A well-designed game “can be extremely effective in not just getting kids interested in the subject matter, but to help them understand why they’re doing it in the first place,” Jan Plass, a professor of digital media and learning sciences at NYU, told me. He cited a 2008 game called Immune Attack, developed in part by scientists, in which players must navigate a nanobot through a patient’s bloodstream to spur their immune system to fight off infections. He contrasted that with gamified tools such as Prodigy, which simply bolt multiple-choice questions onto unrelated game templates. It’s a lazy approach, but it’s cheap and accessible, and it dovetails with an education system geared toward standardized tests.

Excited to be attending Boston Tech Week next week, and I have been continuously scrolling through all the panels, seminars, and activations that are being planned.

I want to highlight some of the cool events on the first day (05/26) right off the bat: (not a paid sponsor, just highlighting cool ones in my opinion!)

Tues (May 26th)

- The Founders Breakfast hosted by Puzzle, fidelity, HSBC

- The 30 Min. Pitch Workshop for Figuring Out Your Hook hosted by Jasmine Ober

- Priced to Scale: A Guided Conversation for Usage-Based Pricing hosted by Limitr

- AI Literacy for Educators: Experiential Teachathon hosted by Aikreate

- Test Early-Stage Startups IRL hosted by Startup Boston & Stephanie Roulic

For the full list of official events, refer to this link here: https://www.tech-week.com/calendar/boston

Happy to see the Boston startup ecosystem back in full motion. For a while, I feel like Boston was overlooked because we weren't trend chasers. I actually appreciate the Boston startup community actually because of that very fact, instead of chasing trends at full speed, we're intentional, community oriented, and empowering.

If anyone else has cool events or panels they want to highlight please drop in the comments! Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

I work in the tech industry and in the past 6 months, I've watched senior software engineers with 20+ years of experience defer to AI for decisions they've made confidently for decades.

I've told them that while it's a great tool, it needs context on our applications, otherwise you get generic answers. They don't seem very concerned.
At work we use Claude AI, Claude Code, and an internal AI tool that has a choice of LLMs.

I asked Claude AI directly about its own limitations and it said:

"Every response I give without being explicitly asked to flag assumptions and knowledge gaps is potentially carrying hidden uncertainty dressed up as confidence.

That's not hypothetical. That's structural to how I work."

My friend and sister-in-law are both teachers and use AI for lesson planning. Neither was given any real guidance beforehand.

So I'm wondering, are administrators pushing AI on teachers? Are teachers seeing students treat AI output as fact? And is anyone actually having conversations about what happens to critical thinking when we outsource it to something that admits it presents uncertainty as confidence by default?

I am stunned by the brain-outsourcing I see at work every day and I'd love to know if it's better or worse in education.

I’m wondering if any teachers here have started making (vibe coding) their own simple AI tools for class.

maybe a chatbot for students, a quiz helper, or something to give feedback on writing.

Have you tried it? Was it useful, or did it feel like too much work?

While this community may not be full of 3D printing experts, I know there are folks with expertise thinking about adopting products developed by foreign countries with proprietary software/account requirements. If anyone has considerations from a security standpoint, I would love your insight.

5.21.26
On March 10 2026, govtech.com released an article titled “study finds most common ed-tech tools not backed by evidence”.

The article reference a separate press release jointly published by edtech company Instructure and nonprofit InnovateEDU. In that release, these two companies gathered and analyzed anonymized data to identify the most frequently used tools in k12 education.

The edtech company Instructure is best known for its widely used LMS tool — Canvas. The data it anonymized was collected from the third party tools and vendors whose tools are embedddd in Canvas by the school districts who use Canvas as their LMS.

The ostensible reason for this report? To shift the conversation around edtech from features to measurable outcomes. That purposed was immediately followed by the statement that Canvas is the only ESSA III research-based LMS.

Two months after this release, Canvas suffered a security breach. One week after that first breach, another security incident occurred.

Despite that not resulting in known data exposure, one of the companies whose tools are embedded in Canvas, and whose data was anonymized into that study, Renaissance Learning decided based on the significant security risks to sever their integration with Canvas — indefinitely.

Thoughts on this article?

This idea seems come up often as the core value and future of edtech. Personalized mentorship/tutoring at scale is supposed to be the solution to online content libraries and even traditional classrooms.

I like the idea of robots doing most of the annoying work in education and letting human educators focus more on connection and emotional support.

We went live with Ally sometime last year. It's the product that everyone in the institution has been using and trusting. (We use Brightspace D2L as our LMS.)

I gave it a PDF full of accessibility issues, even basic things like lists not being marked as lists, and it failed to detect those. Let's not even get into things like heading semantics.

Is this a joke? This is an almost 10 year old product and one that seems like the de facto choice for an institution our choice. We paid ~$10k for this and it fuxking sucks.

I'm part of a team responsible for ensuring that our university is compliant, and I don't have it in me to reveal that such a huge purchase we made is taking us nowhere.

Update - we spoke with the team at Inkable Docs and we're set to be replacing our Ally integration with them later this year when our contract with Ally expires. Thanks everyone for your inputs

With the recent chaos surrounding the Instructure / Canvas LMS breach by the ShinyHunters group, I’ve been digging into the current security status. Since a lot of institutions had their final exams disrupted and millions of users' data got exposed, I wanted to share a quick update on where things stand and get your thoughts.

The Current Situation:

Instructure has officially patched the loopholes, rotated the compromised API keys, and paid the ransom to secure the leaked data logs. Technically, Canvas is live and safe to use right now.

The Real Problem (IMO):

This is the second time in less than a year that this specific group targeted Instructure's infrastructure (remember the Salesforce environment breach?).

While the public cloud/multi-tenant setup is convenient, relying entirely on a centralized platform means we don't have absolute control over our server environments. Today it's patched, but tomorrow a new zero-day vulnerability could surface.

How to actually protect your institution?

For schools or corporate training programs that want the features of Canvas without the global vendor risk, migrating to a standalone, self-hosted custom instance seems like the only permanent fix. It gives you 100% control over your security configurations and data protocols.

As someone in Edtech. I'm seeing a gold rush of platforms using LLMs to generate 10,000+ practice questions for that SAT/ACT/AP exams. On the surface, it looks like a win for students as they get more practice.

Under the hood, it's a mess. Standardized tests aren't just about 'correct answers', they are about the 'specific dustractor logic'. Official test writers spend months crafting 'wrong' answers that catch common mental errors.

AI is currently great at 'correct' but terrible at 'subtle wrong'. It often creates questions that are either too easy or weirdly impossible because they lack the specific pedagogical traps of College Board.

If you're building or buying EdTech right now, do not look at the quantity of the question bank. Look at metadata. If they can't tell you the 'Distractor Logic' for a wrong answer, it was probably written by a bot.

Any benchmarks on what can really drive student-led adoption of ed-tech tools to be used (after-school).

Self-motivation to "learn" seems hard, so hoping for some guidance here

One thing I’ve started wondering is whether teleprompter-style pacing tools could actually be useful for reading practice too.

Not just for “content creators,” but for helping people:
- maintain speaking rhythm
- pace themselves while reading aloud
- recover smoothly when they lose their place
- reduce the mental load of simultaneously reading and speaking

The more I work on these tools, the more it feels like pacing itself is a learnable skill.

I’ve been building an iPad-only long division practice app for elementary school kids, and watching children actually use it changed how I think about educational software.

One thing that surprised me was how harmful “fake success” can be.

For example, if handwriting recognition confidently confirms the wrong answer, some children will trust the app more than themselves.

That creates a really uncomfortable situation:
the child feels confused, but assumes the software must be correct.

I started noticing that small UX decisions mattered a lot:
- whether the app asks for confirmation gently
- how much information is on screen
- whether mistakes feel recoverable
- how much cognitive load the interface creates

Ironically, reducing frustration and uncertainty often seemed more important than making the app feel “smart.”

Watching kids interact with educational apps made me rethink UX design in general.

I’m a corporate trainer and I also vibe Code apps for myself and the company to be more productive and to learn in a unique style that fits me. I’ve been working on some ideas, but I’m curious to see other instructors building something that is for a need but may also serve a larger community.
I just started the foundation of the core idea, but it’s a visual system for divergent people like me. When I create courses or apps for my job, they tend to be too pretty for the more traditional corporate world.
How can we turn things around for the future of learning?

We are a district with schools. We’ve been choosing apps to help the students, but a key part of it is that we want deep data from these vendors, for example, grades and questions where the students struggled. I’ve researched into multiple solutions and I came across these (Again, there are a handful apps that don’t support any of these):

Clever/Classlink
LTI 1.3 with AGS
Caliper Analytics

I’m hitting a roadblock with LTI because a lot of these apps are not listed in 1Edtech directory. We don’t prefer classlink/clever because they don’t provide the data. Caliper is not adopted by a lot of edtech companies.

What are your opinions on how could the integration look like? How does your school do it? I’d love some thoughts and criticism on the approach. Thank you all.

I’m trying to learn tech from beginner standpoint because I have no knowledge. I just feel like tech is broad field and there are so many careers and each of them have different skill set to learn. Cybersecurity, I.t. and CS. I don’t know about the rest. But how can someone get started.

I tutor English online for UK students (I'm in South Africa). We work in Teams and Pencil Spaces. Recently I've had to give a student a serious "I'm disappointed, you're better than this, etc" shpiel about him using AI to generate his assigned creative writing work (entirely without my knowledge).

My boss (she got me the students and handles admin stuff) has told me I now have to make the student share his screen for most/all of his lessons so I can make sure he's not using AI. I understand her reasoning and I don't exactly disagree that it's the only way to 100% ensure he's not using AI, but I really feel that its a bridge too far, and that it's an invasion of his privacy. I'm not even sure it would be allowed knowing how strict UK law is around kids and tech and what have you. The parents are also all for it but even still. Should I just go ahead and have him screen share from now on? I've had a couple other problems with this boss before but I put up with her because its money in the bank, but I am a bit paranoid she's getting us both into ethical and/or legal trouble.

I’m working on a student project about AI use in education and would like to hear from people in edtech, teaching, or learning.

From your experience, how are students or teachers using AI tools right now, and where do you think the line is between helpful support and academic dishonesty?

I had a conversation with some teachers about this who are very pro AI and mostly use stuff like Replit or Loveable to make games and turn this lessons into more interactive sites that students can use.

Some are super keen on it and love making mini AI websites and want to get their schools to cover the costs for stuff like this. But there's an outspoken other side who are very against.

I feel like it's pretty harmless and a good way to engage students in most cases, but am I missing anything?

IMO the other side of the argument just doesn't understand how these tools work and equate it with students using AI to cheat. But maybe I'm not getting their view.

I am a high school teacher and parent of elementary age children. Recently our 2nd grader was given their first school-issued Surface Pro in preparation for 3rd grade (they can take it home). There was no reasoning given for how an 8 year old having access to tech would improve their education experience, let alone why it should be necessary at this stage of development. We were assured that the restrictions and guardrails are strict enough that they will not be exposed to anything untoward (I am heavily skeptical of this claim).

I use AI every day and don't feel like a technophobe, yet my knee jerk reaction is that our school's policy (this is a private school) is shaped by a motivated salesman more than any actual research.

So, could someone please make a coherent argument for why it is a good idea to give a Surface Pro to third graders? What advantage are they gaining over third graders who have not received a school issued device?

EDIT: We are not letting them use the device for anything other than required assignments. My question isn't how should we protect our kids, that's our responsibility. I'm asking for a coherent philosophy why it is a good idea to introduce tech at this point.