A teacher asked why the module took three weeks instead of three days. I didn't have a good answer beyond: the slow part is where I figure out what actually confuses students.
Brady Licht
@bradylicht.bsky.social
Considered Digital Learning Experiences 🌱 Learning Specialist | LMS Admin | PD Facilitator | Adjunct | Designer | Zazen Sitter | Occasional Luddite 🌐 https://www.bradylicht.com Located in SD. Opinions my own; reposts, likes, & follows ≠ endorsement.
Bandwidth maps still tell you more about a district's real options than any pedagogy framework does. You can't flip a classroom on a connection that drops every time it rains.
The pitch decks and the actual staff room conversations are not the same AI.
Noticed the district that gets the most out of technology has, by far, the smallest tool stack. One LMS, one video tool, one everything. Nobody's fighting the interface to teach.
the SMEs who make the best partners are rarely the ones who know the most. they're the ones who remember what it felt like not to know it yet.
A teacher in Bison told me her whole "computer lab" is four Chromebooks and a prayer the satellite internet holds. Nobody in a policy meeting has ever budgeted for weather.
Tracking and Reminder System 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…
Tracking and Reminder System
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.
bradylicht.com
The Learner Who Shows Up in Week Four 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…
The Learner Who Shows Up in Week Four
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.
bradylicht.com
Teacher asked me to just sit in her room Thursdays. No agenda. That's the whole model, really.
Where Design Authority Lives: A Working Ethos 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.…
Where Design Authority Lives: A Working Ethos
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.
bradylicht.com
Trying a Post-Digital Lens 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…
Trying a Post-Digital Lens
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.
bradylicht.com
The AI that actually helps is the stuff nobody writes breathless articles about.
The nearest high school is 90 miles away, but somehow we expect these kids to have the same digital resources as Denver suburbs. Geography still matters, even when everything's supposedly online.
Behavioral Surveillance Refusal – Chrome Extension for Canvas 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…
Behavioral Surveillance Refusal – Chrome Extension for Canvas
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.
bradylicht.com
The best curriculum conversations happen when teachers can say "this doesn't work for my kids" without having to justify why their classroom is different from the theoretical one.
Most curriculum gets designed by committees that never talk to the people who actually use it.
Teaching Realism 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…
Teaching Realism
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.
bradylicht.com
PD that sticks happens in the margins, not the mandated hours.
Watching my neighbor's chickens ignore the fancy feeder for scattered corn on the ground. Same energy as teachers skipping the $500 course modules to find what they need in a Facebook group.
www.ailawlibrarians.com/2026/03/04/c...
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: One Semester, Eight Vibe-Coded Teaching Tools - AI Law Librarians
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...
ailawlibrarians.com
Reading Ursula K. Le Guin before designing curricula. Her worlds help me see systems.
Who Pays for the Free Tool? 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…
Who Pays for the Free Tool?
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.
bradylicht.com
Decision Rights Mapper 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…
Decision Rights Mapper
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.
bradylicht.com
Does time outside actually help teachers decompress, or do we just tell ourselves it should? Most educators I know are either too tired to get outdoors or feel guilty for taking the time.
Maybe we keep calling it professional development because that sounds more serious than admitting we just need time to think.
What Birding Taught Me About What We Mean by “Knowing” 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…
What Birding Taught Me About What We Mean by “Knowing”
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.
bradylicht.com
The Security Case Against Vibe-Coded EdTech 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…
The Security Case Against Vibe-Coded EdTech
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.
bradylicht.com