How d’Skills is preparing students for the future (and you can too).

How d’Skills is preparing students for the future (and you can too).

Are you ready to ditch the old school playbook and blaze a new trail in education? If so, you’re in the right place. I’m Danny Bauer, and this is the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast, the only podcast for Ruckus Makers who do school different. This is your go to show to learn how to challenge the status quo and unleash the potential found on your campus. In today’s show, I spoke with Hannah Grady Williams, founder of The Skills. Her story began in a blue pickup truck at age twelve, sparked by this intro to business by her dad. She went to college early, graduating with a bachelors at 18. Now Hannah is the Chief Rebel at The Skills, a hub where students turbocharge their passions with AI and convert them into paid real world projects.

Christopher Lockhead calls her one of the most important voices in education today, and a school administrator once called her offensive to some. In our show, we cover topics like how Hannah provides AI turbocharged internships for students in schools and how they won’t need any extra staff to pull it off, why she got the stink eye and almost got kicked out of a school career day, and how your campus could differentiate itself from every other school in the district by having 100% of your students being published authors. It’s not a pipe dream, and Hannah’s helping schools do just that. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be right back after a quick message from our show sponsors. Hey, Ruckus Maker. I’ll make this quick. If you’re listening to this message right now, you’re missing out.

01:54
Danny
When you subscribe to the Ruckus Maker newsletter on Substack, you get access to micro books focused on how to do school different tools and other resources that will help you make a ruckus and do school different stories and case studies of the world’s most legendary Ruckus Makers of all time. Access to my calendar to schedule coaching sessions, and you’ll also get bonus podcast content that won’t be released on the main podcast feed and podcast episodes without any advertisements. So if you love this show, if it’s helped you grow and you want access to more tools and resources that will help you make a ruckus and do school different and become a paid subscriber at ruckusmakers.substack.com. The secret to peak performance is not complicated. It’s a plan on how to optimize the five fundamentals found in the Ruckus Maker Mindset tool. This simple tool will help you consider where you are now and where you want to be in the next 90 days. For each area, you can complete the tool in five minutes or less. Download it for [email protected]/Mindset over 1 million teachers rely on IXL because it’s empowering. It helps them make better decisions with reliable data, and it adapts instruction based on student performance. Get started [email protected]/Leaders. That’s ixl.com/leaders. Question: would you serve your own kids the same food you serve your students in your cafeteria now? Quest food Management Services elevates the student dining experience, serving scratch made meals using high quality ingredients that are sourced locally and responsibly. Now that is food you can be proud to serve. Learn more about quest food management [email protected], or follow Quest food on social media. That’s questfms.com dot. And Hannah, welcome to the show.

04:14
Hannah
You’re a Ruckus Maker. I’m a chief rebel, this is going to be awesome today.

04:18
Danny
I can’t wait 100%. When I saw that, and I’ve been following your work, I was just super excited for this episode. Probably more excited than most episodes I get to record. I actually stopped talking to strangers, stranger danger. And so you snuck in. But we have a mutual friend and we’re aligned. And you know how we see things where we’re in school differently. We’re trying to accomplish education. I can’t wait to highlight what you’re all about. You mentioned you have a good Ruckus Maker story for me to kick us off, so let us have it.

04:55
Hannah
Boy, do I. This is the time when I got called offensive to some by a school administrator. And I say that I wear that badge proudly because Ruckus Makers who do things differently tend to sometimes offend people. Sometimes it’s incredibly persuasive and amazing. And other times it’s rough. But there was a moment. This took place about a year ago. I’m 25 and I’m the oldest of seven kids, so I see my younger siblings growing up in this very topsy turvy world right now. They’re native digitals.  They’re living in a world that’s so incredibly challenging in so many ways, very different ways from our parents.  I do everything that I can to go to events where there’s lots of teenagers and where I can help them navigate this native digital world. There was this one event at a school a couple hours away from me in Charlotte, North Carolina, and it was a career feed networking event with a local high school. So a really cool concept. Kids come into the lunchroom, they have businesses there. Students sit at a table for a few minutes, and then they rotate around the room. Well, here’s something that’s interesting that happened. So before the kids came in,we were all sitting in this lunchroom. It’s toward the end of the school year, kids are anxious to get out of school. It’s really warm and beautiful outside. And coming in this door, prior to the students were all these really hardworking, tough dudes coming from plumbing companies, trade companies. I’m the only person there who’s a digital business. We got to the point where the school administrator, the career counselor, was giving us a debrief before we had the students come in. And here’s what he said, Danny, which I thought was so interesting, he said, “Guys, these kids are just clueless. They have no clue what they want to do in their future. They don’t know what careers are out there. They really need your guidance.” Really, he used the word dumb.

07:13
Danny
Really?

07:13
Hannah
And I was sitting there. I was like, what’s going on? Of course, not a typical counselor.  Career counselor person. I don’t know his exact title, and he believes the best in his students. But I think he was really trying to get us all as the employer sort of riled up, like, we really gotta guide these kids.  I sat down and the kids started coming in, and I was the only digital business there. Everyone else is a trade, but we get groups of kids, probably seven or eight students. When most students approached the tables, what tended to happen is you had students who would ask, they might ask a few questions, but it was usually the person in the employer role giving them this spiel on, here’s what it’s like to work in manufacturing, or here’s what it’s like to work here and handing out flyers. When my kids sat down, I asked them a different question. I asked them, ‘What do you think about AI? What’s happening with AI?’ And the kids looked at me, and I kid you not, Danny, they looked around the room to make sure no one was listening. Before they would utter the word AI to my face, I had to tell them. I had to look at them and say, ‘hey, guys, if someone comes over and they say anything, blame it on me.’ This is my fault. I asked you the question. Let’s have a discussion.

08:36
Danny
The school alarms are gonna be set off.

08:39
Hannah
And I just asked them, I just sat there, and once their guard came down, we had a really great conversation around AI. And I just asked them what’s happening? Do you know what’s happening in the world of work with AI? This year we just had the Microsoft and LinkedIn trends report come out where they interviewed 31,000 employers and asked them, would you hire someone who doesn’t know how to use AI? 71% of the employers said they’re not hiring people who don’t know how to use AI. And yet these kids are afraid to utter the words AI. And so just a long story, longer, including the story. We were sitting down, having this great conversation around AI, and I ended up asking the kids, so what’s your perspective on this? And they would say things like, it’s cheating. We’re told we can’t use it. All of all these negative sentiments around AI. But within a ten minute conversation, we were able to turn that ship around, and we started delving into the students. What could you do if your passions were turbocharged by AI, if they were unlocked by AI? Whether it’s your passion for filmmaking or nonprofit research or science,  what could you do with AI? And by the end of ten minutes, the kids were chatting to Bt on their phones, probably 80% to 90% of them. So they’re pulling it out. We’re just creating silly poems, and we’re asking AI about a couple students’ careers in the context of AI. It was so much fun. And you could see over at our table, the kids’ faces lighting up and the laughing that was happening while everyone else was being sort of given this spiel about what they should do as a career. I just remember feeling, and I had several students come up to me afterwards and just say, ‘I don’t really have permission to think like this in a lot of my classes, and I want to be able to voice my opinions.’ And so I’ll just wrap this up, Daniel, by saying, what I saw in that room with the hundred or so kids that I spoke with was an insane amount of curiosity, was an insane amount of advocacy for their futures. And many of them already knew what career paths seemed interesting to them. It was quite the opposite of what the potential sort of perspective was from the school administration on what those kids were capable of in both thinking about themselves and their futures and even their community. And that brought me so much hope I was a little bit of a Ruckus Maker there. We did have teachers come over, give us sort of the stink eye a couple of times, but it was ultimately fulfilling because I know that those kids are, they’re going to advocate for themselves and be on an amazing path in the future.

11:18
Danny
From that story, what seems insane to me is the expectations of the career counselor and probably many of the faculty. And you see how the kids started to accept that sort of point of view. It’s cheating and all this kind of stuff. And You founded The Skills and you obviously have a radically different point of view than that when it comes to AI. We started to hear just a taste of it. But can you talk a bit about life, living in the present moment and in the future, because AI is here, it’s not going anywhere. It’s only going to continue to grow in prevalence and integration, how it touches our lives. Can you talk a little bit about that?

12:03
Hannah
I love this question. I’ll answer this in a couple of different ways. The first is, let’s think quickly from a student’s perspective and then I’ll share what I’ve learned from working with about 3000 businesses and what they’re saying from the employer side, which is ultimately the world our kids are getting ready for. I was in this wonderful panel just a couple of months ago in Michigan where students, it was called the AI and me panel, and a school had basically given students the creative liberty to explore how AI will impact their careers. And we’re talking cosmetology, insurance, and firefighting. We’re not talking about your typical careers in the sense of what people tend to think about AI right now as AI equaled only for students in computer science or AI equal only for students interested in coding.

That’s not the case. AI is going to touch every single career. So this panel was awesome. But one thing that a student said when I asked him this question just blew me away.  I asked the question Ikenna, if you had the ear of every superintendent in the country and you were the keynote on stage, what would you share with them about how AI is being banned in schools? And the kid said, don’t always assume we have negative intent. I was like, sure. It’s brilliant. This is a 17 year old student who is saying, I know AI is going to be a part of my future. There’s no way around it. So don’t always assume in the school setting that we as students have the intent to cheat, sometimes maybe we have the intent to look out for our futures and figure out how to use this technology alongside our work. Okay, so that is a student’s lens. Let’s talk about the company and corporate side that we’re preparing kids for. I’ve worked with about 3000 employers, and I just ran a poll on LinkedIn the other day to ask how my audience views AI and work. And like we talked about a few minutes ago, the LinkedIn workforce report said it was 31,000 employers that they interviewed. 71% said 31 countries, too. A thousand employers in each country. And 71% of them said they won’t hire someone without AI skills. And 66% said they would rather hire someone who’s less experienced, who understands AI, versus someone who’s more experienced and doesn’t.

14:53
Danny
That was the one that really caught my attention.

14:55
Hannah
I’m curious, what was interesting for you?

14:58
Danny
They’re stating we’d rather take somebody, like you said, less experienced.. And usually we think of getting a job and that kind of thing, building up the resume, building up your experience, is the key to opening doors. And If you desire to climb some kind of ladder or just looking to elevate your career in some kind of way, it’s all about experience. But they’re saying, like, the experience that’s needed is not necessarily in years and age, it’s in testing things out and being competent or at least playing around with AI. So they’re saying, like, this is important, and that’s over half 31,000 employers, like you were mentioning. So that was shocking to me.

15:38
Hannah
I love that. No, it’s not shocking to me, at least in the sense that employers are saying this, but shocking in the sense that, I don’t know about you, but when I talk to people in my general circle we’re talking about personal life. Not just not professional, but in my personal life. I don’t know many families that have really embraced AI to the extent that they understand that it’s going to infiltrate every bit of our lives. And so as I ran my poll in my audience, which is employers, and the results came out approximately the same, it was about 84%. So actually higher people were saying they’d rather hire someone with AI experience instead of years of experience. And I just think it is so interesting that especially in schools, as we think about education, and think about kids.

16:34
Hannah
There’s a really powerful discussion that needs to happen around what is the place of AI in helping our students learn? But the bigger question, looking from the employer standpoint of the workforce ready student, when we look sort of with the end in mind, like Stephen Covey talks about beginning with the end in mind and then working backwards, I think it’s really important to consider that if our kids are going to have this skill set, then why should they not be using it now inside of our learning environments?  I want to make a disclaimer here, because this is important. And there’s all these conversations happening around AI in schools, and there’s many organizations talking about, how could we bring AI into the existing classroom and enhance the learning? And how do we have students writing with AI or image generating with AI?

17:32
Hannah
Those I would say are important, but we need to be asking a bigger question, which is in a world where AI is everywhere, what are The Skills and mindsets our students need to have to thrive? It’s not a question of just AI literacy, it’s a question of what are the skills that make us unique, make humans unique and successful and thriving in a future where AI is everywhere. And to my knowledge, I see a couple of schools addressing this really well, but when you look at the big landscape, a lot of AI literacy approaches are missing that key distinction. We should be asking instead of the obsolete things of school, such as memorizing long lists of facts and doing fact based recall tests and all these things, instead of doing those things faster or more efficiently with AI, shouldn’t we be teaching different things? And that’s really what we started The Skills for. We use The Skills. I mean, it’s less of a company, more of a lifestyle. If someone has The Skills, they’re a student who’s going to be prepared for a future where AI is everywhere. They’ll have the tenacity, the confidence, the advocacy, the ability to fight for and advocate for their ideas. There’s someone who’s impact is focused. There’s someone with digital skills, like The Skills. There’s someone with digital and these AI skills. But it’s about so much more than that. It’s about a student who is future ready in a world where AI is everywhere. Because we are all entering a time when I. The questions are becoming more prolific than the answers. There’s just so much that’s up in the air as I think about myself as a Ruckus Maker and we use the rebel base and the rebel terms. But as I think about myself. I’m leading kids to be these rebels and to forge their own pathway because that’s ultimately what it will take to be successful in a future where AI is everywhere.

19:43
Danny
That’s why I said it was shocking for me, too, because connecting some dots, the landscape is what most schools are afraid of. Faculty, teachers play it safe, principals are afraid of AI and what could be happening. I did a little research, too. I was just curious, how did schools initially respond when the calculator first came on the scene? I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at that. But what’s really interesting, like people did legit protests outside of schools with picket signs.

20:15
Hannah
Oh my gosh.

20:16
Danny
Basically, like say no to the calculator type of thing. And so I think that just talks to a bigger issue within big systems and fear of change.Again, it’s all about perception. Like, don’t assume we’re here to do evil with it or just try to get away with cheating. Yes. Does that happen? Of course, there’s many positives on the other side of it as well, and you’re just missing out on all that opportunity. And most importantly the way I think about it is if education ain’t a bit disruptive, if we’re not experimenting a little bit for not embracing AI, seeing what’s possible, then what are our students really learning? Like, what are we doing? What are we doing with school? What is school for?  I think this is a good place maybe to pause for a second to get some messages in from our sponsors. But in the second half of our show, maybe you could talk a little bit about how The Skills is helping students prepare and answer that bigger question that you shared with us.

21:23
Danny
What makes an assessment effective? I would argue giving teachers access to quick, reliable and useful results that inform the next best steps for teaching. And that’s where I EXCl really stands out. Teachers get powerful insights into student performance on a daily basis so they can address issues the moment they arise. Imagine that, ingesting instruction in real time before it’s too late. Your teachers have a tool that helps them to be more effective and your students continue to grow. Check it out for [email protected]/Leaders that’s ixl.com leaders. Here’s a few reasons I love quest food management services. Quest provides high quality, scratch made food in k twelve schools and universities across the country. Quest provides solutions for school cafeterias of every size, including multi station dining halls, cafes and coffee shops. Marketplace, grab and go catering and events, satellite programming and more. The quest food philosophy is to prioritize the health and wellness of students by cultivating chef crafted recipes containing high quality ingredients and using scratch made cooking techniques and responsible product sourcing. Learn more about Quest food Management [email protected] or follow questfood on social media. That’s questfms.com. And we’re back with Hannah Grady Williams, and she’s the founder of The Skills, which you need to check out. It’s going to be linked up in the show, notes the LinkedIn Microsoft report. We’ve been talking about the future work that’ll be there, too. Certainly want you to get involved with this program. And prior to the break, Hannah brought up this bigger question of basically, what are the skill sets needed, what’s possible when we develop students and help them embrace AI and what they could do? And so I’d love to hear some stories of how The Skills is doing that. Maybe, I love the aloha state of Hawaii, and so maybe you could bring us there and talk about some kids that never left the island and now are doing some really cool stuff.

23:48
Hannah
One student is named Mejia, and she is, oh my gosh, she’s just phenomenal.  Mejia is a native Hawaiian student. She’s 16 and she wants to go to school for law, potentially after her business degree. But Mejia has ADHD,in fact, I’ll send you the video, Danny. It’s amazing. She did this 1 minute video after being invited because of what we’re about to discuss. She got invited onto an advisory board where she’s the only Gen Z member now because of her incredible experience and The Skills she has. But Mejia has ADHD. And she said the traditional school was so hard for her.  The studying, the fact of cramming, all that jazz when she discovered The Skills. And she’s almost the end as we, as the date we’re recording is almost at the end of a ten week sprint.

We call it impact ten, where students essentially identify an impact gap in a small business, in their community or online. They use their d’skill to solve the gap in that business using AIH and their digital skills. And then they also share their journey on LinkedIn to build a global professional network. Mehe set these goals for herself and the way the whole experience works is to choose your own jury. She decided she wanted to be a digital advocate for small businesses to do a combination of digital media and marketing. She might do some SEO. It kind of depended on the client’s needs. Mejia just blew this out of the water. She said, I don’t want to just meet the connection goal. Of the 50 people on LinkedIn, like 50 global professionals in my network, I want to reach 400. And guess what? In the first three weeks, she had 400 professional LinkedIn connections. She starts sharing her journey as she’s reaching out to local small businesses in her area. She lives near Honolulu and goes to a school called Kamehameha Kapalama. She’s reaching out to small businesses about her SEO services, and she’s sharing her journey on LinkedIn this whole time. Come to find out, this was two weeks ago on week seven of her sprint, she started having clients reach out to her, asking her for her services, asking to compensate her.

26:19
Danny
Because can you unpack a bit, like, what those services are and stuff? Because the listener, although innovative and visionary SEO they might not know what these things are, why what Maya is doing is so impactful.

26:31
Hannah
Several different clients have different needs. One thing she could do is search engine optimization. So that’s where she would take a small business’s website and she would work some magic behind the scenes, getting the site to rank higher on Google. She’s using a combination of AI tools plus research plus keyword tools to help that site rank higher. Another service she’s offering is digital media marketing. She’s creating short form video content for small businesses. Another business she’s exploring right now is building AI bots, using chat GBT for small businesses to help with their customer service or to put on their website as a sales agent. There’s all sorts of different digital projects. That is a part of her agency, and she’ll talk about those projects sharing her journey, which, of course, showcases the learning. She’s someone who oftentimes in a classroom, when you’re digesting what you’ve learned, you might be doing it with a friend or through an essay, but when you’re doing it publicly on LinkedIn and other people can see your journey, it ends up showing them more about you and how you think. So not only can a teacher look at your LinkedIn now and evaluate, how well did you understand this assignment, so to speak? Mahaya, in this case, is using it as a tool to get clients to understand her better potential clients, just like you and  doing marketing for our own businesses. But she’s doing it at 16. So that’s just one example.

28:15
Danny
And being compensated too.

28:17
Hannah
Exactly. Being compensated, which is a goal of empowering hack ten, is showing kids when you forge your own pathway, you can use this to do whatever you want. Whether that stands out on college applications, whether it’s launching your own business, whether it’s earning income on the side while you go to college and you’re paying your own way through school. World is our oyster right now, and LinkedIn is the new resume. Kids have the opportunity to do so much in high school that they, in many cases, don’t get the opportunity to. And that’s what distilled is all about.

28:52
Danny
I don’t know, call it a value or what, but some. I was reading through your site that there’s an initial investment to participate in a program. I don’t know if that’s impact ten or a different one, but I remember clearly, like, part of the expectation is what kids discover through your process that they go through should also generate revenue that exceeds the initial investment. It’s paying for itself and maybe even creating a profit too. I don’t know if there’s any other examples or maybe a quick one we could talk about honestly, it could be a seven hour podcast and I would love every minute of it. But do you have another story? Actually, one you were telling me there was some AI and firefighting, like what’s going on there?

29:42
Hannah
Oh gosh, this is cool. I’m actually about to go back to Winchester to do this again. We have students. One of my loves with AI is connecting it with CTE because it’s. It’s predicted that Gen Z and Gen alpha native digitals will have between seven to 15 careers in our lifetime. Not jobs, different careers.

30:09
Danny
Careers.

30:11
Hannah
That’s how fast the world is changing. If you think about a kid in a traditional CTE program, maybe they’re studying to be an engineer or a hairstylist or maybe they’ve chosen a pretty rigid pathway. That’s great. And what if we can multiply their life option by adding AI, adding skills onto that CTE pathway so that once that student reaches, maybe they’ve worked in cosmetology five to ten years, they now have The Skills to go out and do digital freelance projects or launch a side hustle, or who knows, even open their own salon. They’ve got some more leverage and more opportunities that we can multiply for them. So there is a student right now that I’m working with, and this student is a firefighter. So we’re talking about what could you do to enhance your industry using AI?

31:11
Hannah
And the idea he came up with was, oh, my gosh, what if I could build a GPT that is trained on fire escape routes in my city? I’ll just put them, those images and the training data into the back end of my AI. And that way when my fellow, I don’t even know what you call them, your fellow cadets or fellow firefighting students, when they’re going through training, they can now use this AI bot to give them scenarios that they have to creatively, in a gamified way, figure out how to set a particular building using this new bot that he’s created. And you could apply that to thousands and thousands of industries. In fact, if anybody’s curious about this, if you go to our website, it’s d skills IO, and you go forward slash dispatch, we have this list of like 130. It’s like 134 impact projects that students could do, and they’re broken down by different interests. Just go take a look and see if you can find your interest, or if you’ve got students, go take a look and see if you can find your class on there, because it’s so amazing what you can do with the existing digital tools that are out there and enhancing a pathway, an industry, a business with AI.

32:35
Danny
Love it so much. I think the last. Last questions before we get to the questions we asked all our guests. And so you have a new project called Expedition AI. And would you like to share a little bit about that?

32:49
Hannah
One of the things that we realized with our ten week sprints, which kids just love, and the students I’ve been sharing about, they’ve been a part of impact ten. They’re earning income, building their LinkedIn profiles, making impacts in their communities. But one of the hurdles for many schools is how do we make our students and our teachers aware of what they can do when they’re skilled or turbocharged by AI? To go back to a point earlier in our conversation, it’s very easy to say AI is only for computer science majors. It’s only for kids interested in coding. Right? It’s easy to put it in the tech bucket and not realize how it’s affecting publishing, it’s affecting scientific research, it’s affecting doctors, it’s affecting every single career.

So we just launched an asynchronous course called Expedition AI, where any teacher can just take an hour per week of their classroom time and bring in these amazing project sprints with AI, where they and the students together can build artifacts with AI with our guidance. So an example artifact, which we could totally put this in the show notes. Kids are turbo charged by AI, writing children’s books in a matter of hours. And it’s incredible, Danny, what they’re coming up with through their creativity, through how they prompt the AI to tell the stories they want to tell that are sometimes lost by them being too young. Maybe they’re in middle school and they don’t feel like they have a voice, but you give them this tool of being able to tell their story through the lens of a book that’s illustrated kids to go back to Hawaii for a moment got students telling stories that have been passed down from their great grandparents that might have gotten lost to history, and now they’re telling them with illustrations and with beautiful imagery and word imagery. And so kids who never thought they had a creative bone in their body are now able to be creative because of this tool set.  Expedition AI is truly an expedition into AI, and it’s helping kids unlock their potential and teachers to unlock their potential by putting them into these project sprints.

35:18
Hannah
It’s six of them throughout the year where they get to really get their hands dirty in these tools in a safe way. And the best part is, I hear schools all the time asking me, we’d love to do a program with AI, but we’re going to have to hire a really savvy teacher who knows this tool and who can offer this class well, they don’t anymore, because part of the beauty of AI, is you get to learn by doing alongside other people. It’s changing every day. So instead of bringing in an expert who, anybody who says they’re an AI expert is lying.

35:57
Danny
Just FYI, I’ve seen some people posted about that in these principal groups and their posts suck. They’re like, f level sucks. I mean, the worst. I’m just thinking, oh, would you just stop posting, for the love of God.  I had to get that off my chest. They’re the education AI experts. I’m like, you just appeared out of nowhere. Nobody heard of you before. But anyways.

36:20
Hannah
And there’s no way to be an expert at this moment. It’s changing every single day. And so you can’t be an expert. You can be someone. I’ve spent thousands of hours working with these tools and building with these tools, building apps. I can’t code now so I can build apps. It’s just amazing. So I think magic happens when you get your hands dirty. You have someone who’s guiding you with a framework, but then you and your students just get to explore and see what is possible with this tool. That’s what gets kids excited. Long story, longer expedition AI is. I consider it a way for teachers and students to get excited together about the possibilities of turbocharging their skills with AI and to do it in a safe context, their classroom. And it doesn’t even have to be a separate class. It’s this supplemental fun program that you could add into writing or English or computer science or design or what, wherever you want to insert it. I’m really excited about that, Danny. It’s. Yeah, it’s coming soon, both.

37:27
Danny
And in 100% of your students. Imagine a campus where 100% of your students are authors. Is that a differentiator? I think it is. Steal that. I want to ask, like, what’s, what is your ask of the Ruckus Maker list? If it’s a principal leading to campus, they want to get involved or it’s a Ruckus Maker. They have kids and they want their kids to get involved. What’s the next step you want them to take?

37:52
Hannah
So there’s two approaches that you could take. One is if you want to just taste what this incredible potential is like with AI. We have a one day free AI sprint, like the book sprint that I mentioned, where you write a book in a day with AI. Bring your kids, bring your classrooms, whatever you can sign up for. I’m sure the link will be in the show notes. It’s just d’killIO/sprints. They’re free. We launch new ones all the time. There’s the book sprint. We’re going to have a merch sprint coming up where you design a fashion line. We’re going to have a music sprint.

38:32
Danny
I knew that.

38:33
Hannah
I knew that sounds pretty great. But We got music sprints, so you’ll be able to compose an album with AI. We have all these fun ways to use playgrounds to experiment with AI. And so I love to see Ruckus Makers there with your kids in your classroom and your own kids. It’s awesome. The second thing you could do is just go message me on LinkedIn. Hannah Grady Williams on LinkedIn. You’ll see me. It’s a lot of yellow, a lot of color on my page and I just love to hear from you because we’re working with the most innovative schools and school districts to help transform kids, to bring them The Skills they need for their futures. And we’re making this easily accessible through expedition AI, but also for your own kids.

39:23
Hannah
We have the school principal leaders, teachers who will send their students to impact and to create their own internship over the summer. It’s just incredible and the things that those kids are doing. So I’d love to hear from you and yeah, those are the two best ways to get in touch with me.

39:42
Danny
Great. We’ll get you linked up on LinkedIn, the link to sprint dispatch, everything we’ve been talking about. They’ll all be in the show notes for the Ruckus Maker listing. I have to ask, do you mind sharing maybe the top three to five AI sort of tools that you find interesting or most helpful right now?

39:58
Hannah
Oh gosh. I am a huge user of GPT premium specifically because of the GPT store access and building tools there for myself. I really am enjoying experimenting with Adobe Firefly. I still prefer the middle journey. Do you use either of those?

40:18
Danny
I was messing with mid journey a lot and creating a ton of pictures. So yes, I had played with that. I haven’t played with Adobe yet.

40:25
Hannah
I hope they’ll make it free at some point. And mid journey to me is by far the best image generation tool. I’ve also really enjoyed playing with Unreal Engine. So this would be for the game designer students and teachers interested in that, but they’re doing some just awesome work with video. Gosh, it’s going to slip my mind. But there’s a tool where you can create AI generated characters. We might have to link this in the video or in the show notes. There’s a guy I follow on YouTube who’s got some really cool unlocks with AI tools, but he basically puts three or four of them together to do voice synthesis and then creates a character that you can generate and it creates this AI generated talking character. And it’s awesome. It’s very human, realistic. It’s not a cartoon.

41:13
Hannah
Anyway, I’ll find that video and share it with you. It’s really cool.

41:16
Danny
Brilliant. So onto the last few questions to wrap up. But Hannah, if you could put one message around all school marquees for a single day, what would your message be?

41:27
Hannah
I needed to think about these before this is a big question.  I’ve seen one of the biggest challenges with students that I work with is believing in themselves, having just advocacy for themselves and confidence. So probably my marquee statement would be something like, something to that effect of having confidence in yourself and believing that anything is possible when you put your mind into it. As cheesy as that sounds. But that’s probably what I would want kids to hear.

42:03
Danny
Not cheesy at all. The interesting thing, adults, many of the Ruckus Makers that work with me, confidence is like a big thing that we work on and they’re leading schools. It’s a human challenge, but not cheesy. Walt Disney said, if you could dream it, you could do it. And look what he created.

42:19
Hannah
So there’s one other thing that I’d add, which is the greatest message my dad ever shared with me is people are just people. And I wish every student could hear that earlier in life, because if you go into life with that approach that people are just people, it doesn’t matter how important the person you meet is. I just met the governor of Michigan a couple weeks ago, who’s going to be running for president in a few years. People are just people. And if you treat them that way, then you’re going to go very far in life by just treating humans as humans.

42:52
Danny
Right on. If you’re building your dream school and you didn’t have any limitations in terms of resources, your only limitation was your ability to imagine what would be your three guiding principles building this dream school. Hannah.

43:06
Hannah
Okay, you caught me.  I’m not a very concise person, as you can probably tell at this point. Let me describe for you visually. I’ll break the rules a little bit.

43:15
Hannah
Visually, what my dream school would be. I would love to see a school, and I think there’s a couple models that could be pulled from where every day is an expedition, a competition, or a fun, gamified scenario that you get thrown into. Just a quick example. When I was in high school, the most incredible history teacher that I ever had did something called the Middle East Project. And in this project, all of us grouped up into teams, and we became different countries around the Middle east, and there was also America and all this. And we had to make political decisions, economic decisions, resource decisions, as our country. So you had a person who was a spokesperson, you had the president, you had the military leader, et cetera.

44:05
Hannah
And you all, as the semester unfolded, got to wrangle about this incredible discussion around we had military maps that we all built together just because we wanted to. We made food from those countries. It was just incredible. And I could see that my dream school is to have those types of projects, scenarios, challenges, competitions happening all the time. And that was the met, the mechanism for learning. So if you could pull three guiding principles out of that, then maybe ask GPT to do that.

44:37
Danny
It’s a good prompt to put in there, but you painted a picture of relevance and real learning. I appreciate that from you. We covered a lot of ground today, for sure. And of everything we discussed, what’s the one thing you want a Ruckus Maker to remember?

44:52
Hannah
I’d want a Ruckus Maker to remember that students are capable of so much more than any system curriculum any of us could possibly imagine. And if we can find that one part of them to unlock, if we can be that person who helps unlock that potential, then we’ve done our job. That’s our job as educators, as mentors, and as people who inspire kids, is to unlock that one bit of potential. And once they can do that and turbocharge that with AI, they’re gonna be unstoppable.

45:32
Danny
Thanks for listening to the Better leaders Better Schools podcast rock maker. How would you like to lead with confidence, swap exhaustion for energy, turn your critics into cheerleaders and so much more? The Ruckus Maker Mastermind is a world class leadership program designed for growth minded school leaders just like you. Go to betterleadersbetterschools.com/mastermind, learn more about our program and fill out the application. We’ll be in touch within 48 hours to talk about how we can help you be even more effective. And by the way, we have cohorts that are diverse and mixed up. We also have cohorts just for women in leadership and a BIPOC only cohort as well. When you’re ready to level up, go to betterleadersbetterschools.com mastermind and fill out the application. Thanks again for listening to the show. Bye for now. And go make a ruckus.