📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe As teachers, we are constantly seeking ways to make learning more durable and meaningful for our students. We want them to not just memorize facts for a test, but to fully understand and retain what they’ve learned overContinueContinue reading “Using AI to Support Interleaving & Spaced Practice and Retrieval in Unit Planning”
Category Archives: AI & EdTech
EdTech Leadership in the Age of AI: What Matters Most When Everything is Changing
My coffee is still warm when the first alert comes in. A teacher cannot access Canvas, and their students are stuck at the login screen. I walk the teacher through the SSO steps, confirm access, and move on. By midmorning, I have visited classrooms, supported teachers with technology integration, and observed lessons to plan follow-up coaching. After that, I sit with our engineers to review system performance, troubleshoot issues, and test several EdTech tools and updates planned for release.
At two o’clock, there are three messages on LinkedIn about a new AI tool that promises to transform learning. I scan one, note the potential and the hype, and return to the work I already committed to do. The afternoon goes to email, planning professional learning, and reviewing the week ahead.
Sound familiar?
For many of us in EdTech and instructional leadership, this mix of strategic and immediate work is the norm. Some hours go to multi-year plans, budgets, and compliance. Others are dedicated to making sure one specific app works for one teacher so students can keep learning. The pace makes it easy to lose focus when the day is packed and many things are going on simultaneously. I return to a single question: how do people learn, and how can instruction and technology work together to support that? If we cannot answer that question, systems, budgets, and tools will have little impact.
This post shares how I connect what we know about learning with the daily realities of leading technology and instructional change in schools. I will describe several major themes and then provide a summary of the next steps to help you further reflect upon your leadership and programs.
Creating AI Agent Safeguards (for now) through Pragmatic Instructional Design to Deliver Assignments and Assessments
As you prepare your syllabus for the upcoming semester, a question I’ve explored before looms large. In a previous post, “The Death of the LMS in Higher Ed,” I argued that its role as a simple repository for assignments is becoming obsolete. With AI agents now ubiquitous, how do we prevent the LMS from becoming a mere drop-box for bot-generated work from an autonomous AI Agent?
The solution isn’t to fully abandon the LMS (for now), but to evolve its purpose and create humanizing instructional barriers in the tasks and assessments we deliver to our students. This post presents a few practical strategies (I am implementing this term in my own graduate-level course) to revitalize our courses by shifting the focus from the final product, which AI can generate in seconds, to the learning process, which it cannot. This is going to my attempt to defend against students utilizing AI Agents. While I know this may not be one-hundred percent effective, I do have a hunch it will mitigate AI Agents to a degree, at least for the time being, this semester.
Using AI to Build Powerful Retrieval Practice Activities to Supercharge Student Learning Opportunities
The “testing effect,” a term championed by researchers like Roediger and Karpicke, demonstrates that every time a student actively recalls information, they strengthen the neural pathways associated with it. This effortful retrieval tells the brain that the information is important and makes it easier to access in the future. Ultimately, over time, if students are able to actively recall correctly, this means they likelihood of them learning the content, is much higher. Although the challenge for teachers has always been the time it takes to create a rich variety of material, such as flashcards, practice tests, and quizzes, that facilitate this process.
With powerful AI tools, we can now create engaging, interactive retrieval practice activities in minutes. Tools like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT have built-in “Canvas” features that can generate the code for these resources, and you don’t need to be a coding expert to use them.
5 Ways Agentic AI Can Transform Your Teaching Workflow
What if you had a personalized assistant who knew your school’s handbook, understood your instructional philosophy, and could help you design lessons tailored to your students’ needs? This isn’t a glimpse into a far-off future; it’s the reality of what AI agents can offer teachers today.
Thinking Systemically About EdTech Integration in Schools and Districts: A First Look at the VATT Framework
📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe Yesterday, my friend and colleague, Dr. Drew Hinds, shared a newish framework (2023) for evaluating educational technology and integrating technology in schools with me, and it has been percolating around in my head ever since. It’s called theContinueContinue reading “Thinking Systemically About EdTech Integration in Schools and Districts: A First Look at the VATT Framework”
Boost Student Learning with Interactive Worked Examples: Thanks to the Canvas Feature in Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude
Picture this: you can provide interactive, step-by-step worked examples for just about anything – math problems, ELA sentence structures, science processes, you name it. And here’s the best part: you absolutely do not need to be a coding expert to pull this off.
#WhyKnowledgeMatters Podcast Appearance for Co-Teaching Evolved: Co-Teaching Partnerships, Strategies, and EdTech & AI Integrations
📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe You may have seen my recent social media posts about the latest #WhyKnowLedgeMatters Podcast episode, and it’s a particularly special one for me! In this installment, I had the pleasure of discussing the very concepts from Dr. BelindaContinueContinue reading “#WhyKnowledgeMatters Podcast Appearance for Co-Teaching Evolved: Co-Teaching Partnerships, Strategies, and EdTech & AI Integrations”
AI Agents: The Future of School Leadership
📬 Stay in the loop Join educators getting weekly insights on AI, co-teaching, and instructional leadership. Subscribe The deployment of AI Agents has the potential to greatly impact school leadership. These autonomous software systems, capable of perceiving their environment, making decisions, and executing actions independently, will have the opportunity to redefine the role of educationalContinueContinue reading “AI Agents: The Future of School Leadership”
The Reading Crisis: Where Are We At and Where Do We Go From Here?
As someone who’s spent years working in the worlds of both K-12 and Higher Education, I’ve witnessed a worrying trend that’s been brewing for over two decades amongst students in both K-12 and Higher Education. It’s a crisis that gnaws at the very foundation of learning and critical thinking: a reading crisis.