Control Alt Achieve: EdTech Links

Each week I keep an eye out for the latest edtech resources through blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, user groups, and more. I then try to reshare these resources in many ways.

One way I share these is here on the blog in these "EdTech Links of the Week" posts. See below to explore the latest batch of resources, and be sure to share with others who may benefit.

If you want to make sure you don't miss new resources, you can:

🔗 View all EdTech Links of the Week: bit.ly/caa-links

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And as always, please let me know of any resources that you recommend. I would love to learn from you!

This week I have 4 resources from around the Internet and 3 resources from my blog.

🦃 Build a "What I Am Thankful For" Turkey

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With Thanksgiving right around the corner, now is a great time for all of us to pause and think about what we are thankful for. To help out with this, a few years ago I created a Google Slides activity for your students. With this template your students will build a turkey where each of the feathers will display things that the student is thankful for.

▶️ Upcoming Webinar - Gemini Gems to Skills

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I am excited and honored to be providing a free webinar as part of Google's Edu on Air series. Here are the details:

Mastering the Shift: Gemini Gems to Skills
December 10, 2026 - 1:00pm to 1:45pm Eastern Time
Register for free at https://bit.ly/gem2skill or Website link
Description: Get ready to level up your AI understanding as Google Gemini evolves from Gems to Skills! In this high impact 45 minute webinar, K12 educators, instructional coaches, and district leaders across the globe will get the essential need to know strategies to make this transition seamless and stress free. Discover exactly how this shift impacts your custom Gems and daily workflows, complete with school and district ready action steps to keep your staff ahead of the curve. Best of all, join renowned EdTech pioneer and Google Gems guru Eric Curts (creator of EduGems.ai) for an exclusive live demonstration showing practical classroom examples and hands on migration tips in real time. Walk away with everything required to prepare your classroom, school site, or entire district for the future of Gemini Skills.

Feel free to share with others, and I hope to get to learn with you!

💎 From EduGems to EduPrompts

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Recently Google announced that they are transitioning from Gems to Skills. I have received a lot of questions from people about how this change will impact my EduGems website. Here is my plan for the site:

🔗 Site Rename - The site be renamed to EduPrompts - https://www.eduprompts.ai/
💡 Gems to Skills - All of the current Gems will be converted into Skills
📓 Gems to Notebooks - I will also be making Gemini Notebook versions of the prompts
📄 Gems as prompts - Of course you can always simply copy any of the prompts and use in whatever AI tool you prefer.
➕ More prompts - And I will continue to add many more AI prompts to add to the 170+ prompts already there

Get all the details in the blog post announcement linked above and be sure to share the site with others.

💡 TeacherDev

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There are so many great examples of vibe-coding in education, and recently I came across another amazing collection. TeacherDev is an education non-profit that chooses a new teacher need each day and builds a brand new, and totally free, solution for the need. They use AI to help in the vibe-coding and then share the resulting tool for free for everyone to use.

So far they have solved over 60 teacher needs with such awesome tools as Math Figures, Chemistry Figures, Physics Figures, Class Gauntlet, Shy Safari, Growing Reader, and more. You can even submit your own requests for new needs to solve.

🚫 Hide Google AI Overviews

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A common question I get asked in trainings is how to disable the AI overviews in Google Search. These are the AI summaries that appear at the top of the Google Search result page, and also include the "AI Mode" button in search that lets you dive into a deeper chat.

Understandably schools want to have the option to control where students interact with AI. Many schools want their students to be able to use Google Search, but not have the AI overviews or AI Mode as an option.

Google has announced that they plan to make some changes to AI in search for students, but it is still unclear exactly what they will look like. In the meantime there are loads of Chrome extensions that have popped to address the concern. One good example is the "Hide Google AI Overviews" extension.

A school can push this extension out to students through the Google Admin Console and it simply hides the AI overviews and the AI Mode button in Google Search. Until Google provides a built-in option, this extension (or others similar to it) can serve as a simple and free solution to the problem.

📰 LayoutSplat

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I can recall using and training on Microsoft Publisher way back in the early days of my EdTech career. It was the "go to" tool for newsletters, posters, brochures, greeting cards, and more. As of last month however, Publisher is no more. Microsoft has officially ended support for the program.

Recently I have seen several vibe-coded alternatives popping up to offer an option to fill the gap left behind. One of these is LayoutSplat from my friend Miguel Guhlin, who earlier shared DrawSplat. Here is his description of this new, free tool:

Design with 126 distinct compositions, Avery labels and name badges, linked rich text, rulers, guides, master pages, tables, and mail merge. Import Publisher files inside the browser, and export print proofs, HTML, and Pack and Go.

Learn more here - https://splatworks.org/wiki/layoutsplat

💻 Flint AI Literacy Course

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Most AI training talks at you. Flint's free AI Literacy course starts by listening. Before the first lesson, it asks:

📚 What you teach
🤖 How familiar you are with AI
😟 What worries you about AI in your classroom

Then it builds a learning path around your answers. Your subject, your comfort level, your concerns. No two teachers get the same course, because no two teachers start from the same place.

It's free and platform-agnostic, and 11,000+ teachers have already joined. Finish a level and you get a certificate for your PD records. 😎

👉 Start the free course