TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

As always, thank you for listening to the show and for sharing and downloading and rating and kindly reviewing. It is very much appreciated and I am quite grateful. So we’re all life long learners, but for some like me, our initial foundational methods and styles of learning seem like a lifetime ago. Many of us began our school age education with lots of paper, repetition, socratic recall methods, piles of solo homework, plenty of memorizing and cramming, and mostly low-tech. Fast forward with computers and rich visuals, digital learning devices and the internet, and now AI and augmented reality learning, well they’ve all taken recent generations to new collaborative and asynchronous teaching that certainly make my own schooling honestly seem like it happened a hundred years ago. And so given a) the incredibly high stakes of childhood education…and b) the prospective impact that technology has on student learning as the fertile soil from which our future is blossoming, it was really timely and terrific to catch up with my friend Advait Shinde. Advait is the co-founder and CEO of Go Guardian, an educational tech company that’s aiding K-12 students to engage in better learning experiences. Both Advait’s own experience as an engineer at Google, especially combining innovation and scale with launching products, and a blossoming passion for finding solutions in the education tech space led him to help launch and build GoGuardian as a platform where all stakeholders in a school’s ecosystem could organize and use the internet and technology in an open, collaborative, safe, and productive way. Now, as a pediatrician, and especially over the past 3-4 pandemic years, we’ve certainly seen the revolution of online learning engagement intersect heavily with concepts of well being, pace and strength of retained knowledge, and of course cost and task burden for students, teachers, parents, and community members alike, so this conversation with Advait to learn more about his work and the impact on youth is certainly quite top of mind for me. So we chatted about it all, but I first wanted to find out more about what Advait’s own learning experiences were like and how they perhaps informed him in launching GoGuardian…