🗑 5 sneak peeks at new Ditch Summit sessions

🎁 FigJam Holiday Livestreams! 📺

Figma for Education is celebrating the season with a cozy collection of holiday-themed livestreams designed just for teachers! 

Join us for a FigJam Holiday Series where educators and Figma experts share easy, engaging activities perfect for end-of-year reflection, community building, and classroom fun. Our goal is that you walk away from the session with activities to bring right back to your classroom this holiday season. Dive into the Holiday FigJam Activities template and start spreading the cheer!

📆 Pick the time that works best for you:

• December 4 — 1:00 PM PST / 4:00 PM EST (Register here)

• December 9 — 4:00 PM PST / 7:00 PM EST  (Register here)

• December 11 — 1:00 PM PST / 4:00 PM EST (Register here)

• December 18 — 4:00 PM PST / 7:00 PM EST (Register here)

💻 TECH TIP 💻

🌎 Take your students on a trip around the globe this December!

Looking for an easy way to explore diverse winter celebrations that infuses student choice? Check out this December Holidays Around the World Explore Board.

Explore boards are designed to support a variety of learning styles, integrating content and critical thinking. You can learn more about personalizing learning with explore boards in this blog post.

The December Holidays Around the World Explore Board is a single, interactive hub packed with engaging videos, articles, and activities that introduce students to diverse celebrations like Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and more.

This explore board is ready to share with your class or you can make a copy and customize it for your students. Perfect for integrating social studies, art, and critical thinking into your winter curriculum.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🫣 5 sneak peeks into Ditch Summit 2025

It’s almost here — Ditch Summit time!

This is the 🎉 TENTH YEAR 🎉 for our free conference for educators! Maybe the Ditch Summit is the way you found this email newsletter (and me?!?).

All the basics on the Ditch Summit

If you’re new to Ditch Summit, here are all the details:

• It’s FREE.

• It opens on Dec. 15, 2025, and it closes on Jan. 11, 2026. (Four full weeks.)

• Starting Dec. 15, I’ll email you day by day as new speaker videos are released. Just click the links in the emails to access it.

• We have eight fantastic featured speakers, so they’ll all be released by Dec. 24.

• Our video library is full of presentations from previous years! Combined, you’ll have more than 100 video presentations to choose from.

• It’s all pre-recorded. Nothing is live streamed. That way, you can watch what you want, when you want.

• You can get certificates of completion for professional development credit for watching these presentations!

• At the end of the day on Jan. 11, 2026, the summit will close. All video presentations, PD certificate generators, and resources will become unavailable until next year’s summit.

You can learn more about the summit — including some info about our speakers — at DitchSummit.com.

5 sneak peeks into this year’s Ditch Summit sessions

Almost all of the Ditch Summit sessions are already recorded! I always try to start recording them in late November. It takes a LOT of coordination with our busy speakers to block out an hour to talk. But I LOVE interviewing them — and we always try to keep it as practical and real for you as possible.

Here are some moments I’m still thinking about from this year’s new speakers:

1. Brain-based tips can help your students remember better.

Ditch Summit speaker Dr. Janell Blunt is a cognitive scientist — and a teacher! She knows lots of ways that the brain prefers to learn — and she practices them with her own students at Anderson University.

In her Ditch Summit session, I learned …

• Retrieval practice (recalling from memory without notes) is a powerful way to get students to remember.

• She’ll let students do brain dumps (recalling everything they remember about a topic).

• She has mini dry-erase boards that students use to recall. They love that the boards are impermanent — and mistakes are easily erasable.

• Online review games (like Kahoot!, Blooket, etc.) can be OK, but when the game is focused too much on speed, it can be a red flag.

Read more about retrieval: 10 ways to improve students’ long-term learning.

2. Students (and teachers!) can custom AI help with very messy prompts.

In a Spotlight Sponsor Session for Google for Education, Clay Smith shared a very powerful insight about Google Gemini (which most Google schools will have access to).

He showed how students and teachers can create Gems — chatbots with custom instructions for whatever you need them to do. Example: Student who needs help with quadratic equations in math. He created a personalized tutor just by voice typing — in a fictitious student’s random, scattered train-of-thought speech. And it was great!

My takeaway: Students can get custom support — and they don’t have to be computer scientists OR have exceptional prompting skills.

BONUS: Gemini has a “prompt rewriter” that will polish up your messy prompt to make it better.

Here’s our Gemini 101 starter’s guide for teachers.

3. Build upon your school culture to get incredible results.

When Amen Rahh took over as the principal of a new school in Los Angeles, he had seen struggles with attendance and student motivation.

It was time for a change.

He implemented incentive programs to give students extrinsic motivation to come to school.

He partnered with organizations like the L.A. Clippers basketball team and Planet Fitness.

Slowly, his students’ views about school — and the relevance and motivation they had for school — changed.

You can’t miss this Ditch Summit session! It’s inspiring — and you’ll get ideas to consider in your own school.

4. Teachers can make educational video games now!

My childhood was full of great educational video games, from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? to Oregon Trail to Reader Rabbit.

Now, through the power of AI, we can make games like these for our students. And it’s easier than you might think. Presenters Tony Vincent and Greg Bagby share how they’re “vibe coding,” where you tell an AI assistant like ChatGPT the app or program you want to create. And it writes the code to create it!

Greg and Tony shared how they do it, but Tony also shared some of the little programs he has “vibe coded” that you can try:

• 👀 Glance and Guess – Test your number sense by estimating the number of emojis on the screen. 

• 🫴 Six or Seven – A math-based guessing game where every answer is 6 or 7.

• 👻 Ghost Writer – Keep typing or your words vanish! A spooky way to spark focused, nonstop writing.

5. “If your principal could do one thing for you, what would it be?”

In her leadership and educator work, Allyson asked this question of teachers on social media. “If your principal could do one thing for you, what would it be?”

She tallied the results and was surprised with what she saw — and what was absent.

What she didn’t see? Food. “What they didn’t say was … have a pizza day or bring in donuts.” (They also didn’t mention jeans days, Allyson said.)

The top five things:

1. Treat time as a precious commodity.

2. Show teachers that they are valued.

3. Ask questions. (Don’t make assumptions.)

4. Really listen.

5. Show love for kids and for the work.

In her session, she shares what happens when teachers AND when leaders show up in these powerful ways in schools.

Share the Ditch Summit with others

Want to tell others about the Ditch Summit? This document has lots of information you can copy/paste to email, share on social, or otherwise.

Or you can always send them to DitchSummit.com …

Or you can forward them this message!

Winners of our “share Ditch Summit” contest!

Congrats to the winners of our Ditch Summit contest …

• Marjorie from California (Apple Airpods)

• Audra from Texas (full set of my books)

• Jason from Pennsylvania (choice of two of my books)

We will have more ways to win … stay tuned!

👋 How we can help

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

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!