Learning in Hand Issue 60

Issue 60 • Date June 10, 2026

Last week I hosted Camp Plug and Play 20.0. This year it was online and focused on giving lessons and units a glow-up. You can read a feature article about each of my six sessions in this newsletter.

Five sessions leaned on AI to help teachers craft learning experiences, but one session was a bit different.

During my "Prints Charming" session, I donned my royal sash to celebrate the joy of creating tangible, printed materials with Canva. I shared some of my favorite projects, including custom door hangers, personalized sticky notes, thank-you cards, and even printable dice.

Maybe it's just me, but there's something satisfying about taking a design off the screen, trimming it with a paper cutter, and making that perfect crisp fold.

As much as I love digital tools, sometimes it's nice to create something students can actually hold in their hands.

🖨️ Preparing Printables

The beauty of Canva is that you don't have to start from scratch.

With more than a million templates available, there's no need to reinvent the wheel when someone has already designed a cut-and-fold die, table tent, greeting card, envelope, or just about anything else you can imagine.

Some templates are created by Canva's design team, but most come from independent designers, illustrators, and educators in the Canva Creators Program.

To find templates, click the Templates button in Canva's sidebar while signed in. On a template's details page, you can star it to save it to your Starred list or follow the creator to easily find more of their designs later.

People who aren't part of the Canva Creators Program can still share templates, but those won't appear in template searches. Instead, you'll access them through a direct link. For example, you can preview this simple Envelope template and, if you'd like to use it, select Open in Editor to create your own copy.

While free Canva users can open and use templates, only Canva Pro and Canva for Education users can create template links. To share one of your designs as a template, click Share and then select Template link.

The next time you need a printable classroom resource, start with a template. You might be just a few clicks away from your next great cut, fold, and print project.

Canva's Templates search show results for "trifold"

⚡ Rapid Recaps

Want a quick overview of what I shared during "Prints Charming: Preparing Printables with Canva" and what attendees found most valuable? Open this article.

Yes, ChatGPT wrote the article.

It would have taken me hours to review my presentation and dozens of exit ticket responses, pull out the big ideas, and write a feature article. Instead, I provided ChatGPT with the webinar transcript and attendee feedback and asked it to create a recap for K-12 teachers.

This was the prompt:

Take the transcript from my webinar "Prints Charming: Preparing Printables with Canva" for Arizona K12 Center's Camp Plug and Play 20.0 on June 3, 2026 and the exit ticket information to write a feature article about the session. Make it informative for those that didn't attend, and a great review for those that did attend. Include big ideas and tips and tricks. Write in a friendly way for K-12 teachers, including quotes from the exit tickets.

Of course, I reviewed the draft and revised before publishing.

In fact, ChatGPT helped me create feature articles for all six Camp Plug and Play 20.0 sessions. Whether you attended or not, they're a great way to explore the ideas we covered.

For each session, I collected responses to two exit ticket questions:

What should other teachers know about what you learned in this session?
Complete this sentence: "I used to think _____, but now I know _____."

To generate the transcripts, I skipped Zoom's recording tools and instead recorded each session in the Notes app on my iPhone. After the session, Apple Intelligence automatically transcribed the recording. From there, it was as simple as copying the transcript and exit ticket responses into ChatGPT.

The result was six detailed session recaps that otherwise would have remained unwritten.

😎 Vibe with Vincent

Camp Plug and Play may be over, but Classy Vibing with AI is just getting started. The online workshop began June 9, and registration will remain open for a couple more weeks.

Classy Vibing introduces "vibe coding," a new way to create apps, tools, games, and interactive experiences. Instead of writing code yourself, you describe what you want to build and AI generates the code. You test it, tweak it, and continue the conversation until your idea comes to life.

Over the past year, I've created dozens of small apps with AI, from classroom tools to just-for-fun projects. In this workshop, I share what I've learned, including strategies for getting better results, fixing problems, and turning rough ideas into useful creations.

Each week includes a 50-minute video lesson and an optional assignment. Participants are encouraged to share their projects, learn from one another, and offer feedback. I also provide feedback on every submitted assignment, creating a growing collection of examples, ideas, and lessons that benefit the whole class.

The workshop is designed to be flexible. If you can't participate week by week, you'll still have lifetime access through Google Classroom, allowing you to learn at your own pace and revisit the content whenever you like.

If you've ever thought, "I wish there were an app that could do this," vibe coding gives you a way to build it.

Photo of Tony next to the words "Shake Things Up"

💡 Problem-to-Program

What have I vibe coded lately? Mostly, I've been building tools to solve everyday problems for myself and other educators.

A preschool teacher had a folder full of photos and needed a quick way to turn them into a slideshow video with music for the last day of school. There wasn't time to resize and arrange dozens of images in a video editor, so I vibe coded Reel Fast. It's a simple way to combine photos and music into a video, and it runs entirely in your browser. Your photos never leave your computer.

I often need to bring a large number of images into Google Slides, Keynote, PowerPoint, or Canva. Importing, sizing, and positioning each image is tedious, so I created Perfect Fit PPTX. Drop in your photos, and the app automatically centers and scales each one to fit perfectly on a slide. The result is a .pptx file you can open in your favorite presentation software.

Whenever possible, I prefer working with vector graphics. Unfortunately, Google Slides doesn't support SVG files. To get around that limitation, I developed PPTX Genius. Drop an SVG file into the app, and it converts the artwork into editable shapes within a .pptx file. Upload the file to Google Drive and open it in Google Slides. The vector artwork remains editable, so you can resize it without pixelation and recolor it just like any other shape.

I also like to play background music during work time in my live workshops. Since work sessions are usually longer than a single song, I used to open audio-editing software to combine multiple tracks. To save time, I vibe coded Sound Bound. Drag in audio files, trim them as needed, and stitch them together into a single track. Like the other apps, everything is processed locally on your computer.

These apps, along with several more teacher-created tools, can be found in the Utilities Collection on Teacher Hive.

🛰️ Orbital Observations

Need a brain break? Open LeoLabs' Low Earth Orbit Visualization.

The interactive globe shows thousands of satellites and pieces of space debris currently orbiting Earth. You can rotate the globe, zoom in, speed up time, and filter objects by country, altitude, and more.

My first thought was, "There are that many things up there?" The visualization makes Earth's orbit look surprisingly crowded.

This could make for an interesting classroom discussion. Ask students what they notice. Where are the satellites concentrated? Why do some areas seem busier than others? Why is there so much debris? What responsibilities do countries and companies have when they launch objects into space?

Or simply put it on the screen as students enter the room and invite them to share one observation and one question. The visualization will get them curious and talking.

Among the objects in orbit are 8 active and retired Landsat satellites. Operated by NASA, Landsat satellites have been capturing images and data about Earth for decades. NASA's Your Name in Landsat project uses those images in a fun way: it finds satellite photos that resemble the letters in your name and spells it out using real imagery from Earth. It's a clever follow-up activity after exploring what's orbiting overhead.

🛠️ Tutoring Toolkit

This issue of Learning in Hand is sponsored by Boardous.

Do you provide tutoring services or want to provide them? If so, take a look at Boardous, an all-in-one platform designed specifically for online tutors and tutoring organizations.

Boardous combines scheduling, video calls, collaborative whiteboards, lesson templates, messaging, billing, and lesson reports in one place. Tutors can schedule sessions on a built-in calendar, reuse lesson materials, annotate PDFs together with students, and even track billing automatically.

Instead of juggling Zoom links, shared docs, spreadsheets, and invoices, Boardous aims to keep everything connected in a single tutoring workspace.

Features include:

Collaborative whiteboard
Display and annotate PDFs
Screensharing
Calendar scheduling
Student accounts
Toolbars you can minimize for simplicity

If you outgrow the free plan, you can save 10% on paid plans by using my promotional code via the web: TONY

One of my favorite parts of Camp Plug and Play was reading the exit tickets. Again and again, teachers shared how their thinking had shifted and how they were leaving with new skills, fresh ideas, and practical strategies they could use right away.

Reading those reflections is a reminder of why I enjoy working with educators.

If you're one of the people who plans professional learning for your school or brings in speakers for events, I'd love to work with you. Send me an email and let's chat.

Smiles from Iowa,

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