My Sun City EdTech Sessions

I am excited and honored to be a featured speaker at the 2025 Sun City EdTech Conference hosted by ESC19 and TCEA in El Paso, Texas on September 11th.

I always look forward to an opportunity to see old friends, make new friends, share some ideas, and learn so many new things from others.

You can get all of the details about the conference including registration, presenters, sessions, and more on the conference website at:

esc19.net/conferences/sun-city-edtech-conference

Below is a list of sessions I will be presenting at the conference, along with any associated resources. Please feel free to join me for any of these sessions. I look forward to sharing, learning, and chatting with you!

EdTech Links - Week of 8-18-25

Each week I keep an eye out for the latest edtech resources through blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, user groups, and more. I then try to reshare these resources in many ways.

One way I share these is here on the blog in these "EdTech Links of the Week" posts. See below to explore the latest batch of resources, and be sure to share with others who may benefit.

If you want to make sure you don't miss new resources, you can:

🔗 View all EdTech Links of the Week: bit.ly/caa-links

📰 Sign up for my weekly email newsletter: bit.ly/curts-news
📧 Join the "Control Alt Achieve" email discussion group: bit.ly/caa-emailgroup

🔔 Get new blog posts automatically through email - FollowIt link

And as always, please let me know of any resources that you recommend. I would love to learn from you!

Chromebook Accessibility Tools with the Innovation Squadcast

I recently had the pleasure to be a guest on the "BCSD Innovation Squadcast Podcast" hosted by Pam Hubler and the team at Berkeley County School District.

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love podcasts and am always mentioning something new I learned from one of them, so I was super excited to get to join an episode of this podcast.

The podcast is described as follows:

In this podcast, the district’s Innovative Learning Coordinators delve into the newest technology and innovations to equip our schools, teachers, and students with advanced resources and support. Produced by the Berkeley County School District’s Office of Technology in Goose Creek, South Carolina.

I had a wonderful time chatting about Chromebook accessibility topics including:

• Built-in accessibility tools such as select to speak, dictation, docked magnifier, face control, quick answers, reading mode, and more.
• Recording tools for students including the Chromebook Screencast tool
• Helpful extensions to support learners such as Read&Write, Helperbird, Google Translate, Beep, Mote, and more.

Take a look below to listen to the episode, access the resources that I shared in the episode, and explore more about the podcast.

Why Every School Should be Using Gemini - Data Privacy

There are a wide range of excellent AI tools that can benefit educators and students. I have shared many of these on this blog, and I routinely provide training on them for schools around the world.

One of the AI tools that has consistently improved over the last few years is Google's AI chatbot - Gemini.

Google has added so many useful features to the free version of Gemini including Deep Research, Fact Checking, Guided Learning, image generation, Gems, Canvas, Audio Overviews, Quizzes, and more.

However there is one feature that is the number one reason why Gemini should be a part of every school's AI toolbox. It may not be the most exciting or flashiest feature, but it is arguably the most important for schools and educators.

And that is data privacy.

As educators we are required to protect student data privacy and to comply with laws such as FERPA and GDPR. Well thankfully, for free, Google provides schools with built-in data privacy and protections in Gemini.

See below for a short video and write-up that covers the details of what is included in this.

EdTech Links - Week of 8-11-25

Each week I keep an eye out for the latest edtech resources through blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, user groups, and more. I then try to reshare these resources in many ways.

One way I share these is here on the blog in these "EdTech Links of the Week" posts. See below to explore the latest batch of resources, and be sure to share with others who may benefit.

If you want to make sure you don't miss new resources, you can:

🔗 View all EdTech Links of the Week: bit.ly/caa-links

📰 Sign up for my weekly email newsletter: bit.ly/curts-news
📧 Join the "Control Alt Achieve" email discussion group: bit.ly/caa-emailgroup

🔔 Get new blog posts automatically through email - FollowIt link

And as always, please let me know of any resources that you recommend. I would love to learn from you!

Career Tech AI Prompts for Teacher Support and Student Learning

Over the last few years I have had the privilege to provide AI training for a wide range of educators, conferences, and organizations. Sometimes that has included Career Tech teachers.

I recently presented a day of sessions for a Career Tech conference in Alabama. In preparation for that training I put together a couple of new documents to support the attendees. These included:

AI Prompts for Career Tech Educators - Over 300 prompts broken down by different Career Tech subject areas, designed to help support educators with planning, differentiating, assessment, content creation, career exploration, and more.

AI Interactive Simulation Prompts for Career Tech - About 100 prompts that can be used to create engaging interactive simulations for career tech students. These allow the students to interact with AI for simulated interviews, problem-solving scenarios, work-based simulations, and more.

As with all of my resources, these prompt collections are completely free to access, modify, and use however you need. See below to get those documents.

Gemini's Guided Learning - Moving from Answers to Understanding

There are lots of ways that AI can be helpful to students, such as personalized learning, feedback, productivity support, and more.

The problem is, sometimes it can be a little too helpful.

A student might ask for assistance with a homework problem or an essay and the AI chatbot will simply do the problem or write the report. We want AI to support learners in their work, not do their work for them.

Thankfully Google has a helpful feature built right into Gemini that does just that. It's called "Guided Learning".

With Guided Learning, instead of just giving the student a quick answer, Gemini will explain some of the basic information, but will then ask the student questions to bring them into a discussion and encourage them to think critically.

See below for a short demonstration video and written directions on how you and your students can use Guided Learning.