Episode 31: The Future of AI in Education

The integration of technology in the classroom has transformed the educational landscape in many positive ways - especially when it comes to the use of AI tools. With the power and capability to help teachers save time, assess students’ comprehension of assignments, and even provide insights into mental health and wellness, it's getting harder to deny the positive impact these tools offer.

As a steadfast proponent of utilizing AI in education, Josh Knutson, the Vice President of New Product Innovation at Securly, joins Voices in Education to help demystify AI and discuss his ground-breaking new K-12 solution, Securly Discern.

Join Josh as he discusses how education technology has helped him to help thousands of schools and students all across the US, and how AI is changing the future of data-driven decision-making in education for everyone. Whether you're already sold on AI's benefits or are completely new to this game-changing technology, this is a conversation you cannot afford to miss!

Voices in Education is powered by Securly

Securly is your school’s all-in-one solution for student safety, wellness, and engagement. And now, with the introduction of Securly Discern, you can be more effective than every when it comes to supporting your school, staff, and students.

Securly Discern is provides AI-driven insights for K-12 school leaders that empower educators and staff with the data they need to help students thrive. Revolutionize your school and student support, and  make the most of your school’s data with K-12’s most powerful AI inference engine – no matter your resources.

Request a personalized demo today from Securly's team of experienced former educators.

Transcript

Adam Smith:

You're listening to the Voices in Education Podcast, powered by Securly. In our third season of the podcast, we're fine-tuning our focus and shining a spotlight where we believe it's needed most, on those who've dedicated their careers and lives to education. I'm Adam Smith, a former teacher, mental health advocate and your host of the Voices in Education Podcast. It's my great honor and pleasure to get to sit down with educators just like you to discuss why they chose a career in education and how they stay the course in the face of challenges. In hearing their stories, I hope you'll come away feeling refreshed, re-energized and reconnected to your own reasons for becoming an educator. Let's hear from the Voices in Education.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Voices in Education Podcast. I'm Adam Smith, your host for Voices in Education, and I can't wait to share these inspiring conversations with you all. Today, I am joined by a very special guest, whose innovative mind and desire to help students and teachers everywhere has led to some truly revolutionary tech support for wellness in the world of education.

My guest is Josh Knutson, a mental health clinician turned software and tech innovator, whose sole mission in life is to leave the world a little better than he found it. His steadfast resolution to help other humans took him from counseling in a single school community in San Diego to supporting thousands more with his ed tech wellness solution, Rhythm. Today, as the vice president of new product innovation at Securly, he's the mastermind behind Securly's revolutionary new AI solution, Discern, a product that is already being lauded as the first of its kind game changer for schools and educators everywhere.

Josh, welcome to the podcast. It's genuinely awesome to have this time with you today. How are you?

Josh Knutson:

I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me. I am back from a couple days in Kentucky, talking about this sort of stuff. It's nice to be back home. I'm a homebody, nowadays. It's nice to sleep in my own bed and wake up this morning, have my own coffee. Yeah, feeling good today.

Adam Smith:

Having your own coffee is something I can 100% get behind. You can get coffee anywhere, but having that blend that you like, having it the way you like, that's critical.

Josh Knutson:

That's right.

Adam Smith:

Hey, thank you for squeezing us in. I know you are a very busy human right now, especially with, as we say, this launch of Discern, which we will definitely get into.

But before all of that, I would like to let our listeners know a little bit more about you and your current role. Vice president of new product innovation, that certainly sounds very intriguing. It's a very cool title to have. Truthfully, I imagine many of our listeners don't really know what that includes. I myself do not really know what that includes, on a day-to-day. Would you mind just giving us a quick whistle stop tour, I suppose, of what your days look like, what a week in your role looks like, and I guess maybe your favorite parts of that role?

Josh Knutson:

Yeah, yeah. It's ever-changing. Earlier this year, it was a whole lot of just thinking, and brainstorming, and hacking together little proof-of-concepts and playing with ideas. What I think is just cool about this entire role is 9:00 AM is my dev standup. I talk to my engineers every day. Where are we at, what's going on with the actual technology? And then, a couple times a week, I also pop up and talk to licensed therapists in here that work for the company and say, "Okay, here's what we're doing on the tech side. We're about to launch this thing. Let's talk about the ethics of this. Let's talk about okay, we had this one technical problem we're trying to solve but I think it has a mental health tilt to it, can we get a consult with you guys and talk through this?"

The product manager, Brandon, that works with me on Discern and all the new products, fascinatingly has a Master's degree in psychology. Him and I do the same sort of jumping in and out of technical problem solving, engineering, technical solutions, AI deep dives, and then pop up and actually talk about, "Well, how does this impact wellbeing? How do we make sure that this does good and not harm?" It's a lot of that. It's a lot of conversations with engineers, it's a lot of conversations with mental health people. It's integrating that with the rest of the team. This is a product that's a pretty new, pretty different thing so it's a lot of education, and teaching people internally what this thing is and how it works, and why we do it. It's a lot of talking to other people, which frankly, I enjoy.

Yeah, a little bit of a meandering description of what my day-to-day responsibilities are. But that's what it looks like.

Adam Smith:

No, it sounds super intriguing. I think, when you talk about innovation, you mention there are a lot of, I guess problem solving, puzzle solving. How do you not only create this new thing that doesn't exist, but yeah, how do you then make sure it's ethical, make sure that you are considering the ins and outs of, I guess what the purpose of it is and what it actually does, and how you make those two marry together. When we do get to talk about Discern in a little while, I think there is just some excellent examples of that in practice, where there is an idea, something that was missing that didn't exist before, that you've now been able to innovate and create. I just think it's such an exciting time for wellness, I suppose, in that regard. I think this could be a game changer, as I mentioned in the intro.

Well, we'll get to that. Because actually, what I would love to do, this isn't where you've always been. It's not been your day-to-day all of your life. I think your journey to get here has been, again, just as interesting as the destination really. Again, your journey started in a different place, where you started to realize maybe what your mission or objective in life was. You began on a path that ... Yeah, you mentioned the word meandering a minute ago, I feel like your path was a fairly meandering one, where you were trying to figure out, "How do I accomplish my objective in the most complete way?"

Yeah, I would love to go back because I believe you started out really, actually, in the trenches, as many educators would call it, actually within schools. Take us back to those early years, and I suppose where you developed ... You said to me before we started recording that you just wanted to be able to help other humans, that was your real drive. Where did that come from, how did it all begin, and how did you begin this journey on your way to innovation?

Josh Knutson:

Honestly, you just articulated that very beautifully. I think I just had some insight about my own life, as you were describing that to me. I was like, "Yeah, this is. It's always been the same objective and journey, it just looks different."

I was one of these people, that I was probably 12 or 13, and you would ask me what I was going to do and I was like, "I'm going to go get a degree in counseling, and I'm going to be a therapist, and I'm probably going to have a private practice and that's going to be my life." I just knew it. Partially because, shout out, Mom, if you're watching this, I was doing it for my family as a kid. This defacto was always, with my nuclear family, holding the puzzle pieces together.

Adam Smith:

Right.

Josh Knutson:

My broader family, as we all do, has their challenges. I was always trying to hold the pieces together as a kid, and it just came naturally to me. I just liked doing it. I felt like it was fun to help. Yeah, that was the original idea. Went into mental health, and got the Master's degree, and I worked in Boston for a little bit. Well, my wife was freezing in Boston and we weren't ready to come back to Texas yet, so we went to San Diego. That's really where I did the majority of my post-graduate mental health practice. It was amazing. It was a life dream come true, to be able to do that work, and in some sense, basically had my own practice out there. It was a rural area so I was very isolated and it felt like that.

But, where education came in, I was in that rural area. I mostly did trauma work with adults. But again, on this meandering journey to help, I just started driving around the community and asking who needed help where. I went to the middle school and high school one day, and just said, "Hey, do you guys need help?" They were like, "There's not a counselor within 70 miles of here, of course we need help." I became the defacto school counselor at the middle school and high school in this community.

Adam Smith:

Okay.

Josh Knutson:

That's where I discovered that education was a place that I felt like you could have an impact because people were really all on the same page about the need. And really, everybody had that same desire.

Then, I think the next phase of it was just a recognition that the problems I was experiencing and working with in that small community were not isolated to that community, that they were nationwide, worldwide. Frankly, the scale of suffering that people are experiencing out there was just too hard for me to sit in the small community and know that millions of people were experiencing this. It was literally that burning, you could feel it in your chest, you've got to go do something about this on a bigger scale.

Yeah, left, literally had no idea what that was going to be. Left the job behind, packed everything in a PT Cruiser and drove it back to Texas. "I don't know what's going to happen here, but we'll figure out it, because I got to." My wife and I started a small daycare in our house, in our rental home that we had, just to keep the lights on. We taught social-emotional learning to zero to four-year-old kids back then. Also, taught them how to read and write.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

Well, not write necessarily, but you get the gist.

Adam Smith:

Scribble, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

Yeah, scribble, letters, numbers. The good stuff. Then yeah, met my co-founder Jake, and was just sitting in the back room of that daycare, coming up with ideas and trying to think about how to do this. That's where Rhythm was born, with me sitting in a bed in my back bedroom, with 12 toddlers running around my living room.

Adam Smith:

Nice, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

Where the idea came from. That was Rhythm, that was the company I started and ran for three years, that became a part of Securly in April '22. That one was really just about, again, recognizing the need and the excitement in education for doing something about student mental wellbeing and mental health. It took off.

Adam Smith:

Talk to us now a little bit, I suppose, about the journey from joining Securly, and then how defector Discern came to be. Then yeah, we'll dig into I guess what Discern is, what it does, and the future of it. Yeah, what was it like coming to Securly and how did you make that transition?

Josh Knutson:

Yeah. To be honest with you, it was amazing. Immediately, just awesome. The team here, the people here have been great. The technology, I was a startup, right? You got to remember, I was a counselor, I didn't know anything when I went into this thing. A front end, back end, what is all that? Right as I arrived, ChatGPT, or GPT3 launched to the world. I'd been aware of some of that stuff before, but when you saw it in action it was like, "Whoa."

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

The most capable tool ever for innovation drops at the exact same time that my job was innovation. It was beautiful. Then, when we started just digging into what was here. One of the things I always saw, even when we were going through the process of the acquisition and becoming a part of Securly, was just the dataset that Securly had available to them. I'm a fan of what they do with safety, and how they keep students safe with that dataset. You see the online activity and you have tools like Aware that can catch those things that you want to make sure students are not doing, and prevent them from harming students and catch that sort of stuff early on. But I'm always, as a clinician, one of the things we're taught is really to be strength based. To think about what are the positives you have available, too.

As I looked at that dataset I thought, "There's so much rich goodness in here too, to find." It was just something that was always on my mind. Also, I felt like same thing with Rhythm, where we were trying to amplify the student's voice and help people understand how the students, what students were doing. It was that same information exists here already, it's here, we just have to figure out how to find it.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

That's what it was. We were just literally, "How do we find this?" We were really thinking about just broader data, and dashboards, and doing some of that stuff. We said, "All right, what if we used generative AI to look at this?" Basically, our filter data, the Aware data that's sitting underneath the hood, what if we just told a generative AI to look at that and tell us if it found ... The first one we did, it was a strength. It was let's see if we can find these five strengths in this online activity. We built a little proof-of-concept and ran it, and it was like ... It worked! It was like, "Whoa! Okay." 20% of students have this strength, 50% this strength. It was like, oh my gosh.

Again, it was actually supposed to be, it was just how do we solve this one problem for a broader product? But then, literally when we saw it in action, all of us on the call were like, "This is the product, this is it." We don't need to do anything else, we need to just jump in on this. There were no toddlers running around the living room this time, but it was similar.

Adam Smith:

Were you still in your bed, even on the call?

Josh Knutson:

Maybe. No, I think I was actually standing, probably right here actually, in this exact spot.

Adam Smith:

Amazing, amazing.

Josh Knutson:

Yeah. It really was an accident, we just stumbled upon it and it just became immediately clear to everybody on the call when we saw it in action, what it was going to be capable of doing. Yeah, that's how it came to be in a nutshell.

Adam Smith:

Again, Discern. What is Discern? You've given us a little flavor of its inception there. But, what is Discern, what does it do? And I guess, why do you think this is such an important product for student wellness and for education, and all those things?

Josh Knutson:

What Discern is, it's pretty simple, really. We call it an inference engine or an insight engine. Literally, all we do ... Again, if you're using our product like Filter or Aware, what is happening in the background is we're logging the online activity in order to, in the filter case, prevent students from accessing things they shouldn't be accessing on a student or school device. In the Aware case, it's to see are they self-harm, suicide, is there anything like that going on?

Well, in the Discern case, it basically says let's use generative AI, which is much more broadly capable, to inference over that same data. Instead of where Aware is looking at one individual search, each individual search and saying, "Does this search or does this site, or whatever, does it meet these criteria?" What Discern can do is say, "Well, let's look at a month's worth of searches and let's ask any question we could ever imagine asking of that data." If we're looking at a given student or a student body, what are these students interested in? What are their passions? How often are they doing things that seem to be related to academic work on their computer versus not? What skills might they have? What competencies?

We got a whole risk world, we can look at a ton of different risk factors. If we want to talk about it from a school safety, we can measure school climate. What percentage of students are demonstrating some level of sense of belonging or lack of belonging?

Adam Smith:

Right.

Josh Knutson:

You can use CASEL's five core competencies and say what percentage of students have self-awareness, or responsible decision making is being demonstrated here.

Again, it's actually really fundamentally an incredibly simple product. Literally, in natural English, we are telling the AI system what to go look for and how we want it to look for that information. One of the things I think is really important about this, and why I think we are uniquely positioned to do this and do it really well, and shout out to Securly, to the leadership here ... One of the biggest things, they always said to me that Rhythm is even here is the product is great and all of that, but they wanted mental health expertise in this company.

Adam Smith:

Right, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

Because if we're going to do this sort of work, if we're going to be a wellness company, hire people who know it.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

Our ability to tell the system in English what we want it to go do is rooted in our ability to actually understand how to find this information and how to act. The prompts we use to tell the system are very complicated and sophisticated, and we spent three, four, five months, I talked about it earlier, where I'm jumping in and out of tech and mental health. That was huge. That was a time where most of what we were doing was really theoretical, hypothetical, writing those prompts and trying to think about how to do eliminate and address bias, and all the sort of various layers of how you do that, do it well and the ethics of it all.

Yeah, that's it. That's the fundamental how it works. Out the other side, obviously, when you go produce that data, literally you go in and you tell the system, "Hey, run school climate. Look at the last six months’ worth of data," submit. In an hour or so, it will come back to you with all the results, process all your ... If you're a big district, you're looking at 15 million online activities over six months, or something like that. Then, now you've got all your school climate data and it's done in an hour, and then you can come in and look at it. Well, we got some basic data vis stuff in there, where you can see the charts, and the graphs, and the normal stuff.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

But one of the coolest pieces of it is then again using AI, generative AI, is we have a data analyst assistant, where I can actually just come in, and in natural language, ask questions of the data and it will produce visualizations for me, on the fly.

One of my favorite examples was we have a MTSS framework, Multi-Tiered System of Support, which is where we're going to identify which students have no or low needs, which ones have medium needs, and which ones are critical needs. We can run that framework and identify which students have higher level needs. I was on with a customer, one of our beta customers who was using this. She said, "Well, which of these?" We looked at the MTSS 303 students, and there was 400 of them that were identified across the district. She said, "But which ones are academic versus emotional versus behavioral? How do I know?" I was like, "I don't know, let's ask."

I selected the analyst and said, "Which ones of these are [inaudible 00:20:45]?" In 10 seconds, it comes back with a pie chart that breaks down, because it can actually read not just the data that gets returned but the actual online activities, and the summaries, and everything it has access to the metadata around that. Yeah, it was able to break it down for us in a pie chart. Then she's like, "Can I get a list of the students that have the emotional needs so I can talk to my student services?" Yeah, "Can you get a list of those?" And off we go.

Yeah, that's one of the most exciting parts about it for me, is just giving people the ability to ... Because so much of this is you can generate data, but then disseminating it, and answering all the questions people have about it, and producing the bespoke reporting, and all that is such a hard thing to do. That's one of the pieces I'm most excited about, to be able to just ask those questions in real-time and get answers. And get visualizations, too.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

An actual pie chart.

Adam Smith:

I think excitement is the right word because I think anybody that has even dipped a toe into the world of AI, as we know it now ... Obviously, it's been around for a long time. But the AI we're talking about now, generative AI, that kind of thing, I think it is exciting but it can be quite scary, I think, for people because the understanding of how it works or what it's drawing from, or those sorts of things, can be quite scary. But what I love about this, what I love about Discern specifically, is that as you just said, the use for this is so valuable, both in time efficiency, because you are saving so much time not having to manually troll through this data. You've managed to isolate the data you need through that initial part of the search. Then, as you say, you can communicate with it to break it down even further into ways that are so valuable.

We were speaking before the podcast again, and you mentioned that the lack of resources and the time that those resources or those staff, or whatever, have to spend on tasks that now, this will eliminate and will give them back so much time. But not only that, it will give them accurate data that is actionable, that is so valuable to their students, and to their action plans, and to everything really. There's nothing that it can't be tailored to help with.

Josh Knutson:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

That is very exciting because so many of the guests that I have on this podcast will talk about lack of resource, lack of time, that they would love to be able to offer more help, if they could. They now kind of can because this takes away so much of that middle piece, where from the intro section where they know what they want to achieve, and then being able to actually achieve it. It just absolutely shrinks that timeframe.

You mentioned beta customers in that little bit there, that you've been speaking to them, you've been obviously working closely with them to help finalize the product and keep it progressing. What else has been said, what feedback have you had? In actual use cases, how has this performed?

Josh Knutson:

Yeah. It's performed shockingly well. First of all, the beta customers have been, beta people, shout out if you're listening to this, thank you all so much. It's been really, really useful. The leaps and bounds we've made in the last two months with just getting that feedback has been amazing. And also, if my team ever listens to this, shout out to y'all for moving so quickly on the feedback that I just kept hammering them with.

But look, I think one of the best examples of this, I think that I've seen, it was actually the very first customer we ever got on a call with and just ran the data alongside of them. We ran, it was a threat assessment. We found a student in there that we all looked at together, and it was aggregate we identified on our side, so they had to go figure out who the student was on their side. But we're like, "Man, there's something. This is serious." They were using our Aware tool and they were like, "This wasn't flagged in Aware. Why not?" We clicked into the underlying online activities in the system, and there was no individual that was of any concern.

Adam Smith:

Right.

Josh Knutson:

It was the pattern of the full month worth of searches that was able to be identified. It was literally call one, run one, we'd never used the system with real people before. It was like, "Oh my God, we got to hangup. We need to go check." It was crazy. You just had to see it in action immediately.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

That showed us that this was going to be pretty cool.

The other thing is the actual, GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. These AI systems, the generative AI, they're transformers is what they're called. But what I think a lot of people miss is these systems are optimally designed to do the tasks we're asking them to do.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

They're trained on the internet, so they understand the internet. They understand slang, they understand Reddit way better than a human does. And especially adults. These systems, if you are asking it to make inferences on online activity, well it is literally trained on online activity. It's extremely good at knowing what those are.

Also, the entire English language, all 200,000 or so words in English, it's embedded in this thing called a hyper sphere. It's like 512 dimensions, it's crazy. But it literally has the semantic meaning and relationships between words embedded in a space. It literally understands every single word in the English language, probably better than we do. It actually understands the relationships. It knows this language, it understands the language of the internet. This combination tells me this thing is going to be really, really good at this task.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

It's actually ideally designed to do a task like this, read natural language on the internet and produce inferences about that. To me, it's been really exciting to see the results that have come out. It is time saving, and that's a huge, huge, huge piece of why I think this is a value. But the thing that I'm seeing, as we deployed this out and people are actually using it, is it's really accurate. It's really good. It actually gives you really, really good information, and probably better information than you might be getting from the traditional surveys and assessments.

We're going to do some actual science in here and we're going to validate those results, and we're going to see how accurate, and effective, and efficacious this thing is over the long term. But just anecdotally, just early on, and just the way we understand how the technology actually works, it's like man, it's actually really good at what it's doing. If the point is, you're right, these educators, people in the education ecosystem, there's an emphasis on data.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

We need this information, we need this data to be able to make data-informed decisions. But there's this vicious cycle out there where gathering the data to ... Let's say we want to get data on burnout and understand how teachers, so we're going to deploy surveys into ... This is a double [inaudible 00:28:31], now you're contributing to my burnout by making me just take and deploy these surveys, to figure out what's going on with burnout. It's just a vicious cycle. All well-meaning, there's no one doing anything maliciously. We're all trying to come at the problem.

But I think this tool is about saying we can get that same data with absolutely no effort. Not only can we get that same data with very, very minimal effort, we might be able to get even better data with minimal effort. And, instead of needing to gather that data, process it, visualize it, and then answer questions about it for the next year from all the different people, we're just going to give them their own data analyst to ask the questions and get the data that they need automatically and continuously. Anyway, that's the whole meandering story of why I think it's valuable, and exciting, and some different ways.

Adam Smith:

If I could just piggyback off what you said, because I was having a conversation about AI, again there are a lot of detractors. There are a lot of people that just immediately hear those two letters and, "Well, no. Back off. You're going to steal my job, you're going to do this, that, and the other." But actually, what you've just pointed out here with Discern specifically, it will allow ... By removing that piece of work, the data crunching or visualization of the data, or whatever that might be, by removing that from a teacher's day-to-day responsibilities and work, the teacher can now go and do what the teacher does best, too.

Yeah, AI is better at this, quicker at this than the teacher is, but that means the teacher ... The teacher is not a specialist in data and analysis, so now a teacher can go and be a better teacher. They can go and put that time in. I think that speaks to what you were just talking about I think. That's where AI is so valuable because it can take those jobs that it is better at and quicker at, allowing us to focus and be better at the job that we originally signed up for probably, in that regard.

Josh Knutson:

Yeah. To your point, there is way more ... If you have 100% of your time available to you, well there are 250% of your time available worth of tasks for everyone in education. We can eliminate an entire thing that you have to do, an entire job so to speak, and that gets you from 250% of your time to 150. You're still needed for everything.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Knutson:

We're just getting it closer to you actually being above water instead of under is the exciting thing about this.

Adam Smith:

It is answering an age-old problem of how do I get the most of my data so that I can make the most impact as a teacher, as an educator, as a student services professional, as an IT professional, whatever role you might have within the school. It will allow you to do it better now. I think the future of Discern is an incredibly exciting one.

Just to wrap this up now, before we come to a close. What do you see as the future then, for Discern?

Josh Knutson:

Oh, gosh. Man, you want me to pull up my product roadmap, it's about a mile-and-a-half long. The future of Discern is one thing where I think we're going to pull in some other data sources. We were talking to a school district today that was talking about images. Can we look at images and say, "What's going on in the images themselves?" Is this an image that has a gun in it, for example? Is it a positive, negative? So looking at images, not just the text data is another thing that I think is really, really fascinating to play with. That literally was an idea, shout out to the people, the educators, always they got the good ideas. That happened an hour ago and it literally got added to the product roadmap. I was like, "That's brilliant, we got to do that."

Adam Smith:

Incredible.

Josh Knutson:

There's a lot of that. I think also just generally making that assistant smarter, better. But more broadly outside of Discern, I think the general roadmap for innovation here, you talk about an age-old question, an age-old problem, I hear it daily, which is can we understand how any of this data that any of these ed tech vendors have or provide to us, how they impact our students' performance, their grades, their attendance? Can we get that student information system and that other data, can we put them together and understand what's driving outcomes?

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

What I think we have a responsibility to our customers internally, to just put that all in the same place.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Josh Knutson:

The data that generated by all these systems, they don't need to be going to 15 different places. I think we can put them in one space. What Discern does is it allows us to really tell different stories. So when you look at, for instance school climate, we can run Discern to look at these core school climate variables. But then, we can pull in things like filter and say, "How many activities on filter were banned or blocked, versus positive activities?" Then, we can pull in things like Aware, "How many bullying incidents were identified?" Then, we can pull in things like Rhythm, "What's the general mental, emotional sentiment of that?" You pull all four of these together and you get this incredibly robust picture of your school's climate across all these different systems.

And then, internally we have a tool called Securly Synced, where we can pull in all that student information system data. Your roster data, the grades, attendance, pull all that together. Discern allows us to fill any gap in a data story. Then, when we pull all that together and we layer in grades, attendance, behavior, that's the next phase of innovation I think, for us to be able to really get down to what are the core drivers of positive and negative academic outcomes inside of education.

Adam Smith:

Right.

Josh Knutson:

With Discern, it allows us to look at any variable we can imagine and say, "Does this have an impact? Oh, I just thought of a new thing that might have an impact. Can we look at that and see if it correlates?" Yes, we can. I think when you start to pull it all together into a broader ecosystem is when Discern goes from, "Wow, this is really cool," to we can really understand the core drivers of what's moving us forward and what's holding us back in education.

Adam Smith:

I've used the word exciting far too often on this episode, but it is just so exciting. Everything you're saying, I think to any of our listeners out there who are in education, this has to be goosebumps. This is such an important step I think, in the right direction for these things. As you say, that future where you can really dig in even further and see it, again holistically, in this universal way. Yeah, I can't wait to see what sort of applications and what success stories we have from this as we move forwards.

But, Josh, we are going to have to wrap this up. Where can people find out more about Discern if they want to? If this has intrigued them, if this has given them a taste, where can they go?

Josh Knutson:

Go to securly.com and you'll see it, front and center. You can learn more about Discern there.

By the way, those of you especially early on, if you're interested in this and want to dive in, and you reach out to Securly, there's a very good chance that you will be seeing me walking you through this thing, as I'm spearheading the first demos and talking about this to people so that the broader team can understand how to work with it. Hopefully, I'll be seeing some of these listeners in real digital person sometime soon.

Adam Smith:

What a perfect way to close this. You have a captivating story, Josh, and you're a captivating speaker as well, so I'm sure anyone listening who does want to learn more will be very thrilled to be able to speak to you again.

That does bring us to the end of today's episode of the Voices in Education Podcast. But now, we would love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to leave a rating and a review to help other listeners like you find the podcast. We'd also love for you to continue this conversation over on our social channels. You can follow us on Twitter or X @Securly, over on YouTube and Instagram @Securlyinc, and on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/company/Securly. I look forward to seeing you all there. Until next time, don't forget that though the work that you're doing every single day might be for the success and wellness of students everywhere, your own wellness is just as critical. Taking the time for yourself and for your own needs is just as vital, so don't be ashamed to reach out if you need support. Whether that's your friends, your family, your colleagues, or professionals, there are people out there that care just as much as you care about your kids. Take care of yourselves and we'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning in to the Voices in Education Podcast, powered by Securly. For more episodes and additional details about the podcast, visit www.securly.com/podcast.