STERLING — Ben Sondgeroth’s job is teaching teachers, and in an ever-evolving world of technology, it’s one that’s keeping him increasingly busy.

At workshops and presentations, rows of teachers often sit quietly, eyes fixed on glowing screens as he clicks through slides and reveals what he believes is the future of education in real time. Some lean forward. Others hesitate, thinking about what this means for their classrooms.

Sondgeroth keeps a tab on what’s new in technology, interprets it, and teaches it to educators throughout northwest Illinois as a lead regional educational technology coordinator for the Learning Technology Center of Illinois, an Illinois State Board of Education program. He is one of five in his position — each serving a specific region of the state — and is based out of the Lee-Ogle-Whiteside County Regional Office of Education in Sterling, where his father, Bob, once served as regional superintendent.

His job involves preparing and hosting workshops and presentations for educators who find themselves in a world of technology that’s evolving and adapting at almost breakneck speed, especially with artificial intelligence. Three to four days a week, he is on the road hosting workshops and roundtables, and the mileage stacks up fast as he moves between districts of different sizes to answer questions like: What’s changing? What matters? How do we keep up? In a two-month stretch from early January to early March alone, he logged 33 presentations and roughly 3,800 miles behind the wheel.

And wherever he goes, he makes it his mission to be in the lead.

“The rewarding part of this is that my job is to be at the forefront of how these schools work, of updates, and being able to take those updates and new technology and being able to explain it in a way that makes sense,” Sondgeroth said. ”There’s always a new tool and a new update, especially in the age of AI where there’s something new every single day.”

Sondgeroth also facilitates tech roundtables for each regional education office in his territory that bring together school technology leaders. In those open forums, they collaborate and compare notes on everything from artificial intelligence to internet infrastructure.

When he’s not teaching teachers and pulling a chair up at roundtables, he’s teaching the public about tech efficiency and how AI can make life easier — as long as people know how to use it. He’s addressed businesses, service clubs and community groups that are trying to understand what AI means for their daily lives.

For many, AI is already part of their daily lives, whether they’re using it to search for information, solve a problem or come up with a caricature. However, there are moments when it’s better to do tasks the old-fashioned way.

“I use it every day, for all sorts of different stuff,” Sondgeroth said. “Sometimes I have to reflect on whether I should be using it for this task. Sometimes the answer is to just do it yourself, and be better off looking that up on your own.”

Being immersed in new and evolving technologies began when Sondgeroth was a rookie teacher. Growing up in a family of educators in Rock Falls, he wasn’t what one might call a tech nerd: baseball and history were his passions, and he went to college at Sauk Valley Community College and the University of Indianapolis to become a teacher while calling pitches behind the plate for their baseball teams.

It was only when he became a high school history teacher and baseball coach at Morrison High School in 2010 that Sondgeroth became enthralled with how technology could enhance the educational experience. The district was one of the first in the area to work with one-to-one Chromebook devices, and it became more meaningful to him when he saw what it could do for his students.

“It’s been a real fun path,” Sondgeroth said. “I started as a high school history teacher in Morrison, and through that, I was able to teach with technology. I wanted to be on the leading edge of how to implement technology in the district with iPads. I got the bug of wanting to share that with educators.”

Sondgeroth began to rethink how students engaged with the material, especially in a subject like history, where storytelling sits at the core.

“When I was spending more time in the computer lab with my kids than in the classroom, I felt like this was how I could make them happy and have fun learning in a different way,” Sondgeroth said. “Especially for a course like history, I’m not talking at them, I’m letting them tell the story. It just kind of sparked something in me that I kind of liked this, and liked the technology. It’s kind of the marriage of how to bring the new school in with history, and make it come to life.”

He eventually became Morrison’s technology director, where the work expanded to implementation, policy and support. Eventually that momentum carried him out of the district entirely and onto a national stage working with EdTechTeacher, a professional learning provider that helps educators solve the challenges of a changing classroom environment where technology and teaching go hand in hand. For two years, he traveled across 16 states, worked in dozens of schools, and saw firsthand how different regions approached the same challenges.

The traveling didn’t last long before Sondgeroth started a family and decided to settle down in Dixon. His next job was closer to home: In 2018, he joined the Learning Technology Center of Illinois. These days, his travel is closer to home, within Boone, Bureau, Carroll, Henry, Jo Daviess, La Salle, Lee, McHenry, Marshall, Ogle, Rock Island, Stark, Stephenson, Whiteside and Winnebago counties. But even within that smaller footprint, there’s no shortage of variety. The region ranges from suburban communities to small towns.

“It was really cool, being on a lot of planes and seeing a lot of spots,” Sondgeroth said, “but then my son was born, and I didn’t want to get on a plane three days a week anymore.”

What he brought back from his EdTechTeacher experience was a clearer sense of how varied teaching styles could be, even when the mission of educating stayed consistent.

One of Sondgeroth’s biggest challenges over the years is handling how to help veteran teachers understand the value of new technologies. Rather than pushing change, he learned to frame technology as a way for them to enhance lessons, save time and better engage students, and that, he said, gradually brought more experienced educators on board.

If the early years of his career were about new devices and access to them, the current moment is defined by dealing with AI. Artificial intelligence has moved quickly from a curiosity in the classroom to an expectation, and Sondgeroth is one of the people tasked with helping others make sense of it.

In each school district he visits, the questions are immediate and often uneasy: How should students use it? When is it helpful? When does it cross a line between usefulness and convenience? The answers, he said, are still evolving in real time.

“I have to tell people all of the time who ask me ‘Does it do this?’ and if it doesn’t, I just say, ‘Not yet,’ he said — but that doesn’t mean it won’t be able to. “I can’t definitively say it can never do that.”

Over the past few years, Sondgeroth has delivered well over a hundred presentations on AI, each one tailored to the audience he’s addressing. In each session, the focus isn’t just on what AI can do, but how to keep learning at the center of it.

“It’s been fun trying to open that door up a little bit,” Sondgeroth said. “I love my job with the LTC, and I also love helping people, and showing them how they can leverage technology to help themselves and make them more efficient. Especially people who are retired, they can’t believe what it’s capable of doing; a lot of them go, ‘I wish I had that when I working.’”

With efficiency, though, comes caution. Used without honest intention, the same tools that can enhance education can ensnare students into a trap of using it to do their work for them, and ultimately, end up not knowing the subject matter. He encourages exploration without losing control of it.

“We keep the human in the middle,” Sondgeroth said. “You can use AI if you’re brainstorming to write something, but you better write it. You can also use AI to help you get feedback on it. That’s good. But as long as that middle part is still you, that’s the important part. Can they demonstrate the knowledge they gained?”

Outside of artificial intelligence, Sondgeroth’s curiosity continues to branch into other forms of technology, including 3D printing — he owns a number of printers and has led workshops on them — and even drone operation, which he has also helped introduce to schools.

The tools are more complex and the pace is faster than ever, but Sondgeroth’s goal remains steady.

“I get to, as much as AI is dominating what I do right now, have the freedom to explore pretty much any topic I want in educational technology, and help schools implement it,” Sondgeroth said. “If it touches tech, I get to be part of the conversation, and still learn new things that are something that I never would have thought.”

Go to ltcillinois.org/person/bensondgeroth to learn about how Ben Sondgeroth works with regional educators on implimenting the latest technologies for their classroom.

Interested in having Sondgeroth present a professional development tech topic? Go to exploringedtech.com to learn about his presentations and for booking inquiries.