February 2026

Padlet TA, Padlet Sandboxes, and Pilot Licenses 

If you've attended any of my AI trainings, you've probably heard me mention or demonstrate Padlet TA. It has been an excellent resource for generating different teaching materials, including interactive activities like matching and fill in the blank, and printable activities like worksheets and coloring sheets. Padlet TA recently posted this announcement, indicating that they are essentially retiring the printable resource generators, and focusing exclusively on the interactives. This is exciting because they are coming out with even more awesome interactive practice activities that you can use with students, but if you've fallen in love with the printables, that journey is ending, at least with Padlet. In the update that Padlet posted, you'll see that they tried to recreate their printable generators in Google Gemini, and provided links to those alternatives, but I don't find them to be as good. The AI world moves fast, my friends! 

Padlet TA Announcement: https://padlet.help/l/en/article/10z0dbkbka-changes-to-padlet-ta-content-creation-tools 

Calling all Jamboard fans! Padlet Sandboxes (learn more here) are Padlet's attempt to provide an alternative to the popular, simple, Google Jamboard. Those of you familiar with Padlet might be familiar with their three-board limit for free users. This is frustrating because the tool is so great but you can't really teach at scale with three boards. Well you're in luck! Padlet has made their sandboxes specifically free to create until June 30th! You can create as many sandboxes as you'd like for the next couple months. I recommend making some extras even if you don't have a plan for them yet, just so you have them for future use. 

We are purchasing a small number of Padlet licenses (25) as a pilot for next year, to see what kind of impact the resource has. If you are interested in using one of those pilot licenses, please reach out to me. With these 25 teacher licenses, all students in the district will get access, so they can create their own boards. 

Magic School Update

Magic School has started teasing a large new update to their platform, saying it will be an "AI Operating System." It's not entirely clear what that means, but just yesterday they released a beta version of an in-house quiz tool and a rubric-based writing grading tool. Many of us have used Magic School to generate quiz questions and then take them elsewhere, like to Google Forms for students to actually answer. Now, that is no longer necessary- students can take the quizzes right in Magic School. Writing feedback is also not new to Magic School, but this new tool streamlines the whole process of grading and returning feedback to students. This leads me to believe that the "AI Operating System" Magic School will be releasing will resemble something like Google Classroom, where students can stay within the Magic School ecosystem to accomplish lots of learning-related tasks. Stay tuned- technology moves fast!  Check out  my tutorial video for those new features here: https://youtu.be/bPm6jC1rO0A and check out Magic School's video announcing these features here: https://youtu.be/bSgP-NcE-Hs?si=jEipHusrZOyMFf4F

After posting this blog, Magic School released a full walk-through of the "class writing feedback" tool and there are definitely some interesting additional features I didn't see in my tutorial video: https://youtu.be/VGkdzeHsqQo?si=tbaRbWsN1aJO9N3h

AI Principles, Beliefs, Policy

Did you know that Churchville developed an AI statement of principles and beliefs?  It is meant to clarify how our district views AI. It is not policy but advocates for AI use that promotes learning and thinking, rather than replacing it. The board also adopted an official AI policy in May of 2025, which spells out things like bias, student use, teacher use, and more. Together these documents edify Churchville's approach to AI: 

• afford teachers autonomy to use their professional judgment with AI tools

• guarantee teacher training on AI

• clarify that student use of AI is at the discretion of the teacher, and teachers should clarify what AI use looks like in their classroom

• find ways to embed AI in our teaching and learning practices, not the other way around

Professional Development

February will be a busy month for training! I am offering full-day in-person training on Magic School (AI) February 24th and February 25th. In addition, I am offering full-day in-person training on Canva  February 5th and February 12th that anyone can sign up for. Please note that these trainings are not two day trainings- I am offering two separate days to accommodate those who may have scheduling conflicts with one particular day. You can chose between February 24th OR February 25th, and February 5th OR February 12th.

Self-paced PD options continue to be limited as I revise the existing trainings. I am hoping to make a revised version of Canva self-paced training available soon (it's hard because they update their platform all the time). This may mean that, even if you've taken the Canva self-paced training in the past, you may want to take it again. The more recent self-paced trainings continue to be available: Magic School, Magic School for Students, and Clipchamp. 

Resource highlight: Kami

What is Kami? At its core, Kami is an annotation tool. They call themselves a learning platform, though, because Kami has so many teaching and learning features that you can facilitate all kinds of learning experiences. Most often, Kami is used to bring a document, PDF, worksheet, etc. to digital life: teachers will upload their document, maybe make a few annotations ahead of time, and then assign to students. Students will then use text boxes, audio recordings, drawings, screen recordings, images, etc. to annotate the document in order to complete the assignment. Kami was the hot tool during the pandemic, but has since cooled off in usage. You may have used it in the past and completely forgotten about it! We do still pay for it, so now is a great time to revisit this resource. If you'd like to explore and learn more, check out the Kami page on my website.