Ixchell Reyes (0:00): From the Alamo city to the cutting edge of edtech. In this episode, we are discussing Brent’s visit to ISTE Live 25 in San Antonio.

Ixchell Reyes (0:18): Welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. I’m Ixchell Reyes, English as a second or other language instructor and teacher trainer, and I’m here with Brent Warner, professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College, specializing in integrating ed tech and AI into language teaching. Brent is also a frequent speaker and TESOL blogger. He also recently launched not one, but two ESOL publications. Hey, Brent.

Brent Warner (0:53): Hey! Can we – I think after this episode, the promoting – well, I mean, we’ll talk about these things, but the big promotions are done and everything. It’s nice to be done. But yeah, how are you?

Ixchell Reyes (1:09): Pretty good. It’s July. It’s my birthday month.

Brent Warner (1:12): Happy birthday! So exciting. And what do you want for your birthday?

Ixchell Reyes (1:17): World peace.

Brent Warner (1:18): Good luck! Alright, so Ixchell, I was in your neck of the woods. Yeah, and so I made it down to San Antonio for the conference. It was ISTE Live 25, and now it’s ASCD. So I don’t know how many different ways to say the name of this conference, but it’s the big one. It’s the big, big one. So yeah, got a little chance to hang out and the book was launched. The book came through ISTE and all those things, so yeah, lots of fun.

Ixchell Reyes (2:06): Yeah, a few of us got a preview at the book launch, which, if you happen to miss it, that’s not a problem. You can catch it on YouTube, and we’ll link the video in the show notes.

Brent Warner (2:18): Yeah. And big thanks to everybody who came out to the launch. The people who came to watch it, of course, was great. And also the presenters – I mean, everybody had such a rad idea. So we had so much cool stuff going on. You helped out there. Sarah Davila helped out. Ed Campos, Kate Cull, Denise Lowe – I mean, everybody was great with short, little, quick, useful ways to use tech with language learners. And so even if you’re not interested in the book or in the toolkit, it still, I think, was really useful. So please feel free to check it out.

Ixchell Reyes (3:01): Okay, so San Antonio – I didn’t get to go this year. I went to Denver last year. But of course, things happen so quickly, especially with technology. And I’m curious, what were some noteworthy sessions? Were you in any sessions? What new tools did you find? What connections did you make? Tell us everything.

Brent Warner (3:25): I mean, there’s way too much to kind of say everything. So if you have never been to ISTE before, it is overwhelming. I mean, like, really – I’m likely to say it’s kind of too much. It is intense. And so if you are a person who kind of gets exhausted by a little overstimulation, it’s definitely going to exhaust you.

Ixchell Reyes (3:51): Like TESOL times five?

Brent Warner (3:55): Oh my God, way more than that. I mean, it’s massive. And then you walk into the exhibitors hall and it’s just like, “Oh!” – just lights everywhere, millions of screens and people all over the place. I mean, it is a massive, massive event. And so anyways, just kind of to be aware – it’s a big deal. It’s a big, big thing. And you kind of have to plan and have your decent walking shoes ready to go for everything. But yeah, so a few sessions. I’m not going to talk about all of them. I’ll talk about a handful. So one – I was invited, kind of last minute, to join a panel. It was “AI Meets the Science of Reading,” and that turned out to be a really great session. My part is fine, I guess, but actually, the co-presenters who were talking really shared a lot of interesting parts about real interesting ideas on how to improve reading – really what the science of it actually says – and then using AI to make those things happen. And so it was really great. And while I was talking to someone else, one of the other co-presenters, an audience member came up and said, “Thank you so much for this session. You guys filled my cup.” Or maybe she said, “Y’all filled my cup” – I’m not sure if that’s a Texas thing. But when you get that kind of feedback, it’s really nice because it’s like, “Oh, this is the part of the conversation that people are actually looking for.” And so that was really nice – about reading, about AI tools. And then another one – so one of the co-presenters on that was this woman named Kathleen Beachboard, and she does this whole thing around the science of hope. And so – I’m not sure, I don’t know, this is all new to me – but she was calling it “hopeology,” and she’s like, “People will dismiss it really quickly, but we actually need to talk about it.” And it was fascinating because she had her own second session that was really focused on this. It was called “Improve Motivation, Engagement and Achievement Using Hope Neuroscience.” And so that whole thing was just outstanding, because it was basically talking about the idea that hope is – scientifically speaking – it is a buildable skill. It’s not something that you either just have or don’t have. It’s something you can actually build with time and with effort. So people can learn to be more hopeful. We can also learn to kill people’s hope – learn the other way, to lose hope too, right? But it was very fascinating because she was also talking about the idea that it’s not just soft sciences – there’s actually gray matter in the brain that can grow or shrink depending on how hopeful you are, and they do all these – it’s just fascinating. So then she’s talking about the idea of applying that to your classes. And there’s research that shows if you rearrange your students, and if you have your seating charts where there are hopeful students together with less hopeful students, that they can boost each other’s growth. And it’ll improve attendance, it’ll improve GPAs or outcomes, all these things – like measurably, like up to 10% or something like that. So it was just fascinating. I really want to learn more about that. And she provided about 10 million pages of resources on everything as well.

Ixchell Reyes (7:23): So like that. We like that here at DIESOL.

Brent Warner (7:27): And she’s got a book too, so I’ll put the link to that book as well in there. But that was really, really interesting. And I enjoyed that session.

Ixchell Reyes (7:37): Alright, so let’s shift a little bit more toward AI, because that’s just what we’re inundated by. But were there any presentations or discussions specifically focused on AI’s role in ESOL instruction? I know that’s something that we’re always monitoring, right? So what was your experience there?

Brent Warner (7:56): There were a few. It was cool. So last time I went to ISTE, which was a few years ago, because I was out of the country last year when you went – so it was in New Orleans – I was kind of disappointed that there were so few multilingual learner stuff, right? And so this time it was a whole category, and as I looked through the sessions, I had to learn to be a little bit discerning, because it seems like maybe people just picked it as an option, saying, “Oh yeah, this could also apply to multilingual learners.” But there were more sessions that were about language learners and helping them out. In particular, one that I went to was Kelly – I think it’s Lechner – and Brittany Moreno, and they did one called “AI-Powered Language Dives.” Ixchell, are you familiar with language dives as a concept?

Ixchell Reyes (8:45): No, this is new to me.

Brent Warner (8:49): Yeah, I wasn’t exactly – I didn’t know this terminology either or exactly what it was or what it meant. But basically, language dives are when you take a single sentence and then you do a really deep academic dive on that sentence, right? So actually, what they were doing was they’re taking sentences from textbooks that their multilingual learners maybe were doing in a science class, or maybe were doing in something else, and then they would do a real academic breakdown of that single sentence, which takes quite a lot, because it’s like, “Okay, what are the key vocabulary words that you have to understand here? How are they working in relationship to each other? What’s the grammar?” And then it would also do like, “Let’s build some DOK” – okay, level one, level two, level three questions about this sentence, right? So do we understand what it means? Then the depth of knowledge, right? So they have those depth of knowledge levels where the first level is just kind of regurgitation of facts. Two is applications of these skills, right? And so it was fascinating. And basically, then they were saying, “Well, this is something that we used to like to do, but it just took so much time.” Because essentially, on a single sentence, you would be building out like two pages worth of activities, trying to learn the vocabulary and do all these things, and they’re like, “It just takes so much time.” But of course, with AI, if you just go in and feed it in and say, “Hey, here’s the sentence, help me build a sentence dive on this,” and then you can really play around with that and give a lot of the work to the students – the autonomy, the exploration, all these kinds of things. So I did like that. I thought it was really useful. So language dives – yeah, so worth checking out if you haven’t, and there’s resources out there online for that. And then one that I didn’t get to, but I wanted to – so I overslept, I guess it was Tuesday, because finally, the jet lag of the two-hour jet lag caught up with me on Monday night and Tuesday. So I was like – I woke up with jet lag. I mean, you know, you come to California, sometimes you come back, and it throws you off in a weird way. And so anyways, I missed this session, but Barbara Culla, who is, I guess, the mother of Richard Culatta, who’s the CEO of ISTE, she did this one called “Enhancing and Intensifying Early Literacy Instruction Through Digital Media.” I was like, I really wanted to see it. And I found out I had talked to her a little bit and she had this history of working with language learners and traveling around the world and all these different things. And so I was like, I really wanted to go see it. So this is one that I’m going to go back into. If you did go to ISTE, I think you should be able to go in and watch the recorded sessions. And I believe hers is a recorded session, so I’m going to check that out later.

Ixchell Reyes (11:50): Yeah, so we don’t file it under “things I wanted to do at ISTE but didn’t.”

Brent Warner (11:56): Yeah, that’s endless. There’s just so much going on.

Ixchell Reyes (12:02): And where did you notice any future trends at ISTE? I know that’s where I usually get all of my ideas for what might be happening. Anything that’s impacting, particularly ESOL, within the next three to five years? What were the discussions like in terms of policy, or how people were…?

Brent Warner (12:25): Well, policy is madness right now. I mean, obviously, I think if we’re looking at all the mandates coming out, whatever else it is – I don’t even know. It just needs a little breathing room, because it’s so messy with what’s going on. But the big thing that was going on with a lot of the AI stuff was – and I’m not going to say three to five years, I’m going to say six months to a year, six months or less – is that there was a lot of the organizations were really working on the agent-type conversation, where you build out a single-purpose little AI thing that does one thing that the students can then work with and interact with. We’ll talk about this a little bit later. But like Google was doing that with Gemini, Claude is doing that with Claude AI – or Anthropic, I guess, is the company – Microsoft is doing… I mean, basically every company is like, “Oh, we want to have these little places for people to go in and just focus in on the one thing at that time.” And so I think that’s going to be an area that continues to grow.

Ixchell Reyes (13:35): Cool. We’ll have to revisit and see what happens in six months.

Brent Warner (13:39): We’ll definitely be talking about that soon. Yeah, something to explore.

Ixchell Reyes (13:44): So I was not at ISTE and I was having big ISTE FOMO. So for other teachers who couldn’t attend, or maybe couldn’t afford it because it is pretty pricey, what could you tell them? Because I know that I feel like I’m left behind every time I miss a big event like this, and I learn a lot from you and from my colleagues who share, but what message could you give them?

Brent Warner (14:10): Yeah, I mean, I think if you’re really just interested in the content and picking up some ideas and things like that, there’s so much that people are offering online and sharing – on LinkedIn or on YouTube or wherever else it is that you go and get a little bit of your personal training. So on that side, I wouldn’t worry too much, because if you really want to chase it down, you can chase it down. The part that is unique, of course, is the in-person meeting with everybody, the opportunities to chat and talk to everyone. So a couple different things you can do. One, if you’re in the area, of course, you don’t have to get the full pass. You can get the exhibitors hall pass and go, if you just wanted to go into the exhibitors hall and check those things out and talk to people there, you could do a lot of socializing. And then there are a lot of these events also – these organizations, the companies that are in the vendor halls – then they have parties afterwards, right? And so you could theoretically kind of just show up, not really do sessions, but you could still have a good time and do a little vacation and mix in your own things, if you wanted to. But there’s a lot online as well. So I mean, yes, going is great, but going is also overwhelming, and so you just kind of have to balance out what you’re available for.

Ixchell Reyes (15:28): Yeah, and I think many of the presenters – you see little snippets of what they might be presenting right before ISTE, right? Because they want you to be aware. But post-ISTE, a lot of them will share even more snippets, so you can pick up on little activities or bite-sized PD, right? A lot of it goes on Instagram or on YouTube.

Brent Warner (15:52): Well, also, my guess is – if you go in and I think you can look at the session descriptions without even being enrolled to go, right? – my guess is that most of them, if you reached out to that teacher or presenter directly, they would probably share their slide deck with you. If you just said, “Hey, I wasn’t able to make it but I’m really interested,” most people that I know are very happy to share, as long as you catch them in the right moment. Sometimes I get these emails and I’m like, “Oh, I’m just not looking at it,” or I’m out and about, and then I happen to see it on my phone, and then I forget about it later. But anyways, I mean, there’s some reasons why it might not come through, but I would say 85 to 90% of people that you email to say, “Hey, could you share?” they would probably say yes.

Ixchell Reyes (16:37): Yeah. And I noticed a lot of people posing with your book on IG, on Instagram, and I got my own too. I have my own copy now. Thank you. But if teachers weren’t at ISTE, where could they get your new book and/or the toolkit?

Brent Warner (16:56): So the official launch and the bonuses are over at this point. But the book is still available, of course, at ISTE.org – you can go to the bookstore, you can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, I think anywhere that you wanted to get it. And the toolkit is available at TESOL.org/elt-toolkit. That is a digital resource, right? And so you have to log in to go access it, but yeah, both of them are always going to be available at ISTE.org or TESOL.org.

Ixchell Reyes (17:33): Alright, so Brent, do you have a most fun memory of ISTE or San Antonio or both?

Brent Warner (17:39): I mean, there are lots of fun little things that happen. I’m going to save it for my fun find. So let’s come back to that. Alright. So we do have a mailing list everybody. So if you would like to join it, you can go to DIESOL.org and get yourself signed up. Finally, with the launch, we’ve been a little bit more active about making sure that emails are coming out and things are happening. And so I think I’m going to try to be more proactive about making sure people know what’s going on. There is a lot happening and a lot to share. And so if you would like to get on the mailing list, please feel free to join us over at DIESOL.org.

Ixchell Reyes (18:20): Alright, Brent, so as you mentioned, the vendor hall is a whole experience in itself, and that’s one of my favorite places to go, but I often have to step back because it’s so overwhelming. Paint a picture, tell us about it.

Brent Warner (18:40): So it’s interesting, right? The vendor hall is basically a commercial, right? I mean, it’s like a commercial for all these things, but it’s totally fun, right? Like, there’s just interesting things to see, all sorts of little giveaway swag…

Ixchell Reyes (18:52): All the BrainPOP guy! You can go take a picture with the little BrainPOP guy, I saw…

Brent Warner (18:56): Someone walking – I’m sure she worked for them. But near the BrainPOP booth, she had on a denim jacket with a bedazzled BrainPOP guy on her jean jacket. It was so…

Ixchell Reyes (19:08): That’s awesome. Or the Kami – Kami has a cat, I think. Yeah, they’ve got things going on, the little mascots.

Brent Warner (19:15): Yeah. So vendor hall, huge. Here I will have my little gripe with the vendor hall, which was essentially, they kind of clustered all the major, major vendors together in the middle. And those are the ones that have the big open spaces, the walk-around experiences – massive things. They have seats out for everybody to go and watch…

Ixchell Reyes (19:41): It’s like a little workshop happening, yeah, right?

Brent Warner (19:45): Yeah. And so these vendors that probably pay quite a lot, I guess, to go do those things, are in the center. So that’s like Microsoft, Adobe, right? Some of Epson, some of these types of companies. But I didn’t like that layout because it essentially doesn’t encourage people to go to the outside. And so then it was like all the smaller vendors were wrapping around it. So it was almost like a castle type of… I mean, it really was kind of like that. And so then when you’re in the other sessions – or not sessions, but when you’re going to these smaller booths, there’s like nobody around. And I’m like, “Come on, you guys.” So what I was thinking is that they would do so much better to have a setup that’s kind of like a mall, right? Where when you go to a mall, there’s flagships on the ends and then spaced out throughout, and that encourages people to walk by and see what else is going on in the other places, right? But here it was all just like, “Okay, you’re definitely going to go check out Google and Microsoft and whatever,” right? But are you going to go check out… I talked to some of these people from the French delegation. It was way off to the side. And nobody had any – there’s no incentive to necessarily go and look at it, unless you’re just kind of doing your own exploring. So I didn’t love that layout. And I will say, I think they were aware of layout problems because the vendor halls are so big. So they did have these things where they would give you different types of maps, depending on what you’re interested in exploring. So they would give you a map that’s like, “Oh, I’m into literacy,” and it’s like, “Oh, here are the different vendors you might want to go check out,” or “I’m into hidden gems, and here are the ones that you might want to go check out.” But it’s still just kind of a map of all the places in different spots around. And so I would love to see a more thoughtful layout set up for the future.

Ixchell Reyes (21:47): Excellent. Did you do any presentations for any other vendors?

Brent Warner (21:53): I did. Yeah, I did for Mote. As you know, I’ve loved Mote all this time. And Mote was really kind – they had a smaller booth set up over there, and I did a couple talks for them, and they did some giveaways of the book and everything like that. But it was nice. So I talked, I shared a little bit there, had a few people coming through and checking those things out. So that was kind of cool to be able to talk with people in the hall and share a little bit. But Mote was the only one this time around. But a couple other ones that I did go check out – bigger vendors. I mean, you can’t really talk about this without saying, like, “Hey, Gemini,” right? I mean, it was everywhere. Google really has done this big explosion on kind of – they’re trying to now push more things into education, probably putting up competition with a lot of the companies who had been using the wraparound services on top of ChatGPT. But yeah, so Gemini. There’s a lot of cool stuff, and we will talk about this in the future. But if you go back and watch that launch party video and watch Sarah’s part, which was the first – she was the first presentation around using Gemini to kind of build these little mini apps that students can work with. They were doing a lot of that conversation inside of there. It’s like, “What can you do to customize? What can you do to build?” And it’s not just back and forth with text. It’s like, “Hey, build me flashcards.” And it’s like, “Boom, here you go. Here’s a bunch of flashcards.” And it’s all built in ways that are going to increase learning and cycle through in ways that help you understand. So I did talk to a couple of the Gemini people, and they’re really trying to make sure that learning standards and pedagogy is built into what they’re doing with those things. So that was kind of cool.

Ixchell Reyes (23:50): Microsoft – big one.

Brent Warner (23:51): So Microsoft is doing some of those same things. They’re doing lots of cool stuff. But the thing that I was actually most happy about is for quite a while they have had Reading Coach and Reading Progress and Speaking Coach, which are these things where students can read a passage and then it kind of tracks them and tracks their work, and kind of gives them feedback on those things. Those are tools that I’ve worked with a bit, and I’ve been excited about it, but Microsoft has always wanted to push those through Teams, right? It’s like, “Oh, it’s gotta be in Teams. It’s gotta be in…” It’s like, “Come on, you guys. Teams sucks,” right? Sorry, but… And so, but now they are doing it where it integrates into Canvas or into other LMS – they had Schoology. And so by the end of summer or mid-fall, they said they’re going to be ready to have all of those tied in. So that’ll be a big add for me. I even have a couple of activities in the book that talk about some of those. And so just being able to click a button and have it right in there should be good. And the last one, Adobe.

Ixchell Reyes (24:59): It’s like the three big ones, man. Google, Microsoft, Adobe.

Brent Warner (25:03): Yeah. And so Adobe is doing all this super cool stuff around creativity and AI stuff. And I actually am going to totally do a re-dive back into Adobe Express and Adobe for Education.

Ixchell Reyes (25:15): We have to. It’s changed so much I don’t even know what I can do with it anymore.

Brent Warner (25:20): Yeah. I was talking to a couple people who were like, “Okay, let me…” and they’re talking about recording. So there’s a whole podcast-ish thing that people are doing inside of there with very low onboarding. So just clicking to record and get going with everything. But then they have this really cool option where you could record yourself talking, and then you could click a button, and you could have it animate your voice on top of these characters. So you could be like… Actually I have a little sticker that they gave here, so it’s like a little pencil – like cartoon character pencil – but as soon as it puts your voice in it, then it starts moving its mouth to talk and match up with something. And then you can set the backgrounds and do all these kinds of things. So I’m like, “Okay, there’s a lot that language learners would really feel connected to this.” Because, one, they don’t necessarily have to show their face, but they could use their voice to talk about things, and then they could see themselves moving and being in part of these actions. So I really want to do some more exploration around Adobe.

Ixchell Reyes (26:20): Awesome. I’ll definitely have to do that in the future, for sure. All right, it is time for our fun finds. And mine is the F1 movie. I am not really a Brad Pitt fan, but I love cars, and I love racing, and it’s a two hour and 47 minute film. And on a work night, I went and I did not fall asleep. It’s so good. You know me – in movies, I tend to fall asleep for 10 minutes and wake up.

Brent Warner (26:53): Every time we talk about movies, you’re like, “What?” And there’s like…

Ixchell Reyes (26:57): So F1 movie is a good choice.

Brent Warner (26:59): Nice. Okay, cool. So mine is going to tie back to the favorite memory. You and I went to Buc-ee’s.

Ixchell Reyes (27:10): Like 11pm, yeah.

Brent Warner (27:14): Like 11pm after I landed. So we went down or up – I don’t know – or over to Buc-ee’s. If you don’t know what Buc-ee’s is, it’s a gas station. That’s what Buc-ee’s is, right? It’s like a 7-Eleven equivalent on a gas station, but it’s giant. And so if you’ve driven around other parts of the states, you’ve probably seen signs. It’s a beaver – they’re the beaver logo. And they’re… But it’s a gas station. So I don’t know why it’s rated number one in the United States.

Ixchell Reyes (27:51): Thank you very much. Number one gas station.

Brent Warner (27:55): Yeah, cleanest toilets. It was nice. It was clean. And the little cute Bucky the Beaver souvenirs were all over the place. But it was just kind of cool. I mean, it’s basically, in my thought, it was like almost like a mini Costco, where they’ve got all these things that’s like their branded versions of things out for sale for cheap. But then you kindly got me a – what was it? A brisket sandwich, or something like that.

Ixchell Reyes (28:26): Yeah, the brisket sandwich. They’ve got really good food – good gas station, freshly prepared food.

Brent Warner (28:34): Yeah, yeah. So it’s a culture that’s a little different, but I enjoyed it. And anyways, it was fun. So we went to Buc-ee’s, and I think that was a nice, totally non-related thing, but a Texas experience nonetheless.

Ixchell Reyes (28:52): Alright, for the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/122. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram at @DIESOLpod.

Brent Warner (29:04): You can find me out there on the socials at @BrentGWarner.

Ixchell Reyes (29:07): And you can find me mostly out there at @Ixy_Pixy, underscore Pixy. That’s I-X-Y, underscore P-I-X-Y. Thank you for listening.

Brent Warner (29:17): Thanks everybody. See you soon.