A free AI course built specifically for teachers (and it actually adapts to you 👀).

Most AI training talks at you. This one starts by listening. It asks what you teach, how familiar you are with AI, and what genuinely worries you about it in the classroom. Then it builds a learning path around your answers. Your subject. Your comfort level. Your concerns. No two teachers get the same course, because no two teachers are starting from the same place.

It's completely free, platform-agnostic, and over 8,500 educators have already taken it. When you finish, you earn a certificate automatically (no hoops, no fees). Just proof that you showed up for your own growth. 😎

If you teach outside the US, you've probably noticed that a lot of education conversation assumes an American school calendar, American mandates, and American systems. We have members teaching all over the world, and they deserve a space where that's not the default.

So we opened one. The new International Educators channel is a place to talk about teaching where you are: your curriculum, your school year, your policies, your students, and everything that would take too much backstory to explain anywhere else.

Bec Hadfield, Nienke Bakker Keers, Linda Lopez, Cammie Kannekens, and Denise Sullivan will be our first sort or caretakers of the space. You'll also see them in the #TeacherLife channel and elsewhere across the community, bringing an international perspective to the bigger conversations.

Teaching outside the US? Come say hello and tell us what your school year looks like right now.

You can join the free DTT Community to read ideas like this, connect with other educators, discuss, and share ideas of your own.

Instead of creating a dedicated AI unit, weave AI conversations into the learning tasks you’re already doing. When students interact with AI tools—like Kira or other classroom-safe AI assistants—as part of a standard assignment, they naturally learn how AI works (and where its limits are) in real time.

Here are 3 simple ways to model AI literacy on the fly:

By integrating AI tools like Kira directly into daily learning, students don't just consume technology—they develop the critical thinking skills needed to navigate an AI-infused world.

Want to dive deeper? Check out my full session slides AND a video from my ISTELive presentation.

This year, I have a class with 30+ students. Spanish 3. (You may have seen me talking about this at some point this semester.)

During class, we have learned to make it work. The class is a good one … no behavior problems … and we are both fairly aligned on learning Spanish, so it’s doable.

But the grading and feedback? For one class, sometimes it can be a handful!

Maybe you’re like this, too. For ages, we teachers have bemoaned the struggle of providing feedback to students. Because good feedback takes time. The late Grant Wiggins wrote years ago about seven keys to effective feedback (in an article I cite every chance I get):

The timely and ongoing part? Those are hard when you have lots of students — and lots of work to provide feedback on!

We decided to take on this question: How do I give feedback to 100+ students?

As a high school Spanish teacher, I’ve been in that boat before — 20+ students x 6 classes per day = +100 students.

Even if you’re responsible for a smaller group of students the whole day (like elementary teachers), your students are producing more work that needs your feedback at a higher volume.

So, what can we do?

In our updated post — How do I provide feedback to 100+ students? — I dig into some practical strategies you can start using right away. Here’s a quick summary …

Whole-group instruction gets a bad rap sometimes. Some people see it as “all lecture all the time.” But when we have all students paying attention to something that’s important — that impacts all of them — it’s still really effective.

If you’re grading and providing feedback, sometimes you see a pattern across all of the students’ work. In that case, there’s no need to write the same comment dozens of times on everyone’s paper. Address it as a class instead.

Other ways to provide big-picture feedback for the whole class:

You hear the term “triage” associated with hospitals. After a catastrophic event, when hospitals have to care for a large influx of patients, they don’t treat on a “first come, first served” basis.

They triage, treating the most important (and life-threatening) cases first.

You can do this with feedback. When grading and providing feedback on student work, if there’s too much to get to, don’t mark EVERYTHING. Instead, pick what’s most important to address. Leave some feedback on it. Then, leave the rest for another day.

Another added benefit: The student won’t feel overwhelmed (and defeated) to see a ton of marks on their paper.

Other ways to provide triaged individual feedback:

If the teacher is the only one providing feedback, then the teacher becomes the bottleneck. When there’s only one of us — and dozens of them — we often can’t keep up.

Help students to be self-sufficient. Give them ways to critique and create feedback on their own work. That will help them be more reflective and introspective on their own work going forward.

Ways to provide student self-provided feedback:

This goes with the one above — when the teacher is the only one providing feedback, they become the bottleneck.

When students provide feedback to EACH OTHER, it adds a benefit — the perspective of someone other than yourself.

Here’s the problem: Peer feedback can be terrible. (And, sometimes, hurtful if we’re not careful.) Creating some structures around it can improve the outcome and the end product. I like the framework provided by teacher Mark Gardner in this Edutopia article about peer feedback.

Ways to provide peer feedback:

Now, before you come after me for even suggesting this, let me make something clear (reiterating a point I made earlier) …

This is NOT “let’s just let AI grade everything.”

When the human teacher turns grading and feedback fully over to AI, we lose out on the humanity in teaching … and our lived experiences with the students … and our own unique personal style … and our relationship with students.

It doesn’t have to be “all or nothing” … “all AI or no AI.” But AI can help provide additional feedback on top of our human-generated feedback.

In many instances, I’d rather students get the quick timely feedback from AI in addtion to my human feedback, augmenting what I can provide. Then they can determine whether the feedback is worth taking … and THAT is an important lesson in AI literacy.

Ways to provide AI-generated feedback (with one tool suggestion each):

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education: