On August 4th, 2015, in Davis, California, superintendents and high level district teams from around California assembled for a day of exploring edtech solutions, networking with colleagues and learning from other educational leaders. The EdSurge California Edtech Summit featured four panels throughout the day, and we’re now bringing you those talks in podcast form. Even if you aren’t a superintendent or district office official, hearing what they have to say is incredibly informative and useful.

EdSurge started off the Davis Summit with a keynote panel hosted by EdSurge CEO Betsy Corcoran, where EdSurge brought together three thought leaders to discuss what blended learning really means. The panel ended up being one of the most tweetable panels, mostly because of the crisp, incisive comments that all three panelists made about teacher and student autonomy, competency-based assessment, the problem with poor "flipping of the classroom" and the nature of digital assessments like PARCC and SmarterBalanced. In fact, as panelist Richard Culatta said, “These digital tests are the worst they will ever be; we’re only going up from here.”

Speaking of Richard Culatta, the panel featured him (the head of the Office of Educational Technology for the Department of Education), Michael Horn (co-founder of the Christensen Institute and author of the book Blended), and Esther Wojcicki (award-winning journalism and English teacher at Palo Alto High School).

Ready to give it a listen? Here's the first of our four panels in podcast form.

Big thanks to all of our panelists for participating. If you enjoyed this EdSurge Extra, check out our other panels from the Davis Summit, up on iTunes and SoundCloud now.