💡 Where do you get your best ideas??? From other educators!
I still remember going to my first teacher conference.
I was a VERY new high school Spanish teacher. My world language department had one person — me. I didn’t have ANYONE to bounce ideas off. I felt like I was on an island …
… until I went to my state world language teachers conference. (Shout out to the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association!) I found my people! I got TONS of new ideas. And I got a renewed excitement about teaching.
Not long after that, I went to a different conference and found something else — “Teacher Twitter.” (AKA: EduTwitter.) It was this great community where teachers were sharing their best ideas and having real talk about what it was like to be in a classroom every day.
I was hooked. I spent a ton of time there and learned a LOT.
Sadly, the social media landscape for teachers has shifted. Twitter (now X) isn’t a thriving community for educators in the same way.
Soooooooo … we decided to create a new community … the Ditch That Textbook online community!
It’s a place where you can go to read what other educators are saying … to post what’s working (or not working) for you … to ask questions … to talk about what’s really going on.
In today’s 💡 Big Idea, I’ll share some of the best, most helpful parts of the FREE DTT online community. (Yep, it’s free.)
And here’s your challenge …
If you’re a regular here and you haven’t joined the community, just hop over here and join! (Also: fill out your profile and download the mobile app for Apple or Android!)
If you HAVE joined the community, post something! (Did you know you’re allowed to add posts?) Just go here and hit “new post” … then ask a question, share something you love, start a discussion, share a resource … whatever!
🤖 BONUS AI COMMUNITY DISCUSSION: Below, I shared a few quick practical teacher tips for using AI. If you have AI tips, share them in this discussion thread!
Inside:
📺 Free educator webinars on Figma
👀 DTT Digest: 4 resources worth checking out
💻 Tech Tip: 🤖 How to make smart choices about AI tools
💡 The Big Idea: Remembering EduTwitter (and where we go from here)
😄 Smile of the day: The perfect lesson … is it REAL???
👋 How we can help
❤️ Ideas for building class culture, plus a look inside Kira
What do you want your classroom to feel like this year?
This free, teacher-facing resource walks you through a few different ways to build a strong class culture. You’ll find practical ideas, reflection prompts, and space to decide what feels right for you and your students.
It also gives you a peek at what a lesson in Kira can look like, with interactive components, activities, prompts, and reflection all in one flow.
Kira is an AI-native platform that brings curriculum, assessment, and intervention together in one place. Tell Kira what you want students to explore, and it can create a standards-aligned lesson for you to review, shape, and make your own.
Take a look at the lesson below. When you’re ready to build your own, create an account and start exploring what you can create!
👀 DTT Digest
4 teaching resources worth checking out today
🦸🏾♀️ Create your own action figure with Adobe Express (correct link!) — Design an action figure and share your personality + goals + achievements in one collectible card. Sorry for sharing a broken link last week! Thanks to everyone who let us know it didn’t work.
🇺🇸 9/11 resources for the classroom —This collection of resources from The Retro Report contains four original short films, each accompanied by a lesson plan and student activity.
💻 Register for the complete 180 conference — Back to school is a time to come back with confidence … to come up with a solid plan … to build momentum for the school year. That’s what the virtual Complete 180 Conference is all about!
❤️ Community building resources — Grow closer to students and help them grow closer to each other with these resources shared on our EfficientTeach page.
💻 TECH TIP 💻
🤖 How to make smart choices about AI tools
When you use the right AI tool the right way, it’s much easier.
I was talking to a teacher recently about how she’s using AI. She said she had learned about NotebookLM (now called Gemini Notebook) lately and was using it to make practice questions and worksheets.
I thought this was interesting and suggested: “You know, if you use a text-based AI assistant like Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT, it’ll just work with ideas and the text. When you ask it to make an infographic like that, it’s doing work that’s almost like a painter painting a worksheet on a canvas — and you’re more likely to get mistakes.”
When I saw the response on her face, I knew I had to share some more quick and practical AI tips like that.
Here are a few based on how I use AI. (Feel free to share your own — or offer a counterargument to one of mine — in this community discussion thread!)
If you want to create something like a graphic organizer, you might try generating an image in ChatGPT or Google Gemini — or even making infographics with NotebookLM.
I’m impressed with Claude (claude.ai) and its ability to create visual layout with HTML. If you ask it to create a design for you, it’ll make it in HTML. You can open it the HTML file to view it, print it to a PDF or print it on paper.
If you get an AI-generated infographic and it has mistakes, an easy, quick way to fix it — pull the image into Canva, click “Edit”, and choose “Grab Text” in the tools. (It’s a premium feature, but teachers can verify to get Canva premium features for free.)
If you need teaching resources (lesson plan ideas, practice questions, rubrics, etc.) you CAN use K-12 AI apps like MagicSchool, SchoolAI, and Brisk Teaching. BUT … they don’t always use the highest powered AI models. If you have access to more a powerful AI models in your school Google / Microsoft account, you will likely get better, more insightful responses if you’ll describe what you want in a detailed fashion — and just follow-up with replies telling it what to fix.
💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡
🐦 Remembering EduTwitter (and where we go from here)
Back in the mid-2010s, I was what you might call a “connected educator.”
I followed TONS of fellow educators on Twitter (and other platforms, but Twitter was my jam). Twitter chats brought educators together in one shared space — a hashtag — and we chatted, debated, and shared around a specific topic for the night. It was GLORIOUS.
To put it into perspective, a quick glance back at 2017 highlights just how vibrant that ecosystem was:
General Leadership: #edchat, #satchat, #cpchat, #CultureEd
EdTech & Innovation: #EdTechChat, #ARVRinEDU, #TLAP, and our very own #ditchbook (woot woot!)
Grade & Subject Specific: #kinderchat, #elemchat, #mschat, #sschat, #aplitchat
Things have changed on the social media front. Teaching hasn’t gotten any easier, but the collaborative online community we relied on has diminshed or disappeared in many places.
Because public social media became so noisy, educators started migrating toward closed, moderated spaces. It turns out, shrinking the room makes it a lot easier to actually connect.
We built the Ditch That Textbook (DTT) Community specifically to bring back that warm, vibrant "finding your people" energy—minus the algorithm stress.
If you’ve been missing that original EduTwitter spark, come join us inside the DTT Community—we’ve saved you a seat!
Join with the button below, or keep scrolling and we’ll tell you what you’ll find.
The main channel of our DTT Community: #TeacherLife
The #TeacherLife channel is the main hub of the community. If you have a question or a topic of discussion, this is the place to post it. (Don’t forget — you CAN post to the community! In fact, we’d love it if you did!)
Check out the topics along the top — and the list on the right.
You can search posts by topic
When anyone posts to the community, they have to choose a topic tag (or multiple topic tags). That makes it easy to sort by posts on that topic. Head to the community and click on a topic tag to see content on an area you’re interested in. For example, the Classroom Strategies topic has more than two dozen topics to browse.
In the Lesson Library, you’ll find lessons that DTT community members shared that you can read about and try yourself! Also: anyone can post to the lesson library. If you have an idea that went well, tell us about it — and we love it when you share images and links, too!
We are still in the thick of the back-to-school season. Our community members have shared more than 60 comments on the back-to-school channel about classroom rules, expectations, seating charts, building relationships, and more.
Wait, there’s a leaderboard?!?
Yep, it’s one of the tabs at the top of the community page. You get points for interacting on the site and it is always updating. Check out the 7-day, 30-day and all-time leaderboards! The levels have fun names. If you get 1,280 points, you become a DITCH-osaurus. (I don’t even have that one yet!)
Get a summary of community activity via email.
Catch up with the email digest
When you sign up, you can get the weekly email digest — a recap (that usually comes on Thursdays) of what has happened in the past seven days. Even if you don’t make it into the community, you can see what’s happening. (And if you hit reply, you’ll get to chat with our lovely head of community, Sara!)
Pretend that the middle one says “Ditch That Textbook” and not “Growth Network.”
Stay up to date with the mobile app
This is my MAIN way of keeping up with the community. We run our communtiy on a platform called Circle. When you download the app for iPhone/Apple or for Google Play/Android, you can log in and access our DTT community. BONUS: Sign up for notifications so you don’t miss new posts!
How has the community been for you?
If you’ve used the community, we’d LOVE to hear about your experience. Just hit reply (I promise I read every one and try to reply to them all, too!).
Tell me:
What do you think of it?
What do you use / what have you done?
Have any suggestions for us?
And if you haven’t used it and you’ve made it this far, well … what are you waiting for?!? Just join the community here!
😄 Smile of the day
It doesn’t happen often but when it does 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Source:thefunnybeaver.com
👋 How we can help
There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:
Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.
Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.
Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!
