The Best Thing I Found at ISTE 2026 Wasn't at the Loudest Booth

I have a theory about conferences.

The best stuff is never where the speakers are the loudest and the lights are the brightest.

I developed this theory the same way I developed my best opinions about food: by ignoring the obvious choices and wandering until something unexpected stopped me cold. I am the person who will drive past three chain restaurants to find the place with no sign, a handwritten menu, and four tables that has been run by the same family for thirty years. I am the person who, in an unfamiliar city, asks a local where they actually eat, not where they send tourists. I am the person who genuinely believes that the best bar in any city is probably a dive bar with a good jukebox and no Instagram presence whatsoever.

A Picture of Dive Bar Austin found on Trip Advisor

ISTE is the same way.

The main expo floor at a conference like this is a spectacular thing. The booths are enormous. The screens are everywhere. The giveaways happen on the hour and the speakers are calibrated to reach the back of a convention hall. Companies have spent serious money to make sure you cannot miss them, and they are very good at their jobs.

But I have been to enough of these to know something that took me a while to learn: the loudest booth is not always the most interesting one. The biggest screen does not always have the best idea behind it. (This is absolutely not intended to throw shade at some of the larger, more successful companies who are able to build absolutely epic presences in the expo hall. They may have once been exactly the kind of vendor I'm about to describe in the posts that follow!)

So I do what I always do. I wander toward the edges.

The periphery of an expo hall is a completely different ecosystem. The booths are smaller. The energy is quieter. The people standing at them are often the people who built the thing they are showing you, not a sales team, not a brand ambassador, but the actual founder, the actual developer, the actual educator who had an idea and figured out how to make it real and got themselves a table at the biggest conference in their field to share it with whoever stopped long enough to listen.

Those are my people. Those are my conversations. Those are the finds I come home raving about.

This week I am writing about everything I experienced at ISTE 2026...and there is a lot.

Over the next several days, you can expect posts covering:

• The three tools I found at the periphery that stopped me cold — a student-built writing coach living inside Google Docs, a keystroke-tracking academic integrity tool that does what AI detectors cannot, and an accessibility app for students with dyslexia that should be in every classroom immediately.

  
  

• The main floor experiences that genuinely blew my mind: including my first VR experience, a 3D screen augmentation technology that made me feel like I was in a science fiction movie, and a live classroom session that showed me what programming education looks like when it actually works.

  
  

• The announcements worth paying attention to: Kami Coach, Adobe's AI video creator tease, and Classkick's one-screen experience and AI answer assists, each getting their own dedicated post because each one deserves more than a sentence.

  
  

• The sessions that changed how I think: a Magic School AI session led by Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth that reminded me what great educator-led professional development looks like, and a mind-expanding exploration of app smashing Adobe and Canva to teach drawing and bring student work to life, led by Joe Merrill and Manuel Herrera.

  
  

• The conversations that mattered as much as anything on the expo floor: a Brain Science panel, an AI policy discussion, and the colleagues both old and new who continue to make ISTE the conference I will keep coming back to as long as they will have me.

  
  

That is fourteen posts worth of ISTE 2026 coming your way over the next several days. Some of them will be tools. Some of them will be ideas. Some of them will be people. All of them will be honest.

But we start at the periphery. Because that is always where the best stuff is.

The place with no sign. The handwritten menu. The four tables.

Come find out what I found.