Reading and Reflection

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

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

I was walking through the expo hall at ISTE 2026 when a young man stepped out from a small booth and said something I have rarely heard at a conference before. "Excuse me. I see that you're a teacher. Can I show you a tool that another student and I built together?" I stopped. I stopped, not because of the question. It was everything about the moment. The confidence of it. The directness. The fact that he was not holding a branded tote bag or offering me a chance to win somet

Sorry for no post on Wednesday, I'm dealing with one of those lovely "spring flus" and my body waged war against itself....but I'm back today! Your next Visible Thinking Routines post will be out next Wednesday!! I grew up in the era of giant maps painted on blacktop (the sweetness of the 90's amirite?). My elementary school had one, a full map of the United States, state lines and all, spread across the outdoor concrete in faded paint. I remember spending recesses running a

I was vibe-aware before the kids these days started talking about vibes. Though I always feel like Steve Buscemi when I hear them say it. What I can say, and for those of you who have either seen me present, heard me talk, or chatted with me, I definitely am self-aware of the vibe I bring everywhere. Part of my inner child thinks I'm Jeff Spicoli from the end of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.. My tasty waves are something I find engaging, or I hope engages others. My cool buz

Some mornings, I walk into my classroom before my students arrive and I tape a sign to the board. Several years ago, it started on a large Post-it pad, the kind on a wheeled easel — on a morning when I had planning period first, and I knew, before anyone walked through my door, that I was not okay. The sign tells my students what they need to know: where to find their assignments, that loud or unexpected noises are a trigger for me, and that I cannot process more than one per

I was a senior in high school in the fall of 2001. The internet's influence was growing. Google was becoming more mainstream. And the adults in charge of education were absolutely losing their minds about it. Which one of those kids is me, Senior Year, 2002? The concern, stated with full sincerity by serious people in serious publications , was that students would simply Google everything, copy and paste their way through school, and render the entire enterprise of educatio

Will Ferrell once played legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray on SNL. If you've never seen it, the bit is basically: Harry Caray is a man completely unmoored from social norms, asking the most unfiltered, bizarre questions imaginable: to scientists, to astronauts, to anyone fortunate enough to sit across from him, with zero apology and maximum enthusiasm. At one point, Harry says, completely unprompted: " I'm curious like a cat. My friends call me Whiskers. " And here's the t

If I got a nickel for every time I heard someone ask about my "why" when attending a PD, Keynote, Webinar, or anything in education...I'd have a whole mess of nickels. If I also got a nickel for each scoff, sigh, and hard eye roll from the audience at those same spots...this would be me: However, for the first time, I've encountered an argument for "starting with why" that doesn't make me gag! On Friday, Jeff LeBlanc (Go Penmen!) had an article on EdSurge published titled:

I will go on the occasional rant about just about anything. It's part of my introverted charm; I bottle everything up and then find a hill to die on with all of my hottest of takes! Today, my thoughts are on the accessibility of resources in education. Education is a powerful tool that shapes lives and opens doors to new opportunities. With the advent of the internet and AI, it has become FAR easier to embrace the democratization of education. According to SORA Schools : "E