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Back in June, at the end of an Adobe session at ISTE 2026, Claudio Zavala Jr. showed a room full of educators a one-minute and fifteen-second animated video that stopped me completely in my tracks. It was rich, layered, professionally rendered, and made entirely with AI-generated prompts. Every element editable. No animation degree required. No production budget. Just an idea and an Adobe account. I squeed. Loudly. In a room full of people. I have zero regrets. I also wrote a

Yesterday, I did not like my lesson planned for US History. Not in the "this is boring but necessary content" way that we have to march through content. This was in the "I taught this to one section yesterday, and it was painful for everyone in the room" level of dislike. The lesson landed with a resounding thud for everyone to hear, because the classroom was dead silent with boredom. During the 90 minutes of my planning period before seeing a different section of the same c

We've all been that teacher... You find the perfect video. Twelve minutes. Covers exactly what you need. You assign it, press play on the projector, and spend the next twelve minutes watching students do one of three things: take notes with varying degrees of engagement, stare at the screen with the particular glazed expression that means the content is entering one ear and leaving immediately through the other, or quietly do something else entirely while technically facing t

A Knowt a day keeps the IDK away. I will see myself out. Actually, no. I will not. The research behind that terrible pun is genuinely extraordinary. And we need to remember, really remember, the power of memory and old-school pedagogical techniques to augment our reliance on technology. On Monday, I wrote about the Fast and Curious EduProtocol and how pairing it with Wayground turns a fifteen-minute daily quiz into one of the most visible growth experiences a student can have

Check out my "class" photo of some of my students' avatars! Monday morning. Students are shuffling in. The weekend is not quite over for anyone in the room, including you. Here is a routine that takes fifteen minutes, requires almost no prep once you have set it up, and will produce some of the most visible evidence of student growth you have ever seen in a classroom. It is called the Fast and Curious. Pairing it with Wayground might be the most satisfying thing you do all w

I was always the headphones kid. From my first Walkman, to Discman, to a revolving door of MP3 players, and now my phone, which can stream music in an instant, I have always needed music in the background. I was even the kid who would try to break my over-ear headphones to run them up my sleeves so I could sit with my head on my hand and listen while I worked. It did something to help keep me calm and centered. Every time my students look at the clock, they see this sign. To

This may look similar to last Monday's post. I had several people reach out and ask for some additional steps or context on how I built the structure of my Claude project space. Also, the World History resource page is LIVE!!!!!! Every August I tell myself this will be the year I stay ahead of my own lesson plans instead of writing them at 10pm the night before. This year I tried something different. Before I planned a single lesson for tenth grade Modern World History, I s

The first two days of school are a negotiation. Students are figuring out who you are. You are figuring out who they are. Everyone is performing slightly more than they will for the rest of the year: students performing compliance, teachers performing authority, while the actual relationship that will make learning possible has not yet been established. I have been teaching for twenty years. I have done the syllabus reading, the procedure walk-through, the icebreaker where ev

Checking in from a still-being-organized Room 288, the new home of the plAIground! When I wrote the Year Zero post back in June, I made a promise. . Everything I build gets shared. Two dedicated resource pages: one for US History, one for World History, updated as the year goes on. Not a highlight reel of the things that worked perfectly. Everything! It's August. I'm in my 2nd of 4 days of PD, and I see students for the first time on Thursday! Before the madness of Day 1 of Y

I talk a lot about being intentional. About deliberate practice, deliberate design, deliberate teaching. And then, when life got in the way, and I forgot to rebook my travel to/from the Adobe Education Summit and accidentally had the most unintentionally intentional six days of travel that I'd never dreamed of. A summer that included traveling to and running debate judges at NSDA Nationals in Richmond, then one week later traveling to Orlando to present multiple sessions at I

The exterior of one of the three Adobe corporate towers. It is less than twenty-four hours since the Adobe Education Summit wrapped, and I am writing this on a train headed home. Not a plane. A train. (#RimmeyOnTheRails) What was initially an economically efficient method of traveling because I forgot to book a flight, has become the best decision I've made about travel in a long time. I've now found that the best way to both clear my mind and process new information at the

I did not expect to have my entire worldview surrounding art and creativity blown away at ISTE, but here we are. Manuel Herrera said something I wish I had heard as I was limping through all of my theatrical design classes in college (I was the rare speech/theater ed person who was in the program for the speech part). Manny said: STOP THINKING ABOUT DRAWING AS AN ARTISTIC PROCESS. IT IS A THINKING PROCESS. I wrote it in all caps in my notes because it deserved all caps. I am

I am going to keep this one short because the thing itself was short. This tease turned Claudio from one of my favorite Adobe Evangelists into the DEVIL! At the end of an Adobe Education booth session at ISTE 2026, our presenter, Claudio Zavala, showed us a one-minute and fifteen-second video. It was a 3D-animated short, the kind of visually rich, layered, genuinely beautiful piece of content that you would normally assume required a professional animation studio, significan

There is a phrase that kept appearing across multiple sessions at ISTE 2026, in different contexts and from different presenters, so consistently that it started to feel less like a talking point and more like a genuine shift in how the education technology industry is thinking about AI. From shortcut to scaffold. Microsoft made it the title of their session. Anoo Padha from Microsoft and Becky Keene (of whom I'm a MASSIVE fan!!!!!!) from Phygital Labs, whose book The AI Opt

There is a specific kind of discovery that only happens at a conference. Not just the periphery finds I love: the small booth, the student founder, the tool you would never have stumbled across any other way. This is a different kind. The kind where you walk past a booth, catch something on a screen in your peripheral vision, stop, watch for thirty seconds, and think: where has this been my whole career? I had never heard of Classkick before ISTE 2026. That is on me. Classk

There is a particular kind of excitement that happens when a tool you already trust announces something new. It is different from the excitement of discovering something unknown. It is more like watching a favorite restaurant add a dish to their menu that you did not know you needed until you saw it, and then immediately understanding that it has always belonged there. I am a Kami user. Have been for a while. If you are not familiar, Kami is the platform trusted by over 40 mi

I spent forty-five minutes actively rethinking the most common criticism of vibe coding. The criticism goes something like this: if students are using AI to generate their code, they are not actually learning to code. They are learning to prompt. They are outsourcing the thinking to a machine and calling it programming education, and the result is a generation of students who can describe what they want a computer to do but have no idea how computers actually do it. It is a r

There is a moment at ISTE where the conference stops feeling like professional development and starts feeling like the future arrived early and forgot to send a warning. For me, that moment happened twice on the main expo floor. Once with my hands around a holographic human heart. Once standing in the trenches of World War One. Neither of those sentences is a metaphor. zSpace: When the Screen Reaches Back Throughout my career, I have seen a lot of technology demos. I have nod

I stopped at this booth for every student I have ever taught with dyslexia. Past and present. The ones who sat in the back and pretended the worksheet was not defeating them. The ones who worked twice as hard as everyone else to produce half as much on paper and knew it. The ones who were smart enough to feel the gap between what they understood and what the text on the page was doing to them, and who had no tool in their hands powerful enough to close it. I stopped because I

Let me tell you about the problem with AI detectors. They are trying to answer the wrong question. Every AI detector on the market: GPTZero, Turnitin, Copyleaks, all of them, asks some version of the same question: does this finished text look like it was written by a human or a machine? They analyze the output. They look for patterns. They generate a score. And then they tell you, with varying degrees of confidence, whether the thing already submitted to you is probably auth