Part 11 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. Now that a tool can come together in an afternoon, the harder question is whether a request needs one at all. Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality helps me think through when a conversation is the better tool.

My letter "Dear L&D: Your Learning Platform Has a Point of View" is now up on Training Industry as part of their Dear L&D series, where people in the field write directly to the profession. The letter argues that a learning platform is not a neutral container. Its required fields, defaults, and reporting views add up to a working theory of what learning is and what counts as evidence of it, and most of us don't hear that argument until we're already working inside it.

Part 10 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. When Spearfish School District started using the Danielson walkthrough tool I'd built, the first thing they did was ask for changes. The tool began as a fairly plain Sheet that administrators use to record walkthroughs against the Framework for Teaching. Spearfish wanted their own set of questions instead of mine.

Part 9 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. The reading order is here. A course module arrives as a Word document. A subject matter expert wrote it, and it is good: objectives at the top, sections under headings, a figure here, a YouTube video there, a reflection activity and a reference list at the end. Then somebody has to rebuild all of it inside Canvas, page by page, in the agency's branded template with its own icons and heading styles.

The phrase shows up in a predictable spot. A district is deciding whether to adopt a reading program, a behavior framework, or a platform, and somewhere in the second half of the meeting someone says that the option on the table is research-based. What happens next is the part that interests me. The conversation does not get more rigorous. It gets shorter.

Canvas has a badge feature. If I want to, I can open the settings for a course, attach a requirement to a module, and have the system hand out a small image to anyone who finishes it. The work does not change. The reading is the same reading, the quiz is the same quiz, and at the end a graphic shows up next to a name in a table that mostly only the instructor looks at.

Anthropic has revealed how Claude is able to secretly watermark AI-written text, and it has everything to do with word choices.

A Google Sheet that tracks one item across a group of people and emails them about it on a schedule until they are done. If you have ever been the person responsible for making sure forty other people turn something in by a date, you know the shape of this problem. The work is not the collecting. The work is the chasing.

Every cohort has one. Somebody emails in week four asking if it is too late to join, or logs in for the first time after three weeks of silence because a building crisis finally passed. If you have facilitated anything with a start date, you know the feeling of reading that email and doing quick math about what they have missed and what it would take to catch them up.

Educational technology is not neutral. Every platform, every pricing model, every data policy reflects a set of decisions about who benefits and who adapts. This document is about who those decisions belong to, and who they currently belong to instead. I am writing from inside one of the places where those decisions get made and lived with. I work at Black Hills Special Services Cooperative, an educational service cooperative serving districts across the Great Plains region.

Most of the language we use to talk about technology in education assumes a line between the digital and everything else. We talk about technology integration, as if the technology arrives from somewhere outside and gets folded into the real work of teaching. We talk about adopting a tool, resisting a platform, or running professional development on a new system, and each of those phrases quietly treats the digital as a separate domain, something we bring to the table or choose to leave off it.

Canvas records a great deal about students that has nothing to do with their schoolwork. It logs when a student last logged in, how long a session lasted, how many times they opened each page, and the sequence of actions they took inside a quiz attempt. It surfaces all of this to teachers through dashboards and reports: classic Course Analytics, New Analytics, the per-user Access Report, the activity columns on the People page.

I have been noticing something in the way AI tools market themselves to educators. The pitch varies in specifics, but the underlying structure is almost always the same: teachers are overwhelmed, teachers are burning out, teachers are leaving, and this product can help by reducing workload, automating grading, generating lesson plans. The teacher's suffering is the given, and the tool is the response.

Somewhere around tool number five, I realized I had a problem. The kind where you keep saying "almost done" and then it's 2 AM and you're finalizing a React app that lets your students act as bots and...

In a recent article, I wrote about the ethics of building automation tools for educators, using Mary Doria Russell's concept of the "vulture," a freelance analyst who maps a worker's expertise so machines can take over parts of it. That piece ended with what I still think is the right distinction: the best version of this story is the one where educators automate their own work, on their own terms, rather than having it done to them by someone else.

A note before you start The Decision Rights Mapper is released as a free, open tool under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. That openness is intentional, and it carries a corresponding responsibility for anyone who uses or distributes the tool. This is a reflection instrument for teachers. It was designed with care to resist becoming a surveillance or evaluation tool. No identifiers are collected.

My dad kept a bird book with a life list penciled inside the front cover. I do not think he updated it very often. It was one of those things that surfaced years later in a box of older stuff he had cleared out, and when I found it, the list was short and the handwriting was from a version of him I did not really know.

Over the past several months, I have been building an argument across multiple articles. I have made the case that educators can and should build their own tools using AI-assisted coding. I have explored the power dynamics of who gets to automate whose work. I have been honest about the platform constraints and practical limits of building with Google Apps Script.

YouTube video by CEPS Ljubljana

The Scope and Sequence Builder is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, which means you're welcome to copy it, modify it, and share it with colleagues as long as you keep an attribution back to the original. It's provided as-is and is not a substitute for your team's professional judgment about what to teach and when; it's a structure for applying that judgment, not a replacement for it.

By handling what you can with structured data and saving the generative AI API call for what you genuinely need, you get better tools.

A video about replacing streaming subscriptions with a home server recently crossed my feed, and I have not been able to stop thinking about how cleanly its argument maps onto educational technology. The creator, Jeff from the channel Dammit Jeff, spent a year documenting his process of detaching from cloud services by building his own home server. His core thesis is straightforward: convenience became dependence, and dependence became leverage.