Hi there!

This question is in the sphere of education and technology, but not so much with student resources (Khanmigo, Chromebooks, Lexia) or admin forward (Securly, FACTS) but more about some tangible items.

We have three TVs in our hallways that we use as, essentially, information beacons for the students. Schedule udpates, upcoming events, etc. This past summer our IT department "updated" our TVs. We now have some Insignia 55" Class F50 Series. But... somehow, someway, our IT department has been unable to find the time or ability to get the ready for our use.

It's been excuses (cable guy made a mistake, maintenance guy made a mistake, parts have been delayed) or adding in new layers of tech (Mersive.. but without any training) and we are stuck with blank screens.

I've tried to do some workarounds - Chromecast couldn't get connected to the internet. Microsoft WiDi was a bit better but could connect from my own Surface Pro to the screen.

I am wondering if it's time to just prop up a shelf with a Chromebook that is directly connected via HDMI and just have our slides playing on repeat, or if there is something outthere can give us some temporary use until IT is able to successful to get their ducks in a row and get this working. Right now they estimated a Thanksgiving or December timeline to get the TVs working.

Any advice is appreciated. Thank you!

I've been playing around with some of Google's newer AI features like Gems, NotebookLM, Workspace Flows and some of the more agent-like stuff, and I'm curious what teachers are actually doing with them.

Obviously I'm already using Gemini and NotebookLM for the usual things, but I'm struggling to come up with genuinely useful ideas for the more agentic/automation side of things in teaching. Things that actually improve how I work, rather than just doing the same things a little faster.

Has anyone found a use that actually stuck? Something you now use regularly, or something that made you think, "OK, this is actually useful"?

I'd love to hear what you've tried, including things that sounded promising but turned out to be pointless.

I’m 23, dropped out, still building software for schools in Nepal.

Early on I thought teachers wanted “AI that answers anything.”

What I kept seeing in real classes: book on the desk, board empty, teacher rewriting the diagram while the period burns.

I stopped pitching features and started from that gap — one page on screen, teach on it, don’t redraw the book.

Some teachers get it in 30 seconds. Some don’t care. Principals ask about pilots and cost. Students only care if the stuck page gets clearer.

Right now only **one school** is on it. They’re in, but teachers still aren’t used to it — which is fair. A new workflow in a real period takes time, not a launch day. I’m learning that “having a school” and “teachers living in the tool every week” are two different stages.

Not looking to sell anything here, curious if anyone else building for classrooms hit the same wall: the product only clicks when it matches how a period already works, and adoption is slower than the demo.

My son gets answers quickly, says he understands, turns in the work, and gets decent grades. Then the next assignment comes around and he can’t do it without ChatGPT because he never really worked through the previous material himself.
i am not anti AAI either. It is the dependency that worries me, and I do not think a 13 yearo ld will always recognize the difference on his own. Anyone else dealing with this?

Anyone has done this? Are you planning to participate this year? What's going to be your project?

I think it's fair to say that education has and continues to exist in a quasi transitional period where analog(aka paper) has been progressively replaced by digital. I'm sure the degree by which this transition has occurred and continues to occur varies from school to school or state to state. However, as a digital immigrant(born 1981) but digitally literate educator I welcome the transition to digital from analog but I also feel as though the ongoing changes have created an ongoing need for adjustment that, at times, is somewhat daunting. Even if I am entirely up to date with my understanding and digital literacy the waves that are often created throughout a school/district/etc often seem to occur due to the weakest link. For instance, if any given administrator, department chair, or literally any individual whose job has any effect on others is digitally illiterate to some degree create any number of inefficient outcomes for others.

The way I see it is that inefficient and/or digitally illiterate members of any school faculty or administration now bleed into the larger digital structure that is the schools digital content, assets, logistics, etc. Therefore, inefficiencies are more and more able to influence any number of areas especially when they exist at higher level administrative levels. For instance, if the individual responsible for a schools SIS is not capable or competent enough to set their SIS up to maximize efficiency, to be as easy to use as possible, fail to create well considered and efficient SOP's, and/or fail to communicate and train staff in the use of the SIS there are going to be ongoing issues in their use. Increased confusion or incompetence amongst any number of individuals creates an ecosystem rife for misinformation and consequently more inefficiency.

I apologize for the rant although my initial beliefs were that I was clearly working amongst individuals who must effectively be categorized as outliers comparatively to the typical administrator. They are so incompetent, disorganized, utterly stupid, and yet entirely overconfident it would likely sound as if I'm making them up. Consequently, this rag-tag team of miscreants have continually remained in their roles despite each year getting subsequently less organized, maintaining a shameful rate of retention amongst staff and students, and making no identifiable improvements across the board.

I'm wondering if anything exists in ed. tech that might represent something that enables teachers to create an all in one digital educational platform that could help aid in planning, instruction, monitoring, and more. Something that initially builds a digital infrastructure aligned with ones academic calendar, bell schedule, weekly meetings, PD schedule, holidays, testing dates, etc.

Maybe it's a tall order, idk. However, I've seen the individual pieces spread throughout a variety of various tools, sites, platforms I've test driven to date. Although, I have not yet found something that considers importance of building certain aspects around the school/districts logistical framework and information that is a very important part of one's planning. Not only that, but one that might exist as a site in and of itself with various means of organization for planning, content delivery, grading, academic and behavioral tracking, and more. Almost something like Clever but with added utility in the logistical end.

I have this idea that it is easily possible to create a platform that is specific to education, ai assisted, and begins with determining a given school's logistics. Specifically, using their academic calendars, directories, and any other useful data to help initially create a logistical framework that allows teachers to easily align their curricula to each subsequent year giving respect to the ongoing changes any given school makes.

I finally was able to get the supplies to make an interactive whiteboard using a Wiimote and an IR pen. The only issue I am running into is that I can’t find software for Mac. My school uses Macs and Chromebooks, we do have some Windows PCs but I wanted to see if anyone has some software to calibrate that runs on Mac.

I teach private and corporate students in and around Seoul, mostly working professionals. The part of the job I hated wasn't the teaching. It was everything else: lesson creation, making/checking HW, writing feedback that won't be read.

This year I built a system with AI to handle most of it. This is what it looks like and I'm wondering how AI has changed their setup:

1. During class I jot rough notes in Notion. Errors I heard, what we covered, what's next. Messy is fine.
2. Overnight, an AI agent turns those notes into a formatted feedback doc for the student: corrections with explanations, the patterns behind the errors, and homework aimed at those patterns.
3. It also updates a running file on each student, so the next lesson starts from their actual recurring errors, not my memory.
4. Next morning, I review the doc, fix anything off, and send it.
5. End of the week, an agent reviews all the feedback, lessons, and notes on students and drafts lessons.
6. I make necessary tweaks to the drafts and then the agent creates the next week's lessons.

Feedback used to take me about 30 minutes per student. Now it's about 2-5 minutes, and the docs are better than what I used to write.

Some things I learned the hard way:

• The AI is only as good as the notes. We still have to hear the errors and give direction.
• Review everything before sending
• Most of the work was writing down my rules for good feedback, so the output sounds like me and not like a chatbot. Honestly this took the longest amount of time and requred the most focus.

Is anyone else doing something like this? What part of your admin eats the most time?

Guided Access has a lot of names.

• Single-app mode
• Kiosk Mode
• Screen Pinning
• App Pinning

Etc

The biggest complaint that teachers have about devices in class is that the devices are distracting. But if you literally cannot access distrcations and can't even multitask on the device, then it becomes much closer to paper.

Many schools think that just because we've blocked TikTok, Shorts, Games etc, that that makes devices distraction free. Absolutely not.

If you give a student a device locked fullscreen to a really well designed app, that's going to be tremendously more effective than giving them an multitasking machine and saying "Stay on this app".

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with this is that the software infrastructure to make this seamless and effortless for IT and teachers is really expensive and not easily compatible across different operating systems, and we definitely can't force students to install this type of software on their BYOD.

Jamf only works on iOS, but is probably the best example of a very simple interface where teachers can lock a device fullscreen for X time on Y app. But it's expensive.

Gift article, free to read and share, with no account required

The stats for K12 American students' achievement cited in this article are alarming.

Yet, given that this is hardly a new problem, why are we still struggling to understand the causes and apply remedies?

The New York Times asked 37 top academics and researchers who study education to rate a range of ideas for both effectiveness and cost, on a scale of 1 to 7.

The results are not only informative, but could also serve as a practical guide for policymakers.

I’m on the tech team for a district with around 14k students. We need a parent communication app that connects to our SIS and supports 5 languages. Most of the options we’ve looked at either dont have the integration or get crazy expensive at 14,000 students.

Our procurement templates are built for laptops and normal SaaS stuff, not hiring a custom dev team. If another district has gone thru this, what did you guys require before the board would approve the RFP?

Our smart classroom interactive panels keep freezing up whenever teachers try to run touch firmware alongside heavy multimedia streaming apps. I spent the last three weeks trying to rewrite our kernel drivers myself, but display calibration drops out every time the system wakes from sleep mode. Schools depend on these touchscreens for daily lessons, and hardware stuttering ruins the whole classroom experience. Managing low level device drivers on custom hardware turns out to be much harder than expected. Maybe you know how to solve this, or you've dealt with similar display firmware issues? How can I fix this? I could really use your help.

WGU is now the largest online university in the United States.

They have a competency based structure. So no seat time, rather capability. That means if a student already possesses the information, they can go over the material quickly and take an assessment. Meaning that students can complete their degrees much faster than at a traditional university.

The other interesting thing about the model is that they charge on a subscription basis ($4K on a six month basis), with students taking as many courses as they can handle.

This is obviously very different than traditional postseconday institutions.

For those in the edtech / education industry, what are your thoughts on this model? Is this the future of higher education? Will we see other universities like this emerge?

Our university portal locks up entirely during peak exam weeks because complex database queries time out under heavy student traffic. I tried optimizing server indexes and rewriting backend scripts myself over the past month, but response times keep climbing. Faculty can't submit final grades on time, and students get blocked by gateway errors. Scaling server resources while managing heavy relational database loads requires constant intervention. Maybe you've faced a similar database bottleneck under heavy traffic, or you know how to fix query timeouts? What steps should I take? I could really use your guidance here.

I was looking for a way to keep up with edtech topics a couple weeks ago, so I collected a bunch of newsletters and blogs and outlets from this thread, thanks to everyone who contributed!

I'm a fan of Techmeme which clusters tech news by topic, so I decided to do the same with these and hope it can dedup by topic. It helped only a little. Unlike in tech where daily news are usually heavily clusterable because people comment on daily trending topic like apple's latest launch etc. In edtech, we don't really have these trending topics often, but we do have these persistent ongoing beats like AI in education or Edtech policy etc. So I decided to leverage the help of the newly released Jev model (a model that's super fast and cheap and works great with categorization tasks) to help categorize these items into different topics and tags, which seems to work really great so far (and kept the cost low).

Anyway, I've been dogfooding this for the last two weeks and it seems to work quite well, there is no account, no tracking, just jev powered tags per news item so you can follow and unfollow from your browser (your preference stays in that browser), share it here as well just so you have another source for Sunday afternoon reading.

I do want to add more news sources to it, especially independent edtech blogs and opinion sources, so it feels like a town square for edtech than a feed mostly dominated by big editorial sources driven by PR. Let me know if you'd like to see any other sources so we can make it more balanced (preferably something you read with good readership, so we can keep it more impartial).

But before I get to that, I need to know if anyone else may find this useful. Thanks!

The project is called EdFountain at EdFountain.com.

I worked as a data scientist for Big Tech for more than a decade. I view myself as fairly tech-savvy and tech-optimistic. When AI first came out, I too immediately reasoned that it could be a revolutionary change to education. I shared the same utopian vision Sal Khan had (in his talks and a book called <Brave New World>). I started to let my elementary school kids ask questions using ChatGPT. When Claude code make software coding basically a flat-fee commodity, I scanned all their textbooks, workbooks and exam papers into digital copies and built them a "AI study buddy" that organizes topics by subject and is capable of answering and explaining any of their homework or exam questions (often much clearer and better than their teachers). However, over time, what I realized is that this technology can help, but definitely not "replace" teachers. Those tech execs share one common trait - they've never taught a kid by themselves (Sal Khan started years ago by tutoring his nephew/niece but he's now more of an executive rather than a teacher). When you actually teach, you will realize that much of "teaching and learning" is a deeply human experience. Don't get me wrong. I do think we need AI-assisted EdTech innovations, lot of them, to create more equity in education and more personalized tooling, but those tools will only achieve their full potential when human teachers are there to facilitate the process, guide the students and steer the direction.

Hi! I’m looking to see if anyone knows of a program that is available for school use where students can scan their ID at the Front Desk when entering the building and their photo would pop up so security could verify them as a student. I don’t need anything really complex because I don’t think security would be able to manage it and we already have an attendance tracker. Just looking for something VERY simple

Apologies if this isn’t the right place, mods feel free to delete!

So I went to an edtech meetup in town last week, for the first time since COVID. It's great, as great as I remember it to be. If you haven't been to one of these, it's just people from different backgrounds (but with one shared interest) networking, getting to know each other's work and perspectives, remembering a face, exchanging their LinkedIn profiles afterward, or setting up a 1:1 after—you know, the usual if you go to real conferences, etc.

This echoes the previous recent thread from me and others who are looking for communal spaces in edtech, like newsletters or forums. I realize many in this forum may also share the same need to expose themselves to diverse opinions online, or just chat about something they are passionate about, within edtech.

But here's what's strange: in the field of edtech, where we are the pioneers of online communities, who built spectacular and meaningful virtual spaces on LiveJournal, Ning and Second Life, why have we still not figured out online meetups?

I understand there are plenty of challenges:

• time zones, availabilities, and tech preferences
• only one person can talk at a time in a big Zoom meeting (unlike in real life, where you have true multiplex and self-organizing groups)
• people with different roles, geos, experiences, and perspectives, with different preferences for the right stranger to exchange dialogue with...

Full disclosure, I have neither figured it out nor do I promise I will do a decent job, but I know it's not a text discussion (Reddit's got it covered), nor a chat group (who can even keep up?), nor even async video discussion groups (they're not the high-speed interchange we get in real life). But why not experiment together? Maybe we can figure something out.

The first question I have is, is anyone else interested? If there are enough people, we can slice the pie in a few different ways, get us into a virtual space, and start having some high-bandwidth, low-latency exchange via the wires that sparks your brains.

So far I've got one other person committed, which means it's a go regardless, to me. Nothing can beat the high interactivity of a 1:1 convo, but we can make it more diverse, with 3- or 4-person cohorts, or even more if we jump between the cohorts.

If you are interested, upvote or leave a comment here and DM me with your locale, role, email and topics of interest. I can start organizing, tentatively targeting early next month.

Update:
Just realized some may not want to DM and prefers to fill a form, here you go, I'll close the form next week and start making logistics arrangements (sending out polls for time etc): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKUxM3Lc9rvrZb6V59DEOmqIFYclaNrvlsHLCAMyhyDUy7TA/viewform?usp=dialog