🗑 Our Summer PD Bingo board is here!

📚 Summer reading: AI for Educators

Is it finally time to wrap your brain around all of this AI stuff?

Get a grasp on how it can save you time — or how to navigate academic integrity?

My book, AI for Educators, is a quick page turner … a primer on AI for busy educators who just haven’t had time to explore and understand AI yet.

It dives into big issues, like …

• What do I need to know about AI to really get it?

• Can it be used to support teaching and learning? How?

• What about cheating and academic integrity?

• How do I prepare students for an AI-integrated future?

Plus, there’s a free companion website with even more resources, including links, templates, videos, and more.

💻 TECH TIP 💻

📺 Free Videos + Lessons to Bookmark for this Fall

If you are looking for ways to foster critical thinking skills and student engagement, check out these free collections from Retro Report. They include: 

• Instructional videos 

• Short documentaries

• Customizable lesson plans

• Ready-to-assign activities

• Interactives and more! 

It’s all FREE. All you have to do is create a teacher account.

🗣️ Civics Skills — These videos feature high school students at the top of their class, who demonstrate essential skills and strategies for civic engagement, critical thinking and respectful communications.

💻 Use the Internet to Check the Internet — Refresh students’ media literacy skills with these short videos. They will learn once and for all how to sort fact from fiction and stop the spread of misinformation online.

📚 Book and Video Pairings — Popular books that are often assigned by E.L.A/English teachers are paired with videos that offer historical background and connections to current events in this collection.

📘 AP Collections — Bring history to life in your AP courses! Check out dozens of engaging short videos, FRQs and more for APUSH, APGOV, APHUG, APPSYCH, APES and APAAS. 

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🕶️ Our Summer PD Bingo board for teachers ☀️

If you’re like me … at some point during the summer, you get a little bored and you’re ready to try something new.

(Hey, maybe not … maybe your summer is full of fun trips and fruity drinks by the pool or glamorous beach Instagram posts … and if so, good for you!)

Or maybe you see your summer as the opportunity to do things you didn’t have time for during the school year.

Either way … or if it’s something else … you have lots of options to explore!

Each year, Ditch That Textbook’s blog/social media editor, Karly Moura, scours the web and finds the best free teacher PD offerings.

Then, she gathers them into our annual PD Summer Bingo card for the summer.

You can share the link to this post … or download it as a PDF file … or even make a copy of the Google Slides file to customize it!

It started in 2020. (Hey, EVERYONE was seeking during COVID.)

In fact, if you want even more options, you can grab previous years’ bingo boards and check out other opportunities …

Let’s take a look at some of the offerings from this year’s Summer PD Bingo …

• Become a Brisk AI Professional — Learn to use Brisk Teaching to integrate AI seamlessly into your workflow, freeing up time for direct student engagement, actual teaching, and doing the things you love to do.

• Check out our Digital Learning 101 email course — This short, FREE email-based course will help you streamline your digital work and make learning engaging and interactive for your students with a TON of new ideas!

• Join Wakelet Community Week — From August 4th - 8th, join thousands of educators, administrators, and thought leaders from around the world for an unforgettable week of inspiration, connection, and discovery. It’s free and has lots of great presentations.

• Learn Canva Teacher Essentials — Learn essential Canva tools to create engaging teaching resources, lesson plans, and activities. Use AI-powered tools to save time, track progress, and give meaningful feedback.

• Get Kahoot! certified — The “Kahoot! Certified” program is a free certification course designed to enhance teaching by integrating Kahoot! into the classroom. It culminates in the top tier “Kahoot! Superhero” status.

• Earn ScreenPal’s Flipped Learning Badge — Dive into the world of flipped classrooms with ScreenPal’s easy-to-follow course! In just 31 minutes, you’ll learn how to make your classes pop with cool videos that turn learning on its head.

• Learn to create culturally responsive spaces — Join a webinar on June 24 to explore the implications and unintended consequences of Brown v. Board, offering action-oriented tools to cultivate inclusive and equitable environments where all students can thrive.

• Earn SchoolAI Level 1 Certification — The SchoolAI Level One Certification Course is a comprehensive introduction to integrating AI into the classroom, covering the basics of SchoolAI, practical tools for document generation and editing, the use of AI assistants like CoTeacher, and the creation and exploration of SchoolAI Spaces.

… and that’s just the start! Explore all 24 from the bingo board. (You have already checked off the free space in the middle, you know … so kudos to you.)

👋 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!