What I Learned on Day 1 at #istelive #notatiste

I started the morning in the lazy river with for some quiet time with my Bible, Journal, and a moment. The water was moving slowly, the conference hadn’t started the intensity yet, and then my friend Angela Maiers — founder of the You Matter movement — came over and brought me breakfast.

We floated and we talked. And what we talked about was kids: how we help them build social skills, how we help them know they matter, how we teach them to relate to other people, get along, and get out of the house. I didn’t know yet that the last thing I’d hear at the end of the day — a keynote built on neuroscience — would say the same thing right back to me. More on that at the end.

Smart glasses, with Jaime Donally and Hall Davidson

My second stop was a conversation I’d been looking forward to: Jaime Donally and Hall Davidson showing me their Meta display glasses — the ones with Meta AI built in. I recorded a hilarious video below for those of you not here so you can feel like you’re here!

Hall looked at me through them and said, “Hey Meta, who’s Vicki Davis?” Well, it seems that I’m an Irish visual artist based in Cork. We tried Jaime next and got an actress, then a performer from Tyrone. So — the AI is not always right, but at this point, we know that. Hopefully our students do.

But here’s where I got really excited! The glasses do live captions. When you talk, Hall sees your words in front of him. They’d set this up at a previous conference for someone who is hard of hearing and reads lips — and in a big, noisy room, with dialect differences or somebody wearing a mask, lip-reading falls apart. The captions let him have a real conversation. Jaime is so right on this one: the accessibility side is the strongest case for this technology.

I asked the obvious teacher question: what about these in schools? This is an honest question, but she’s right here as well. Wearables, aren’t going away — Apple’s Vision Pro proved there’s a real appetite for it. But the issues are the ones we already struggle with, amplified: assessment integrity, the privacy of everyone else in the room, and what’s being captured and stored.

So, what do we do? She says we need to go ahead and decide what is acceptable and what is not and set our policies now. There are wonderful implications for those who are hard of hearing but we need to talk about that now before the technology walks in the door, because it will!

There are currently three versions of the Meta Smart Classes:

• Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses
• Oakley (for athletics that are water resistant and sports rugged)
• Prada (no explanation who these are for.

Jaime talks about in the video how she uses these every day. It is hard for me to understand but then again I didn’t understand how Claude Cowork would be so useful for me as well. What does she use the glasses for?

• As she’s walking texts can be read in her ears
• Reminders (appear on the screen and audible in a tiny mike in the earpiece that no one can see (or hear she says)
• Directions while her hands are full of luggage.

She says Coaches have their players using the Oakley Metas to record player-POV video. Her daughers’ volleyball team played in them to see the ball coming the way a player sees it.

So it was funny. She even talked about her dog eating the Meta glasses and the case. She has a tiktok on it. I think my dog would have been in big trouble.

Hall Davidson on accessible, low-cost creativity

Then I caught Hall Davidson again on the tools side, and his whole frame is one I love: start cheap and creative, then scale up.

He showed how a $20 View-Master can do real work — Walnut Ridge, Arkansas used 468 of them for the town’s 150th anniversary, pairing historic building photos with current ones so people could walk the town and see its past in their hands.

Here are Hall’s Resources:

He pointed to free XR resources through a Verizon–Discovery Education partnership: virtual field trips, interviews with people working in cybersecurity, e-sports, and more, already chaptered for the classroom. And he talked about using Sora to generate video from a prompt — rough at first, surprisingly good with persistence. His handout lives at tinyurl.com/XRISTE2026.

Steve Dembo, Gabriel Carrillo, and student creation

The playgrounds sessions are some of my favorites! So, I ran into some more friends at the Playgrounds!

So, then, my friend Steve Dembo was presenting how he uses Canva for digital storytelling. Here’s his process:

1. Write the script first
2. Record the audio in one take inside Canva
3. Add visuals and time them to appear and disappear on the timeline

He has students use AI graphics generation as a backup but to start by finding graphics. He wants students to focus on creating and not get lost in the weeds. Steve says it takes just about three class periods to finish once the script is written.

I also had time to talk to Gabriel Carrillo and he says the best digital storytelling tools are the ones that students have access to and can use.

One thing about voice only recording that all of the presenters in this playground said is that voice-only recording takes the on-camera pressure off students so they can focus on content.

Some use Adobe Podcast and others use Garage Band. One teacher even said that their local NPR is sometimes willing to air student work.

My son’s life was changed when he podcasted for me in tenth grade. He now produces my show!

A quick note on Plaud

I have to mention the tool that let me write this. I’ve been using Plaud Note Pro.

This device is a small recorder. I recorded my introductions for the Monday presentation and pulled it into Claude Chat on my phone. Then, it created a PDF for me and I put it onto my Remarkable Tablet and I was ready to go for the Monday session. I will say, however, if you want a voice recorder for the classroom, use Socrait instead.

The reframe: AI in schools

For this next section, I took the Plaud notes and let Claude summarize after I dictated my voice telling what I thought of each section. I’ve been testing an AI “detector” Pangram which is pretty slick. It pretty much notices when I go from writing and editing to when I let the Claude generated content be posted. That said, I’m not sure I agree that it is truly AI written when I’m the one who recorded, I’m the one who dictated my thoughts, and then we pulled it together. I want to make the point here as you read this information below that it is my thoughts even if an AI tool might claim “AI written.” It might be AI compiled but I definitely wrote it. So think about that. But that said, I have to run go to a Code.org session now as I’m preparing to press “send.”)

Then, I went to the keynote and a big part of the day was the shift in how we talk about AI in schools.

Dr. Jose Cruz of Miami-Dade County Public Schools reframes AI as additional intelligence — something that supports a student’s actual intelligence — and ties it to the real skills in their Portrait of a Graduate: collaboration, problem-solving, resilience. Calling these tools “tools” lands better with parents and teachers than the hype does.

Richard Kwan, with Dr. Rosemary Vozar, made the point I keep coming back to: screen value over screen time. Their research summary across more than 100 studies argues that how technology is used matters far more than how many minutes. They named five conditions for getting it right — clear, age-appropriate guidelines; prepared educators; real digital citizenship; parent education; and ed-tech tools that have been independently validated.

There was also a name on the marquee. During the opening keynote, Richard Culatta and board president Jeremy Owoh announced that ISTE+ASCD is becoming the International Society for Transforming Education — the acronym stays, but the focus shifts from the how to the why. They also pointed to a free Google AI Educator Series of short, teacher-by-teacher micro-lessons, an AI-ready graduate profile, and a new EdTech Teacher Certification aimed at classroom, new, and pre-service teachers.

I had several conversations through the day about the harder side of this, too — AI grading bias and AI detection. I won’t put words in anyone’s mouth, but the concern is real and there’s research behind it. A Stanford study found that AI writing-feedback tools gave more praise and less constructive criticism to students described as Black, Hispanic, Asian, female, unmotivated, or learning-disabled. Read that twice: the harm here is the withheld feedback — the honest critique those students need to grow, quietly held back. As the lead author put it, the models are “picking up on the biases that humans exhibit.” Pair that with AI-detection tools that flag honest students with false positives, and the lesson is simple: keep a human in the loop. Always.

The keynote that tied it all together: Heather McGowan

The last thing I heard all day was Heather McGowan’s keynote, and it brought me right back to the lazy river.

She talked about the loneliness epidemic — and the neuroscience underneath it. Loneliness actually increases hostility and dampens the oxytocin we’re supposed to release when we connect with another person. She named the shifts we’re all living through: from presence to performance, from speech to text, from human to synthetic. And she made a case for what she calls productive friction — the truth that real relationships and real learning require negotiation, struggle, and effort. You don’t grow without it.

I’ll be honest about one place I part ways with her. She called the people who use AI well “cyborgs.” That’s a stretch. There’s a school of thought that says humans are merging with machines — I don’t buy it, and I don’t want to. AI is a tool. It should stay a tool. Use it well, push back on it, make it think harder — but you are still you, and the person across from you is still a person.

I started this day talking with Angela about how we need to help kids know how to relate to others, get along, and get out of the house. I ended it listening to a keynote lay out the neuroscience for why that’s not soft, optional, feel-good work — it’s essential. As I told my husband Kip on the phone tonight: kindness, respect, and just listening to people is, in some ways, becoming a superpower.

That’s Day 1. If I could capture every conversation to share with all of you not at ISTE, it couldn’t capture the beautiful of the wonderful human beings walking the halls at ISTE this year. I hope this chain of thought gives you some ideas for your own classroom. I’ll be back tomorrow! See you later, educator.

A note on the links

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you buy something through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you — it helps support this blog. You can browse all the books and tools I recommend on Vicki’s Amazon Affiliate Storefront.