Latest posts
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Classkick: The Tool That’s Been There All Along
There is a specific kind of discovery that only happens at a conference. Not just the periphery finds I love: the small booth, the student founder, the tool you would never have stumbled across any other way. This is a different kind. The kind where you walk past a booth, catch something on a screen…
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Kami Coach: When a Platform You Already Love Gets “Smarter”
There is a particular kind of excitement that happens when a tool you already trust announces something new. It is different from the excitement of discovering something unknown. It is more like watching a favorite restaurant add a dish to their menu that you did not know you needed until you saw it, and then…
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From the Classroom Floor: Code AI and the Case for Teaching Coding WITH AI
I spent forty-five minutes actively rethinking the most common criticism of vibe coding. The criticism goes something like this: if students are using AI to generate their code, they are not actually learning to code. They are learning to prompt. They are outsourcing the thinking to a machine and calling it programming education, and the…
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Expanding Reality: How zSpace and ClassVR Made Me Feel Like a Kid Again
There is a moment at ISTE where the conference stops feeling like professional development and starts feeling like the future arrived early and forgot to send a warning. For me, that moment happened twice on the main expo floor. Once with my hands around a holographic human heart. Once standing in the trenches of World…
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From the Periphery: MYdys; the App That Hands the Text Back
I stopped at this booth for every student I have ever taught with dyslexia. Past and present. The ones who sat in the back and pretended the worksheet was not defeating them. The ones who worked twice as hard as everyone else to produce half as much on paper and knew it. The ones who…
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From the Periphery: Typed by Hand ISTE 2026
Let me tell you about the problem with AI detectors. They are trying to answer the wrong question. Every AI detector on the market: GPTZero, Turnitin, Copyleaks, all of them, asks some version of the same question: does this finished text look like it was written by a human or a machine? They analyze the…
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From the Periphery: DeskPad.ai and the Students Who Stopped Me At ISTE 2026
I was walking through the expo hall at ISTE 2026 when a young man stepped out from a small booth and said something I have rarely heard at a conference before. “Excuse me. I see that you’re a teacher. Can I show you a tool that another student and I built together?” I stopped. I…
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The Best Thing I Found at ISTE 2026 Wasn’t at the Loudest Booth
I have a theory about conferences. The best stuff is never where the speakers are the loudest and the lights are the brightest. I developed this theory the same way I developed my best opinions about food: by ignoring the obvious choices and wandering until something unexpected stopped me cold. I am the person who…
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Who’s Ready to Soak Up the Sun at ISTE 2026 in Orlando?
The laptop, headphones, and portable batteries have been charged. The sunscreen has been forgotten. The kids have been hugged and kissed goodby with the promise of seeing them again in a week. I’m currently in KCI chatting it up with some World Cup fans and some Europeans who’ve traveled here to support their team, and…
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The Grading Trap: Why a 95% Was Never the Problem
On more than one occasion, a student has opened their PowerSchool account, seen their grade, and come to talk with me about it. When I asked what it was, they responded: a 95%. I knew I didn’t turn my poker face on fast enough. This was not the first time, and it will depressingly not…