AI Exchange: Empowering Educators for Tomorrow

Kick off the conference with opening remarks from the organizing team as we welcome participants, highlight the goals of AI Exchange, and provide an overview of the days ahead.

In this keynote, Ronit Levavi Morad, Senior Director and AI Literacy Lead at Google Research, will tackle one of the crucial design challenges of our time: how do we design AI that is truly in service of pedagogy? Grounded in Google’s pedagogical North Star—which prioritizes inspiring active learning, managing cognitive load, adapting to the learner, stimulating curiosity, and deepening metacognition—this session will reveal how learning science is being operationalized on the ground. Join us to explore a collaborative, responsible vision for a future where safe, equitable AI serves as an active, powerful partner for both educators and students.

This interactive knowledge exchange will bring together educators, researchers, and system leaders from Canada, Hong Kong, and the United States to share experiences, promising practices, and lessons learned as they navigate AI integration in K–12 education.

Through facilitated discussions and cross-cultural dialogue, participants will explore approaches to AI literacy, professional learning, policy development, and classroom implementation. Together, they will examine shared challenges, identify emerging opportunities, and exchange practical strategies for supporting responsible and meaningful AI use in teaching and learning.

Participants will leave with new perspectives, actionable ideas, and valuable connections to an international community working to prepare students and educators for an AI-enabled future.

Educators are already experimenting with AI in ways that are reshaping lesson planning, student projects, and everyday classroom learning. In this panel, teachers from different countries and subject areas will share how they’ve been using AI tools to support their work and open up new possibilities for student engagement and learning.

Panelists will bring examples from their classrooms from student work, planning artifacts, visuals, and short demonstrations, that show how AI is being used in real and tangible ways. The session will highlight small shifts and bigger changes in practice, and ideas that educators can take back and adapt to their own contexts.

Creating is one of the most human things we do—a way of expressing ourselves, making sense of ideas, and connecting with one another. Our creating, and what we learn from it, are deepened when supported by others, whether as guides, collaborators, audiences, or critics. Generative AI is radically reshaping what we can create and how, inviting timely questions about the social dimension of creating. In this session, we'll explore these questions through examples from my research and teaching—from kids creating interactive media in community with Scratch, to students using AI in self-directed projects, to a new course on vibe coding—accompanied by hands-on activities.

AI is being used in law, research, and industry, and each of these fields has had to make decisions about how to adopt it responsibly, where to apply it, and what risks to watch closely. This panel brings together perspectives from different fields to share what they’ve learned about working with AI in real-world contexts.

Panelists will discuss practical considerations such as privacy, fairness, regulation, bias, and decision-making, highlighting both successes and challenges that have emerged along the way. These insights will help surface important questions about how AI is being integrated and governed in different settings.

The conversation will then connect these lessons to K-12 education, exploring what educators and system leaders can take from other sectors as they think about responsible and meaningful AI adoption in schools.

As a dynamic component of the Al Exchange: Empowering Educators for Tomorrow conference, the SynergAI Hackathon is an intensive, two-hour design sprint. This event will unite educators, students, teachers, and researchers to collaboratively ideate and prototype the future of K-12 education. The core mission is to showcase how AI can serve as a powerful tool to personalize education, enhance critical thinking, and elevate the overall learning experience, rather than disrupting or replacing the essential human elements of teaching.

This session will examine research on how AI is affecting individuals and the economy and identify gaps in how we think about preparing the next generation to succeed, which requires rethinking the skills we teach students in school.  Evidence from both economic data, and education research will point the way forward.

Following the closing keynote, the team will share a few final reflections and next steps to bring the event to a close.