It is nearing the end of school here. Teacher Appreciation Week. Lots of tests. Quite a few situations where students are in a last-minute panic because of forgetting to do this or that.
But there are ways to find beautiful moments your last weeks of school, as I wrote in this very popular 2011 post: Finding Your Beautiful Moment: The Last Week of School.
This week I have two Cool Cat Teacher Talks to share about: one on being beautifully human in the age of AI (and what AI can't do), and one about how to travel with students and some of the amazing things educators are doing as they connect their students with the world. We also have a cool real-world STEM story with Oak Ridge High School students and some brain-first AI teaching principles from Philip Seyfried. I'll also summarize some of the latest in AI (including the shocking demise of Khanmigo).
"As we lose the things that have grounded us, we will increasingly feel aimless and grow weary. We will base our entire identities on what we do, rather than who we were created to be."
— Jason Thacker & Richard J. Mouw, The Age of AI
This Week's Shows
Cool Cat Teacher Talk · S6E1
What AI Can't Do: Being Beautifully Human
This show is focusing on being beautifully human. What are the things that only humans can do? What are some things to learn so we can better communicate with each other through the spoken word and written word? How do we teach emotional intelligence, and what happens when a teacher decides to use puppets to teach kids how to act? Finally, what does a school look like that chooses not to use any technology (except robot building), and how and what do they hope to teach when they do this? There are many voices as we live in the AI age, but always we should cherish the diversity and beauty and variety of the human voices who make this world a more interesting and better place. I hope you find yourself challenged and intrigued by this episode.
Featuring Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk, Alan Lipton, Karen McCallum, and Krise Nowak.
Listen Now →
Cool Cat Teacher Talk · S6E4 · Sponsored by EF Tours
Traveling With Students: Five Teachers Who Took the Leap
Some of the greatest memories of my life have been watching a student's whole world open up the moment they step off a plane in a place they never dreamed they'd stand. After 20 years of taking students to Qatar, India, China, Dubai, Hawaii, and even just up the road to Atlanta, I can tell you this: travel changes students. It changes lives. And honestly, it changes us as teachers, too.
In this episode, you'll meet five educators who decided their students deserved to see the world. A middle school teacher in Laredo. A rural ag teacher in Colorado. A Denver science teacher whose quiet student found his voice in Belize. A biology teacher planting mangroves in Panama. And a principal in Baton Rouge who's done this for years and knows exactly what to look for.
Listen Now →
10 Minute Teacher · Episode 933 · Sponsored by EF Tours
Real World STEM: Real Tools, Real Clients, Real Money
Sometimes there are conversations that need to be had. This is one of those. I sat down with Joe Fatheree and Dr. Mark Buckner, two leading innovators in the space of STEM, AI, and helping high school students engineer and design in ways that are relevant in the real workforce. Joe is a globally recognized educator, author, and filmmaker named one of the top 10 teachers internationally by the Global Teacher Prize. Mark is the architect behind Oak Ridge High School's Wildcat Manufacturing, a Smart Industry Top 50 Innovator who won a $1.25 million Tennessee state grant to build a student-run enterprise where teenagers run real contracts with real companies on world-class equipment.
We range across what STEM educators are wrestling with right now: how to build a learning environment with industry-grade tools, why AI ethics has to be taught alongside AI tools, what neuroscience actually says about kids' developing brains in the attention economy, and the three pathways their students take: starting their own business, walking into a $100K+ workforce job, or accelerating into engineering programs years ahead of their college peers.
Listen Now →
10 Minute Teacher · Episode 934 · Sponsored by EF Tours
Brain First, AI Second: Teaching Writing in the AI Era
A new MIT Media Lab study took two groups of writers, one started with AI, one started with their own brain. Then they swapped. The group that started with their own thinking before bringing in AI? They had a clear advantage. As teachers, we keep getting pushed into "love AI" or "ban AI" camps. The truth is in the middle, and it starts with the order of operations. Brain first. AI second.
This week I'm talking with Philip Seyfried, doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, decade-long middle school ELA teacher, and co-author of AI-Enhanced Literacy: Practical Steps for Deepening Reading and Writing Instruction. We dig into the brain-first approach, why AI detectors don't work (and what does), how to monitor AI in the classroom without policing it, and how to build the kind of trust that lets students tell you the truth about how they're actually using these tools.
Listen Now →
10 Minute Teacher · Episode 932
ADHD Misconceptions: What Your Students Need You to Know
When we think about ADHD in the classroom, most of us picture a student who can't sit still or struggles with focus. But that's only half the story, and it's a misconception that's costing our students real confidence, real relationships, and real success. Jheri South, a certified ADHD specialist and mom of seven neurodivergent kids, is here to set the record straight. The neuroscience is clear: ADHD is far more about what's happening inside the mind than the behaviors we see, and understanding that difference changes everything about how we teach.
In this episode, you'll discover the five things that actually engage an ADHD brain (hint: "just try harder" isn't one of them), the hidden emotional struggle that affects 95% of people with ADHD, and the simple shifts in classroom practice that turn frustration into breakthrough moments.
Listen Now →
AI News and Views
Students Use AI on Assignments and Lie About It
The Cheat Sheet shared an article about how students use AI and lie about it. (In next week's Cool Cat Teacher Talk, we'll have a professor who shares that teachers lie about it too, so be warned. This is a problem for all of us.)
The Shocking Demise of Khanmigo
Shockingly, Khanmigo is going away, and Dan Meyer writes an amazing commentary on this. Khanmigo was the AI chatbot unveiled by Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and supposedly was going to replace or reduce the need for us teachers to teach. It didn't happen. They really kept pushing the tool on students, and there was pushback or really just downright ignoring it altogether.
This presents the issue with any chatbot that refuses to give answers to students. Students often want answers, not help understanding it for themselves. The productive struggle of learning is just that: struggle. And when a student struggles, the more they struggle, the less likely they are to sit in that struggle without an expert teacher at their side helping them through the process. It is worth reading Dan Meyer's commentary.
Senate AI Legislation: The CHATBOT Act
Also surprising, it looks like the Senate is working on AI legislation and requiring family accounts for kids under 13, time limits, conversation logs, as well as "I am not human" labels. I'm not sure this will work, and also not sure 13 is old enough. I would definitely pull it up to 15 if not older.
Whatever the law, I hope parents are closely monitoring their children's phones and their computers. One parent went on her child's Chromebook and found he had watched 13,000 hours of YouTube in class. With such distraction, many parents are pushing back against devices.
As always, I will say devices can be of great use, but we need to be able to monitor them, have filters on our firewalls that help block many distractions, and this YouTube conundrum really is one. YouTube originally was our go-to for educational videos. But now that YouTube (and Meta as well) have largely begun imitating the TikTok algorithm, dangerous content, mindless content, and child-inappropriate content is endless scrolling past our kids and begs a question if we will even be able to use YouTube at all, or if we'll have to go back to uploading videos to EdPuzzle and such, as many already do and have been doing.
We've just seen that Los Angeles has become one of the first major school districts to require screen time limits, banning screens for kindergarten and going to rolling labs for 1–5. Again, they are saying that kids are playing video games, watching YouTube, and scrolling social media. It isn't the screens, but how we're using screens. I think as a whole, many schools (and families) used screens to get their kids through the pandemic, and now we're reaping the results of such behaviors. Kids need to engage with the world around them and learn.
One App to Rule Them All
And now we're moving towards a day, with the OpenAI ChatGPT Futures announcement, where we have one app to rule them all. In fact, now I'm using my Claude Cowork as the starting point for a lot of my work, where I write it, have it fact-check, get research back, review it, and write. As I'm writing this, I have had Claude Cowork pull the snippets of articles I've sent (I call them "research seeds") and I'm writing in my own words and will have it insert the links and smooth out the typos for me.
This is a new age, but what matters is: are we teaching, are kids learning, are we helping students and teachers set healthy boundaries with the online world so we can better experience the face-to-face world?
Increasingly, I'm seeing my students play card games, get rid of phones, and some of the apps my students have created in this semester's MAD Learn Shark Tank app-building project reflect a renewed desire to get offline and reconnect with one another. In this project, students work to solve big problems. The big problem they are seeing? Disconnect. In fact, I had a major kerfuffle to handle when two groups wanted to name their app Reconnect even though the apps did entirely different things!
Being human is so important, as the next show we'll discuss will share.
"We adopt without thinking, panic, remove without thinking. This is a leadership failure. And it's about to happen again with AI if we don't intervene."
— AJ Juliani
Being Beautifully Human
I'm really proud of this show, where I interview my editor, Alan Lipton; an amazing head of school who teaches people on TikTok and Instagram how to communicate, Jeff Bogaczyk; a wonderful educator, Karen McCallum, who teaches young children how to interact using puppets; and Krise Nowak, the head of a school that uses no technology at all.
While I personally am an advocate for technology use, I think it is vitally important to listen to those who aren't using technology so we can see what we may be missing in our technology-rich schools, to put those things back. Krise Nowak shares some powerful points about the methods at her school that we should consider.
I relistened to this show and even John's and my comments at the end of the show, and found myself nodding as if it wasn't even me on the show, going, "Wow, ain't that the truth!" I hope you enjoy that one.
Listen to S6E1: Being Beautifully Human →
Traveling With Students
Then, we talk about a topic I love: student travel. When EF Tours reached out to me some time ago, I was like, "Yes! I want to talk about the amazing things I've learned and my students have learned through travel and how to do it with students," and I also asked to interview a bunch of teachers doing the same.
If you have considered adding more travel opportunities to your school, you should listen to what these teachers are doing with middle and high school students, particularly to bring STEM and Career and Technical Education topics into their classrooms through travel around the world.
Listen to S6E4: Traveling With Students →
Grants & Speaking
The Department of Justice extended the ADA Title II digital accessibility deadline. (For my IT director and instructional tech reader friends, don't read this as a reprieve to ignore it; read it as breathing room to actually do it well.)
Also, K-12 Dive reports that AI and computer science will be prioritized in the new grants. This is a sweet spot for me, and I'm an ISTE 2026 Featured Speaker this year. I'm also talking to a few schools about being part of their grant process to receive these grants.
Now that some things are through with Dad, I'm starting to book speaking again. If you want to know more about how to bring me to your school, district, or conference, you can check out my speaking topics and information here.
⚠ Security Alert: The Canvas Data Breach
The latest in cyberattacks that everyone has heard about is Instructure Canvas, as sites at Harvard and Princeton and many other colleges have gone down. Read the AP News coverage here.
Kathryn Dickson Cogdell posted an amazing AP CSP Case Study on this data breach that spells things out so well. You could use this in just about any CS class.
The group, "Shiny Hunters," which is a loose affiliation of teenagers and young adults primarily based in the US and UK, attacked starting in September 2025 and threatened Canvas to "pay or leak." They claim to have stolen 275 million records and 3.65 terabytes of data. Instructure didn't publicly announce the breach until May 8th, after on May 7th all of the Canvas accounts were placed in maintenance mode and students saw a ransom message replacing their Canvas login page. This happened during finals week at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Georgetown, Rutgers, and many other places.
There doesn't seem to be evidence that passwords, dates of birth, social security numbers, or payment info were leaked. But full names, emails, student ID numbers, private messages between students and teachers, accommodation and medical/mental health disclosures, and Title IX communications were exposed. So this is one to consider if your high school has a college program where students attend college during high school.
A Personal Note for the End of the Year
I've been working to update some of the pages on my site now that I'm speaking again and back into things after my Dad's passing and getting through work that happens after such a loss.
For my birthday, my husband took me to the mountains. I sure did need it. I think it is important to remember that when we experience the loss of someone close to us, grief can happen continually for years. It doesn't take much to trigger it, and sometimes it seems to come out of nowhere. I had great parents and have leaned on friends of faith who have gone through such difficult things before.
I'm also working hard not to settle for less than the best, even as we approach the end of the school year. This week we have Shark Tank, and the work students have done since I taught them vibe coding is truly incredible. I'm going to have to talk about how to teach vibe coding. (In fact, many schools are doing this. Peninsula School District in Washington says it saved $250K in edtech costs through vibe coding.) That said, it does help to know some about coding. If you do, you're not vibe coding; you're actually coding. I think this is a new exciting area that everyone should have PD for their teams, particularly IT departments.
Now, I want to make sure you all know how important you are. I know that the end of the school year can be so hard for so many of us. I look back in my journals and see that all of my end-of-school years have been hard, difficult, often full of tears and frustrations as everyone (sports, theater, clubs) all tries to get in "one more thing" all while academics for the whole year are winding up. Conflicting priorities and schedules can create perfect storms of everyone wanting to use the same space, everyone wanting to use the same time, for things that are all important.
Remember, control what you can control: yourself. Teach the students who show up for class. Be kind to yourself. If you need rest, take time to rest. I like to create little boxes in my planner for grading 1–2 things a day so I can keep up. I've already sent "end of year" emails to all of my classes asking parents to check up on what students are doing and offering end-of-day tutoring time. And then sometimes I have to let it go. I've had so few kids fail over my 24 years, but sometimes it happens. But it isn't going to be because I failed to follow up.
I just hope you'll remember how important your job is, how important it is that we model how adults navigate the challenges of life, and how kids listen very closely to what we say at the end of the school year. And also how integral we are to many students' lives.
I had a young man who has come such a long way this year give me a bracelet yesterday that he picked out himself. It meant so much, and I could tell he meant it. He often tells me what a great teacher he thinks I am and how much he appreciates me helping him. I appreciate that so very much. Because often at this time of year, I can feel like I'm wasting my time. When I see a student who has a ton of work playing a game, or a student continues to skip school and when you reach out to the parent, the parent claims that his or her child didn't know they had anything "to do." I know. I know. Ludicrous, right?
Going Plaid
And yet, I want to tell a story here some of you might think is funny.
So when I'm working on my TV show and go into Premiere Pro, I need everything else to be closed except Premiere so my computer can go as fast as possible and render faster. I use this thing called a Stream Deck. Many venues use them for lighting and such, but it is something gamers use, and mine has buttons on it that I can program. So I have a button that I press when I'm ready to go into Premiere Pro and do the final edit, and this is called Plaid.
(OK, sorry, but this is from the movie Spaceballs, where they have a really fast light speed called ludicrous speed and then they go even faster and call it plaid. It is a joke in my family when we have to get something done quickly and we say we go into plaid mode.)
So I press Plaid, and everything else shuts down so I can get the one thing done my computer needs to do.
So right now, a lot of us (me included) need to go into Plaid mode. We need to go easy on meal prep, easy on everything. Just get through the season. Get rid of anything "extra" and focus on the one thing: finishing well. Go plaid.
OK, that is my advice for the day.
I want you to know how much I appreciate that you read my newsletter. I spent a lot of time researching and writing, and want this newsletter to be the best of my current thinking. I hope it helps you be the most remarkable, amazing teacher possible.
Blessings to you. If you have any feedback or questions, as always, just reply to this email.
