McLendon Speaker Works with Students to Showcase AI in Education and Public Purpose  

On November 15, 2023, McLendon Speaker Christian Talbot spent the day at GDS working with upper school students in a social entrepreneurship workshop. Students used generative AI to develop solutions to local problems, approaching these problems with a social entrepreneurship mindset. 

In the afternoon, student teams presented their work to GDS faculty and staff as well as to a panel of local entrepreneurs and community leaders, which included Dr. Eric Gladney, Assistant Dean and MBA Director for the Willie A. Deese College of Business and Economics at North Carolina A&T State University; Libby Ramsey, entrepreneur and owner of the Libby Ramsey Leads consulting company; Frank McCain, President and CEO of the United Way of Greensboro; and Chris Colangelo, Founder and past-President of Sequoia Services LLC, a Greensboro-based civil and environmental company.

Following their presentations, students reflected on their use of AI to help them develop their ideas, anticipate objections to their proposals, and examine issues from different points of view. The panelists selected the team of Omri Kavaler ’25, Jules Voorhoeve ’24, and Tyler Johnson ’24 to present during the evening session.

During his evening presentation, Mr. Talbot discussed the transformative potential of AI technologies in both education and public purpose and described the importance of helping students develop ethical guardrails to guide their interactions with these new tools.

About the speaker: Christian Talbot is President & CEO of the Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools; co-founder of Juno, a strategy and design consultancy firm; and former head of school. He is the founder of Expeditionaries, a social entrepreneurship bootcamp for middle school and high school students, and he teaches in the Nonprofit Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania. 

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The McLendon Parent & Faculty Education Speaker Series is a longstanding tradition at GDS thanks to an endowment established by Charles McLendon, co-founder and first board chair of Greensboro Day School.