EdTech: Dr. Nathan Lang-Raad of Lightspeed Technologies On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Nathan Lang-Raad.
Dr. Nathan D. Lang-Raad is Vice President of Business Development at Lightspeed Technologies, where he advances the company’s mission to help every student hear every word. He previously served as a teacher, administrator and adjunct professor, with other notable roles that include Director of Elementary Curriculum and Instruction for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and education supervisor at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The author of twelve books and a national speaker and instructional coach, Dr. Lang-Raad is committed to strengthening educational equity and supporting educators in building learning environments where students of all backgrounds can thrive.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Arkansas as a deeply curious child who wanted to understand how everything worked. I took things apart simply to see what was inside. That curiosity turned my bedroom into a kind of workshop. At one point, I built my own “computer” out of a cardboard box using metallic tacks, bits of wiring, small alarm bells and improvised circuits. I tried to recreate how signals might move through a real machine based on what I imagined was happening beneath the surface.
Alongside this hands-on experimentation, I was fascinated by the weather. Arkansas storms can dominate the entire sky, and I would stand outside watching clouds build, collide and move with force while everyone else rushed indoors. For years, I was convinced I would become a storm chaser. That combination of building, observing and experimenting shaped how I learned. I did not see learning as memorization. I saw it as discovering how systems behave and what happens when you test them. That way of thinking has stayed with me.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One of the most formative experiences of my career was training to fly aboard NASA’s Zero G C-9 jet. Before participating in parabolic flight, I completed a series of physiological training exercises designed to prepare us for extreme conditions. One of the most memorable took place in the hypobaric chamber, where I experienced hypoxia in a controlled setting.
I remember the precise moment when my thinking slowed and routine tasks became harder to complete. The exercise was designed to teach us how quickly cognition can falter when oxygen levels change, and how important it is to recognize those early signs. It was a powerful lesson in how fragile our assumptions about mental performance can be.
After completing the training, I flew aboard the C-9 and experienced weightlessness during multiple parabolic arcs. For brief periods, gravity released its grip entirely. In those moments, you relearn how to move and orient yourself. That experience reshaped how I think about learning. When conditions change, learning accelerates because we must rebuild our understanding intentionally. That insight informs how I think about instruction, adaptation and the design of learning environments.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My grandmother had a lasting influence on how I approach learning and technology. She was the first person in our family to own a computer and the first to have internet access at home, long before it was common.
She approached technology with curiosity rather than caution. She taught me how to defragment a computer, navigate early software and solve problems when things broke. What mattered most was her mindset. She treated technology as a tool for learning, exploration, and possibility. She showed me that curiosity does not diminish with age. It deepens when we choose to keep learning. That lesson has stayed with me throughout my career.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
One quote that has guided me for years comes from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” It captures the optimism of discovery and the patience required for real understanding.
Whenever I feel uncertain or overwhelmed, I return to that idea. It reminds me to slow down, look more carefully and trust that insight often appears when we stay curious long enough.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Curiosity
Curiosity has shaped every phase of my life. It pushed me to explore storms as a child, dive into chemistry as a student and question how learning actually works as an educator. Curiosity prevents me from settling for easy explanations and keeps me open to better ones.
Empathy
Empathy helps me stay focused on the lived experiences of teachers and students. When you consider cognitive load, emotional strain and classroom reality, you design tools that remove friction instead of adding to it. Empathy reminds me that the goal of technology is not efficiency alone. It is access, dignity and understanding.
Adaptability
Education shifts constantly as research advances, technologies evolve and student needs change. Adaptability allows me to respond thoughtfully rather than react defensively. It creates space to learn, refine and align more closely with how people actually learn best.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
Classrooms are inherently busy environments filled with sound, motion, and competing stimuli. Students must filter through that noise to access instruction. Even when they appear attentive, their brains may be expending significant effort simply decoding speech. That effort pulls cognitive resources away from comprehension and deeper thinking.
Teachers face a parallel challenge. Many feel pressure to project their voices all day, even though sustained vocal strain is not sustainable. Fatigue affects clarity, energy and instruction. These challenges impact every learner, not only those with identified hearing needs.
How do you think your technology can address this?
At Lightspeed, our goal is to reduce cognitive load and ensure students can hear instruction clearly, allowing them to use their full mental energy for learning and comprehension. We do this through instructional audio systems that are seamlessly integrated into classrooms and easy for educators to use. By speaking into a lightweight microphone worn on a lanyard, teachers’ voices are distributed evenly throughout the room, ensuring every student can hear key moments of instruction regardless of their spot on the seating chart.
This approach also significantly reduces vocal strain for educators. When teachers can speak in a calm, natural tone throughout the day without worrying about being heard, it helps preserve their voices, especially late in the day when fatigue typically sets in.
This technology also helps students find their own voices. I’ve seen it firsthand: students eagerly passing the microphone around the classroom, thrilled to have a fun, clear and amplified way to participate that made them feel more comfortable speaking up, asking questions, and sharing ideas. That sense of being heard, both literally and figuratively, created a more inclusive and confident classroom environment.
We also integrate with BoostLingo to support multilingual learners through real-time translation and transcription. This allows students to hear instruction clearly while also receiving language support that helps them stay engaged and keep pace with learning.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?
My passion for education took shape when I served as a chemistry teaching assistant in college. I enjoyed the subject, but what mattered most was helping fellow students succeed. Watching someone finally understand a difficult concept changed how I viewed teaching.
That experience introduced me to the Science of Learning and cognitive load theory. I began to see instruction as a design challenge. When learning is structured clearly and intentionally, students can think more deeply. That perspective continues to guide my work at Lightspeed.
How do you think your technology might change the world?
We don’t see this technology as something that radically transforms education overnight. Instead, its impact comes from addressing a problem educators deal with every day that often goes unnoticed or unaddressed: helping students stay focused and truly hear instruction in busy, distracting classrooms.
By making it easier for teachers to be heard without changing how they teach or disrupting the classroom, we hope to bring these barriers the attention they need and solve them in one fell swoop. When students can hear clearly, they’re better able to stay engaged, follow instruction and participate, and those changes can add up to meaningful improvements in learning experiences over time.
At scale, that kind of impact matters. Helping educators create calmer, more accessible classrooms supports better outcomes for students and more sustainable teaching environments without adding complexity or pressure for teachers to do more.
Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Any new technology introduced into schools carries the risk of unintentionally widening existing inequities if it isn’t implemented thoughtfully. That can happen when tools are too expensive for under-resourced districts, require extensive training educators don’t have time for or depend on infrastructure some schools simply don’t have in place.
That reality is something we take seriously. From the start, our goal has been to design solutions that are inclusive, intuitive and financially accessible. We focus on ease of use, minimal training requirements and deployment models that work for under-resourced districts.
At the same time, we recognize that no solution exists in a vacuum. Even well-intentioned tools can have unintended effects if they’re rolled out without adequate support or if local conditions are overlooked. That’s why we continually listen to educators, evaluate how our technology is being used in real classrooms and adjust our approach to minimize gaps rather than widen them.
How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?
There’s no slowing the amount of technology entering classrooms, and with that push comes increased distraction and pressure on students’ attention. As classrooms continue to evolve even further in this direction, the challenge for educators will be finding ways to cut through the noise and help students stay focused on what matters most.
At the same time, classrooms nationwide are seeing an increase in ELLs and multilingual students, a trend that also shows no signs of slowing. To support this shift, we’ve partnered with Boostlingo to offer real-time translation and transcription services in a wide range of languages. This allows students to hear instruction clearly while also seeing it presented in the language they’re most comfortable with, helping them stay engaged and keep pace with instruction without missing key moments.
As education continues to change over the next decade, our focus remains on helping educators manage distraction, support attention, and ensure all students can fully access what’s happening in the classroom.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- Start by finding the root of the problem.
Technology creates a positive impact when it addresses a problem that educators feel every day. In education, it is tempting to aim for sweeping solutions that promise to fix engagement, achievement and equity all at once. In practice, that approach often leads to tools that are too complex to implement well. Real progress begins by identifying a specific barrier that consistently interferes with learning and focusing on removing that barrier with care and precision.
At Lightspeed, our work began by asking a simple question: where is unnecessary effort being spent in the classroom? When students must work hard just to hear instruction, their cognitive resources are diverted away from learning. Addressing that root issue allows improvement to ripple outward without requiring teachers to change how they teach or students to change how they learn.
- Reduce extraneous cognitive load.
The most effective educational technologies do not add features. They remove friction. Learning is constrained by working memory, and when students are forced to process irrelevant or competing information, understanding suffers. Positive social impact comes from designing tools that reduce this extraneous cognitive load so learners can focus on meaning, reasoning and connection.
I have seen this play out clearly in real classrooms. In one elementary classroom, simply improving the clarity of the teacher’s voice changed how quickly students engaged. Before the shift, students frequently asked for directions to be repeated and lost momentum during transitions. After instructional audio was introduced, students spent less time trying to figure out what was said and more time actually working. The lesson did not change. The pedagogy did not change. What changed was the mental effort required just to access instruction.
This principle shifts the design goal away from novelty or personalization for its own sake. Instead, it prioritizes clarity. When classrooms are calmer, instructions are easier to hear, and transitions require less explanation, students have more mental space to engage deeply. Reducing cognitive noise is one of the most equitable moves technology can make.
- Understand your audience.
Educators operate under constant time pressure. Any tool that requires extensive training, workflow changes or ongoing troubleshooting competes with the realities of teaching. Even well intentioned innovations will fail if they do not respect teachers’ time and attention.
Designing for educators means observing real classrooms, listening carefully and valuing simplicity. A successful tool fits naturally into existing routines and supports what teachers already do well. When adoption is easy, impact can scale.
- Adapt with learning science.
Technology should evolve alongside our understanding of how people learn. As research in cognitive science continues to refine what we know about attention, working memory and transfer, effective tools must adapt accordingly.
At Lightspeed, deepening our understanding of the Science of Learning clarified why instructional audio matters. Clear access to spoken instruction supports attention, reduces cognitive strain and improves comprehension. Adapting based on learning science keeps technology grounded in human cognition rather than trend cycles.
- Stay prepared for change.
Education will continue to shift in response to new research, new technologies and changing student needs. Tools that create lasting positive impact are designed with flexibility and humility. They remain open to refinement rather than locked into a fixed vision.
Staying prepared for change means listening continuously, testing assumptions, and responding thoughtfully. When technology evolves in service of learning rather than disruption, it can remain relevant and responsible over time.
In the world of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?
At Lightspeed, we do not collect any data about students. Our systems improve instructional access without requiring personal information. This simplifies deployment and builds trust.
Looking ahead, we are exploring ways to offer instructional insights without collecting student data. While these ideas are still in development, our guiding principle remains clear privacy through design.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Pay attention to the problems that spark your curiosity. Small questions often lead to meaningful change when pursued consistently.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would choose Stanislas Dehaene. His work on learning, attention and language has shaped how we understand cognition at a fundamental level. I would enjoy a conversation about how classroom environments influence thinking and what clarity really means from a neuroscience perspective.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
There are plenty of ways to reach me online. You can check out my personal website at https://drlangraad.com/ and find out more about my professional work at https://lightspeed-tek.com/. I also have a Substack where I write on a variety of topics here: https://drlangraad.substack.com/.
