AIxEd[Connect] MAY 8 & 9

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AIxEd[CONNECT]

Join 2,000+ educators, administrators, students, and innovators this May 8th and 9th for the premier gathering of the AI in the education community. Hear from leaders and discover how AI is transforming teaching, learning, and institutional excellence.

Registration is FREE FOR ALL- thanks to our sponsors!

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[CONNECT]

TRACKS

EXPERT
SESSIONS

AI in Education Focus
Deep-Dive Sessions

UPskilling
LAB

Back-to-Back Sessions on
AI Fundamentals

EXPO

The heart of AIxEd[Connect], where innovation meets implementation.

DEMO

[Demo Sessions]
Throughout Both Days

Kristi Girdharry & Erik Noyes

Community Before Compliance: Co-Learning in the Age of AI

We've seen institutions often defaulting to unclear rules and restrictions that can lead to confusion and even division. This session considers an alternative path: beginning with community. Drawing on the experience of launching an interdisciplinary AI initiative called "The Generator" at Babson College, we will explore how faculty leadership, student engagement, and institutional alignment can create durable, values-driven responses to AI. This session will offer attendees glimpses into initiatives we have taken on from a community-first perspective. Examples include an AI Teaching Training program, the development of new courses, research support, and community engagement initiatives. The session will include space for participant thought and dialogue about what community-building might look like in their own contexts with particular attention to the issue of resources.

Dan Serig

AI in the Doctoral Journey: How Students and Faculty Are Rethinking Research

This panel brings together doctoral students and faculty to examine how AI tools are reshaping the research process — from literature review and data analysis to writing and defense preparation. Anchored by findings from Dan Serig’s longitudinal study tracking doctoral students through the GenAI era, panelists will share firsthand accounts of integrating AI into their scholarly work, discuss the evolving expectations around originality and rigor, and explore what it means to develop researcher identity when AI is a constant collaborator. The session is designed for faculty, graduate program directors, and anyone guiding the next generation of researchers.

David McCool

Muzzy Lane Presents

Rania Ben Amor

AI Chatbots in the Classroom: Design, Deployment, and Governance

Generative AI chatbots are rapidly being adopted in educational environments, yet many instructors lack practical guidance on how to design, structure, and deploy them effectively for learning. This hands-on session provides a technical and implementation-focused approach to building classroom-ready chatbots using large language models (LLMs). Participants will learn how to design chatbot architectures that support structured interaction, create robust system prompts, and apply prompt engineering techniques that control output quality and pedagogical alignment.

Gamze Yilmaz

AI as Co-Intelligence: A Pedagogical Framework for Assignment Redesign

As AI rapidly enters the college classroom without adequate pedagogical guidance, instructors face a critical challenge: How to incorporate intentional AI use into student learning so that it complements rather than replaces students’ critical thinking. To address this challenge, this session will introduce the AI as co-intelligence framework, a pedagogical redesign approach that positions students as domain experts who must guide AI using dialogic prompting to complete a class project. Applicable across disciplines, the framework provides a model for AI-enhanced assignments by guiding students to build AI literacy, engage critically with course content, and reflect on their thinking processes. Attendees will leave with a concrete approach for designing assignments that make AI use purposeful and academically rigorous.

Pelin Bicen

SAIL in Action: Teaching First-Year Business Students AI Literacy Through a Real Client Challenge

This session will walk participants through the core components of effective chatbot design: defining task structures, implementing role-based prompting, designing multi-step interaction flows, and integrating feedback mechanisms that guide student responses. Concrete examples will demonstrate how chatbots can be used for simulations, guided practice, automated formative feedback, and adaptive learning activities.

Luke Hobson

Build, Design, Transform: A Hands-On Guide to Gen AI in Online Education

AI is reshaping higher education—but knowing where to start is half the battle. In this hands-on session, we'll cut through the noise and explore how generative AI can practically transform teaching, instructional design, and the student experience. Together, we'll dig into real-world learning strategies using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Notebook LM, etc. Whether you're just getting started or ready to push your practice further, you'll leave with practical takeaways, fresh ideas, and a clear picture of what's next—so you and your institution can stay ahead of the curve.

Peter Shea, Tiffany Kim, Lance Eaton, Julia Stanly Flores Steve Covello, Ruth Slotnick, Allan Glass

AI and the Future of Higher Education: A Panel Discussion

A panel of higher education professionals from varied roles will discuss how AI is reshaping teaching, learning, student support, administration, and workforce preparation across today’s colleges and universities.

Dan Be Kim

A Participatory Design Workshop Hosted By The Center For Digital Thriving At Harvard University

"THE AI TO Z WORKSHOP is a participatory design experience developed by the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In it, a diverse group of people come together to name the often-invisible ways AI is reshaping culture, relationships, and everyday human experience. Using simple materials (index cards, Sharpies, and conversation protocols), participants surface and coin terms for phenomena we're living through but don't yet have words for. In previous workshops, we’ve come up with provisional terms like Chatplomacy, Expectation Explosion, Human Signaling, Why Botherism.
The act of naming these things is an intervention in itself, making cultural shifts visible and giving us shared language to talk about them. But the process does something more than diagnose the present. By creating new language together, we begin to see what's changing with more clarity. And with that clarity comes the agency to choose how we relate to it, the hope that comes from knowing we're not alone, and the beginning of a shared vision for a future we actually want to move toward."

Asher Scott

Critical AI Literacy in Practice: A Case Study from NYC Public Schools

Most AI literacy frameworks stop at "understand the technology." This session argues that's not nearly enough, and presents a case study from New Visions for Public Schools to show what a fuller approach looks like. The framework introduces two missing dimensions: market literacy (who built this tool and how does their business model shape it?) and self-literacy (do you know your values well enough to notice when AI is shifting them?). Participants go through the same structured reflection exercise delivered to staff across New Visions and our school partners.

Kishore Aradhya

From Card Catalogs to AI Agents: Your Librarian Was the Original AI Architect

The AI industry is spending billions solving a problem librarians figured out generations ago: organizing knowledge so people can find what they need and trust what they find. Classification hierarchies, controlled vocabularies, disambiguation — these keep showing up under new names like "context engineering," "semantic modeling," and "knowledge graphs." This session connects those familiar principles to the technical architecture underneath modern AI: how large language models process context, how retrieval systems decide what's relevant, and why structured knowledge representation is the difference between AI you can trust and AI that just sounds right. You may never look at your school's librarian the same way again.

Rayna Freedman

Entering The Pitt: Equipping Elementary Classrooms with AI That Works

Step into The Pitt—where high-stakes decisions, quick thinking, and heart define every moment. In today’s elementary classrooms, educators face similar pressures: meeting diverse student needs, managing limited time, and staying current with fast-evolving technology. This session explores how AI can become a trusted partner in the chaos, not a complication.
Join Dr. Rayna Freedman as she shares practical, tested strategies for integrating AI tools that truly work in elementary settings. From lesson planning and differentiation to student engagement and formative assessment, you’ll discover how AI can lighten your workload while amplifying student voice and learning. You’ll leave with classroom-ready tools, examples of student work, and ideas for supporting your staff or grade-level team. Whether you’re an AI beginner or already experimenting, this session will equip you to enter The Pitt with confidence—and maybe even joy.

Mike Mendelson

From Curiosity to Capability: What It Means to Go All In on AI

This session is for people who are trying to figure out how seriously to take AI in their work. We’ll look at what it actually means to go “all in” by walking through two real domains: software development and education. Not hypotheticals—what top practitioners in these fields can actually do now because they’ve fully embraced AI. Then we’ll shift gears. Instead of just talking about it, we’ll run a short, structured, hands-on exercise that helps you feel how AI works and how to use it more effectively. By the end, you should have a much clearer sense of: - What “full adoption” looks like in practice - What you might be missing right now - Whether going deeper with AI is worth it for you

Kippy Smith, Akesha Horton, Yousuf Marvi, Anne Fensie

Real Educators Learning AI in Real-Time

Educators today are doing something unprecedented — learning a rapidly evolving, transformational set of skills in real time, on the job, without a hard-and-fast roadmap to follow. In this practitioner-led panel, K-12 educators, education leaders, and higher education faculty share how they are actively building AI fluency for a range of purposes. Panelists will reflect on their own learning process — what approaches have worked, and what hasn't — and draw on those individual experiences to surface insights about what it might take for schools and systems to build collective AI fluency at scale.

Cole Collins & Alex Laraia

Build It to Believe It: AI-Powered Rapid Prototyping for Educators

Cole Collins & Alex Laraia / Crafting Tomorrow

Build It to Believe It: AI-Powered Rapid Prototyping for Educators

What if turning a teaching idea into a student-ready interactive tool took minutes, not months? This hands-on workshop introduces educators to AI-powered rapid prototyping—a process that lets anyone, regardless of technical background, transform a teaching concept into a clickable, working prototype using freely available tools. No coding experience required.

Ola Ozernov-Palchik

Will AI Tutors Improve Learning or Make It Worse? What Schools and Innovators Should Consider

AI-powered tutoring tools are rapidly entering K to 12 classrooms, yet both schools and innovators are making high-stakes decisions with limited guidance on what actually drives impact. In this 60-minute session, three researchers studying how AI shapes learning in children will present key factors that influence the effectiveness of these technologies, followed by a panel discussion and Q and A. Dr. Ola Ozernov-Palchik will share emerging findings from studies of AI-supported tutoring in early literacy, including ongoing work comparing AI-based and human tutoring and examining how students’ and educators’ perceptions of AI may shape its effectiveness. Dr. Kathleen Courvieu will present research on how children evaluate and decide whether to trust AI systems, and how these perceptions influence their engagement and learning. Dr. Ying Xu will present findings from studies comparing children’s interactions with AI and human partners, highlighting differences in communication, engagement, and emotional expression, and what these differences may mean for learning.

Rachel Schechter

Navigating the Evidence Clearinghouses:

How Educators, Leaders, and Students Are Evaluating AI Tools Before They Buy
Are Evaluating AI Tools Before They Buy

Asher Scott

From Idea to App: A Hands-On Build Session for Educators Who Want to Make Things

Most AI sessions show you a finished product. This one walks you through building one. Using TimeSaveAI as a case study, the session traces the arc from real educator pain point to working AI tool. Then participants do it themselves, picking a problem from their own context, drafting a system prompt, and testing it live. No coding required, just a laptop and a problem worth solving.

Meg Riordan

Teaching in the Age of AI: Human-Centered Learning x High Quality Tech for the Future of Work

The conversation about AI in education often centers on tools and efficiency. This workshop shifts the focus to a deeper question: How can AI expand human potential and build durable skills that position young people for in-demand careers? Drawing on innovations at The Possible Zone, we will explore how AI can support competency-based learning and stronger teacher-tech-student collaboration. Participants will leave with concrete strategies for using AI to deepen learning.

[Speakers] - Expert Sessions

Kristi Girdharry

Babson College

Erik Noyes

Babson College

Pelin Bicen

Suffolk University

Luke Hobson

MIT

Ying Xu

Harvard GSE

Kathleen Courvieu

Boston University

Rachel Schechter

LXD Research

Gamze Yilmaz

UMass Boston

Asher Scott

New Visions for Public Schools

Dan Serig

Northeastern University

Chris Unger

Northeastern University

Rayna Freedman

Jordan/Jackson Elementary

Ola Ozernov-Palchik

Boston University / MIT

Rachel Slama

Cornell University

Format:

30-60 minute focused sessions
Extended Q&A and discussion
Opportunity to connect with presenters afterward
Sessions organized by educational level (K-12, higher ed, or both)

Full [Connect] Expert Sessions full agenda and schedules will be published in April 2026.

Space is limited - get your tickets now!

[Speakers] - UPskilling LAB

Dan Be Kim

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Meg Riordan

The Possible Zone

Rayna Freedman

Jordan /Jackson

Elementary

Kishore Aradhya

Frontdoor, Inc

Northeastern University

Asher Scott

New Visions for Public Schools

Cole Collins

Crafting Tomorrow

Alex Laraia

Crafting Tomorrow

Kippy Smith

Sideby.ai

Mike Mendelson

Sideby.ai

Format:

45 minute interactive sessions
Hands-on practice with real tools
Beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels clearly marked
Participants receive session resources and follow-up materials when possible

Full [Connect] UPskill LAB schedule will be published in April 2026. Space is limited.

[Connect] DEMO

[Demo Sessions]
Throughout Both Days

Live demonstrations and presentations from companies, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions showcasing their innovative approaches to AI in education.
Session Types:

Product launches and feature demonstrations
Case studies from successful implementations
Research findings and academic insights
Platform comparisons and decision frameworks
Future trends and emerging technologies

[Connect] EXPO

The heart of AIxEd[Connect], where innovation meets implementation. Explore exhibitor tables featuring:

AI-powered learning platforms and tools for classroom instruction
Administrative solutions for student services, enrollment, and operations
Assessment and analytics platforms for data-driven decision making
Content creation tools that leverage AI for curriculum development
Accessibility solutions making education more inclusive
Professional development platforms for educator upskilling
Student engagement tools and interactive learning technologies

What to expect

Hands-on product demonstrations
One-on-one conversations with solution providers
Side-by-side comparisons of different approaches
Personalized recommendations based on your specific needs
Live Q&A with product experts
Special offers and exclusive AIxEd event pricing

Pro Tip: The exhibition hall is open continuously, so you can explore between sessions at your own pace.

[

AIxEd[CONNECT]

]

[CONNECT]

TRACKS

EXPERT SESSIONS

AI in Education Focus Deep-Dive Sessions

UPskilling LAB

Back-to-Back Sessions on AI Fundamentals

EXPO

The heart of AIxEd[Connect], where innovation meets implementation.

DEMO

[Demo Sessions] Throughout Both Days

Kristi Girdharry & Erik Noyes

Dan Serig

David McCool

Rania Ben Amor

Gamze Yilmaz

Pelin Bicen

Luke Hobson

Peter Shea, Tiffany Kim, Lance Eaton, Julia Stanly Flores Steve Covello, Ruth Slotnick, Allan Glass

[Speakers] - Expert Sessions

Format:

[Speakers] - UPskilling LAB

Format:

[Connect] DEMO

[Demo Sessions] Throughout Both Days

[Connect] EXPO

The heart of AIxEd[Connect], where innovation meets implementation. Explore exhibitor tables featuring:

What to expect

EXPERT
SESSIONS

AI in Education Focus
Deep-Dive Sessions

UPskilling
LAB

Back-to-Back Sessions on
AI Fundamentals

[Demo Sessions]
Throughout Both Days

[Demo Sessions]
Throughout Both Days