#LMS #EdTech #ISTE26 #ISTELive26

Where Design Authority Lives: A Working Ethos Educational technology is not neutral. Every platform, every pricing model, every data policy reflects a set of decisions about who benefits and who adapts. This document is about who those decisions belong to, and who they currently belong to instead.…

#ISTELive26 #ISTE26

Trying a Post-Digital Lens Most of the language we use to talk about technology in education assumes a line between the digital and everything else. We talk about technology integration, as if the technology arrives from somewhere outside and gets folded into the real work of teaching. We talk…

The AI that actually helps is the stuff nobody writes breathless articles about.

The nearest high school is 90 miles away, but somehow we expect these kids to have the same digital resources as Denver suburbs. Geography still matters, even when everything's supposedly online.

Behavioral Surveillance Refusal – Chrome Extension for Canvas Canvas records a great deal about students that has nothing to do with their schoolwork. It logs when a student last logged in, how long a session lasted, how many times they opened each page, and the sequence of actions they took…

The best curriculum conversations happen when teachers can say "this doesn't work for my kids" without having to justify why their classroom is different from the theoretical one.

Most curriculum gets designed by committees that never talk to the people who actually use it.

Teaching Realism I have been noticing something in the way AI tools market themselves to educators. The pitch varies in specifics, but the underlying structure is almost always the same: teachers are overwhelmed, teachers are burning out, teachers are leaving, and this product can help by reducing…

PD that sticks happens in the margins, not the mandated hours.

Watching my neighbor's chickens ignore the fancy feeder for scattered corn on the ground. Same energy as teachers skipping the $500 course modules to find what they need in a Facebook group.

Reading Ursula K. Le Guin before designing curricula. Her worlds help me see systems.

Who Pays for the Free Tool? In a recent article, I wrote about the ethics of building automation tools for educators, using Mary Doria Russell's concept of the "vulture," a freelance analyst who maps a worker's expertise so machines can take over parts of it. That piece ended with what I still…

Decision Rights Mapper A note before you start The Decision Rights Mapper is released as a free, open tool under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. That openness is intentional, and it carries a corresponding responsibility for anyone who uses or distributes the tool. This is a reflection…

Does time outside actually help teachers decompress, or do we just tell ourselves it should? Most educators I know are either too tired to get outdoors or feel guilty for taking the time.

Maybe we keep calling it professional development because that sounds more serious than admitting we just need time to think.

AI is now creating content for textbooks #ai #artificialintelligence #news #tech #edtech

What Birding Taught Me About What We Mean by “Knowing” My dad kept a bird book with a life list penciled inside the front cover. I do not think he updated it very often. It was one of those things that surfaced years later in a box of older stuff he had cleared out, and when I found it, the list…

The Security Case Against Vibe-Coded EdTech Over the past several months, I have been building an argument across multiple articles. I have made the case that educators can and should build their own tools using AI-assisted coding. I have explored the power dynamics of who gets to automate whose…

Building for intermittent internet feels like planning a garden that might not get rain. You design for scarcity but hope for abundance. Every offline feature is a hedge against infrastructure that promises more than it delivers.

The people who talk most about lifelong learning seem to have stopped learning themselves around 2003.

The audio quality isn't the best, but I love Gert's point on the language of "learner" halfway in this video. It obfuscates essential questions around the content and purpose of education. Theoretically to make it "student-centered," it may hide these issues of power: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCU1...

The hardest part isn't finding time for professional learning. It's admitting that most of what I thought I knew three years ago was incomplete or wrong. Growth requires grieving your former expertise.

Scope and Sequence Builder The Scope and Sequence Builder is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which means you're welcome to copy it, modify it, and share it with colleagues as long as you keep an attribution back to the original. It's provided as-is and is not a…

The best ed tech tools I've seen lately are the ones that do one thing well. A timer. A random name picker. A simple poll. Meanwhile we're buying platforms with 47 features that teachers use like elaborate paperweights.

The same consultants selling us AI tutors that will "revolutionize learning" are the ones who promised interactive whiteboards would do the same thing fifteen years ago. Different decade, same breathless pitch deck.

How are we supposed to foster the deep thinking needed within our schools if we are just as distracted as our students? mugmarks.study/p/schools-as... #education #deepthinking #technology #edusky #schools #culture #edtech

Are you attending ISTE26? Join us for the #ISTELive Board Game Meetup! 💲 FREE registration - bit.ly/iste26bgm 📆 June 28th - 6-11pm 📍 Hyatt Regency Orlando - Regency Ballroom PQ 🎲 300+ board & card games to play & bring your own! 🍕 Food & drinks #EduSky #EdTech

New article on eLearning Industry about a pattern worth considering when building AI-powered learning tools: the AI should be the finishing layer, not the foundation. elearningindustry.com/cut-the-cable

What a Homelab YouTuber Can Teach Us About EdTech Dependency A video about replacing streaming subscriptions with a home server recently crossed my feed, and I have not been able to stop thinking about how cleanly its argument maps onto educational technology. The creator, Jeff from the channel…

The fanciest LMS features gather dust while teachers still email PDFs to parents. Simple tools that solve actual problems beat elegant solutions to problems nobody has. Keep it simple, but first figure out what simple actually means to the person using it.

Been thinking about the teachers who quietly redesign their lessons every summer versus those who attend three conferences a year but change nothing. The quiet ones never call it professional development. They just call it teaching.

Maybe the real professional development happens in the margins between the planned sessions.

Staff Rounding Dashboard "Rounding" is a practice borrowed from healthcare leadership where administrators make regular, structured check-ins with their staff. Rather than waiting for annual surveys or hoping problems surface on their own, rounding gives school leaders a way to hear directly from…

EdTech companies must assess their effectiveness for students with disabilities. The 2026 EdTech Evidence Report offers a framework for evaluating accessibility. Read the report: www.innovateedunyc.org/evidence-rep... #EdTech #K12

What Does Breakfast of Champions Have to Say About Instructional Design? Early in my career as an instructional designer, I took on a project that should have felt like meaningful work. We were building a train-the-trainer program for people who would be supporting at-risk students. The mission…

I built a free #Chrome extension that gives #teachers professional course page components for #Canvas, Schoology, and Moodle without needing to code or pay for a plugin. 37 components based on atomic design, grounded in learning research. No account, no tracking. CC BY 4.0. #EdTech #OnlineLearning

#academicsky How a Civics School With a Conservative Bent Divided Its Supporters www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/u...

Designing Smarter EdTech That Uses Less AI When I started building AI-powered tools for education, my instinct was the same one most people have: send the user's question to Claude, get a response, display it. The AI was the tool. Everything ran through it. And it worked, until it did not. An API…

A small district showed me their PD budget breakdown: 80% on one-time workshops, 20% on follow-up support. Then they showed me their implementation rates. The math was backwards. We keep buying the event instead of investing in the practice, then wonder why nothing sticks.

Designing for Human Judgement in AI-Powered EdTech The first version of my course builder had a problem, and the problem was me. I had been building a personal tool to accelerate the most repetitive parts of course development in Canvas LMS. The idea was straightforward: use AI to draft…

Alexandra Cornejo Named 2026 School Librarian of the Year www.slj.com/story/Alexan... #Skybrarians #EduSky

... I realized I don't have another place to post this at the moment, at least not until I get a Bluesky account for the blog, so I'll share this here instead: I'm playing board games again, and apparently writing blog posts about it too. thecraftynerd.com/2026/02/08/f...

We tell contractors to survey the foundation before building, but buy ed tech like we're shopping for shoes. Most failures aren't about the platform. They're about assuming the ground was ready when nobody checked if it was even there.

The topic? "Designing for connectivity challenges in rural learning." The irony was not lost on me as I sat next to the jerky display explaining why we need to build offline-first learning experiences. Sometimes the universe has a sense of humor about our work. #LXD #EdTech #EduSky

How to Grow and Thrive as Women in Education – Bonus Episode with Community EDU/Leadhership Network for Women #EdTech #edusky #TLSky #teachers #education #educators

Daughter is a walking biohazard today - snot, red eyes, the works. But working at BHSSC means I can handle sick kid duty while still getting to meetings and using naptime as deep work time. Project-based work actually works with life's curveballs. bhssc.org #LoveWhereYouWork #WorkLifeBalance