI is really good at clerical type tasks, and this is something that shined in our survey and in our interviews. Student support and instruction that even though this wasn't survey looking necessarily into the classroom work, this is still a big part of building curriculum. I heard a lot of superintendents especially talk about just what a game changer AI has been for differentiating curriculum.
Data analysis, this is something as a researcher, are going to hear me shout from the rooftops, AI is a game changer when you are swimming or drowning in data. And then finally accessibility. So a lot of folks are using AI for translation, language support and closed captioning. These are all things that have been really difficult to do at scale, especially if you're in a district with a lot of languages. And so AI is able to really be a helpful tool in this respect.
But how does AI change the work of school administration?
We believe, and this is sort of my thesis and my hope, and maybe there's a little bit of optimistic thinking here, I hope that AI, when used well in school communications and leadership positions can create the potential for more personal connection.
It can save you time. Think about that chart I showed you where there were lots of tedious time consuming tasks that were easily automatable or at least able to connect with AI, social media management, website maintenance, those kinds of things. It harnesses data. So respondents in our survey were really quick to tout how useful AI is in analyzing data such as internal staff, pulse polls and broad community surveys. And then it fights burnout. AI is able to really push and do a lot of good work in these tedious clerical tasks. I want to talk a little bit more about this middle column because I think this is something that is exciting, especially to school communicators and administrators.
AI is able to do more analysis with data in a matter of minutes than what used to take me maybe a month to do manually.
And this means that you're able to not only collect more data, but able to take more action quickly. So let's say that you do a pulse poll of your teachers and staff to understand how an initiative is going or how the beginning of school year is going.
You're able to do the survey and analyze and get the results all within a week.
Before that kind of turnaround cycle would have taken a lot longer. The same is true of your community. I talked to a school district earlier this week that did a poll of kindergarten, or sorry, newly registered kindergarten families, And they used AI to adjust their kindergarten registration process by the beginning of the school year. So they were able to pivot things, address pain points and do all of that very quickly.
And this is a quote from a school communications director, AI has really streamlined my work. And honestly, it's done wonders for my well-being. In a small district where we all wear a lot of hats, I don't have much extra help and the AI has been a total game changer.
So now, but where do you start? So something that I hear a lot from school superintendents especially is like, okay, I get it. AI is a game changer. I'm excited about it. Where do I start? And how do I get this moving with my school district?
So we have three tips to get you started and a whole lot of resources and QR codes, how did your way on how to make this feasible so you can leave with a plan today. So our three tips are kind of bucketed in three areas. So first, to start with strategy and not tactics. Second, to build policies that provide answers. And then third, to make it fun and helpful.
So first, let's talk about this first bucket. Your staff has to know what they're trying to accomplish with AI before they're asked to do it.
So despite their enthusiasm about AI, most school leaders and communicators have their concerns about this technology. And this is something that shouldn't be overlooked. So over sixty percent of our respondents cited data privacy and security as one of their biggest roadblocks to incorporating more AI use in their work. And in an era where safeguarding student privacy and student data is a major challenge for school districts, it's no surprise to me that that's a major concern.
However, many respondents also raised concerns about algorithmic bias and equity underscoring that bias isn't just a technical glitch, it's an issue in ethics with real world consequences for students and communities.
But I think there's not just ethical concerns keeping districts from adopting AI. So half of our respondents said that there was a lack of staff training and professional development as one of their biggest challenges and that they lack clear policies and guidelines. And a third of our respondents that there was resistance from staff and community members.
So how do you take all of this feedback and move forward? You have to show your district what you're accomplishing with AI before they're expected to start working.
And what I mean is this, people have anxiety about AI. And the more headlines we see, the more times we see AI go south, it makes sense that there's anxiety. They need to understand what the AI is being used for and how it can be harnessed to improve their jobs to make things easier.
For an idea of how to get this started, our team interviewed Jeff Woods of the AI Driven Leader. And it may make you feel better if you're a communications director or superintendent to know that this is something that's consistent for executives in the private sector as well. So Jeff said that one hundred percent of the executives in his study said AI was the future, to the superintendents and communications directors that we talked to. And a hundred percent of them said that they would adopt it, but less than five percent of them had actually done anything with this point. And when he peeled back the onion to see why, it's because they didn't know where to start. And Jeff has a lot of really good tips in this Q and A on how to get started.
Gustavo Balderas has this might be a familiar name for some of you. He's a superintendent Beaverton School District, a really strong AI front runner.
His question that he always posits to superintendents especially is how can you think about strategic use of AI and not just tactical? And let me give you an example of what that looks like.
Using AI to write emails as a tactic. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that is a tactic. It's giving you a specific output, it's not changing your process. Using AI strategically makes you reexamine your processes and use it as a thought partner.
For example, I talked to a lot of superintendents and communicators who view AI as sort of a partner in ideation. So like coming up with ideas, relensing some of the things happening in their district and addressing some of their misconceptions. We all have biases and the AI is not inherently unbiased. However, it is a great tool to help you understand different perspectives.
When leading, you also need to think about these anxieties and how to be transparent about some of the more challenging aspects of AI adoption. So this is probably another familiar name, Rebecca Bultsma is an incredible AI speaker and communications or former communications director from Canada. And she created a list of three ethical conversations that every school leader needs to be prepared to have with their staff about AI. These are the us conversations.
So how are adults modeling the AI norms? And even though we're talking about AI in the central office use, I think that it's important to think that every adult in a school district is modeling what is typical and what is expected for the students in the district and the families as well. The them conversation, and this is when students kind of go off the walls with AI. How do you react?
How do you react as a district? How do you react as a communications department? These are conversations you need to have before you get there. And then finally the oh no conversation.
And that is when you realize that a step that you've been taking with AI is not working out. I don't know how many of you have read Co Intelligence by Ethan Moloch. He's a really good AI researcher and book writer, but he has this practice about AI that I find very insightful. And that is to consider that every AI you use will be the worst AI you ever encounter.
What this means sometimes is that you must be ready to try and fail, and that this failure has to be normed and okay for your staff. Like we need to know when we should rinse and repeat and when we should toss it out.
If you would like to get started right now, we created a little mini prompt library. Most of these are sourced from school communicators and superintendents across the country. Feel free to scan this QR code. And if you have something you'd like to add to this, please go ahead.
All right, number two is staff need clear policies and guidelines and only a fraction of districts actually provide this. So NSPRA did a really great study a couple of months ago that found that while ninety one percent of school communicators are using AI, sixty nine percent report that their district lack formal policy for employee use. As you can imagine, this mismatch makes things challenging school communicators, but also everybody else.
And although I'm a big advocate for using AI, we also wanted to make sure that this was, Which QR code? Oh, this one? Yeah, Barrett, can we get a link to the Oh, he's already ahead of me, amazing.
While I'm a big advocate for using AI, I also am a big advocate for being transparent about the dangers of AI. So Melissa on my team, if you know her, she's absolutely incredible. She wrote an article talking to all kinds of private sector and school professionals about when AI shouldn't be used. This article is called How to Not Use AI. It is a very good metaphor. You can see the table saw here on how to use AI as a tool that is helpful, but not buzz your hands off.
And then finally, to make it fun and make it helpful.
So teachers and staff may not be resistant to use AI or may not just be resistant. They may also be intimidated. And something that I heard again and again in my research was that school administrators have not done a good enough job with creating the sandbox time that teachers need to really experiment and play with AI.
An idea to roll out AI within a team, especially a team that is resistant, is to first work with personal tasks. So I've talked to a lot of people about AI and a lot of people are concerned that AI is going to impact their jobs in ways that are uncomfortable and unwanted.
Therefore, you can help them work with AI through some of the more tedious tasks of their personal life. My personal examples of things I've used my AI for or AI for in the last couple of months that have been hugely helpful is I actually had AI help save me thousands of dollars by helping me work with my car manufacturer to push back on a warranty claim that they denied.
I had no idea how Subaru evaluates warranty claims. That is not something that I have personal knowledge of, but Gemini was very quickly able to read all kinds of forums, all kinds of internal documentation that somehow got onto the internet and helped me navigate a very convoluted system to save thousands of dollars on getting my car repaired. I'm grateful for that. I also used AI to plan my daughter's summer camp themed birthday party.
In my head, I knew a lot about summer camps, I went to them. I was really ready to come up with some games for them. And then I quickly realized that I had no idea how to scale games for a bunch of six year olds. AI was great at this, it was really helpful.
With this sandbox time, so you can do all of this and you can make it fun.
So sandbox time is a time when teachers and staff can play together with AI. And it was cited multiple times in my study as being what built the moments for staff. I want you to think of this as an essential step of implementing any new AI tool. Just like you wouldn't roll out a new curriculum without having training, you also shouldn't roll out a new AI tool or a new expectation around AI without giving teachers time to play.
So some of the teachers and staff that I talked to mentioned that the sandbox time was also helpful because there was a lot of vulnerability on the behalf of the leaders. When you're in these sandbox spaces, you want to be modeling not just how you use AI well, but also like the times when it's kind of flops and you're okay, you move on with it. And then finally related to that, you need to celebrate the wins and misses. So when somebody does something really good with AI, you want to share it far and wide. I talked to multiple communications directors and school administrators who share a daily AI tip that they source from the district in their internal newsletter or a weekly tip, But also being really honest whenever things don't work, because again, according to me, Ethan Mollick, these are the worst AI tools that we're ever going to use. And the only way that they get better is by us providing feedback and pushing the market to be more useful for us.
I want to really end this idea of AI as being a driver of curiosity. So I don't remember if I had any Ohio people in the chat, but Christina Caprata is a communications director in Ohio. And she is one of, I think the foremost thinkers of how AI impacts school communication. If anybody knows Christina, you can tell her I said that.
She wrote an absolutely beautiful perspective for us on how AI has changed her work as a one person shop. Christina goes through this slide sometimes where she lists all of her different skills and things that she does for the district, newsletter writer, photographer, social media manager. And the joke is that she's wearing a lot of hats, but what Christina has says is that AI has allowed her to be not just effective with these different hats, but really push the overall purpose of what her job is doing for the district. All while acknowledging that there are ethical concerns with AI that school communicators are both uniquely capable of addressing and exploring and also uniquely capable of building expectations around.
For Christina, and I think this is a really beautiful point.
She believes that AI, the biggest value of AI is boosting curiosity. And she has this quote that I'm going to read because it's really, really good. Curiosity can show you how to combine what humans do best with what machines do faster. AI expands our capacity, but it's our judgment, empathy, and creativity that give the work integrity.
When I started this presentation, I told you that the goal here is to really think about how AI can push the human connection when it comes to school communication. And I believe that that's true. AI allows us to personalize at scale in ways that we've never been able to do before. AI allows us to segment different audiences for our communication in a way that would have been really tedious, really research heavy, and really, honestly, probably too heavy of a lift for a one person communication shop.
And it also allows us to output a lot of those clerical and tedious content creation tasks in ways that we haven't before. My team has very strong practices and beliefs around using AI in writing. Our magazine is human written because it's for humans. This is something we believe in.
However, and I make this joke a lot, if I found out that IKEA was using AI to write the written instructions, which they don't have, it's all pictures, for how to build chairs, I probably wouldn't mind. There are some things that are good to be written by AI. And when you think about that priorities chart that we looked at earlier in the presentation, think about how those lower level, time consuming low priority lists can be either automated with AI or simply improved with AI.
So this I think is your next step. So across the country, are happening about teacher retention and wellness. And when I think about AI, I wonder what it would be like to get thirty five teachers in the room and hear about the most tedious and annoying parts of their jobs. For example, I had a veteran teacher tell one of my survey respondents that one of the most tedious parts of her job were writing report card comments.
He showed her how to use AI to write data informed report card comments based on the commentary she was already making in the SIS and multiple feedback avenues, and then generate those into quick report card comments. And she told him that those were the best report card comments she had written in twenty five years, all within a fraction of your time. AI, I hope has the potential to make everybody likes their jobs a little bit more. And that's where that's where I want us to take AI as a organization, as a group of communicators and as leaders across the country.
So how can AI help us dread our work a little less? And how can we in turn teach people in our districts to dread their work a little less by integrating AI?
That's all I have for now. I thank you all for joining. And if you'd like to hear a little bit more about AI and what we do, I'm happy, feel free to reach out to me. It's brittney@schoolco.com.
If you're curious more about what Apptegy, my parent organization does, Barrett's gonna drop a link in the chat. And for now, thank you so much for attending. We've got a great lineup of webinars coming through the rest of the spring. I'll be sure to include those in the follow-up information.
And yeah, just thanks for making time for this and I'm excited to see what you do.