Issue 32 • March 26, 2025

Last week, I had the pleasure of being a featured speaker at the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference in Detroit.

I want to welcome a few dozen new newsletter subscribers from MACUL! Just a heads up that this newsletter is bi-weekly. No, not the twice-a-week bi-weekly, the the bi-weekly that means every two weeks.

In this issue, I’m sharing a few things from my MACUL 2025 presentations.

Digital Delights 🧠

In my Digital Snacks: Breaks for Students’ Brains presentation, I explain that there are plenty of good reasons to give students brain breaks. Quick pauses in learning can ease stress, reduce cognitive overload, break up monotony, and build social connections. These short mental recesses give students a chance to reset so they can refocus and re-engage.

At the MACUL conference, I officially launched Digital Snacks, my collection of online brain breaks for students.

I’ve been curating this collection for over a year. To earn a spot as a digital snack, an activity must be:

• Free

• Browser-based

• No login for students

• Low prep

Digital Snacks are sorted into categories: Relaxing, Cognitive, Physical, Creative, Sensory, Social, and Humor. Each category includes online activities and YouTube videos.

Everything is organized on a Padlet with voting reactions turned on. Please give a 👍 to your favorites—and if a snack’s a flop, go ahead and give it a 👎. The lists are sorted by rating, so the best ones rise to the top!

This list has been a lifesaver when I’ve stepped in as a substitute teacher—it’s made it so easy to give students meaningful breaks that keep the day running smoothly. Honestly, I wish I had a great big list of Digital Snacks back when I had my own classroom. It’s the kind of resource I always needed but never had—until now.

Lit Levels of Learning 🔥

My Artificial Sweeteners: AI for Teachers presentation is all about bringing joy, relevance, and irresistibility to your lessons.

One sweet idea? Let AI help with rubrics. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate custom rubrics based on your prompt—which might include the task, standards, and specific criteria. ChatGPT can even format the rubric into a downloadable spreadsheet, while Gemini can save it directly to Google Sheets.

High school teacher Jay Hull from Nevada shared a fun twist in the AI for Teachers Facebook group: he uploaded one of his existing rubrics into ChatGPT and asked it to rewrite the entire thing using current slang.

The result? A hilarious remix where performance levels go from Lit (4) to Major L (1), with descriptions featuring phrases like low-key, ngl, sus, and bruh. It’s a great example of how AI can make something as traditional as a rubric feel fresh—and even funny.

Character Count Control 📏

Funky Forms: Offbeat Ideas for Google Forms is packed with creative ways to add both flair and function to your forms.

One hidden gem in Google Forms is Response Validation. For short answer and paragraph questions, you can turn on response validation to set a minimum or maximum character count. If it’s a required question, respondents can’t submit the form—or move to the next section—until their response meets the criteria.

This feature is great for limiting the length of summaries, encouraging students to prioritize what they include. It’s equally useful for prompting more detailed responses by requiring a minimum length, nudging students to elaborate on their thinking.

Peek and Predict 🫣

In my Tempting Lesson Hooks presentation, one powerful way to grab students’ attention is to get them guessing. When the brain makes a prediction, it naturally wants to find out if it was right—curiosity kicks in!

One way to spark that curiosity is to gradually reveal a photo, diagram, or image related to the lesson. You can do this with my Tile Reveal template, which includes two versions: one with 220 tiles and one with 91 tiles.

To use it, just change the slide’s background to any image you like. Then display the slide in edit view for your class. Invite students to remove tiles (each one is labeled) to slowly uncover parts of the hidden image. After each tile is removed, students can take a guess at what the full image might be.

When you're ready to show the full image, go to the Edit menu, choose Select All, and press Delete on your keyboard.

Egg-cellent Endings 🥚

Review, Reflection, and Recognize are the three Rs I highlight in my Sweet Lesson Closures presentation. I love sharing techie ways to review content, reflect on the lesson, and recognize the people who made a difference.

When it comes to reflection, the same old questions can get a little stale. That’s why I like to add a touch of serendipity by introducing randomized reflection prompts at the end of a lesson.

One way I do this is with my Emoji Wheel of Reflection made using wheelofnames.com. You never know which of the eight sections the wheel will land on, but one thing’s for sure—an emoji will be involved.

The pun-lover in me couldn’t resist creating the Wheel of ReflEGGtion—a playful spinner with nine reflection questions, each using an egg-related pun. I cracked myself up with this one!

Another way to bring chance into the reflection process is with my Reflection Selection template for Google Drawings. Each student makes their own copy, then drags one orange card (looking back) and one purple card (future-focused) to the center. The words on the cards are hidden until they’re placed over their matching boxes, where students then type their responses in the white areas.

Letting chance take the lead adds just enough surprise to make reflection feel less like a task and more like a game.

Query Quest 💁

You’ve probably seen the Let Me Google That For You site. It generates a link to an animation that types a search query into Google—usually as a snarky way to point out that the question could’ve been easily answered with a quick search.

Now there’s something similar called Let Me GPT That For You. You enter a prompt, click the Ask GPT button, and get a link that shows an animation of the prompt being typed, the button clicked, and a response from an AI chatbot.

Let Me Google and Let Me GPT don’t just deliver snark—they spotlight a common question: when should you search the web, and when should you ask AI?

While the line between search engines and AI chatbots is becoming increasingly blurred, I have some general advice. Use a web browser when you need current information, official sources, or specific facts—like district policies or recent developments in education. Turn to an AI chatbot when you want to brainstorm, draft, simplify, or spark ideas. Put simply: search for facts, ask for support.

When my query could go either way, I usually choose a traditional web search. That’s because tools like Google Search typically use less electricity and fewer data center resources than AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Copilot—which require more computational power and more water for cooling.

That’s just a tiny taste of what I shared at MACUL!

If you're planning a conference, summit, workshop, or any kind of summer or fall PD, I’d love to be part of it. I present on a variety of topics—including AI—and I’m always happy to customize content for your audience. Let’s make your next event relevant, practical, and a little bit irresistible. Reply to this email for inquires or use my website’s contact form.

Smiles from Iowa,

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Al was used to revise and proofread some of the text in this newsletter. It was also used to generate possibilities for section titles.