Rob Dickson

USAF Veteran - WPS CIO - 2014 NSBA #20toWatch - 2016 CDE Top 30 - 2017 ISTE Admin Award - 2021 KC CIO of the Year - 2022 National CIO Finalist - 2024 DA 100

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Honored to be named to the EdTech Top 100 Influencers in EdTech Digest's State of EdTech 2026-2027 report.

This recognition reflects the incredible work happening across Wichita Public Schools - USD259 — from scaling virtual learning and esports to building out digital citizenship programs for 50,000+ students. None of it happens without an amazing team and district leadership willing to push boundaries.

The report's theme this year is Connectedness — across systems, classrooms, institutions, and workforce pathways — and that resonates deeply with the work we're doing every day in @WichitaUSD259 .

Grateful to Victor Rivero, Sheryl R. Abshire, Ph.D. and the EdTech Digest team for shining a light on the people working to move education forward. Proud to be in the company of so many leaders I admire on this list.
#EdTech #K12Education #EdTechTop100 #WichitaPublicSchools #EducationLeadership #WPSProud
https://t.co/EPdRX8M8xO

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

96.2% of the Moon in Earth's shadow, and I caught it with a telescope that fits in a jacket pocket. Deep partial lunar eclipse, 8/27/26 — DWARF Mini, 840 grams of pure overachievement. 🌘🔴 #Wichita

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Dan Koe posted something this week that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about in the context of schools:

“There will be 3 types of people in the future:
The Purists — reject AI and become new-age hippies
The Automatons — outsource every decision and become machines
The New Renaissance Man — maintains humanity and leverages tech to do what used to be impossible”

Swap “people” for “educators” and it stops being a philosophy tweet and starts being a professional learning roadmap.
I see all three in every district I talk to.

The Purists aren’t the enemy. They’re often our best teachers — the ones protecting discussion, handwriting, struggle, and the slow work of thinking. Their instinct that something human is at stake is correct. The risk is that opting out entirely doesn’t protect kids from AI; it just means kids learn it without them.

The Automatons are the quieter risk. Not the teacher using AI to draft a parent letter — the one who has stopped reading the output. Once we stop evaluating what the machine hands us, we’ve automated the judgment, not the task. In a school system, that’s the part that isn’t ours to outsource.

The third group is who we should be building professional learning for. Teachers who keep their pedagogy intact and use AI to do what genuinely wasn’t possible before: differentiated materials for six reading levels on a Tuesday night, feedback loops that used to take a week, data questions answered in a meeting instead of a month later.

The uncomfortable part: most district AI plans are written to move people from group 1 to group 2. Tool rollouts, account provisioning, adoption dashboards. Very little of it develops judgment.

The goal isn’t AI adoption. It’s AI-literate professional judgment — and those are not the same metric.

#K12 #EdTech #ArtificialIntelligence #EducationLeadership #ProfessionalLearning

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

https://t.co/klNSdaI7aa

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

https://t.co/klNSdaI7aa

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

The goal isn't to automate teaching — it's to give teachers time back for the human part of the work only they can do. Grateful Wichita Public Schools is helping lead this with @OpenAI . ✨ #EdTech #Education #FutureOfAI @WichitaUSD259 https://t.co/SrnVr4zqQy

[Naval @naval]

To love is to gain joy from another’s well-being.

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

When the path feels unclear, make the next generous move. Clarity often arrives after action, not before it.

#leadership #trusttheprocess #makeitmatter

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I hear the story about how it took 30 years to gain productivity from electricity a lot in relation to AI (I have even told it myself)

But not every technology is that way. Ford went from inventing the assembly line to full deployment in 3 years, cutting car building time by 88%

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Your organization is not spending enough of its efforts on bolstering cybersecurity during the window before open weights Mythos-class models/harnesses become available. The HuggingFace incident shows us that you don’t even need intentional bad actors to be exposed to AI hacking.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

We've gone from "look what happened this year" to "what happened since Tuesday." Acceleration fatigue is REAL. But remember... today is the slowest rate of change you will experience for the rest of your life.

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Opportunities to shape the future are everywhere. They just don't show up until someone's brave enough to name what's possible. 👀 Vision is a team sport. 🤝 #Education #Leadership

[Empire State Building Observation Deck @EmpireStateBldg]

Tonight, the Empire State Building tower lights will turn to a pink sparkle at 9:25 to honor the late Dolly Parton.

Dolly was a global cultural icon whose seven-decade career reached generations of fans. Beyond entertainment, Dolly leaves a significant philanthropic legacy through the Dollywood Foundation and Imagination Library, which has provided hundreds of millions of books to children worldwide.

At Nine-Two-Five tonight, we celebrate her and her legacy 💖

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Judging the 2027 EdTech Awards. Regular entries are open.
@edtechdigest

Honored to judge. If you built something that can survive a public test, enter it.

Enter - EdTech Digest: https://t.co/MnuYXuLhNi

#Ai #Edtech #FutureReady

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Note to self: Progress is often disguised as patience. Keep showing up, keep refining, and trust that the seeds planted in quiet seasons are still doing their work. #Growth #Patience #Momentum #Purpose

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

A phone ban is not a learning strategy.
A laptop is not a lesson.
A chatbot is not judgment.

The easy read is another screen-time memo from Washington. The better read is that Wichita already published the local test.

Kindergarten has no assigned student device. Grades 1-5 share iPads. Middle school laptops stay at school. High school laptops go home. An IEP or 504 tool is access, not extra screen time.

The Education Department's Aug. 20 letter is guidance, not a rule. It asks districts to judge the tool by the learning job, the student, the duration, and the evidence.

If a vendor cannot survive those questions in public language, do not renew.

Today’s Sunday Signal Report

https://t.co/ETsgy3vfFq

#EdLeadership #K12Leadership #EdTech #DigitalLiteracy #AIinEducation

[Kansas City Chiefs @Chiefs]

69-YARD FIELD GOAL TO END THE HALF 🦵

[📽️ Red Tribe Cinema @ClayWendler]

Mitch Holthus losing his mind over Harrison Butker's 69-yard field goal.

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Two states still prove the case for the gap lens:

Kansas. Project Unicorn marks Kansas "Not Reported" across every cell. ECS marks the SLDS "Not Found." But the state agency is implementing KEDS (Kansas Education Data Systems), a modernized P-20W replacement for KIDS that ingests district submissions through a REST API aligned to Ed-Fi.

The national dashboards are behind the work. The work is real.

Wichita's practical question. Whether Kansas has Ed-Fi is the wrong one. The right one: what does KSDE require districts and vendors to exchange once KEDS is the canonical intake, who owns the authoritative student identifier, and does the published API contract survive an actual procurement.

I included four unverified research layers on purpose: statewide SSO, persistent identifiers, open API and data-portability rules, and vendor certification. Project Unicorn's map explicitly excludes district-by-district adoption, and ECS's 2024 snapshot predates the KEDS rollout. Treating those four as a single "Interoperability Score" would have hidden the most useful signal in the report, the gap between what's published and what a district can really use.

https://t.co/xVrvpx0iPT

Full joint dashboard: https://t.co/00Axp2XqCZ

#K12 #Interoperability #EdFi #ADVISER #StateData #CIO

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

Its going to be an era of contradictions.

Polls will show everyone hates AI overall but also everyone will secretly use AI all the time. AI companies will be underwater in public opinion but also many people will feel strongly attached to their own favorite model & care about it

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

The most useful AI posture may be simple: assume this is the worst version you will ever use. Build human judgment and good workflows now, not dependence on a moment. #AIinEducation #Leadership

[Rob Dickson @showmerob]

Leadership is less about having the right answer and more about updating your assumptions when the evidence changes. That is a useful operating system for people and schools. #Leadership #DecisionMaking