What happens when entry-level jobs level up, and whose job is it to close the gap?
On this episode of Trending in Education, host Mike Palmer sits down with Lydia Logan, Vice President of Global Education and Workforce Development at IBM, to explore what Gen Z needs on day one of their first job and how higher ed and industry can get them there.
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Should kids still learn to code when a one-sentence prompt can produce 4,000 lines of it? Philip Colligan’s answer is yes, and he thinks the question matters more now than it did three years ago.
On this episode of Trending in Ed, Mike Palmer sits down with Philip Colligan, CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Philip joined as employee number seven in 2015, after a career in UK government and at Nesta, where his team was asking why schools weren’t teaching computer science. He sets the record straight on an origin story most people have backwards: the charity came first. A group of Cambridge engineers worried about falling computer science applications set out to build a cheap, credit-card-sized computer and hoped to sell maybe 20,000. They’ve sold more than 80 million, and the commercial company the foundation built listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024.
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Is edtech really just YouTube and i-Ready? Or has the backlash flattened a sprawling, layered industry into a couple of easy villains?
Mike Palmer welcomes back Trending in Ed All-Star Tony Wan, Head of Platform at Reach Capital, an early-stage venture firm investing across learning, health, and work. Before Reach, Tony co-founded EdSurge and served as its managing editor, and before that he built a math game startup that he figures he could now one-shot with AI.
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What if banning technology in schools is just like scratching a sunburn: it feels good now, and it comes back worse later?
Mike Palmer sits down with Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD, the newly combined organization with ISTE now called the International Society for Transforming Education. Richard started out as a high school Spanish teacher and a teacher educator, then worked on education policy in the U.S. Senate, at the U.S. Department of Education, and at the state level before joining ISTE nearly a decade ago. He’s also the author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World.
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When AI can tutor anyone, anytime, why are parents still choosing human tutors?
Live from EdTech Week 2026 at Teachers College’s Digital Futures Institute, Mike Palmer sits down with Eugene Kashuk, founder of Brighterly and the show’s first guest from Ukraine. Eugene is a serial entrepreneur with a go-to-market and operations background. Over five years he has grown Brighterly into a direct-to-consumer platform with one-on-one live tutoring in math and reading for grades 1–9. It now serves more than 20,000 American families, with over 1,200 tutors and a team of more than 250 people around the world.
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What would you build if someone handed you a university with almost no students and told you to start over?
We kick off our EdTech Week 2026 series live from Teachers College’s Digital Futures Institute with Dr. Nick Ladany, President of San Francisco Bay University (SFBU). Nick is a first-gen college student and a counseling psychologist by training. He worked his way from professor to dean across Maryland, Temple, Lehigh, Loyola Marymount, Santa Clara, and the University of San Diego, then served as president of Oglethorpe University. In 2023 he arrived at SFBU, a 40-year-old institution with a large unrestricted fund and a mandate to build a university from scratch.
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What if schools stopped paying for books, licenses, and PD days, and started paying for kids learning to read?
Back on the show for round two, Really Great Reading CEO Karl Rectanus joins Mike Palmer live from EdTech Week 2026 at Teachers College’s Digital Futures Institute. Karl started out as a teacher and charter school CFO, taught overseas, and then founded LearnPlatform, whose rapid-cycle evaluation work helped shape the four levels of evidence in the Every Student Succeeds Act. After Instructure acquired LearnPlatform, Karl led K-12 and platform strategy there before taking the helm at Really Great Reading, a 20-year-old OG of the science of reading.
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What if the most important edtech company in your classroom is one you’ve never heard of?
Live from EdTech Week 2026 at Teachers College’s Digital Futures Institute, Mike Palmer sits down with Dan Goldstein of Learnosity, the assessment engine that powers some of the biggest names in education from behind the scenes. Dan’s path ran through College Board’s SpringBoard curriculum, where he led implementation across Texas and New Mexico, and district-facing sales at Cengage, before he joined Learnosity in 2019, just as the “beforetimes” ended.
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What would change if schools knew their students the way the best companies know their customers?
Host Mike Palmer welcomes back Trending in Ed all-star AJ Gutierrez, CEO of Equal Opportunity Schools (EOS) and co-founder of Saga Education, for his first Bring a Friend episode. AJ’s friend is Dr. Susan Enfield, Executive Director of the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington. Susan began her career as a high school English, journalism, and multilingual learner teacher and served as a superintendent for nearly 13 years, including a decade leading Highline Public Schools just south of Seattle.
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What if the teacher shortage isn’t really a shortage of teachers?
Host Mike Palmer welcomes Dr. James Lane, CEO of Unlimited Instruction (UI), formerly University Instructors. James started as a middle school band director, and went on to be a principal, a superintendent in three Virginia districts, Virginia’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the leader of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
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What happens when the original edtech pioneer gets an early look at GPT-4? Host Mike Palmer welcomes Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, for a conversation spanning two decades of edtech. Sal traces his path from hedge fund analyst tutoring his cousin Nadia over Yahoo Messenger to YouTube videos his cousins liked better than him in person, to a nonprofit serving learners in 50+ languages. He explains why he leaves his mistakes in, and why that human quality will be hard for AI to replace.
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