Summary:
Shawn and Troy talk about AI, standards and benchmarks, and more. Dave has a better approach to Science Fairs.
Jokes:
Did you know you can sing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” whenever you feel like it?
- It’s literally a whim away.
Tenor: two hours before a Nooner.
When do cats enjoy Simon and Garfunkel?
- When they’re feline groovy.
Lloyd is forming a no-audition singing group—The OK Chorale.
I listen to Ragtime when washing dishes for the sinkopation.
A rock guitarist plays five chords in front of 5,000 people. A jazz guitarist plays five thousand chords in front of 5 people.
If you drive a Subaru backwards, what are you?
Person crazy about old TV shows about maids:
- Hazelnut.
Middle School Science Minute
by Dave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)
K12Science Podcast: A Better Approach to Science Fairs
I was recently reading the November-December 2025 issue of “Science and Children”, a publication of the National Science Teaching Association.
In this issue, I read the section, “Science 101” written by Matt Bobrowsky. He wrote an article entitled, “Q: How Can I Make Science Investigations More Creative?”
Many teachers do not like science fairs, but there are many ways to have a science festival that avoids most of the issues that impact students, teachers, and families. A science fair can be redesigned to be less stressful and more genuinely educational by shifting the focus from competition to learning.
https://k12science.net/a-better-approach-to-science-fairs/
Reports from the Front Lines
- Back to School Blues
- The End of the Textbook?
- Magic School
- ChatGPT
- School.AI
- Brisk
- AI Perspectives
The Social Web
Things students say… via an exit ticket. “The new thing I learned is a common career language.” #RIASEC #WellBeing
In addition to the volumes of research based materials you’ll find at http://amle.org, AMLE is also a network of more than 35,000 middle level professionals who benefit from sharing best practice. Here’s a tip from a member of our Early Career Educators Committee: we’re accepting applications to volunteer for committee positions through January 16th: http://amle.org/getinvolved
Keep Indiana Learning @keepinlearning.bsky.social
Actionable steps for HEA 1634 implementation are here! Keep Indiana Learning’s Courtney Flessner details the 5 things every school needs to consider for effective Tier 2 & 3 math support. Start preparing today! Learn more: youtube.com/live/f4SQ_io… #EduSky
Eric Curts @ericcurts.bsky.social
Big thanks to @aiforhumans.bsky.social for mentioning my NotebookLM Graphic Novel project – www.controlaltachieve.com/2026/01/grap… – on their latest episode – www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4Z3… – I watch the show every week and it was awesome to be a small part of it! #EduSky #EduSkyAI #EdTech
Strategies:
Save the Student Essay
How do you learn philosophy? By doing it, of course. You read great texts and understand opposing philosophical views. Then you try to form a view yourself—initially through reflection and dialogue but eventually, and more seriously, by thinking and rethinking on the page.
To do philosophy the right way, the “slow cook” method is recommended. You let ideas stew, unattended, bubbling up to the surface once they’re ready.
Yet at this point it’s educational malpractice for professors to blithely assign slow-cooked (take-home) essays. You’re playing your students. You’re playing yourself.
https://openquestionsblog.substack.com/p/save-the-student-essay
Learning by getting it wrong (on purpose)
This isn’t about learning through failure or productive failure or productive struggle
or any of those failing approaches that let kids flail.
It’s more a possible extension of retrieval practice with hints of interleaving.
For years, cognitive science has told us something that still feels counterintuitive in classrooms: trying to remember (retrieval practice) beats rereading, even when it feels harder. Retrieval practice has earned its reputation as one of the most reliable learning strategies we have.
https://paulkirschner173727.substack.com/p/learning-by-getting-it-wrong-on-purpose
Resources:
Tamagotchigogy: A Pedagogical Framework of Care, Feedback, and Responsiveness
Tamagotchigogy is a new pedagogical framework that uses the Tamagotchi digital pet as a metaphor for learning itself. It emphasizes care, feedback, responsiveness, and engagement as essential to sustaining cognitive and emotional growth. This article outlines the theoretical foundations, instructional implications, and practical applications of Tamagotchigogy. Drawing from constructivism, self-regulated learning, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), care ethics in education, and active learning research, Tamagotchigogy proposes a learner-centered approach that repositions teaching as a responsive act of developmental stewardship.
AXIS The Culture Translator
2026 Teen Dictionary
Have you ever 100% felt like you definitely needed a secret decoder ring to understand teen culture? You’re not alone! Culture moves fast. Like — blink-and-it’s-a-new-slang-word fast…BRUH!… Sorry, that was so cheugy of us, we apologize. Don’t worry, as always, AXIS HAS YOU!
Link: Teen Translation Power Pack
Web Spotlight:
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C. Our only source of income is donations from readers like you.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks
We Need to Talk About How We Talk About ‘AI’
“AI” is not your friend. Nor is it an intelligent tutor, an empathetic ear, or a helpful assistant. It can not “make up” facts, and it does not make “mistakes”.
The problem with anthropomorphic descriptions is that they risk masking important limitations of probabilistic automation systems, which make them fundamentally different from human cognition.
Rephrasing the language we use to describe these interactions is truly swimming upstream, because not only do the companies selling these systems describe them as communicators, they also make many design choices to support this illusion.
People may form friendly feelings towards inanimate objects or technology, but they are entirely unidirectional — surely, we would not call a child’s plush toy a friend of theirs without at least a prefix of “imaginary”.
A more deliberate and thoughtful way forward is to talk about “AI” systems in terms of what we use systems to do, often specifying input and/or output. That is, talk about functionalities that serve our purposes, rather than “capabilities” of the system. Rather than saying a model is “good at” something (suggesting the model has skills) we can talk about what it is “good for”. Who is using the model to do something, and what are they using it to do?
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai
‘I feel free’: Australia’s social media ban, one month on
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mpmgn3jv2o
Reading Whole Books, and “Miracles” in Education
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/reading-whole-books-and-miracles
Random Thoughts . . .
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