Here’s a sample of my weekly newsletter. Every so often I share my newsletter here on my blog. To subscribe click the link at the bottom.
Hello Reader,
April is here and it is exciting! Artemis II launched on April 1st – the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apoolo 17 in 1972! Four astronauts are circling the moon RIGHT NOW as I write this. It is so exciting!
During the routine livestream, a jar of Nutella floated right through the cabin on camera. NASA and Nutella said it was just a happy accident but for me — a true Nutella fan — it was hilarious and magnificent
At Spring Break my family went to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. I met Valerie Neal, a Smithsonian curator who wrote On a Mission — the story of all 61 U.S. women astronauts across 45 years of spaceflight. She interviewed thirty of the thirty-two living women astronauts for the book. She had fascinating things to say about the impact (or not) of space on women and I am trying to get her on my show!
OK, lots to share this week – vibe coding, inquiry based learning, data driven schools and a prompt you can use to add the research on fun to improve your lesson plans (Oh and how I made the graphic above – let’s go!
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🛰️ 🛰️ 🛰️
What I’m Learning About AI Agents (and Why It Matters for Teachers)
Our latest Cool Cat Teacher Talk episode — S5E9: Vibe Coding, AI Agents, and What Teachers Need to Know — is a great one for getting up to date on where teachers are going with AI.
Here’s the short version: vibe coding means describing what you want a computer program to do, and AI writes the code. I created an interactive game for my 8th graders where they kept an eagle warm by answering questions correctly. Students scored 5 points higher on average — with no retesting needed. Teachers are becoming “citizen programmers” and it’s so helpful.
But the part I’m most excited about is what I shared about AI agents — specifically how I’m using Claude Cowork. It’s installed directly on my computer (not web-based), and I can set folder-by-folder permissions for what it can access. Here’s what I’ve built:
- Daily email triage — runs at 4:15 PM, classifies my emails by importance (1-10), drafts responses, and flags what needs attention. I typically look, retype, and press send. I don’t let AI do any of that. I do let it write a filter for emails I need to archive and I paste it in, scan the emails and do it myself.
- Voice memo transformer — turns my morning voice memos into multiple formats automatically letting me dictate everything from emails to blog posts.
- Show production skill — saves me 5-10 hours per episode. I used to print hundreds of pages of transcripts and manually cut segments. Now I upload transcripts with a voice recording describing my vision, and the skill does the heavy lifting.
Donnie Piercey and Rachelle Dene Poth have some great additions to this show.
👉 Watch or listen to S5E9:
https://www.coolcatteacher.com/vibecoding/
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🎙️ New on the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast
Episode 930: Inquiry-Based Learning Made Simple for K-8 with Terra Tarango
Terra is the Chief Education Officer at Van Andel Institute for Education, and she makes inquiry feel doable.
- “Beat the Bot” activity — students figure out what humans can do that AI can’t. Brilliant.
- A kindergarten bee project that covers math, science, ELA, and SEL in five lessons.
- Her mantra: start small. You don’t have to overhaul everything.
I’ll have a new episode with Karim Meghji of Code.org going up next about how to teach children about AI.
🚀 Coming Soon: Season 6 of Cool Cat Teacher Talk
Season 6 is starting! The first episode is about being beautifully human — what it means to stay human and connected in an age of AI. I can’t wait for you to hear it.
And Season 6, Episode 2 is all about data-driven schools. Here’s a preview of what’s coming:
- A.J. Juliani taught 150 educators to build their own AI-powered data dashboards (they were mind-blown)
- Victoria Setaro introduced me to “warm data” vs. “cold data” — the numbers only tell half the story; the human stories behind them are where real action lives
- Dr. Deborah Dennie (NASSP award-winner) showed how data-driven leadership starts with seeing people
As I wrote in my script: “Data-driven doesn’t mean data-only. The best data-driven schools are the most human schools.”
🔒 A related note on data and security: You may have seen that Anthropic accidentally leaked Claude Code’s source code via npm on March 31st. No customer data was exposed — it was a packaging error — but it’s a good reminder that we all need to understand how our data flows through AI tools. If one of the largest Ai companies in the world had an accident – it is so easy to make mistakes with Data. More on this topic in the upcoming data episode.
😊 A Note of Joy
I got a lovely email from Gwendolyn Z. thanking me for the ideas about putting fun research into prompts. She called me a “joyologist.” I’ve never been called that before, but I’ll take it! Thank you, Gwendolyn. That made my whole week.
How to Add fun to your lessons based on research I decided to take my information on the research on fun and turned it into a prompt you can use in your AI to take the research on fun and add it to a lesson plan.
👉 FREEBIE Here’s the research and scroll to the bottom for the prompt. (You may have to download it and open in your browser as it is an html file.)
Speaking of April — talk to your students about Artemis II. Four humans are orbiting the moon this week. Nutella is floating in zero gravity. And if you want to dig deeper, Valerie Neal’s On a Mission is a perfect read for anyone inspired by women who made space for themselves — literally.
I’m so glad to get to serve you. Thank you for reading my email and for forwarding it to your friends!
Joyfully in your service,
Vicki Davis, The “Cool Cat Teacher”
PS If you’re wondering how I made the graphic at the top, I took my usual newsletter and loaded it into Google Gemini and asked it to make the heart a moon and to put Artemis II instead of the airplane and then I asked it to add a jar of floating nutella and it worked! You can do this with any of your standard headers, even your header in Google classroom to add a space inspired element to your website.
