I'm excited to share that I will be a keynote speaker at the Teach Forward Summit, a free, virtual event bringing together 1,000+ teachers from leading schools across the US and Canada to explore what great teaching looks like today.

I'm exploring when technology helps, when it doesn’t, and how we know the difference — and focusing on something teachers already do well: making thoughtful judgment calls.

The Teach Forward Summit is happening September 22nd–24th, every day from 3:00 to 5:00 PM ET. You can see the full agenda and register here.

A PD certificate will be provided for attendance, and session recordings will be shared following the event.

Community member Don Sturm started this discussion over the summer about by asking the question: do you round up grades? It's one of those questions that looks trivial on the outside until you're the one holding the grade book.

It's not just an internal debate, of course; grading beliefs go deep and talking about it makes emotions run high. There's a national fight over "no zeros" policies and unlimited retakes on exams, with some states moving to ban them outright, arguing they quietly inflate grades and let effort slide.

Some educators say these are the only ways to grade kids who are still learning. Both sides believe they're protecting students, so what do we do?

Don had an even earlier post in the community, "Grades and the Meaning of Learning," which is really the same question underneath it all: when the math behind a grade and the meaning of a grade stop matching up, which one wins out?

Don asks a philosophical question, for which we are looking for practical answers: if a grade can't be trusted to mean anything, maybe the fix isn't a better grading scale, it's a different kind of assessment.

So: what kinds of assessment have you tried that ditch grading of any kind and replace it with something far more meaningful? How does it work? How do students respond?

You can jump into the NEW discussion we are having in the community to share your ideas.

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

Traditional writing prompts don't always land the way we hope they will.

If you’ve ever watched your students stare blankly at a document struggling to start, changing the lens can make all the difference. The Learn Like an Influencer activity template taps into a format K-12 students interact with constantly to get them planning, drafting, and refining their work.

Here is how it channels that energy into real learning:

It translates essential writing standards into a modern, relatable process without sacrificing academic depth.

And like everything in our free resource library, you can download the Google Slides or PowerPoint file in just a couple of clicks—100% free, no catch.

Give it a spin with your students and see how much faster they start writing!

As a high school Spanish teacher, I’ve had students do timed writings for me for years.

The concept? Get a sheet of paper. Write as much as you can in five minutes. Count the words … and we keep track of the word count throughout the year. It’s a good way to measure written fluency.

(Caveat: It’s basically a completion grade to reduce the anxiety of a timed assignment.)

Here’s the important point …

These timed writings are chock full of insights about how students think that language works … about their strengths and their areas of improvement.

But I have 31 students, and it’s hard (and time-consuming!) to analyze all of that data every single time.

It’s EXACTLY the kind of work that AI does really, really well, though. (Plus, you CAN use AI to analyze paper assignments. I’ll show you in a moment.)

So I started leaning into it …

What can AI tell me about my students’ paper assignments? A lot, actually.

Before we get into how this works, a few words of caution. These are the rules that I abide by when using AI to provide insights into students’ paper work.

OK, now that we have the “do nots” out of the way, here’s what I do …

If you have a digital file (PDF is easiest and best, I’ve found) of student work, there’s a LOT AI can do to analyze it.

I’ve found two ways I really like to do this …

Students do need to put their name (or some identifier) on their work! If you don’t want to feed AI your students’ names, here are some ideas …

This is where it gets interesting. Once your assignments are digital, you can upload it using the plus (+) button (see below). Note: You’ll know you have your data privacy protections in Google Gemini when you see the shield at the front of your text box (see below).

My students did a version of the 8pArts EduProtocol … a graphic organizer where they use parts of speech and write sentences. I scanned their graphic organizers and asked Gemini: Prioritize five points I should emphasize or reteach.

It said: #1 is subject-verb agreement (no shock!); #2 is overuse of auxiliary verbs (adding “es” for “is” where it’s unnecessary).

Both of those are common problems that high school Spanish students face. But here’s the problem …

Sometimes, we get so focused on teaching the new content that we don’t identify the existing struggles and address them. This showed me what students still don’t understand so I can revisit it.

I talked about these earlier! These fluency exercises are full of students’ beautifully messy and flawed Spanish. (I love when it’s messy because it’s honest. It shows me what they REALLY don’t quite get.)

For years, I’ve mostly focused on the word count. But now, they can be a goldmine of observations!

I scanned them and asked Gemini: “Identify patterns, trends, strengths, weaknesses, common structures …”

It said: lots of “English transfer” (using ways of speaking in English that aren’t used in Spanish) was the big one. That’s helpful — and it’s something I can pull up in class right away.

It also analyzed their word counts (words per minute) and compared them against established benchmarks. (My students ranked as novice high.)

The beauty of it? Scanning the documents, uploading them to Gemini and prompting it only takes a few minutes.

I realized that I not only had ONE timed writing … I had TWO of them.

I have always used word counts as the main way of seeing how students progressed in their fluency. But now, I could analyze the growth / change / decline in different ways, too.

I asked Gemini: What trends do you see from August to September? Is there growth/decline in vocabulary complexity, grammatical accuracy, etc? Based on this, what are next steps?

It said: students were doing less “prompt copying” and using more organic vocabulary. (Which was music to my ears!) Their word counts had grown by 6 words.

PLUS … it suggested a new strategy: the 60-second edit routine. Have students go clean up their grammar and remove stray English words before turning it in. (I kind of like that.)

My students are Blooket fiends. They LOVE that game.

And I love it, too. I tell them: Repetitions make permanent. Blooket can give you more repetitions per minute than anything else I can give you. (Here’s my Blooket tutorial / walkthrough article.)

Whether it’s Blooket or Kahoot! or Gimkit or Wayground … or any other online formative assessment tool, they usually will give you results / data on how students performed. Sometimes you can download a CSV file. Other times, it’s just displayed on the screen — and you can take screenshots. (Here’s how to take screenshots.)

I asked Gemini: Analyze patterns, trends, insights I might not have seen from the overall numbers.

There’s all sorts of data we can analyze with AI that can give us quick insights we didn’t already see …

If we’re being careful — protecting student data privacy, not using sensitive data, always using a school account that doesn’t train an AI model — this data can tell us things we might not see otherwise.

Use a Google / Microsoft Form: When you collect data on a digital form, the results are available in a spreadsheet. That’s even easier to analyze than scanning and uploading paper copies.

I’ve seen so much all-or-nothing thinking around technology.

Teachers say: “I’m going back to all paper” or “AI is the way!” or “I do everything through Canvas or Google Classroom.”

It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, giving students assignments on paper doesn’t even mean that tech can’t help you learn more about them.

Not long ago, I wrote about “paper + tech” — capturing student work on paper and using AI to amplify it in some way (like turning student work into comic strips and making illustrated flash cards from our vocab words).

Using these student assignments to get deeper insights into their learning? It feels like someone handed me this secret folder full of strategies that are tailor made for these specific students. It helps me to be a better teacher in less time.

Have you done anything like this? Do you have ideas about how you could use this? Hit reply and let me know!

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