2026 NJECC Edtech throwdown

Welcome to the edtech throwdown. Join us, Eric G and Nick Johnson, as we dive into today's best edtech tools, tips, and practices. We do the research so you can teach your class. Remember to follow us on social media like Instagram X or Facebook by looking for the handle @ edtechthrowdown. Now, please enjoy the show. Welcome to the EdTech Throwdown. This is episode 211 called NJCC Showdown 2026. Guys and I have each selected six of our favorite edte tools for the classroom. Listen in to learn about what they are, why we like them, and how they might advance your practice. This is another episode you don't want to miss. Check it out. All right, back for episode 211. We just got done with the NJC conference. I had a blast this year as we always do. They were celebrating what was it 40 years? Was it 40? I think it was 40 years and I was excited because it was actually warm. Usually it's freezing cold up there, but we got to enjoy some nice weather and it's no secret if you are a listener to our show that this is one of our favorite conferences. It's small but it is a lovely time. We did two sessions this year and as always we end up bringing those presentations to the podcast essentially turning what we did live at the conference into an episode. So, that's what everybody's going to get today. We also sat in on some cool sessions. One of those may or may not show up as a possible future guest. I don't want to say too much about that until things are finalized. I just know I got a ton out of it this year for sure. >> Yeah, that session that we uh were that Nick was alluding to is one of the most powerful sessions that I've seen in a while out of PD. So, hopefully that pins out and hopefully that works out. We'll be able to share some of that stuff with you. It's not over the top he like edtech heavy, but it's still worth an episode in my opinion. We did two two different throwdowns. The first one's our traditional throwdown where we just each have tools and we we battle each other oneonone, which um Nick won this time. I'll just say that. I disagree. I think his tools are great, but I thought mine were better. Whoever goes second tends to win our our battles. And I'm just going to chalk it up to that, but I'm not bitter or anything. The second presentation that we did was with both former podcast guests and our colleagues Dana Heler and and Jeff Lo, and we did some AI best practices and workflow and everything along those lines. >> Yeah. And we'll we'll probably bring I'd imagine we would do that presentation as episode 212, right? You think? >> Yeah, it's definitely worth it. I mean, it there's a lot of great value that Dana and Jeff brought to that as as well as some of our own stuff. But for today, we're going to just get into our edtech throwdown. We got 12 tools. They're pretty pretty awesome tools. I think it's it's a different flavor of tools this year. And uh we're going to get into that right after we pause briefly for this announcement from the Teach Better Podcast Network. >> This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network. Better today, better tomorrow, and the podcast to get you there. You can find out more at teachb.com/mpodcast. Now, let's get back to the episode. >> All right, so we're back and we're going to start going through these tools. We're going to try to do this much like we do live, which is kind of rapid fire. There's not going to be a deep dive here because we're sharing 12 different things. I'll also say like we do in the live presentation, if you feel pressured to be using all 12 of these tools, please do not. The goal of sharing 12 different edtech tools is so you walk away with like one or two that might sound appealing or you think you could use for something helpful today. And that goes like with any of our podcast episodes all the time, but I was just thinking about it because it's one of the things we always start off a presentation session with too. So important to say that for people, >> right? And the other thing that we want to throw out there that we also know that edtech is not the all beall of education. There's nothing out there that's going to replace good classic teaching and a good teacher. EdTE is meant to be out there to enhance the classroom or to improve student learning and engagement in some way, shape, or form. You'll get a copy of this if you go to our show notes. There'll be a copy of our presentation that you can enjoy. And really, it's just there in case you hear something from this podcast or if you're at our presentation from the presentation that will allow you to go back and revisit it when the time is right. might not be right for you right now and that's okay. So, without any further ado, we're going to change this up a little bit. Usually, I would do all six of mine and then Nick would do all six of his. We're going to alternate back and forth for the sake of this podcast and to give us both like a little little bit of a break in between because we've had a long day already here at school. >> Yeah, I'll get it started too with my first one. It's called It's called Talking Tours. and talking tours. I might have even mentioned this on another one of our recent podcast episodes, but I can't I also used it for the presentation and it's very cool. So, I'm gonna say it again. This is it's a Google experimental AI. I don't know what to call it. Let's just say app for now. But essentially, talking tours allows you to use like a virtual field trip Google Street View style tour, right? where you can go to say a famous landmark like something historical or a natural landmark like like Niagara Falls and you can essentially like click around and and tour the place which which has always been there, right? You could do that now from Google Maps anytime you snap into that street view. But what makes talking to special is there's a little camera, like a little snapshot button. And when you click that button, it essentially takes a screenshot of whatever you're looking at in your tour and it uses some AI, I'm assuming Gemini, in the background to analyze that and put together like a little audio tour of whatever it is you're looking at. I I demoed this live at our presentation with Niagara Falls just to kind of show people like when you're looking at the American side of the falls, it gives you like a quick description of that. If you swivel around and go towards the Canadian side where you can see some of the buildings over there, there's like this Space Needle style building. Take another snapshot, it tells you about that building. If you look at the boat, the maid of the mist, it tells you about the maid of the mist. And it's like this personalized little like a literal walking tour of wherever you're at. Obviously, in a classroom setting, this could be pretty cool. If you're teaching about something in a far away place that you cannot go to and you want to do maybe something a little more interactive than just playing a video clip on that place, you can actually have students explore it themselves and watch their own little mini guided tour of that. Maybe you can have them do that and then they each report back to the classroom the coolest thing they saw and learned to get like a everybody sharing out. I love this kind of stuff and we've seen many things like this over the years on the show. I think this is my favorite one because of the AI tour element and it looks really great. I also just like separate from teaching I had a lot of fun checking these out. So, if you had to, you know, just Google Google talking tours or Google Labs talking tours, it'll pop up for you. It's worth your time. >> Yeah, definitely like that one. I think Google Labs is one of the most >> I don't know fun >> things to play around. You can sit down and get lost in Google Labs for a long time. Have fun and >> basically look up and see that you wasted like two hours of your life. >> True. But there are ways that you could bring some of those tools into the classroom, make it fun, and and that's what it's all about. We'll get into my first one. It's called Chalky. Chalky is a it's basically one of those AI apps or tools that you can make and build out lesson plans, whether it's a unit plan, a lesson plan, or an activity. And I really like this one because it has the capability of building out a whole lesson, all right, from start to finish, but stacking those lessons on top. But I really like the activities. And I don't think I would use the activity completely how it is given to me. I think I would break those activities up and use those as my do now and exit tickets. But that that's just my my, you know, two cents on the matter. There are so many things that you could do. It can generate a slide deck based off of just a easy prop that you put in there. What I like about Chalky is the slide decks look polished there. I I typed in photosynthesis and just left it at that and I connected it to the science standard that I wanted and I felt like the content was on point. I felt like the slide deck was probably one of the best ones that I've seen in terms of AI generated ones. Like usually I have to go in and edit a lot and I'm okay with that. Personalizing my learning and to my students needs, but I felt like this one kind of already did that. It hits a lot of those different ways of learning within that slide deck. The lesson series that you can do there is phenomenal. I thought that it's exactly the way that I think and I know what you're thinking out there. How do you think? >> Yeah, that's scary. How do you think? >> I I wish I could tell you how it is cuz like I am the most organized. Disorganized person. Disorganized. Organized person. No, organized. I don't know. >> It doesn't matter. >> I'm very disorganized, but I'm organized within that disorganization. So, >> we know what you mean. >> There you go. I like that it easily aligns up with the curriculum based on the standards that you put in and they have a whole bunch of different standards that you can select from. You could get built-in activities, you could get worksheet creator, all that good stuff and then it's very easy to export to a PDF, Google Slides or PowerPoint. So, you got all that stuff in there. Go check out Chalky. If you're looking at our slide deck, there is a free trial to the pro. There's a link within the slide deck that you can try that out. Go take a look at that. >> I think yeah, we should have said too, we will put the link to the slides that we put together for this in our show notes. So, if you want to head to our website or whatever your podcast player is, just scroll through the show notes there and you should see the link to to this with like some screenshots and videos and and everything else. Okay, my next one is is not something specific like I did last. It's something very general, but I wanted to make sure that people know this exists. And what I'm talking about are AI apps. If you think about your phone that has all these different unique apps that allow you to do the same things that you know, say like a website does, like you can go to your online banking website. You can also go to your online banking app where it's just it's essentially like the website but specifically designed to function on your phone. AI is doing the same things. So, for example, I use chat G GPT because it seems like they have the most right now, although they're coming for Gemini and Claude very soon. You can on the lefth hand menu of chat GPT, click on apps and if you've never explored that before, you should see at least right now one of the first ones that pops up is Canva. So, for teachers, right, that's immediately interesting because it's a tool we use and talk about a lot. What you can essentially do is talk to the chat GPT chatbot, but ask it to do specific things in Canva. It'll make the design like right there within the chat GPT window or tab for you. If you like it and you want to edit that further, you can click a button and it pops you over into your Canva account to like do some real editing. But for anybody that's like using a chatbot extensively as kind of the starting place for all of your your work or your projects, this might be good to know. Also, you might find that chat GPT perhaps does a better job at getting you a design template that you like, maybe better than Canvas AI does. I'm not sure if that would happen. I've never tested it, but it's it's worthwhile. So, I shared two specifically that I felt were interesting. the Canva chat GPT app as well as the Wayground chat GPT app. And it pretty much works the same way in in Way. When you go to apps and search for Wayground, it's going to pop up. You can tell it to, you know, do anything you would make in Wayound, like make a quiz 10 question assessment on whatever topic and, you know, then just go crazy with whatever details you want to include there and it's going to make it. It's going to build it right in there. You can actually even preview it in chat GPT. If it's something you're going to use, then you can click one simple button and it brings you into your Wayground account. I would expect many more of these to accumulate over time to include, I don't know, like probably all of the major educational platforms like Wayground that are trying to be these, you know, these sort of one-stop shops for teachers that are doing everything. you can expect those to incorporate with whatever your AI chatbot of choice is. So, this is something worth paying attention to. So, go check it out and see if you like it. >> So, kind of going along with what Nick just did, you can make your own. You can make your own little AI apps using Gemini Gems and making those gems into these apps. >> Nice segue. >> Yeah, I like it. >> That's good. >> I just thought of it and I thought I would take the opportunity to storm or wreck your parade there a little bit. >> But with these Gemini gems, you can create whatever you want and you can use them over and over again. You could share them out. It's very easy to share them. >> With Gemini gems, what you do is you glorify a prompt. And a lot of times people don't do this and I don't know why, but someone showed me this very early on. I use it all the time. I go to a regular Gemini chat and I ask the chat that I say you are a prompt engineer and you need to make make the most clearest prompt for whatever purpose that you're doing. And then I always upload a if there's a picture showing what I want it to do, I always upload that and put that there. Please make the best prompt so it recreates what is attached here in the same style. And then I grab that and I go over to Gemini gems. I add a new gem and I paste whatever prompt that they just gave me like they as in the AI just gave me. So I have that in there and I save that gem for future use. So, basically, let me give you a couple of examples. And I'm not going to give you education examples because that will come in our next episode as far as like lesson plans or email writing or stuff like that. I'm going to talk to you about the creative stuff that I've done over the last couple of weeks. All right. I made a Gemini Gem just to get kids to like laugh before state testing and relax a little bit. And the first Gemini gem that I made was called Garbage Pale Teachers. So, if you remember the garbage pail kids in the8s, I believe they were the '8s. I was a young kid when I first remembered them. But what I did is I took that same type of humor. It's like, I don't know, disgusting humor. It puts slime into the picture or boogers or whatever into the into the picture and makes you look like a disorganized mess. So what I did is I made a copy of one of the old garbage pail kids. I put it into the chat. I asked it to give me a prompt that would help me regenerate this but tailor it to teachers. So it changed garbage pale kids to garbage pale teachers. And then I further described it to add for example I took your last name Johnson and I said okay add an adjective to the front of Johnson. So Nick came up is junky food Johnson and then he had a whole bunch of like junk food all around him and it was all disorganized into a mess. So, with that, it came up with a pretty awesome picture that took a photo that I took of Nick and basically turned it into a garbage pale teacher photo. If you want to take a look at this, once again, it's in the presentation. I also included the prompt there. So, if you wanted to go in, make a copy of that prompt, changed it to fit your school district, I think you'll you'll like what what was put in there. The second thing I did creatively is, and I say creatively because when you write prompts on your own, and that's what I do, I don't always like ask the AI to do it. Usually, I write my own prompt and then I ask the AI to enhance it a little bit. You know, I think that's still part of the creative process because I'm I'm thinking about it. I'm dreaming it up and then I have to describe it and then I it's it's no different than writing a rough draft in English for a paper and then having someone else go proofread it in my opinion. You might not agree with that, but I I kind of do. But back to the story, it was February 11th and my kids Valentine's were supposed to come in and they didn't. and I got a notice saying they weren't coming in till the 16th and I was like that's not going to help. So what I did is I made a gem called the Valentine's Day editor and I took a picture of each one of my kids and then I gave it, you know, about 12 different sayings that I wanted it to recycle through and I wanted a different image but keeping the likeness of my son's photo. So, it did that and I got things like, "Happy Valentine's Day." And I had a picture of my middle child as Cupid, which was hilarious. And the little message on there, it says, "I like you more than 67. No cap." I don't know what any of that means, but I just, you know, he says 67 a lot. He says no cap a lot. I threw it in there. Great. All right. And then it says your pal Boon at the bottom. So it's a fully colorized Valentine's that took me once I wrote the prompt, it took me about 15 seconds to make 12 different versions of a Valentine, which is pretty cool. You make two copies of each and that takes care of their class. The third thing I did was garbage pale coaches because I had so much fun with the teachers. I just repeated the process, changed it up a little bit and did garbage pail coaches. And the uh the official greasy gist garbage pale coach, you know, sports card is available and you know, I will sign it if you get a hold of a copy of it for free. >> That's a tanalyzing offer. And those those were super fun. You could also make these these unique gems for your classroom. They're we just found out that gems are like copyable. So you could provide a link to a gem to your students that does a specific purpose educationally for them. So if you want to allow AI in more of a safeguarded way, you could say, "All right, today I want you guys to be using this gem that I have prompted to help guide you through whatever like a stoometry problem." And you can sort of tailor those not just to your class, but to like a specific part of a lesson on any given day. I think that's a whole new unexplored world and maybe an episode unto itself. My next one I'm going to do really fast because I think I've also talked about this before and it's just like a fun little add-on that you can use in your Canva designs. If you're really smart, you could export these things out of Canva to use anywhere. Uh but in Canva, there's an app. So much like my last one where I talked about AI apps, now we're talking Canva apps. There's an app called Animator that takes any static image and turns it into a video clip that where it is doing some kind of animation of your choice. I modeled this during our presentation with a picture of a butterfly just like a picture like a PNG or a JPEG file. But with the app, you can describe what you want the picture to do. So I said make the butterfly fly away and it takes that exact image but basically animates it based on your description. Now they're not long. It can't be too complex. But if you've got simple little things that you want to do this with, it actually works surprisingly well. Surprisingly well. We tried a couple different versions. One where the butterfly like flew away. You tried one at a lunch and learn where the butterfly was like catching on fire, which is messed up, but still it actually did it and it was funny and it works, man. So, it's a it's a really cool little add-on. To find it, just head to a Canva design, scroll down to where it says apps, and then search for this thing called Animator. It'll pop right up. I won't even bother explaining how to use it because it's very I mean, it's you it's a can't miss and it's just super fun. So, check it out, guys. Animator app in Canva. Another solid solid tool there. We'll get into my next one, which is called Teacher Server. This is an AI tool library. It is free. It's an AI powered powered platform specifically designed for educators to streamline the lesson planning, assessment, classroom management, and productivity. There are over,00 different tools in there. They are neatly organized by category. So you could have categories such as K12, college, adult, teaching, parents, that type of thing. You could also have organization per subject area. Science, English, math, all that good stuff. And pretty much anything that you would want in there is probably found in there. You should go in there when you have to like maybe listen to something, you have you have time to multitask or something like that. And I always say that I do this while my wife watches one's one of her shows that I don't really care to watch. I'll sit in the room with her, you know, maybe give her a little smile every once in a while, let her know that I'm, you know, still there, still present. >> Very smart. >> But I will be browsing teacher server for some AI tools instead of watching the golden bachelor. >> Also smart. >> Yes, >> skip that one. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, that's a classic. My next one is called Teachable Machine, which is part of our ever growing catalog of ways to teach students and staff, depending your role, about AI and how it works. This is a free website. No accounts, no signons, no nothing. That's my favorite part about it. And it's it's I mean, I don't know what its purpose is really because you can actually you can build your own AI here essentially. But it's a it's also a teachable tool, right, to sort of educate people on how AI works. You can go there and train your own AI model to recognize things via image or or video or audio. When you start it up, uh just, you know, basically just go and start clicking through a series of prompts. It's very self-guided. Nobody taught me how to use it. I just like went and in about 30 seconds, I was training my AI model and I did a visual one with two different classes. And a class is a thing that the eventual model will recognize. In the presentation, I did this live, too, because it's so fast and easy. I trained it to recognize a a hand, like an open palm hand with five fingers out, separate from the second class, which is a thumbs up. And you do that by in view of your computer's camera, taking as many different pictures of a a hand as possible in different angles, different positions. The more data you feed it, so the more sample pictures of a hand you feed it, the better it's going to be at recognizing that later on the back end. Same thing with the thumbs up. I took like 20 different versions of a thumbs up and then it analyzes those. it spots patterns in those images as AI recognition tools do and then on the back end it the model you created it it's usable right so then with the camera you can hold up a hand and it it tells you what it's which class it is viewing based on how you've trained it this is a very fun fast way to teach kids about how AI works you can have them do this and sort of have fun with it you can also have it recognize poses you can have it recognize different audio via the microphone So speaking out different words and if you're really into tech, it also gives you the code for that AI model that you can export and use other places. So like in an actual website or app that you are developing and this is now out of my wheelhouse, but I'm just sharing it in case anybody's in that world. It's as far as I can tell and as far as they advertise, code is usable separate from the website, too. I'm a big fan of Teachable Machine as a teaching tool and honestly I would like to explore it more in the future as well. But that was my fourth feature of the day. >> Let's get into my next one. I I throw this under the creativity building rapport with your students type category. This is called Sunno. I brought this up before probably last year at this time, but there's been a pretty significant update that I really, really like. So, if you didn't know what it is or if you don't know what it is, is an AI music generation music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instruments. So, pretty awesome. I know last year I made fun of Nick in a song because he wore jeans to back to school night, but this year last year was great, but I wish I could have tweaked the lyrics after I made the song because some of the lyrics just didn't fit him or it wasn't as uh you know as creative or as jokingly creative as I wanted it. So this year I made a new song about the chemistry guy up in the 400 hall, but I was able to change the lyrics after the initial lyrics were created. So instead of teaching in the 100 hall, he taught in the 400 hall where he actually teaches. Instead of having red hair, he has I don't know gray breath. >> It looks pretty gray. It's glistening over here. How dare you? >> I mean, I hear the ladies like the salt and pepper. >> We'll see. >> I'm just saying. But anyway, over here, you have a nice set of hair. You You It's nice. There you go. >> All right. But say that I want to, you know, change the lyrics to to make Nick be Nick in the song. I can now do that. And I think that just makes this tool more powerful. So, please go check out the song that I created about Nick, which is in the slide deck, but it's just pretty cool if you can put like kids first names in it and just having it fun. And when the kids come into your classroom, they hear their names and they're, you know, they know that you spent a little extra time picking on them that day and that oftent times builds a strong rapport with the kids in the class. Yeah, that's a winner for your classroom environment for sure. I'll see if I can edit the song into the actual episode, maybe at the end or something. So, stick around for the last few moments of episode 211 if you want to hear it. My next one is called Napkin AI. Very unique AI tool. With this website, you can copy paste in a bunch of text. I tried it with a study guide from one of my chemistry units and you just copy paste it in and it kind of turns it into like this long document that you can scroll through. What it does is then you can hover over hover your cursor over any chunk of text that you just copy pasteed in. Think about it like any paragraph or anywhere there's like a space or a break in that text and it's going to automatically generate an image from what is in the text like a visual or an icon or a graph or a flowchart or a mind map. All kinds of different options and it's supposed to be like a fast way to essentially add visuals to something you're creating. I thought it was very cool. I don't have a great educational use for this yet, but I still shared it because I just what it does was is so like unique and I haven't seen anything else doing that. But like if you were putting together some kind of a report and you couldn't find the visuals to fit the different sections of that report, Napkin AI will make them almost like live in the doc. And then you know you can once it creates it, everything's editable. You can describe how you want things changed. You can switch it to different types of visuals sort of on the fly. You can also export those visuals individually as their own picture file. So, you could use it as a way too to just like turn text into a visual aid. Very, very cool. I would encourage anyone who is interested in AI tools to go give this one a look because I have a feeling there's some pretty clever applications for this that I that I have not thought of yet. So, that was my second to last one. Napkins AI. Also, they pledge there is a fee for this, but you can use it free as an educator, and it's one of the ones where they pledge free forever for teachers. So, you know, no harm, I don't think, in going there, signing in, making an account, and just getting used to it. See if it might help you out sometime. >> So, go get yourself a napkin and then maybe a tissue as you cry over this wonderful AI product. >> Terrible name, though, right? Isn't napkin a horrible name for it? >> Cleans up all the mess. I think it's I think it's fine. Oh, that's why they chose it, huh? I didn't That is the reason. Cleans it up. There you go. >> All right. So, the next one is Notebook LM. Notebook LM is awesome. It was awesome last year. It's even more awesome now with all the updates and everything that you could do with it. So, I like Notebook for multiple reasons. It used to be this research tool and it still is a research tool, but I like it because sometimes when you go out to Gemini or Chat GPT or any of those tools, you go out there and it is enter a prompt and it goes out and it it grabs everything from the internet. All right, it grabs everything from the internet and then tries to bring it together and it's oftent times inaccurate. I know it's getting better and better as time goes on, but say you want to work in a confined space with confined resources and just get the info there. You could do that at Notebook LM. You upload the resources. It will only pull information from those resources and then from that you can get other teaching aids as well. You could get infographics, presentations, you can get a podcast, an AI podcast. That sounds pretty darn good now. You could get AI video as well. They can make presentations for you that look beautiful and are accurate with information. And they have all these different things. Study guides, flashcards, everything in there. >> Did you say infographics yet? >> That was my first one. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Infographics is also, you know, pretty powerful there. But it gives you all this stuff. So you could either share it out with the kids or you could keep all that stuff for yourself. I can make a pretty awesome choice board in under five minutes. And I've done it. I've done a choice board, all the stuff that I would need under five minutes. And then I would go over to Canva and make it, you know, looking pretty good in under like 15 minutes. All right. And then you could use things such as the podcast and the video and stuff like that as, you know, I know you use them for resources when kids do like a study guide or or some type of a worksheet of content that is a little bit more challenging. You put the PowerPoint and the uh podcast and the video there so they have another way of learning the exact same thing that you are teaching them in class. I'm also managing this year or like mentoring nine different students with independent studies and competitions that they're involved in and advising AP research projects for this AP research class completely unmanageable on my own. But I use LM to like weed through a lot of the resources for all these individual student projects and it's the only way that that would be possible for me to help all of these students. So it has been very helpful with that. It's made a huge difference. So I just wanted to like share that other application of it as well. And I'll do my my last one which is a website called myshorthanser.com. You guys know that we are big into gamifying your classroom on this podcast. And this is a cool way to gamify specifically focusing on writing and and ELA. It's has some I could see five but there might actually be more. at least they feature five different writing centered games where you can do like a bracket style minute writing challenge where the kids go in, they each log in with a join code almost like Cahoot or Way or any of these quiz tools, but they respond to like a fun and engaging writing prompt and then it takes all of those prompts and guides the whole lesson by showing the group two prompts side by side at a time. They read them. Everybody upvotes one and then it carries on like this and the game finishes by the class selecting basically bracket style the best winners. That's just one of them. There's four others that are all different types of games, all of which are conducted fully through myshorthanser.com. And it just looked super cool in a time where maybe you it might be helpful to have some different ways to motivate kids to get into writing and to share and talk about their writing and analyze it uh when they when it might be helpful to have something like this. So, it was just a unique little little tool and I liked it because it's not specifically using AI for most. There is one game where it uses an AI character as like a bad guy to give constructive criticism, which I like to because then it doesn't force any one particular person to do that, which can be uncomfortable. You could argue that's a skill people need to learn, and I would agree with that, too. But if you want to start small, then you can let these AI characters play like good cop bad cop with the student writing samples. And that was another neat one to check out. So head to myshorthanser.com ELA teachers and see what you can find. >> Well, since you want to go down the gamification hole here, I'm going to go with that as well and I'm going to talk to you about RARD. All right. Now with the name you might think that this is a grading tool. It's not. It's a gamification tool. It is an AI powered education platform designed to turn those lesson plans and those static contractive or static content worksheets into interactive classroom activities and simulations. All right. So what does this mean? It means that I can go to our grade and I could type in a prompt. make me an escape the room about photosynthesis using this standard for this grade level. I fill in all those blanks and then you hit go and it will make you an easy like five minute activity that you could use as a do now or an exit ticket or just you know a way to have a transition as you're going from one activity to the next in your classroom. It can do Jeopardy like things. It could do flashc card like quest things. I asked it to make a who who is smarter than a fifth grader. It did that pretty easily. And then I asked it to do the weakest link contest or game show where they get to bank questions. So they get to either bank every question or if they they save each question, they get multipliers. and it took about five minutes to create through and through. It's easy to share. It's easy to kick out to your students and they have a fun time playing it. So, it is fresh. When I say fresh, I mean this is in beta, but it's doing good things in beta. I like the tool, but it is fresh. Meaning it is getting updates almost weekly, if not daily. I know that they're working on it around the clock. I'm not getting paid to say anything about RARE, but I think this tool has a lot of promise. So, if you want to get in on that promise, if you want to get in on being able to maybe provide some feedback and see change on a tool, this would probably be one that you would want to, you know, get in on. >> All right, so that's the 12 tools. You guys can decide who you think is the winner here. I think it's clearly me, as did the audience in March of 2026, but that's really up to you. And really, who cares anyway because these are just 12 great tools. Hopefully, you found something useful. And as always, thank you for listening. Thanks for listening to the edtech throwdown. Do us a couple of favors. Subscribe to our podcast on any major podcast catcher such as Apple, Spotify, Amazon Podcast, and Stitcher. Go over to YouTube, search the EdTech Throwdown. Subscribe to the channel. You can connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The show's handle is edtech throwdown. You can connect with guys at Gottic. You can write us an Apple podcast review. 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