Educator’s Notebook #519 (April 13, 2026)
INTRODUCTION
On making your own school tech, collaboration, AI and writing, and more
So much useful reading this week.
I’ve included an article on vibe-coding in the main section this week instead of AI because we’re reaching a tipping point at which this once-niche activity is moving mainstream. When I work with schools, I’ll usually include a demonstration of how anyone (even/especially non-coders) can use AI to make software that meets our needs. Now, people and organizations are using AI to solve real world problems. One feature article this week shows how one school district vibe-coded their own tech tools — and saved $250K from their budget. In the other feature, see a deep, excellent post on how collaboration and empathy are a biological imperative — and it’s the collaborative species that thrive.
Also this week, find an extraordinary number of posts about AI and writing. Helpfully, the conversation is growing more nuanced. Find a New Yorker (!) article which asks if it is wrong to write a book with AI, see also a teacher who explores the viability of using AI to write comments, and also a copywriter who explores when it is good to use AI and when and why it isn’t. I would also note that in chapter five of our book Irreplaceable, we lay out various cases and considerations for the appropriateness and inappropriateness of writing with AI, capturing and framing most of the arguments in the articles I have mentioned here (See pp. 159-162).
As a reminder, if you are looking for a summer read that invites readers through reflections on pedagogy and AI, you can bulk order Irreplaceable with increasing discounts as the order grows. Reply to this email to learn more, and I can connect you to the publisher.
Beyond AI, Daniel Willingham has an excellent post in Learning Science that takes a deep dive into the research behind whether kids today have reduced attention spans. Also this week, excellent posts in Character on fostering curiosity and the importance of boredom. See also in the General section at the end some amazing phone wallpaper pictures from the Artemis II mission.
Last, I’m very happy to say that I’ll be joining Liza Garonzik, author of Conversation Comeback and founder of REAL Discussion, and Sarah Hanawald, Executive Director of the Association for Academic Leaders, for a conversation about authentic interaction (AI) in an age of artificial intelligence (AI). It’s next week, on Wednesday, April 22 and 12pm ET / 9am PT, and free to attend. You can register at this link.
All this and more, enjoy!
Peter
Join me, Liza Garonzik, and Sarah Hanawald for a discussion about balancing AI and AI. Register for free here: https://tinyurl.com/academicleaderbooktalk
Browse and search over 16,000 curated articles from past issues online:
FEATURED
“‘Vibe Coding’ Helped A Washington District Save $250K In Tech Costs”
“Just a few months into this initiative of what is often described as “vibe coding,” the district expects to save up to $250,000 in canceled ed tech contracts alone by the 2026-27 school year, said Kris Hagel, the district’s chief information officer. The district has already identified three or four software subscription tools it will likely not renew, he added, including a workflow automation tool for its HR and finance departments known as Informed K12. While vibe coding is unlikely to replace every ed tech product in the district, there are some tools that Hagel considers to be “low-hanging fruit,” ripe for being developed in-house.”
An Extraordinary Biological/Ecological Argument For Our Collaborative Imperative
“Darwin also stressed that natural selection is not a process by which organisms independently vie for supremacy. For instance, upon introducing the term “struggle for existence” in On the Origin of Species, he explains, “I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another” (emphasis added). In the book’s famous final paragraphs, Darwin invokes an entangled bank—filled with many species of plants, birds, worms, and insects—to illustrate this interdependence. Years later, he would suggest in The Descent of Man that sympathy is a fundamental evolutionary force in social animals: “It will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.””
ADOLESCENCE
Deepfakes Are Haunting America’s Teens
“Why Teens Are So Vulnerable To Big Tech Social Media Platforms”
ARTS
“How Did Black Music Take Over The World? Let Melvin Gibbs Explain.”
Can You Name That Classical Piano Piece In One Note?
ASSESSMENT
ATHLETICS
CHARACTER
CURRICULUM
“Texas Considers Required Reading List for Schools, Which Includes the Bible”
“A draft of the list, proposed by the Texas Education Agency, outlines more than 200 texts, with widely recognized classics such as “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle for kindergartners, “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle for seventh graders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech for eighth graders. But it also includes passages from the Bible in middle and high school, raising questions about the separation of church and state.”
Why Is The Classical Curriculum Appealing To Many Right Now?
What Is The “Classic Learning Test” And What’s In It?
DIVERSITY/INCLUSION
“Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?”
“By Age 7, Most Children Quickly Spot Social Biases”
“Across all participants, more than 75 percent identified that Ann was biased against the group she treated negatively. However, the ability to infer bias based on Ann’s behavior varied with age, with the youngest participants doing so least often: Adults: 100 percent detected bias and mentioned Ann’s bias in 79 percent of scenarios. Ages 7 to 10 years: 90 percent detected bias and mentioned Ann’s bias in 62 percent of scenarios. Ages 4 to 6 years: 41 percent detected bias and mentioned Ann’s bias in 18 percent of scenarios.”
EARLY CHILDHOOD
HEALTH
JAMA Article Recommends Asking Patients About AI Companions
“Increasingly, teens and adults are turning to artificial intelligence chatbots for companionship and emotional support, recent studies and surveys show. And so, mental health care providers should inquire if and how their patients are using this technology, just like they seek information on sleep, diet, exercise and alcohol consumption.”
LANGUAGE
LEADERSHIP
“Leaders Have Better Lives But Worse Days”
Lessons For AI, From “Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel”
“When AI threatens your job, listen to what a classic children’s book has to say about reinventing yourself.”
How One District Uses Multiple New Teacher Pipelines
“Level Up Your Crisis Management Skills”
LEARNING SCIENCE
Willingham: “Do Today’s Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans?”
“There’s been a great deal of research on this question in the last 10 years, and it appears that children’s ability to control their attention has not been compromised, or if it has, it’s a small effect and would not account for what educators feel they see in the classroom. But it’s also possible that the problem is not that students can’t pay attention, but rather that they often don’t want to. I’ll review some data here suggesting that digital entertainment has made children quicker to conclude that they are bored. There is also evidence that, compared to a generation ago, children are less willing to wait for fun—they want it immediately.”
PD
PEDAGOGY
“Is Teaching An Art Of A Science?” Several Educators Chime In.
“My opinion may change again before my career ends, but as of now, the best teaching is grounded in science, allows for individual art, and is powered by love.”
READING/WRITING
“Americans Still Opt For Print Books Over Digital Or Audio Versions”
Can AI Help Write Comments?
“Three comments. Different openers. No generic praise. Each one sounds like it’s about a specific child — because it is, because the notes were specific. That’s the whole system. Your notes go in. Finished drafts come out. You read them, push back on anything that needs adjusting, and move to the next subject.”
Three Questions For Thinking About Writing In a Time of AI
“It Is Wrong To Write A Book With AI?”
“The nature of authorship isn’t as straightforward as it seems.”
“Good Writers Use AI. Great Writers Know When Not To.”
“Who shouldn’t write with AI: 1) Professionals who don’t yet know their own voice. AI accelerates and amplifies the instincts you’ve already developed. If you haven’t yet figured out what makes your writing distinctly yours — like your rhythms, your angles, your way of landing a point — then AI will fill that vacuum with something generic. Junior communicators especially risk outsourcing the very struggle that builds craft. In all honesty, the friction of a bad first draft is how you learn to write a better one! Skip that, and you skip the growth.”
Writing: “The Profession That Does Not Exist”
What Is The Responsibility Of The Critic In A Time Of AI?
SOCIAL MEDIA
STEM
Math Strategies For Shifting Focus From Right Answers To Deep Thinking
“Microchip Implant Helps Blind Patients Read Again”
SUSTAINABILITY
TECH
Sal Khan: The Biggest Gains Will Come From Investing In Teachers
““AI is going to help,” said Khan of this reimagined Khan Academy. “But I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.””
SXSW 2026 Insights Report
“Technology is moving faster than people can absorb it… Be uniquely human… The augmented human is accelerating. Equitable access is not.”
Districts Are Rethinking Their Edtech Stacks
WORKPLACE
What Happened When A High School Offered A Teacher Prep Track
What Does The Research Say About 4 Day Work Weeks?
14 Measures Of Educator Wellness
How Burnout Manifest Across Organizations - And What You Can Do
GENERAL
Satoshi Nakamoto, Elusive Founder Of Bitcoin, Is Unmasked As… Adam Back.
“Stunning Artemis II Phone Wallpapers”
One Model For Public-Private Community Partnerships
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
Tips for vibe-coding, a must-see documentary, a dangerous model, and more
Alex Kotran from aiEDU has been leading vibecoding workshops with educators since SXSW EDU, and he shares his lessons learned in an excellent blog post in the Features. One of the key insights is that domain knowledge matters more than having any coding knowledge. People who are experts in the problems and opportunities of their work are the ones who know what will be helpful. Another insight is that once people build something, they are changed. I find this absolutely to be true, too. When you realize you have agency to make things that solve your own (or other people’s) problems, it feels empowering.
Also in the features: Stephen Fitzpatrick is a veteran history teacher who has been writing in his blog “Teaching in the Age of AI” for a little over a year, and I find it to be one of the most helpful, on-the-ground reports of the experience of teaching with AI. He writes about how he uses AI, he summarizes his conversations and focus groups with students, and he thinks deeply and pedagogically about AI. This week, he wrote about a recent documentary that captures the extremes of how people are thinking about AI, calling out that there is a missing middle of the conversation that we need to explore, but highlighting how the extremes are important wake up calls. It’s a good post.
Also this week (and related?): Anthropic announced that they have developed a new model that is so powerful it will not be publicly released. Able to hack past the overwhelming majority of cyber defenses, it has led Anthropic to pull together a group of the largest tech companies to develop more resilient infrastructure before this model might be released (or not). See several posts in Ethics and Risk and Industry Development for more.
Last, a fascinating survey reveals that the less people use AI, the more angry they are about it, and the more people use it, the more excited they are about it. See more detail in the Gallup survey on Gen Z sentiments around AI. The two pulse surveys around enterprise use of AI are also helpful for understanding what workforce leaders are looking for today.
All this and more, enjoy!
Peter
Higher AI use correlates with excitement, less AI use correlates with anxiety and anger. Click the image or see the Gallup survey in Tech/AI: General for more.
TECH/AI: FEATURED
Insights From 7 Vibecoding Workshops In 4 Weeks
“6. Once someone builds something real, it changes them… You go from “building things is not for people like me, that’s for engineers” to “I wonder if I could build that” to “I think I could build that” to “I know I can build that.” And as you progress, you’re asking those same questions in parallel, but for increasingly ambitious things. And once it does, the conversation about AI changes permanently. People can’t unsee it. Increasingly, those people are going back to their schools and organizations and bringing colleagues in. A teacher builds a tool, shows it to another teacher in the hallway, and suddenly that teacher wants to try. That’s how cultures of innovation take root.”
“The AI:Doc Should Be Required Viewing In Schools”
“This movie is not about AI and writing or cognitive offloading. The reason the film should be viewed is to provide common vocabulary for us to have conversations about a technology predicted to be the most transformative in history. More importantly, it serves as an excellent primer for viewers unfamiliar with the existential debates surrounding AI acceleration and gives them exposure to both the apocalyptic and messianic positions those closest to the technology hold. Citizens, especially students, cannot challenge positions they don't know exist.”
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK
Friedman: “Anthropic’s Restraint Is A Terrifying Warning Sign”
“The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.”
Anthropic’s New Model Is A Cybersecurity “Reckoning”
“This time, Anthropic is making a different, more urgent claim. The company’s executives say Claude Mythos Preview is already capable of carrying out autonomous security research, including scanning for and exploiting so-called zero-day vulnerabilities in critical software programs, flaws that are unknown even to the software’s developer. These efforts can often be triggered by amateurs with simple prompts. The company claims that the new model has already identified “thousands” of bugs and vulnerabilities in popular software programs, including every major operating system and browser.”
“How Accurate Are Google’s AI Overviews?”
“Silicon Sampling” Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling
“Shots Fired… At Councilman’s Home, After Vote Backing Data Center”
AI And Job Security: “Are You Coal, Or Are You A Horse?”
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
Why Anthropic Believes Its Latest Model Is Too Dangerous
“An Inside Look at OpenAI and Anthropic’s Finances Ahead of Their IPOs”
TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS
“AI Quarterly Pulse Survey” (April, 2026)
“87% Upskilling/reskilling current workforce”
“AI Adoption In The Enterprise” (April, 2026)
“92% of the c-suite say they're actively cultivating a new class of “AI elite” employees, and 60% plan to lay off employees who can't or won't use AI. Meanwhile, super-users are about 3x more likely to have gotten both a promotion and pay raise in 2025, compared to those who aren’t embracing AI.”