What an incredible few days at EduTech Sydney 2025. The conference was a great showcase of the tools shaping the future of learning, but of more value were the people I was able to interact with. Rather than a minute-by-minute recap, I want to share the big ideas and the practical tools I’m going to explore.
Sal Khan’s Vision: AI as the Ultimate Teaching Assistant
To open the conference, Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, delivered a powerful vision for the future of education—a future where Artificial Intelligence serves not to replace educators, but to empower them, finally solving the age-old challenge of personalised learning for every student.
His message was clear: the true potential of AI in the classroom is to augment the irreplaceable role of the human teacher, acting as a tireless assistant that frees up educators to focus on what they do best—inspiring, motivating, and connecting with their students.
Here are the key themes from his address:
The Human Core of Learning
Khan’s journey began not with technology, but with a human connection: tutoring his cousins. He quickly learned that pre-recorded videos could handle the explanations, which allowed his live sessions to become deeper and more focused on higher-order thinking. This led to a foundational insight: his most important role wasn’t just to explain concepts, but to motivate his cousins and hold them accountable. This principle remains the bedrock of Khan Academy’s philosophy.
Solving an Old Problem with New Tools
For centuries, the gold standard of education was the personal tutor—an “Aristotle for Alexander the Great” who could tailor learning to an individual’s specific needs. However, this was never scalable. The Industrial Revolution gave us the “factory model” of education, grouping students by age and moving them along at a set pace. While this dramatically increased literacy rates, it often left students with knowledge gaps.
Khan argues that today’s AI-driven economy demands we move beyond this model. For the last 15 years, Khan Academy has worked to use technology to approximate that personal tutor for everyone. With the arrival of advanced AI, Khan believes we are closer than ever to achieving that goal.
AI with Purpose: Building Guardrails for the Classroom
When OpenAI first demonstrated what would become GPT-4, Khan’s team was one of the first to see its potential. They immediately confronted the same risks that schools grapple with today: cheating, accuracy, and oversight. Instead of banning the technology, they decided to turn these risks into features. The result is Khanmigo, an AI tool designed with pedagogy at its core:
- It’s Socratic: It nudges students to find the answer themselves rather than giving it away.
- It’s Transparent: It provides teachers with full oversight of student interactions.
- It Puts the Teacher in the Loop: The system is built around the idea that the educator is the “conductor of the symphony” in the classroom.
Empowering the Educator is the End Goal
Perhaps the most compelling theme was the focus on AI as a tool to reclaim teachers’ time and energy. Khan noted that educators are often asked to adopt new tools that just add to their workload. Generative AI is different. Teachers using these new tools are reporting saving five to ten hours per week on tasks like lesson planning and writing progress reports. This recovered time is crucial, allowing educators to be more sustainable in their careers and, most importantly, giving them more energy to dedicate to their students.
A Call to Action: Lean In
We are living in a moment that feels like science fiction. AI is advancing at a dizzying pace, bringing both incredible opportunities and legitimate fears about job dislocation, fraud, and intellectual property. Khan’s closing message was a call to action: technology is fundamentally neutral. If good people don’t engage with it, a negative outcome is all but ensured. He urged everyone in education to lean in and actively shape this technology, ensuring it is used for the most positive purpose imaginable: to enhance human intelligence, purpose, and meaning for generations to come.
Authentic Assessment in the Age of AI
A central theme coming up in session after session was the critical need for authentic assessment. This wasn’t just a buzzword; it was a foundational concept that speaker after speaker returned to, urging a collective rethink of how we measure student success as we navigate the complexities of AI in education.
Across a number of workshops, a clear definition emerged. At its core, authentic assessment is about bridging the gap between the classroom and the real world. The consensus was that we need to move beyond traditional testing and create assessments that are inherently relevant and practical. These are tasks that are complex, demand higher-order thinking, and mirror the multifaceted challenges students will face in their future careers. The focus is shifting from what students can recall to how they can apply their knowledge in dynamic, real-world situations.
A powerful question resonated across several talks:
“What if we stopped assessing for the past?”
This idea challenges the long-held view of assessment as a restrictive, backward-looking tool. Instead, the presenters championed a new vision: assessment as a forward-looking catalyst for deeper, more engaged learning.
However, the discussions were also grounded in pragmatism. A consistent message was that authentic assessment is not a panacea for the challenges presented by AI, nor is it a magical solution for academic integrity. Rather than being a specific type of task, it’s a guiding principle that should inform the design of all our assessments. Experts emphasised that authenticity exists on a continuum; even small modifications to make an existing assessment more application-focused are valuable. The collective call to action was clear: it’s time to design assessments that are not just an evaluation of learning, but an integral and meaningful part of the learning journey itself.
Climbing ‘Feedback Mountain’ with AI
A session that resonated with me was from Ryan Elwell in the Google Teaching Theatre. He talked about the relentless challenge of providing timely and effective feedback, framing this as “climbing feedback mountain”—a powerful metaphor for a task that can feel overwhelming. The session offered a practical framework for making the climb manageable, not by working harder, but by working smarter with the help of AI.
The core of the discussion centered on three simple but profound questions that every student needs answered:
- Where am I going? (Clarifying the goals)
- How am I going? (Tracking progress towards those goals)
- Where to next? (Identifying the next steps for improvement)
This is where AI is becoming a game-changer. The workshop highlighted how AI tools can be leveraged to help students answer these questions with greater efficiency. For instance, Ryan showed how a tool like Google Vids could be used to create a short, personalised feedback video, allowing a teacher to talk through a student’s work far more quickly than typing out lengthy comments.
Crucially, this frees up the teacher to focus on the “Where to next?” conversation. By automating the more routine aspects of feedback, educators can dedicate their valuable time and expertise to the human elements of teaching that AI cannot replicate: the ability to inspire, guide, and connect. The ultimate goal isn’t to replace the teacher with technology, but to use technology to empower them, making the climb up feedback mountain less about administrative burden and more about meaningful, forward-focused dialogue.
Teaching Entrepreneurship with UTS Startups
One of the most practical sessions was a deep dive into the UTS Startups @ School program, presented by Dr. Keith Heggart from the University of Technology Sydney. This initiative is designed to demystify entrepreneurship for secondary students and equip them with tangible, real-world digital business skills.
The program is structured as a series of hands-on “Missions.” This isn’t about writing business plans in a vacuum; it’s about doing. Students get their hands dirty by building actual micro-businesses and digital assets on the very platforms shaping today’s economy. The learning journey is incredibly practical:
- It kicks off by creating a print-on-demand store on Etsy.
- From there, they learn to create and sell low and medium-content books using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
- Students then explore modern content creation by building “faceless” YouTube channels.
- The course covers dropshipping, first by learning to generate traffic organically through TikTok, and then by scaling with Facebook ads.
- Finally, the program culminates in crucial lessons on due diligence for digital assets and a period of reflection to plan their next steps.
What’s so impressive about this initiative is its focus on action over theory. It provides students with a low-cost, high-impact pathway to understand market validation and digital marketing, turning the idea of being an entrepreneur from an abstract concept into a tangible reality.
A Treasure Trove of Resources from EduTech 2025
The sessions at EduTech Sydney 2025 were brimming with fantastic tools, projects, and resources. To help you explore some of the exciting ideas discussed, I’ve compiled a list of the key resources I came across.
AI & Productivity Tools
A major focus of the conference was leveraging AI to enhance learning and streamline teacher workflows. Here are some of the standout tools:
- Google Gemini: At the heart of many discussions, Gemini was showcased as a versatile assistant for both teachers and students. Its capabilities with Canvas include everything from creating flashcards, quizzes, and timelines to generating complex simulations and drag-and-drop activities for interactive learning. A premium subscription (Gemini Advanced) unlocks more powerful features.
- NotebookLM: This AI-powered research and note-taking tool was a highlight. Grounded in your own source materials (like class readings, reports, or research articles), it can help you discover new connections, generate summaries, create an FAQ, or even compare documents, such as analysing the changes between old and new curriculum documents.
- LearnLM: This is a family of models from Google, fine-tuned specifically for learning. It’s the technology that powers many of the educational experiences within tools like Gemini, designed to help students by providing guidance and feedback that aligns with pedagogical best practices.
- Google Labs: This is the home for many of Google’s early-stage experiments. It’s a great place to explore the future of technology and see what new tools are on the horizon. Many of the creative tools below originated here.
Creative & Design Resources
From generating images to creating engaging presentations, these tools can add a creative spark to your educational content.
- Flow: An experimental AI filmmaking tool from Google Labs. It allows storytellers to generate and edit video clips using text prompts, leveraging advanced models like Veo.
- Veo: While integrated into Flow, Veo is Google’s powerful generative video model. It can create high-quality, short video clips from text and image prompts, a fascinating tool for digital storytelling projects.
- Whisk: A generative tool for animate still images.
- GenType: An AI experiment that generates unique typographic designs, offering endless creative possibilities for classroom projects, presentations, and visual communication.
- Stickity for Slides: A fantastic Google Slides add-on that allows you to seamlessly integrate digital stickers and icons. This is perfect for increasing comprehension, providing visual cues for tasks, and making slides more engaging for all learners.
- Zilla Slab Highlight: The specific font mentioned for making text pop on slides with background images. It’s a clean, modern slab serif available on Google Fonts.
Educational & Maker Projects
These resources provide inspiration and practical tools for hands-on learning and understanding the impact of technology.
- Day of AI Australia: A fantastic, free program that provides curriculum and hands-on activities to introduce K-10 students to artificial intelligence and how it works.
- Precious Plastic: An open-source project providing blueprints and machines for recycling plastic. This is an incredible resource for STEM and sustainability projects, allowing students to design and create with recycled materials.
- Strandbeest: The official home of artist Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures. These “beach animals” are a breathtaking example of the intersection of art, engineering, and physics, perfect for inspiring students in design and technology.
Experiments with Google: A collection of inspiring projects that blend creativity and technology. Here you can find fun experiments like Gen Chess, which uses AI to create unique, playable chess sets.
Conclusion
The message ringing through every session was clear: the future of education lies in the thoughtful partnership between human pedagogy and artificial intelligence. From rethinking assessment to be more authentic, to leveraging AI to make daunting tasks like feedback more manageable, the focus was never on technology as a replacement, but as an enabler. It’s about using these incredible new tools to free up our time for what truly matters—inspiring, guiding, and connecting with our students. The resources and ideas shared were a powerful reminder that we are at the beginning of a truly transformative era in education.
A note on creation: In the spirit of embracing the very tools discussed at the conference, this blog post was crafted with the assistance of Google Gemini. The core ideas, insights, and resources were gathered from my rough notes taken during the sessions, and Gemini helped to structure, refine, and articulate them into this final piece.
