3 Opportunities to Get Hands-on with AI at SXSW EDU 2025 -- THE Journal

Professional Development

3 Opportunities to Get Hands-on with AI at SXSW EDU 2025

By Rhea Kelly
01/28/25

This March 3-6 in Austin, TX, the SXSW EDU Conference & Festival celebrates its 15th year of exploring the most critical issues in education and providing a forum for creativity, innovation, and expression. Topics for this year's panels, workshops, and conversations "range from ethical AI application and strengthening talent pipelines, to rising areas of interest such as non-traditional learning spaces and enhancing opportunities for neurodivergent students and educators," according to organizers.

Not surprisingly, among the multitude of trends and technologies on the agenda, the event features dozens of sessions focused on various aspects of artificial intelligence. In particular, three workshops offer educators a chance to experiment with AI tools and practices hands-on:

The AI Sandbox: Building Your Own Future of Learning
Led by Mike Yates, a senior product designer at Teach for America's The Reinvention Lab, this learning experience promises to help demystify AI, enable participants to build their AI tools to solve real problems, and demonstrate how to share those tools with the greater community.

Enough Talk! Let’s Play with AI
Learn how to utilize AI to "shift possibilities for instruction and engagement in real ways" in this rotation workshop facilitated by Jin-Soo Huh, a partner at The Learning Accelerator, Zachary Kennelly, high school teacher and AI pilot lead at DSST Public Schools, and Albert Kim, managing director of innovation at Leading Educators.

Build-a-Bot Workshop: Make Your Own AI to Make Sense of AI
In this workshop, designers and engineers from Stanford University will walk through conceptualizing, outlining, and creating conversation flows for an AI assistant. As Laura McBain, managing director of Stanford d.school, Reuben Thiessen, emerging technology lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, and Josh Weiss, director of digital learning solutions for the university, state in their session description, "You'll walk away with your own customized chatbot and the practical skills to create powerful, AI-driven learning experiences."

View the full schedule of SXSW EDU sessions and events at SXSWEDU.com.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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