What’s been the most powerful learning experience that you've had? Dr. Margaret Honey has helped build remarkable learning experiences–starting with the television show, The Voyage of the Mimi, through her work at the New York Hall of Sciences and most recently with the Scratch Foundation. Through it all, she’s held fast to several principles, starting with: Never fake it. And center activity around children’s curiosity not around rubrics or assessments. In this episode, Margaret shares with Jeremy and Betsy the triumphs, challenges and hard-won lessons learned of building memorable experiential learning environments–along with what changes in an AI-saturated world. (And, we also learn why actor Ben Affleck knows so much about humpback whales!)

LEARN MORE!

• The Voyage of the Mimi (with Ben Affleck) was a 13-episode television program created in the mid 1980s. (Here’s episode 1.) A crew of the ship, Mimi, explored the ocean, to carry out a census of humpback whales. In The Second Voyage of the Mimi, archaeologists searched for a lost Mayan city.

• Here’s a video short on the Connected Worlds exhibit at the New York Hall of Science. (Better: Check out the exhibit at the museum!)

• Scratch, a free, nonprofit coding community and environment for children, is supported by the Scratch Foundation. (Start here if you’re considering a family membership; here if you’re an educator.)

• Xperiential, a collaboration between Pixar and Khan Academy, is a project-based learning approach aimed at inspiring students to explore careers through storytelling and design.

• Jeanne Bamberger’s 1995 book, The Mind behind the Musical Ear, explores how children develop “musical intelligence.”

• Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways, by Sarah Stein Greenberg (2021) includes both stories and innovative exercises to build creative leadership.

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History is chock full of new technologies developed with good intentions. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that doing research and designing products has layers of complexity. It isn’t enough to just build tech for others – we have to build it in close partnership and community with those who will use it. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy talk with Dr. Elvira Salazar, a life-long educator, passionate devotee of STEM education and NASA, and now the Director of Online Learning & Technology for Latinos for Education. They’ll talk about what the AI community gets right – and gets wrong – in the rush to build the next great thing.

Learn more!

• To explore more of Dr. Salazar’s work, a great place to start is the Latinos for Education website.

• She also contributed this piece, “Learnings from the Front Lines on Redefining Leadership for the Age of AI,” to EdSurge.

• Dr. Salazar described the work of CLEAR, or the Center for Leadership Equity and Research. You can explore the groups work as well as its AI initiative at Clearvoz.com

• This story, “AI Leaves Some Students Lost in Translation,” explores in more detail some of the promise and challenges of AI development for the Latino community. (You can also try out the Playlab app developed by the group, “Elevating your Speaking,” a tool that parents can use to support their students’ language development skills, here.)

• Stanford University professor, Dr. Sanmi Koyejo, discusses his white paper about how AI is leaving non-English speakers behind here. The full report from Dr. Koyejo and his team is here: “Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts.”

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AI arrived in classrooms at the same time it arrived in businesses and homes. And while it may speed up tasks at work, teachers, students and parents are still in the early and often painful stages of figuring out how or even if it will make learning “more efficient.” In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy talk with Dr. Justin Reich, an MIT professor and researcher, and cohost of The Homework Machine podcast. Reich’s been studying Chat GPT's role in school since November 2020. Reich and his team listen closely to teachers through their research. He worries that AI is already slowing down learning. “I think we’re going to find that there are millions and millions fewer minutes of homework being done at all secondary grade levels this year,” he warns. Join us for the full conversation.

Learn more!

• Get started by jumping into the podcast that Justin cohosts called The Homework Machine. It explores the art and craft of teaching through interviews with more than 120 teachers and students from across a wide variety of subjects.

• Prefer to read about AI? Browse this downloadable (and free) PDF from Reich and his colleagues called: A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed.

• Justin’s past books are well worth exploring, too. He wrote Iterate: The Secret To Innovation In Schools (published in 2023) and Failure To Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education (published in 2020).

• Want to understand more about how we teach and learn? Check out the National Tutoring Observatory, a research program aimed at improving teaching and learning at scale by studying great tutors.

• Also seminal: the work of cognitive and learning scientist, Michelene (“Micky”) T.H. Chi. She has built a rich collection of research around how students learn, study and solve problems.

• Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg (2023) explores what we should trust online.

• And when it’s all too much, try a little fiction: Babel - An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang (2022), is a historical fantasy, a sort of Harry Potter meets linguists in a complex world.

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Do you trust AI? And if you don’t, what should you do? That’s the heart of this wide-ranging conversation between leading education policy advocate, Erin Mote, and Future Fluent’s Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran. Interacting with AI, Erin says, is "like conversing with a brilliant person you cannot trust." But Erin doesn’t stop there. She’s got a treasure trove of ideas of how to build bridges over this gap, from more robust government policy, to checklists for school leaders before they adopt AI and, crucially, for parents who want to prepare their kids to live in this complex new world. Advocate, educator, Mom: Erin brings a rich perspective to the question of how are we going to learn to live with AI. Join us.

More to check out!

Erin Mote shares loads of resources on LinkedIn. In addition, here are some of the resources that we talked about during this episode of Future Fluent.

Author and commentator April Rinne writes about how to navigate change. Check out her book, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change (as well as some astonishing pictures of the scores of places she has done handstands!)

The Last Invention podcast goes through the 70-year history of artificial intelligence, including competing visions of utopia and apocalypse.

Get all the details about EdSafe AI, including its latest white paper, S.A.F.E. by Design: Policy, Research, and Practice Recommendations for AI Companions in Education

Super handy for school leaders: This checklist (created by EdSafe) of considerations around data governance and the ethical implementation of AI. It’s called: AI in Education: Negotiating for our Future - A Checklist for K12 Districts, Dec. 2025.

The AI Civil Rights Act of 2025 was introduced in the US Congress in December 2025 and is still in committee. A bill in the Florida state Senate mirrors the approach of the congressional bill and is moving faster. It aims to create strict, state-level guardrails for AI, directly challenging federal efforts to standardize regulations and positioning Florida as a leading, skeptical regulator of the technology.

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