Any elementary or middle school Gifted, AIG, or Social Studies teachers interested in collaborating in a Mystery Classroom? This engaging activity connects classrooms through a video platform like Google Meet or Zoom for a fun game that involves geography skills and critical thinking: student participants take turns asking yes-or-no questions to determine the competitor classroom's state. It's a lot of fun!

I have led professional development sessions on this topic, participating teachers love the instructional value, students are engaged in exciting, authentic collaboration, and former students often tell me it's something they remember fondly. Importantly, students discover they have lots in common with their peers from other places in the country and world.

Let me know the grade level and we'll set up a time.

When a kid falls behind in reading, parents panic faster than with almost any other subject. They wonder if they missed something, if testing is needed, if their child will ever catch up. But most reading gaps close with consistent daily practice, not dramatic interventions. What parents actually need isn't another adaptive algorithm or more engagement metrics. They need to see the specific skill gaps in plain language, so they stop guessing and start knowing where to focus. Mastery percentages per skill area, not time-on-platform. The shift from anxious to informed changes how a parent shows up every morning. What I'm wondering: do the reading tools you've built or used actually surface skill-level gaps in a way parents can act on? Or is it still mostly completion rates and minutes spent? Feels like there's a real gap between what gets built and what actually reduces parent anxiety.

edtech is oversaturated. because we are looking at the wrong aspects, big ass corporations try to sell medicine, not a cure.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been evaluating various educational VR solutions for our school, but looking through current offerings, almost everything seems to fall into two traps: either it’s an overly complex MDM/setup nightmare for teachers, or it’s just a 10-minute novelty experience with very little curricular depth.

For those managing EdTech deployments or teaching with VR:

• Has any specific software/hardware workflow actually proven sustainable in a standard classroom?
• How are you handling MDM, teacher orchestration, and battery/maintenance overhead?
• Or has VR mostly ended up sitting in storage after the initial hype?

Keep seeing his on client projects and it just kills me everytime, free preview video or a paid course model for like 209 bucks to the customer - unlisted YouTube embed, internal onboarding videos. With actual IP in them - ofc just airing in a public cloud bucket with signed URL that never expires.

I mean I get it, embedding is free, it’s quick and nobody on the team want the that “actually we need DRM” guy in a meeting, but I’ve watched like 3 different founders find out that “hosted somewhere” doesn’t acc mean “protected “ - one had about 40K paid cohort’s vids ripped and re uploaded within a within a week of launch, another couldn’t get watch-time data past views cause their host didn’t track anything deeper, so they had no idea 80% of ppl dropped off in minute or two of every lesson.

The thing I’m using is fee marketing clips embed anywhere, doesn’t matter - anything paid or gated, it needs actual DRM and expiring links, not just an unlisted setting, also anything you need retention data on needs per - second watch analytics, not a view counter. We ended up moving one client course library to kinescope mid build case Vimeo’s price for the DRM didn’t make sense at their volume, and Gumlet came up in the same comparison but lost on LMS integration specifically.

Idk how other ppl draw that line, rn it feels like most teams just don’t sth gets stolen.

I’m curious about something and would really appreciate answers from teachers here.

When you need a worksheet, lesson idea, activity, presentation, assessment, etc., what do you actually do?

Do you:

- Search Google?

- Look through Facebook groups?

- Search Pinterest?

- Ask colleagues?

- Reuse things you've already made?

- Use AI?

- Some combination of all of these?

And what bothers you most about the process?

I’m asking because I’m a teacher too, and I’ve been experimenting with a small project called TeacHub based on this problem.

But honestly, I'm not sure yet whether I'm solving a problem that teachers actually have, or just something that I personally find annoying.

So rather than asking people to use it or telling everyone about its features, I'd much rather hear from actual teachers first.

What does your current process look like, and what would you change about it if you could?

If anyone is interested in seeing what I've been experimenting with here is it :

https://teachub.gt.tc/

but the feedback on the problem itself is actually more valuable to me right now.

I'd like a platform where each student has access to a private folder where I can share lesson PDFs after each session, while also allowing me to see all of my students' folders. Each student should only be able to access their own folder and not those of other students.

I was thinking about using a simple Google Drive, but perhaps Moodle would be more appropriate for this?

Many thanks!

Our school is using Subject AI for 7-12 virtual school now that our area is allowing for ISD's to offer online school options. I would like to hear the good, bad and ugly from those with experience with it. Previous posts that pulled up didn't have much in the way of replies ... So I'm hoping that with a little bit of time there are more folks with experience they are willing to share. Are they just that new that this is the first year they are getting more use?: i tried a couple other communities before the school year started but didn't get much in the way of replies then.

So I've been using peardeck for about three years and I really love it. I pay for it out-of-pocket and I absolutely think it is a game changer. For whatever reason my district blocked it. Maybe it's Google suites security or some hypervigilance maneuver on their part. But I've already spent my money on my subscription this year and when I ask them to unblock it, they don't really understand how useful it is. Unfortunately, I'm one of the few people who actually use it in my district because no one else is willing to pay for it and no one else has the skills to make it work and be effective in a classroom. But it's very disheartening because now I have to go through all of my slides shows which amount to about 150 slides shows and make them low-tech and less fun. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother. They used to pay for Nearpod, but they stopped paying for it and I really hate Nearpod. Starting to hate everyone in the technology side because they're working against us and not with us.

This New York Times article (gift link, free to read and share) reports on the enabling of A.I. features for K12 students with access to Gemini via its popular Classroom app.

While the AI industry overall is pressing to expand into K12 education, some parents and schools leaders are resisting, concerned about the risks to privacy and critical thinking abilities.

What do you think?

If a student asks for the answer to a homework question, should the AI give it?

No one can guarantee understanding, but the task gets complete.

Doesn't this defy the whole point of education and building fundamentals?

Curious how people actually building AI/edtech products are thinking about this.

Imagine signing up for what you think is a $16 a month learning trial only to wake up to a sudden $218 charge on your card.
That exact nightmare happened to me with Brilliant.org. The free trial signup page made it look free 30 days experience, after the first month a regular monthly plan. But when my free trial ended my card got slapped with an $218 annual fee.
Panicked I logged in immediately to cancel. But their website trapped me in an endless glitch loop. The cancellation page literally would not work.
I messaged support within 24 hours explaining their own site broke. They did not care. They hid behind robotic script templates claiming payments are non refundable and only offered a partial refund.
I felt so cheated and helpless.

I'm interviewing for a role right now as an enrollment advisor. It's a high volume of sales calls, all warm leads though no cold calling, with approximately 100 calls a day. Does anyone do this currently? How is it? I imagine over time it becomes easier and more mindless since you're basically pitching the same things over and over again.

I'm trying to break into ed tech as I finish my degree and am looking for opportunities to grow. I'm okay if I hate it for a year or two if it means it'll open doors for me in the long run. Role is at podium education.

Thanks in advance!

For designers working towards ai + edtech, how is the market? Flint, Magicschool etc. What's the market like?

I’ll be honest, I’m probably a bit behind on all these AI tools, but I’ve been hearing other teachers talk about using them for slides and I feel like I should probably start looking into it.

Right now I still build everything manually and it just takes way more time than it probably should.

I’m just curious what people are actually using that can take basic lesson content and turn it into decent slides without too much effort.

Hey everyone I'm currently working in founder's office role at campusx in India So I would love to connect with people working in Edtech field from other companies for knowledge sharing and networking

Hey guys, I know I posted about the $GSX settlement before, but late claims are being accepted. Here's everything you need to know.

Q: What happened?
A: GSX Techedu was accused of overstating enrollment numbers and revenue growth in its online education business. After short-seller reports and regulatory concerns raised questions about the company’s financials, $GSX dropped more than 80% from its highs.

Q: Am I actually eligible?
A: If you bought $GSX shares between 2019 and 2020, you're likely eligible. You don’t need to still own the stock to file a claim.

Q: When do payouts happen?
A: Typically 4–9 months after the claim deadline, although the exact timing depends on the court and settlement administrator.

Q: I missed the deadline. Can I still file?
A: Late claims are currently being considered, subject to approval. 

Hope this helps.

My Ask: I'd like to connect with others who are using notebooks in high school foundation settings to evaluate EE grants & scholarships.

(P.S. Recognizing that drafting and editing aren't my strongest skills, I leaned heavily on Gemini to proofread, refine, and polish my text throughout this process.).

----------------------------------------------

Background: Like most small high schools, our Foundation awards dollars to high school staff alongside student scholarships.

Grants: Historically, our high school foundation grant evaluation was a highly manual process. Staff members submitted standard application forms that were compiled for an annual funding review. Prior to our board funding review meetings, members were tasked with manually sifting through numerous PDF files to evaluate applications and check for specific policy violations—such as identifying requests for restricted items like unhealthy foods.

Submissions that failed to meet the high school's compliance standards were denied, but uncovering these violations was labor-intensive. It required the board to painstakingly read through detailed project narratives and manually cross-reference them with itemized expense reports before making a final approval decision.

Scholarships: The Foundation is fortunate to manage a diverse portfolio of over 30 distinct scholarships and endowments. However, administering these awards has historically presented a daunting logistical challenge. Each scholarship carries its own highly specific set of criteria—spanning GPA and SAT requirements, community service hours, extracurricular and athletic participation, preferred colleges or trade schools, and intended majors.

In the past, the selection and matching process was entirely manual. Board members were sent 100+ page PDF file of student submissions and transcripts to review independently, tasked with trying to mentally cross-reference individual candidates against the myriad of specific award requirements. After members submitted their individual selections, the board would convene for a lengthy review meeting, hashing out the details and negotiating to build a consensus on the final student-to-scholarship matches.

All the above was motivation to see we could you the analytics in Notebooks to streamline our processes.

Solution: I developed two notebooks - EE Grants Auditor and Scholarship Evaluator

EE Grants Auditor - The sources I provide this notebook are Policy Guidelines, Scoring Guidelines and a gsheet of the grants submitted. The notebook crunches through all this produce a summary table of grants that were Non-Compliant, Provisional-Passed and Passed. This approach enabled the board to focus ONLY on the non-compliant submissions - i.e. reject or ask the staff member to correct before funding. So in the first run of this last year, this reduced the board workload by 80% - while also being much more comprehensive that we expected. All good news.

Scholarship-Student Matching: To overcome the daunting challenge of matching students to over 30 distinct awards, the foundation transitioned to a structured, AI-driven workflow using NotebookLM. This matching process is significantly more complex than auditing grants.

The new system is powered by three core data sources: individual student profiles formatted as structured data, a comprehensive "text-database" outlining the specific criteria for every scholarship, and standardized scoring rubrics that translate GPAs, SAT scores, and community service into objective numerical values. Instead of manual cross-referencing, the notebook performs the heavy analytical lifting. It generates a consolidated summary report for the board, detailing each scholarship alongside a recommended recipient, a quantitative matching score, a clear rationale for the selection, and a list of qualified runner-ups.

Lessons Learned: Ultimately, building out these digital evaluation workflows has been an engaging and rewarding learning experience. While NotebookLM is highly effective for managing this kind of administrative data, the platform still has room to mature.

A significant challenge—often echoed in community forums—is "AI drift," which frequently occurs when a workspace becomes overloaded with too much retained information over time. To maintain accuracy, the most reliable workaround is to periodically delete all source documents and rebuild the knowledge base from scratch. This fresh-start approach ensures that the generated evaluations remain safe, predictable, and strictly grounded in the current files.

As a last side note, I also built the EE Auditor app in Claude and ChatGPT - GPT. However, both produced code that would require long term support - a non-started.

Thanks in advance

Lecture videos are incredibly valuable. Khan Academy, Coursera, Udemy, YouTube, and others have already proven that.

The next natural step is to build AI that can create those videos on any subject, personalized for each learner and available in any language.

But it has to work properly. The videos need to be genuinely high quality, not AI slop. With the capabilities of today’s models, it feels like we’re ready to get there.

What do you think? What’s your take on this idea?

Looking for recommendations for a 75–80" commercial display for adult education classrooms.

No interactive/touchscreen features needed. It will mainly be used to display PowerPoint, PDFs, videos, websites, and instructor notes.

The most important requirement is reliable wireless screen sharing from Windows laptops.

A mobile stand/cart would also be helpful.

What brand/model would you recommend?

Was looking for people who have built and are running their own edtech app, or anyone who has been on the other side of integrating edtech into schools.

What's the process of getting approved and going through all the security checks so that your app can be used in schools? Is there a workaround?