Augmented Reality Lessons You Can Use Now
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Release Date: 03/22/2021
What Happens to Your Student's IEP After High School? - Episode 972
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Your student has an IEP all the way through high school. Then they graduate — and it doesn't go with them. Dr. Toby Tomlinson Baker was diagnosed with a learning disability in 1987, attended six different schools between kindergarten and twelfth grade, and was told by her guidance counselors not to bother applying to college. She has a PhD. In this episode she explains what actually changes the day a student walks off a high school campus, why the accommodations you fought for don't automatically transfer, and how to teach a student to ask for what they need before anyone makes them. In this...
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Free Teacher-Facing AI for Behavior and Learning
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Most teachers reaching for AI to help with a struggling student are reaching for the wrong kind of AI. General-purpose chat tools pull from the open internet, they were never trained on whether the information is accurate, and they should be nowhere near a student's personally identifiable information. Natalie Tamburello, a learning disability and education equity advocate at Children's Health Council, walks through what a teacher-facing AI built on vetted research actually looks like — and why she thinks that is where the real classroom wins are right now. In this episode, you'll learn: -...
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Teaching Kids Boundaries: What to Say in the Moment — Episode 970
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Boundaries are not a heavy conversation you need a degree to have. They are small, repeated moments — and the right words handed to a child before they need them. Ashley Bendiksen, author of A Kids Book About Boundaries, shows teachers what to say. Ashley Bendiksen is a national speaker and abuse prevention advocate who spent years talking to teens about dating violence. Then she moved earlier. Her book for children ages five to nine teaches the skill underneath all of it: knowing you have a choice, and having the words to say so. In this conversation she shows what that looks like in an...
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Who Smarted? Why Human-Made Kids' Media Still Beats the Bots — Episode 969
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Jerry Kolber built Nat Geo's Brain Games and Netflix's Brainchild — then moved his team off screens entirely. In this episode he explains why, and what teachers are doing with kids' podcasts that he never planned for. The practical piece: transition time. Coming back from lunch or recess, a short episode gets students seated, listening, and settled without a single reminder — and they don't notice they're learning. Jerry also shares how mini quizzes every three or four minutes train attention, and why "co-listening" — making a show adults genuinely enjoy — is a deliberate design...
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Keeping the Teacher at the Center of Classroom AI
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
For twenty-five years we sent the struggling kid to the back of the room with headphones on. Todd Brekhus of Renaissance explains why that model broke personalized learning, and how teacher-facing AI hands the room back to you. Todd Brekhus is Chief Product Officer at Renaissance, General Manager of Nearpod, a former English teacher and technology director, and the creator of the myON literacy platform. We recorded this conversation at ISTE 2026. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why "personalized learning" quietly pushed teachers out of the loop, and what changes when you say "personalized...
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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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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 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...
info_outlineIf you need safe, fun ways for students to connect and learn while keeping their distance in the classroom then augmented reality apps might be for you. But there are best practices you can use to teach math, ELA and more using Augmented reality. In today's show Mitchell Weisburg, cofounder of the nonprofit Games4Ed, shares pedagogical best practices for using augmented reality in the classroom with 3D Bear and other tools.
Sponsor: Advancement Courses’ Tournament of Teachers bracket challenge is back again for the fourth year in a row and voting is now open from March 22 to March 31. This year’s “Remember When. . . Edition” features 32 scenarios that educators both miss and don’t miss about classroom life before 2020. Things like “taking students on field trips vs. hosting classroom parties” or “fire drills derailing your lesson vs. a broken air conditioner.” Vote for which scenarios you want to see advance in each round and see the winners announced on April 1. This is going to be fun! Visit coolcatteacher.com/tournament to learn more and start voting!
Mitchell Weisberg - Bio as Submitted
Mitch helps organizations succeed in the education market. Mitch co-founded Academic Business Advisors in 2005, to help organizations reach teaches and students in the US. In 2014, Mitch co-founded Edchat Interactive with Tom Whitby and Steve Anderson, a service to share best practices among educators through live online interactive events. In January 2015, Mitch co-founded the nonprofit Games4Ed with Larry Cocco, to facilitate collaborations between educators, researchers, game developers, publishers and policymakers to further the use of games and other immersive strategies in schools. Mitch served on the Board of the Ed-Tech Industry Network (ETIN) of the SIIA from 2012-2019, was cochair from 2015-2016, and was the chair in 2019. In January 2019, Mitch became US COO of 3DBear, a Finnish EdTech company that uses Augmented Reality to motivate students to engage and learn deeply. If you are at all interested in what Mitch did before 2005, buy him a glass of wine and ask. Hint: he taught and developed over 200 courses.
Blog: https://blog.academicbiz.com/
Twitter: @weisburghm