Samantha Dykes

I'm a teacher by day, and I also teach a college course here and there at night. I've been teaching now 16 years. I have three kids of my own, and everything I do stems back to my kids. At the time of my first book, I was an instructional coach and technology coach for a school district, and I just saw that kids weren't necessarily being engaged, and classrooms hadn't really changed in the last 100 years, but society has. So we wrote a book about engagement, and having different learning stations, and the importance of engagement for students to want to learn, and having the autonomy, and being able to have choice in where they're doing a task, and what tasks, or how they're showing their learning. My second book is coming out in June, and it is about AI and education. The second book started also when I was an instructional coach. I saw AI coming with a vengeance about two and a half years ago, and there's nothing really out there for schools for guidance at that time. For my own kids, I was like, I want this for them, because it's their future, they need to be prepared for a future that is unknown. So what we created was kind of like a roadmap for schools to be able to take with writing policy, vetting systems, training for teachers, and just that ethical and systematic way to implement AI with safety guardrails in place for students and teachers. I work for Solution Tree, and school districts will reach out to them, and then I will go to wherever they send me to give presentations on whatever they're asking for within AI and schools and engagement.