A quick last-second reminder: I’m speaking TODAY at Panoramic 2026, Panorama Education's free virtual summit.

About Panoramic 2026: It’s a full day of learning, inspiration, and practical ideas for teachers and leaders. You’ll hear from voices across education on how AI can support student learning, make teaching a little easier, and help create the kinds of classrooms where deeper thinking and creativity thrive.

What I’m sharing: A virtual keynote called “Yes, AI CAN Support Critical Thinking in the Classroom.” It's a blend of examples from my classroom, implications of AI in the classroom, and big-picture future thinking. Get a sneak peek of my slides here.

It runs from 11am to 5pm U.S. Eastern TODAY / 8am to 2pm Pacific. (Even if it has already started, go ahead and register and join it in progress!)

And if you can’t make it live, every session is on-demand, so you can watch whenever it fits your schedule.

I had a blast talking about Snorkl during Tuesday's webinar with Snorkl co-founder Jon Laven! Topic: 5 practical ways that Snorkl is transforming learning. Jon and I shared different ways to use Snorkl to promote student voice, to make learning visible, and to engage students with fun activities.

Below is an AI-generated summary of the five practical ways to use Snorkl — with timestamps.

🎁 FREE PREMIUM SNORKL: Jon shared a QR code that gives you PREMIUM ACCESS to Snorkl for the rest of the school year … and he agreed to let me share it with the newsletter community here!

Some of the teacher tasks that used to take us a ton of time are getting less time-consuming these days.

It definitely helps to have your own AI teaching assistant helping you to do tasks.

Think about it: A teaching assistant doesn’t teach the class. That’s the job of the teacher. But the teaching assistant does tasks that support teaching and learning. More gets done faster because two are doing the work instead of just one.

(I’ve never had a teaching assistant as a high school Spanish teacher, but that’s the way I imagine it!)

If you're not using an AI assistant like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or something else, it’s easy to get started.

In fact, these two resources can help:

Now, let’s get started. Here’s how to build your own AI teaching assistant …

By now, hopefully you’ve tried out an AI assistant. Maybe you asked it for recipes or travel recommendations. Maybe you’ve asked it for teaching ideas or to help you create practice questions.

Ask yourself this: What in your teaching day takes more effort than it’s worth?

The answer is a place where your AI teaching assistant might be able to help.

In his book Co-Intelligence, Ethan Mollick gives this advice: Always invite AI to the table.

Here’s what he means. It takes less than a minute to type something into an AI assistant and read the results. (It goes even faster when you use the mobile app on your phone and voice type!)

You never know what AI is going to be good at. (Mollick calls that the “jagged frontier.")

But the time cost to find out? It’s tiny. And the potential benefits could be huge.

If you start asking AI for more help on more things — things that don’t require your unique human contributions — you'll find more that it can do.

If you don’t know what a Gem or a custom GPT is, don’t worry!

I’ll give you an example …

I’ve been using Google Gemini to create Blooket games for me a lot lately. I give it my vocabulary list and ask it to create multiple choice questions. Then, because I know that Blooket has a spreadsheet upload feature, I’ll ask it to format the questions for the spreadsheet so I can easily copy/paste them.

Finally, I thought: “Why do I keep rewriting these instructions in Gemini over and over again?”

I decided to make a Gem — a set of instructions that Gemini can use over and over again.

I asked Gemini: “Can you create a set of instructions for a Google Gemini Gem to complete this task?”

And it did it. Now, instead of asking for specific formatting and detailed instructions, all I have to do is copy/paste my vocab list and it makes me a new game!

(The hidden secret about using AI: You don’t have to be an expert prompter! You can always ask AI to write AI prompts for you. It does a really good job!)

The answer to that isn’t “everything.” You don’t want AI to do your ENTIRE job for you. (More on that in a moment.)

But when you find the things that suck the time (and the life!) out of your day, see if you can automate some of it.

The result? You get to spend your time and energy on things that matter the most!

So … what can it do? Sometimes, the hardest part is knowing what is possible.

In our post, How to create and use Google Gemini Gems in the classroom, we share step-by-step how to create Gems in Google Gemini. (Super easy.)

But we also share examples of the types of Gems you can create!

Jump straight to the teacher Gems section of the post to read about all of these!

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want you to turn EVERYTHING over to the bots.

I’m just saying ... if there are repetitious, mundane tasks that don’t require a human teacher’s touch, they’re a prime candidate for your AI teaching assistant.

If given the choice, there’s a LOT I won’t let AI do, like ...

Just because I CAN use AI to do something doesn’t mean I SHOULD.

Right now, that’s a balance issue that lots of us in education are trying to get right. It’ll take some time and judgment, but in the end, we need to preserve what makes us special as human teachers.

You still have the final say! Where WILL you (and WON'T you) use AI as your teaching assistant?

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