How to Close the Learning Gap
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Release Date: 03/01/2021
Vibe Coding with Gemini: Build Your Own Classroom Tools
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Alice Keeler built the Educator AI Assistant — a Google Sheets add-on that collects no data — in two days. In this episode she talks about how she vibe codes with Gemini to create extensions and tools for teachers and the classroom. Vibe coding is all the rage and everyone is talking about it. But how do you actually do it? This conversation goes specifically to Gemini, surfaces the privacy issues we should be concerned about, and casts a vision for what school IT departments are becoming — or might need to become. Alice makes the case that if a district can describe the tool it needs,...
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How to Teach About Quantum Computing to Littles (Yes, Littles!)
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Quantum computing is roughly where AI was nine years ago. Dr. Nneka McGee has already taught it to five-year-olds — with a penny. Nneka is the founder of Muon Global, project lead and principal co-author of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning white paper "AI + Learning Differences," and the author of an ISTE Jump Start Guide on introducing AI to young learners. Her FETC session on quantum for educators is what convinced me this belonged on the show. Her argument is simple and hard to dodge: the technologies that will shape our students' careers are being built right now, states are...
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How a School Built Its Culture Around the 7 Habits — and the Academics Followed — Episode 965
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
A struggling Title I school built its culture around the 7 Habits — and the academics followed. Principal Muriel Summers tells how. In 1999, Muriel Summers became principal of A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina — the fifth person interviewed for a job four others had walked away from. She had just heard Dr. Stephen Covey speak, and she went back to her staff with one question: do you think we can teach these habits to children? There was no framework. There was no money. What they built turned A.B. Combs into the original Leader in Me school and one of the most visited...
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Free BBC Resources for Your Classroom: Dinosaurs, Bluey, Planet Earth and News — Episode 964
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Free, ad-free BBC videos with ready-to-teach lesson plans — Bluey, leveled reading articles, dinosaur field trips, and a daily newsroom, all free for K-12. Kimmie Fink spent 13 years in the classroom and was named Puget Sound Teacher of the Year before becoming Senior Editor of the BBC Learning Hub. At her ISTE 2026 booth, teachers kept asking what the premium version costs. The answer: there isn't one. Everything is free. In this Fab Idea Friday episode, Kimmie walks through what a teacher can download and use tomorrow — and how a former teacher decides what belongs in a resource library...
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Assessment and Feedback That Move Learning Forward — Episode 963
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
The moment you put a grade on something, it stops being formative. Starr Sackstein returns for her fourth 10 Minute Teacher appearance to make assessment practical — what formative really means, what to do with the data you're already collecting, and the strategies that work at the start, middle, and end of a lesson. Starr has spent more than two decades helping teachers move from traditional grading toward feedback that actually drives learning. Her newest book, Actionable Assessment, is co-authored with Michael McDowell. In this episode, you'll learn: - The one-word difference between...
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Math Games That Build Fluency While Kids Have Fun — Episode 962
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Timed tests don't make kids faster! These experts say timed tests make kids anxious and don't tell you what a child actually knows. Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams and Dr. Gina Kling, co-authors of Math Fact Fluency: 60+ Games and Assessment Tools to Support Learning and Retention, explain what to do instead: low-stress card and dice games where nobody races anybody, and where watching kids play gives you better assessment data than any speed drill. Vicki shares why math facts in first grade were harder for her than calculus at Georgia Tech. (She also shares why her mom, who sat at the kitchen table...
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How to Make VR Actually Work in Your Classroom — Episode 961
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
The wow has to be secondary to the why. Meghan Freeman spent a year letting her staff play in VR before a single student put on a headset — and what they found changed how she designs immersive learning. Meghan Freeman, M.Ed., is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of IlluminateXR. Before that she founded and led Elite Academic Academy, where she bought 46 headsets for her staff and gave them an entire school year to explore, argue, and write the policy themselves. In this conversation she gets specific about what actually works: how to manage a room full of students who can't see the room, how long a...
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Data-Driven Leadership That Changes School Culture — Episode 960
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Most principals say “data-driven” and mean test scores. Dr. Deborah Dennie means attendance, discipline, and climate too — and it changed her school. Dr. Deborah Dennie has led Leonardtown Middle School in St. Mary’s County, Maryland for ten years. She’s Maryland’s Middle School Principal of the Year and one of three middle-school finalists for the 2026 NASSP National Principal of the Year. In this episode she walks Vicki through the data routine she runs every two weeks, why she spent her entire first year looking and listening instead of changing things, and how a classic car...
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Travel With Students: A Principal's Grade-by-Grade Plan — Episode 959
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Travel with students changes what a school leader sees. Karen Spencer, principal of Parkview Baptist School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, treats travel as part of her school’s mission rather than an add-on — a sixth grade overnight, a seventh grade STEM and history trip to Boston, Washington D.C. in eighth grade, and international travel in high school. In this conversation she walks through how the Boston trip started, what it costs a principal in effort, and what she gets back that nothing inside the building can give her. In this episode, you’ll learn: How a single teacher’s push to...
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Gold Standard PBL vs. Just Doing a Fun Project
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Gold standard PBL isn’t a fun project with a poster at the end. Lisa Mireles of PBLWorks explains what a real project based learning classroom looks and sounds like — and how to teach it without falling behind on standards. Lisa Mireles, Ed.D., is Managing Director of Digital Curriculum at PBLWorks (formerly the Buck Institute for Education). She’s taught bilingual students in California, led schools in Indonesia and India, served as an IB coordinator, principal, and assistant superintendent, and was named HIDOE Kaua’i Complex Educational Officer of the Year in 2018. In this episode,...
info_outlineStudents are returning to school and teachers and administrators know a learning gap is there. What do we do about it? How do we close the gap without stressing everyone out? Turnaround principal Rachael George tells us how.
Check out the show notes: www.coolcatteacher.com/e725/
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Dr. Rachael George - Bio as Submitted
From fighting wildland fires with the U.S. Forest Service to putting out fires in the classroom, education was the last place that Rachael thought she’d end up. It wasn’t until a hard conversation with a base manager in Grangeville, Idaho did Rachael realize she needed to put her chainsaw down and make a bigger impact on the world. Rachael is a member of the ASCD Emerging Leaders Class of 2015, an NAESP Fellow, and currently serves as the principal of Sandy Grade School in the Oregon Trail School District.
Over the past six years, Sandy Grade School has moved from being one of the lowest-ranked elementary schools in the state of Oregon to performing in the top 20% of elementary schools. Sandy Grade School has been recognized by the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE) as a Model School for closing the achievement gap.
Prior to serving as an elementary principal, she was a middle school principal of an “outstanding” and two-time “Level 5: Model School” as recognized by the State of Oregon. Rachael specializes in curriculum development, instructional improvement as well as working with at-risk students and closing the achievement gap. Connect with Rachael on Twitter @DrRachaelGeorge.
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."