Keynote Panel

Keynote Panel

Human-Centred Teaching and Learning in the age of AI

AI, like earlier waves of edtech, gives us a chance to rethink pedagogy and extend what great teachers already do well. Yet the last decade of digital adoption has often chased efficiency and scale instead of learning, contributing to stagnant or declining outcomes and growing distrust of classroom technology.

As AI becomes ubiquitous, Ontario educators face a critical choice: will we use it to automate teaching and deskill the profession, or to amplify human relationships, feedback, and hands-on learning—especially when resources are scarce?

Panelists

Aman Sahota

Aman brings extensive educational ecosystem expertise with demonstrated community leadership and market penetration capabilities. Aman is one of the co-founders of Factors Education where he engages districts directly on Portrait of Graduate and Strategic Planning. He also serves as Education Committee Chair for the Region of Peel (200,000 students) providing direct insight into educational decision-making processes and stakeholder engagement.

Factors Education operationalizes your competency-based education strategic initiatives such as your Portrait of Graduate with AI Agents. This is done by creating learner profiles that personalize resources and measure competencies. Factors recently won the Tools Competition to create the benchmark in K-12 for learner profiles. This is achieved by integrating into your LMS system and optimizing our platform to align with the teachers’ workflow, ensuring their problems are solved while aligning with the district’s strategic initiatives. Aman is also leading the integration of esports and AI through his partnership with NASEF, one of the largest esports organizations globally, boasting over 5,000 clubs.

Heidi is an Ontario educator with +25 years of experience and now Teacher Coach at I-Think, an education charity originating at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Heidi leads I-Think’s work in Artificial Intelligence and is the architect of the Artificial Intelligence Challenge Kit for gr. 6-12 students where over 5000 students have engaged in deep critical thinking about AI and used an empathy-based problem-solving process to imagine how AI might enhance the lives of all students. She believes that student and teacher voices need to be front and center as AI tools are developed for education. Heidi is a conference presenter and runs Artificial Intelligence workshops for educators, subject associations, and parent groups. She most recently attended Mila Quebec Institute for Artificial Intelligence Summer School for Responsible AI and Human Rights. Prior to I-Think, Heidi was a K-8 educator for the HWDSB and has a M.Ed. In Education Leadership and Policy. Her work includes several years at the Ontario Ministry of Education in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Branch, supporting the integration of Transferable Skills into learning through the Technology and Learning Fund.

Coming from a career in IT, Tim has been teaching in Ontario for over twenty years and became Canada’s first teacher to earn CCNA Cyber Operations instructional qualifications. Tim’s students won national competitions in subjects ranging from IT & Networking and cybersecurity to coding & 3d animation. Tim’s secondment with ICTC has enabled cross Canada outreach that sees him teaching in classrooms in every province and territory. His secondment was extended by the Quantum Algorithms Institute which resulted in research on quantum computing encryption being presented in Ghana, the United States, Mexico, across Canada, and most recently in the Dominican Republic and Uruguay. Tim is also the first teacher in Canada to complete MIT’s Quantum Computing program. Back in 2019 he tried to engage Ontario education with the coming AI revolution at the ECOO conference with support from IBM, but the room was empty. He keeps hoping that education finds a way to integrate emerging technologies instead of always being surprised by them.

Cal Armstrong is a long-time secondary math educator and the developer behind the OneNote Class Notebook. His work in education emphasizes the importance of digital solutions in personalizing and enhancing the educational journey for diverse learners, especially secondary teachers. He is an avid outdoorsman, a motorcyclist and is an active volunteer in his community.