Session Details

The Robot Rodeo: A Renaissance of Classroom Innovation

Gilbert PS TIE Team

Step into a new era of learning with Gilbert Public Schools educators! This fast-paced, interactive session uses a 12-minute station rotation to showcase how educational robotics spark a modern renaissance across core subjects. Attendees will explore four hands-on stations featuring Cubes and Glows, Sphero Indi, Edison, and Makey Makey. Presenters will demonstrate practical curricular applications, followed by time for attendee exploration. Channel your inner innovator and leave with actionable, classroom-tested strategies, management tips, and direct experience with tech tools used weekly in GPS classrooms to inspire a rebirth of STEM curiosity in your school. 

Unsiloed Digital Citizenship

Kamala Wymore, Alissa Leamon, Sophany Tibke

Digital literacy is no longer a standalone subject, but an essential lens for critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving across every academic discipline. In this interactive session, you will engage in small-group discussions and hands-on design challenges to integrate digital evaluation, research, and media creation directly into your core curriculum. Come ready to collaborate with peers, exchange insights, and walk away with an immediately usable, tech-embedded lesson unit tailored to your specific subject and grade level.

Crafting Conversations That Assess: AI-Powered Formative Assessment for Students and Staff

Jim Verill

Discover how SchoolAI Spaces can transform conversations into meaningful formative assessments that provide immediate insights into learner understanding. In this session, participants will explore how AI-powered spaces capture evidence of learning, identify misconceptions, and generate actionable feedback in real time. Learn practical strategies for using AI to assess student learning in the classroom and measure understanding during adult professional development. Leave with ready-to-use ideas for creating engaging assessment experiences that make learning visible and inform next steps for instruction. 

Productive Friction: Putting Human Override Into Practice
Tara Altherr

Working with AI shouldn’t be frictionless. Questioning a response, explaining what isn’t working, adding context, or changing direction can make the final product better while keeping the human actively involved in the process. In this interactive session, we’ll explore how “productive friction” can turn an AI response into the beginning of a conversation rather than the end. Participants will use the CARE framework (Clarity, Accuracy, Relevance, and Ethics) to evaluate and respond to AI and consider how we can model this kind of active AI use for students. 

From Tool to Agency: Designing Digital Learning Pathways Across Platforms
Jason Flora

Digital learning is not a collection of links or a particular platform. It is a deliberately designed learner experience that helps students understand goals, access and construct knowledge, create evidence of learning, use feedback, and choose their next steps. In this interactive session, participants will use a practical, platform-neutral framework to redesign a familiar learning task. AI tools will be considered as optional supports for access, practice, feedback, and reflection—not as the pathway itself. Participants will leave with a process they can apply using the tools and systems available in their own context. 

Coaching Scenarios for AI Integration

Amy Miller & Sarah Mauel

Ready to address teacher tech fatigue and AI anxiety? This session equips EdTech coaches with reframing strategies and research-based frameworks to handle pushback. You'll learn how to guide teachers away from busywork screens and robot-made essays toward intentional, high-impact learning that keeps real human teaching at the center. Let's collaborate and learn from each other! 

 Designing Learning with Intention, Meaning and Purpose

Melissa Lundquist

Meaningful learning experiences begin with intentional design. In this session, we'll explore practical strategies for creating purposeful, engaging experiences centered on student thinking, creativity and understanding.

Drawing on strategies used in Chandler USD - where educators and students work across multiple technology platforms - we’ll share approaches that have elevated learning and built capacity across the district. With a more narrow focus on Apple tools, we’ll explore how intentional technology choices can support meaningful learning and create new opportunities for students.

Leave with fresh ideas to support learners, educators and leaders. 

Empower Student Creators with Google Vids  
Nichole Smith

Unlock the power of digital creation using Google Vids, Google Workspace’s video creation app. Designed for classroom teachers and EdTech specialists, this hands-on session demonstrates how Google Vids transforms traditional assignments into collaborative, multimodal learning experiences. We’ll explore practical ways teachers and students can storyboard, edit, and publish dynamic instructional content and student projects. Leave with ready-to-use strategies that enhance engagement and elevate authentic assessment in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. 

One Matrix, Six Subjects: The Math Behind ChatGPT, Epidemics, and the Weather Is the Same Math 

Isac Artzi

Six tables get six different datasets — Shakespeare, flu cases, basketball possessions, commodity prices, rainfall, and a pop lyric corpus — and the exact same twenty-five lines of code. Ten minutes later every table has a working predictive model, and they read the output aloud. The English table produces drunk Shakespeare. The coach's table calls the next shot. It is the same mathematical object every time: a transition matrix, built by counting.

Then the turn: this is the honest, buildable ancestor of the AI in every student's pocket. A student who has built a Markov chain by hand cannot be convinced that the machine understands anything. Attendees leave with the code, the datasets, and a hand-drawn worksheet that works with no devices at all. 

Canvas Made Simple: Templates That Save Time and Support Learning

Karen Konitzer

Learn how we designed a Canvas template to support instructional best practices while simplifying course creation for teachers. This session highlights the thinking behind the template, the teaching and learning strategies that shaped its design, and how a consistent course structure can improve student navigation, engagement, and success. Participants will gain practical ideas for using templates to strengthen instruction, create cohesive learning experiences, and save valuable planning time. 

Innovate, Integrate, Educate with Drones, Ozobots, Edison Robots and More!

Stephanie Shamy

Come join us for a hands-on experience as we work with Drones, Ozobots, Edison Robots, Makey Makeys and more! Travel through stations exploring different ways to integrate multiple subjects and standards while using these engaging bots. This is a fabulous opportunity to connect with others as you plan new experiences and opportunities to excite and engage your learners with new possibilities and experiences. 

Empathy Driven Instructional Planning- An Immersive Experience

Shannon Gilbert & Sophany Tibke

An immersive session empowers educators to step directly into the daily experiences of diverse learners through empathy-building simulations and hands-on case studies, equipping them with the critical perspective needed to design intentionally inclusive, highly responsive lessons.

Science/Math/EdTech Integration for a Sustainable World
Tawn Hauptli

In this hands-on session, discover empowering digital tools and activities for elementary students to learn more about people’s relationship to the natural environment and ways to work toward a healthy planet. Participate in simulations, games and collaborative problem-solving using Google Workspace tools including digital game boards. Presented activities raise environmental and data literacy, hone STEM skills and further students’ collaboration. Life science topics addressed include natural resource use, wildlife habitats and environmental stewardship. Take home classroom-ready resources aligned with Arizona Science and Mathematics Standards. 

Leadership Panel

Tracey Metcalfe

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Beyond the Screen: Coding, Creativity, and Classroom Engagement 

Misty Burgueño & Angelica Burgueño

Coding is more than computer science. It’s a pathway to creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving! In this interactive session, educators will experience hands-on coding activities designed for elementary students, explore cross-curricular connections, and discover practical strategies for bringing coding into any classroom. Participants will collaborate with peers, spark new ideas, and dedicate time to creating lessons tailored to their students. Leave with ready-to-use activities, fresh inspiration, and the confidence to make coding engaging, accessible, and meaningful for young learners. 

From Data to Impact: Using AI, PLCs, and IEP Alignment to Support Every Learner

Aracely Vazquez & Bianca Balderrama

Join a STEM Instructional Specialist and Exceptional Student Services Instructional Specialist as we demonstrate how AI can transform collaborative inquiry for resource, specialized programs, and exceptional services teachers. Participants will explore AI-powered prompts for analyzing Present Levels of Performance, aligning IEP goals to standards and student needs, and conducting deeper data analysis within the PLC process. Through structured reflection protocols and collaborative planning strategies, educators will learn how to create equitable learning experiences, leverage technology responsibly, and use data to drive instructional decisions that improve outcomes for all students while maintaining a student-centered focus. 

Build It Yourself: Google Apps Script Web Apps in One Sitting

Dane Jacobson

Funding every promising edtech tool is not realistic, so the next best option is learning to build them yourself. Google Apps Script comes with every Workspace account you already have, and AI assistance makes it fast enough to build a working web app in a single sitting, whether that is a dashboard, a classroom activity, or a version of a tool you could not get funded. This is a build session. You will start from nothing and leave with a tool running. Bring a laptop, a Google account you can run scripts on, and a problem worth solving.