For Matt Kuhn, Chief Technology Officer for Volusia County Schools in Florida, artificial intelligence has been around longer than most folks realize.
“The first AI was really Clippy way back in the day, right?” Kuhn says. “In the 90s when Clippy would jump on your screen and kind of annoy you a little bit, but it was gathering feedback from you and then differentiating what it told you next in terms of assisting you in learning how to use the program.”
Like Clippy (but dramatically less annoying), Kuhn has been active in shaping how AI is being used in his district, particularly by students.
“One of the things we've learned over the last couple of years is when we talk about using AI, we talk about it being a coach, not an answer giver, or we also say that it's an augmentation to your learning,” Kuhn says. “We want all of our AI to let students go through that healthy struggle but keep them right on the edge much like a video game does. You know, when a student loves a video game, it's because that video game has mastered that moment where the student feels like with just a little more effort, I could get to the next level. That's what we want AI to also do.”
Kuhn, a former small district teacher and principal before a stint as an author and edtech consultant, was also instrumental in Volusia’s early adoption of AI.
“We had one of the first policies around AI in the state of Florida in a school district, and I know it was one of the first because a lot of districts in Florida and even other states started contacting me and asking for a copy,” he says. “Our policy took a pretty open approach to allowing AI with some guardrails put in place so that people knew what the structure of it was and how far those boundaries could be pushed. But we wanted to make sure that our teachers and our students had the freedom to innovate within certain parameters.”
Kuhn has continued to lead AI efforts in his district, which include the creation of an AI professional development academy as well as the deployment of AI agents for district leaders to help them be more efficient and effective in their work.
For this and other efforts, Kuhn was recently recognized with a Tech & Learning Innovative Leader Award at the Tech & Learning pre-ISTE Leadership Summit in Orlando. He shares his district’s AI efforts for students, teachers, and staff.
AI Is A Human Endeavor
Volusia County Schools is a diverse district of 60,000 students and 8,000 employees, with about 115 in Kuhn’s IT division. And with that many involved, there was a lot of concern about how to approach AI.
“We had to alleviate their fears with training and other data to show them that AI could be a positive experience for their students,” Kuhn says. “There's still certainly people that are skeptical, but our data shows that it's being used more and more each year by our teachers and our students. And we're an A-rated district for the second year in a row by the state of Florida. So our academic scores and other indicators are going up despite the fact that our AI usage is also going up.”
To address concerns and support staff who were interested in using AI, the district created its AI Academy, a year-long program that provided ongoing professional development events rather than a one-time workshop. The academy offered differentiated learning paths for various roles, including clerical, educator, and administrative staff, and ultimately, was a hit with everyone.
“The academy kept getting so big that we kept having to change rooms to larger venues just to accommodate all of the people who wanted to go through it,” says Kuhn, who added that the experience needed to be in person. “We found that face-to-face was going to be best for this, where people had their computer in front of them and we could walk around and assist and get them collaborating. We also wanted people to realize that AI is also a human endeavor, that it's not just about technology.“
Vendor partners were also part of the program. “If something new was coming out in Copilot, for instance, we would arrange with our Microsoft customer support to teach us that latest and greatest thing so that we could roll that out right away,” Kuhn says.
The academy concluded with “Volusia Learns,” a week-long district conference during which participants received digital badges. “And now when you see their digital signature or the directory information on their school website, they're showing the badge they earned,” Kuhn says.
Agents On Board
Similar to many districts, trying to navigate and analyze data from numerous disparate sources was a growing obstacle for Volusia schools. Director of Educational Technology Melissa Carr challenged the IT team to make board policies, procedure manuals, student data, and other info that’s typically housed in different departments and silos easily accessible to all.
“In the old way of doing things you have to kind of ask everybody ‘Where do you find this? Who has the latest on this? Can they email it to me?’ says Kuhn. “She wanted it to be a quick thing where a principal could just type in some things and this stuff would appear.”
To solve that challenge, Kuhn and his team developed the Volusia County Leaders Agent, a custom AI agent using Copilot 365 that could access district and student data, board policies, and procedure manuals, all with specific naming conventions for easy indexing. They then encouraged district leaders to customize it.
“Essentially what we did is we taught them how to make their own agent,” says Kuhn. “We put together a set of instructions and we gave them the links to the SharePoint site and the URLs that we would be using, and we walked them through. It was only three pages with screenshots, so it's not like a really hard process to create an agent.”
Having the leaders make their own agents allowed them to be very specific in how they designed it, and also fostered ownership and buy-in.
“They're like, ‘Oh, I've got this agent I made,’” says Kuhn. “‘Look at this. It does this cool stuff for me.’ You know, so instead of just saying, ‘Here, use this that we gave you,’ they're proud of it."
Keeping ’Em Swimming
The district plans to continue offering PD opportunities around AI, although it may not be another full year of the AI Academy as there is limited time available for training and many implementations happening in any given year.
Nonetheless, Kuhn and his staff are identifying and training Digital Learning Teacher Leaders (DLTLs), who lead deep, ongoing training on the latest AI tools with staff members within their building, and also provide resources and support. This approach helps them try to keep up with the pace of AI’s evolution.
“It evolves so fast,” says Kuhn. “But the way we figure is if we at least get them in the pool and swimming, even if the temperature of the water changes a little bit, they'll be able to deal with it.”
Tools They Use
- Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory)
- Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Forms)
- Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory)
- ClassLink / VPortal (single sign-on & app catalog)
- Canvas (Learning Management System)
- Focus SIS (student information, grades, attendance, analytics)
- Focus ERP (HR, payroll, finance, purchasing, budget – 19 modules)
- IncidentIQ (help desk, work orders, asset management)
- Jamf (Apple device management)
- Cisco Meraki (network switching & wireless)
- Cisco Identity Services Engine (network access control)
- ContentKeeper (web filtering & student internet safety)
- Finalsite (district & school websites)
- BoardDocs (school board agendas & meetings)
- ParentSquare (family/school communications tied to SIS)
- Canva (instructional and staff content creation)
- IXL
- Achieve3000
- Big Ideas Math
- Khan Academy
- Desmos
- PhET
- BrainPOP
- Facilitron (facility scheduling & community use)
- Lightspeed Web and Classroom Filter
