What I Learned on Day 2 (Monday) at ISTE 2026 #ISTELive #notatISTE

This morning was so sweet as I joined my friends Eric Curts, Jaime Donally, Rachelle Dené Poth, Gabriel Carrillo, and Victoria Thompson for our Edtech and AI Supershare. The crowd was awesome and had so much energy! (That was surprising for a 9 am session!) That really started the day on an up note!

In today’s post I’m going to share some of the cool things I saw, the conversations in the hallway, and just some general observations about what people are talking about. I will tell you one frustration. Social media is not making it easy to connect. The algorithms they use now don’t help us connect with others who are there very easily. There was a day when most educators were on Twitter, but now people are in a variety of places. It just makes it harder. One day someone will invent something, that’s for sure.

First Stop: Edtech and AI SuperShare

Slides: SuperShare resource page

This is the third year my friends and I have done this super fast panel. We have six minutes per person to share classroom tools and three minutes per person to share their favorite productivity tools.

Here were some of the big ideas from each presenter, although I recommend you take a look at the presentation above for every link.

Gabriel Carrillo

“Mr. EdTech Bites” leaned into writing feedback and engagement:

• Class Companion for rubric-based AI feedback on student writing, Short Answer for gamified, anonymous peer critique (his “Battle Royale” round is a hit),
• Snorkl to make student thinking visible with AI feedback, and
• AutoDraw to turn rough sketches into clean icons.

For productivity: all vocab lists should be in a spreadsheet. Then, you can take the CSV file and pull it into just about anything including Kahoot with a CSV, and use Google Vids instead of pricey video editors.

Victoria Thompson

Victoria Thompson focused on gentle on-ramps for tech-hesitant teachers:

• JustARecipe.com (a clean, clutter-free way to ease into AI),
• Goblin Tools to break overwhelming tasks into steps, and
• Microsoft Forms to collect responses and auto-generate a slide deck — she runs weekly staff shout-outs on autopilot, sent every Monday at 5:30 a.m.
• For literacy she pointed to Microsoft’s Reading Coach and Immersive Reader,
• plus Grammarly for tone and professional-email coaching. (Catch her “Classroom to Coach” session Wednesday in W103A.)

Jaime Donally

ARVRinEDU brought the immersive tech:

• Delightex (formerly CoSpaces), where AI “buddies” let students talk through their own 3D scenes;
• Merge EDU for browser-based AR/VR on Chromebooks with cheap 3D glasses (if you’re here, get some at their booth);
• VirtualSpeech for VR interview and presentation practice; and the
• Meta Display glasses for live captions (real accessibility).

Her productivity favorites:

• Parmonic for turning long video into text and snippets (free for educators) and
• Prisms VR with built-in assessment dashboards.
• Grab her AR-activated newspaper, The Reality Times, if you can find her at ISTE, she has a poster session at ISTE today, Tuesday, June 30th at the Higher Order thinking Playground at 12:30 pm.

Eric Curts

Control Alt Achieve is your Google and Gemini guy:

• EduGems, his collection of 140+ ready-to-use Gemini “Gems” for tutors, scaffolds, and assessments (free, for students and teachers);
• Teacher Hive for free, teacher-built vibe-coded games and simulations;
• NotebookLM for turning a script into a graphic novel; and
• Brisk, which now has an interactive whiteboard.
• For AI policy, he pointed to transparency.support for AI-use statements and Google Classroom’s “traffic light” for permissions.

Rachelle Dené Poth

• showed AI-native course and creation platforms: Kira, whose AI tutor guides students toward the answer instead of handing it over; classroom chatbots that stay on topic (her Spanish “I want a pony” demo got a laugh);
• and Learning Genie / Curriculum Genie, which built a full 8-week, 40-lesson course in about five minutes.
• She’s also been doing AR/VR in her Spanish classroom for years and pointed teachers to vibe-coding tools like Magi and Lovable. (OK so I don’t know what Magi is — I’m not sure which one to link to, sorry.

Me, Vicki Davis 😊

And my own in-between bits: I use Claude Cowork to turn my workflows into reusable “skills” (and for the text-based video editing I do), I run an AI jigsaw where students compare how different models answer the same prompt, and I’m a stickler for AI vocabulary — confabulate, not hallucinate, because humans hallucinate and machines don’t. My students vibe-coded their own learning games right inside Claude this year, and I always feed the AI accurate PDFs first so it trains on good information.

I think we should focus on detecting learning not whether AI was used.

I wish we could focus on detecting if learning is happening rather than detecting AI. The question is does a student know and understand what they are doing. I don’t care as much if they use AI to get there.

In five years, AI will be just be everywhere. It will be like asking if we use a calculator on a math problem. It is really irrelevant if we did and more relevant if we can work the problem. I hope we’ll have the controls we need to focus on learning and that every tool we use will help us get there and not distract from the process.

For example, let’s look at how I’m writing this post:

1. Voice AI. Throughout this conference I’m recording my day on Plaud Note Pro. I also record my thoughts and big takeaways and what I want it to focus on pulling out from my day. I love the
2. Compliation and Conversation. Then, I use Claude Cowork to go through the day using my voice notes as a guide. I have it interview me and give my words and thoughts on each aspect of the day.
3. Draft. Then, I have it pull it all together along with links.
4. Fact Check. I have Claude Cowork fact check everything. I mean everything. (See below! Sigh!)
5. Push the Draft to WordPress. Then, after I read over the draft and am happy with it, I have it push the draft to my blog.
6. Rewrite. Then, I go through it and rewrite in my own words. Why? Because even with all of my writing, it still sounds like Claude. I really try to get it to sound like me but it doesn’t. It puts “stakes in the ground” it em dashes where I wouldn’t em dash (and I will use them and not give them up. I wrote about that recently.)
7. Check links. OK I try to check every link. I really do. Might I miss some? Sure. But most of them, I’ll have them.
8. Add pictures. Then I figure out what pics I want and *gasp* I might even AI generate the featured image. Why? Because I want to!

So, let me ask you this — does it matter that I used AI? Is it relevant that without these tools my blog posts often die in the land of good intentions and digitally rot away to irrelevance because in the rush I can’t pull them together?

I really want to help all those teachers not at iste! And some of the most important things are the CONVERSATIONS people are having and one of those conversations is about WORKFLOWS.

So, at this point, I could care less if AI touched something because *double gasp* AI touches everything these days. The qeustion I want to ask is “did this student learn.”

ISTE’s Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate

I really enjoyed ISTE’s new Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate, and I’ll admit it — I like the roles humans are playing in it their pavilion. Now, it took me forever to find it as it is on the bottom floor near the entrance.

The framework names six things ISTE says we should want students to become: Learner, Researcher, Synthesizer, Ideator, Connector, and Storyteller. (Here’s the framework.)

But I love the booth! Educators from the STEM SIG / SIGTEL were demonstrating how they teach their students to be each of those things! It is so fun. Nothing mass-manufactered here. Lots of small groups of humans talking about what this looks like. Educators teaching educators. In small groups. Human to human talking about the tool. That is the way to go (Karim Meghji from CodeAI says it best below.)

Karim Meghji and Code AI: glass box, not black box

Speaking of Karim Meghji,, one of favorite conversations was sitting down with him! Karim is one of my interviews of the day and is president and CEO of Code AI.

Disclosure: CodeAI is one of the sponsors of my time at ISTE this year as I’m recording a few things for them. Companies like CodeAI make the work I do possible and I always disclose that. Although I’ve talked about this organization for years because I love what they do!

One of my favorite conversations of the day was sitting down again with president and CEO of Code AI — the nonprofit formerly known as Code.org, the people behind Hour of Code (which is what got me started in Python) and now Hour of AI.

Earlier in the day, John and I took one of their classes in their activation space. I loved the designs of the lessons.

For example, I can stand up front in class and tell my students all day that “AI is biased.” But when they work to generate foods, you can see the bias. For example, when I said to “make the meal appeal to kid” it put a smiley face of food on the baked chicken. One instructor commented that somehow AI thinks kids like to eat smiley faces! See — bias. And that is the point — we see it. We feel it. We talk about it.

CodeAI is free and has built these moments on purpose. I was even amazed as Kari says they have built some lessons where AI answers incorrectly so students learn to inspect it.

The safety controls are pretty awesome as well with multiple steps between students and the AI tool and back from the AI tool. The I highly recommend these free tools for teaching about AI even if you have other tools in place just because of the way they have set it up.

Karim also pushes past the usual “human in the loop” language. Being in the loop, he says, could mean sitting in the passenger seat. He wants the student driving. An active participant, not a passive one.

There was a line he said that I could repeat over and over.

“If you are going to start anywhere with AI education, it starts with humans teaching humans about what the machine is doing.”

Yes!

I could go on so much more even about the delightful man from Mexico, Oskar, that I sat with in the booth!

The Hallway Conversations

Oh the people are just the best:

• I ran into Nurlan who had emailed me when I went to Edcrunch in Moscow. That was such a happy memory and a room full of educators.
• I talked to Dyane Smokorowski — Mrs. Smoke from my Flat Classroom days and we nerded out on global collaboration for a moment. She’s cooking up a very cool project but I’ll let her share the story soon, I hope.
• I ran into Eric Sheninger who hosted one of the best conferences I ever attended, Edscape. My son was a senior that year. I watched my son get his first sack in Eric’s vendor room.
• I chatted with Don Wettrick, an awesome entrepreneur who helps bring business into the classroom.
• I saw PBL guru Suzie Boss in the hallway. What a brilliant and remarkable human being she is.
• I saw Starr Sackstein at my hotel who may just have the busiest few days this week I’ve ever heard of someone doing! (It isn’t mine to tell, but wow, Starr if you read this – you go, girl!)
• I’ve met people who have read my blog. So many are in leadership now and said when they were a teacher getting started, I helped them get started!
• We might come to ISTE to talk tech and curriculum but the best thing about ISTE is the people!

I’m so mad with Google search and a digital literacy lesson worth remembering.

I’ve learned that mistakes are best owned and then we can move on. And when we share our mistakes, someone might learn from our embarrassment. I was prepping for my interview with Karim, and I was looking for recent surveys on how many adults are leaning on Ai for decision making. I was in a rush because I couldn’t find the research I had looked at just last week.

OK I’m going to show you the screen shot but DO NOT BELIEVE IT. I’m going to get to it below.

OK so the Google summary said that 78.5% of American’s used an AI tool to influence their decision making but only around 17% check the answers. I clicked on Knoxville news sentinel. I did all that I teach my students to do. I vetted sources… or so I thought.

So, after the interview, I did a fact check using my Claude Cowork skill that I programmed to be a “cranky geek curmudgeon” (I’ve blogged about that too.)

And then I could have just kicked the wall. The number went back to a pay-to-post survey from a marketing agency. This is not a source I’d ever hang my hat on.

Dad gum it, as we say in Camilla, Georgia. Google let me down.

Here’s what happened. Google found information but it doesn’t fact check sources,. It can’t tell a vetted study from a press release.

It looked authoritative. It wasn’t. I’m going to have to edit that stat out of the interview even though his response is pure gold. I’m not going to perpetuate the problem by sharing it!

So, I’m working to figure out how to turn off AI search on Google. Or, I’m just going to have to use Perplexity which tends to be more accurate than AI’s search.

So, here’s the lesson. We all need digital literacy. I got burned by an AI summary from Google. (And perhaps you could argue that my well tuned fact checking skill in Claude opened my eyes to the source and helped me fess up where I messed up so I can get better!)

Doggone it. That’s another Camilla Georgia saying. But I’m not going to be gone. I’m going to open up. Below are some ways that I’m working to try to turn off Google’s AI summaries. Some work now and may stop working so be aware.

The “AI dean”: helpful, as long as humans don’t hand over the decision

At the AI-Ready Graduate pavilion, I heard Phyllis Shepherd of Alexandria City Public Schools talk about equity in school discipline. The numbers behind it are sobering — students with disabilities are far more likely to face long-term suspension — and she built an AI decision-support tool to make discipline more consistent and policy-aligned.

It was interesting, and I think it could be genuinely good — as long as the humans involved don’t offload the decision-making to it. That’s the line for me. A tool that helps a human be more consistent and fair is one thing. A tool that becomes the one deciding is another. Keep the human in the chair.

Workflow and Claude Cowork

So funny when I said “Claude Cowork” in the first session, some people cheered. The people who are fans are superfans. And we are nerding out, I’ve got to tell you.

I got a lot of questions about my Plaud notetaking tool and my Remarkable tablet and how my whole workflow fits together.

Lots of people are quietly changing how they work. They aren’t testing new apps because they have gone underground reengineering their workflows. They are forming attachments to their AI tool of choice. They are comparing their time savers.

The conversation among many leaders is about habits. They say we’re moving from the attention economy to the attachment economy. It is happening. You’ll say “are there any Gemini users in the house” and they’ll cheer. Claude Cowork and more cheers. Not as many for ChatGPT — not sure why. Interesting. I still use it but for certain things.

Oh, and vibe coding. We’re all showing each other the apps we’ve built. Again, not as much about the apps on the floor because we’re all building them. English teachers. Non geeks. People with ideas. People who understand workflows. Making apps. This is great!

Walking the exhibit hall – my observations

The floor was its own education. A few things stood out:

• Adobe Premiere on the iPhone with Firefly generation built right in — that one’s awesome, and it changes what’s possible for quick video.
• A genuinely good, extended demo of Renaissance Intelligence — there’s a lot there worth a longer write-up. (Disclosure: I’m doing work for them too and I adore Nearpod which is central to what is happening with this cool tool. More on them later.)
• Canva is still a huge hit; their booth was packed the whole time.
• The curated vendor tracks — booths grouped by the job you’re trying to do — were really popular, and honestly that’s a smart way to walk a hall this size. Curating by the educator’s actual job description is a hit.
• The BBC’s free learning resources were awesome — a lot there for teachers at no cost. (Another sponsor of my work at ISTE)
• And there was a child-sized walking robot. Robots and drones still pull a crowd — people find them genuinely interesting — though I’ll admit I looked at the walking one and thought, I’m not sure why you’d put this in a school. The interest is real; the classroom use case isn’t always.

@coolcatteacher I am just not sure how a humanoid robot could be used in the classroom. It will take convincing. I could see all kinds of mischief with this little feller. #istelive #robot ♬ original sound – therealnevv

Where to find me Wednesday

If you’re at ISTE, I’ve got two more sessions on Wednesday, July 1, and I’d love to see you there:

• 🎬 Empowering Digital Storytelling from Pitch to Publish (with AI) — 10:00–11:00 a.m., Room W206BC (also streamed). I’ll take you through helping students go from idea to finished story using AI at every step — pitch, produce, publish — and share my gear, my gadgets, the projects I use to teach storytelling, and the websites that make it easy.
• 🧰 50+ AI/Edtech Tools and Teaching Tips to Transform Your Classroom — 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m., Room W312AB. A practical rundown of 50+ classroom-tested tools organized by the teaching job they help you do — assessment, creativity, coding, and productivity — plus the pedagogy that goes with each. This one isn’t streamed, so you have to be in the room for the goodies. Resources: bit.ly/50AI-EdtechCCT.

Where Day 2 left me

The day opened with five friends and an energetic room having fun teaching together, and the best line I heard all day was Karim’s: it starts with humans teaching humans. Meanwhile, under all the booths and demos, people are forming real attachments to their tools — the attachment economy isn’t coming, it’s here.

So, here’s where I finish out Day two. Let the attachments be to the humans and then use the tools to help improve how we humans live. Don’t be lonely, live life and get out there. Don’t watch on a screen (if you can help it – when I broke my foot, I had to). Get out there if you can and see the people. The tools are cool but the people are remarkble.

Let’s be human beings not human doings. Let’s work on help kids and loving them well. Let’s have the conversations that matter.

That’s Day 2. I gotta run. Lots of people to see. And there’s this vendor who has edible ink. Talk about eating your words! (ha ha) Oh and there’s a squirrel at the Hilton who isn’t afraid of humans. I don’t like him. I’ve named him Napolean. He’s a little aggressive. And short.

OK enough with the stuff. See you later, educator.