KEYNOTE 180

Teach · Lead · Learn · Grow — with AI EdTech

AI EdTech Weekly Brief

Issue No. 11 · November 9, 2026 — prepared by Keynote 180 for educators & education leaders.

Recap: Last week’s top story here was Howard County, Maryland becoming the first of the state’s four late districts to approve its own nine-standard AI policy, with one quiet pattern running underneath: nervous districts from South Carolina to Missouri were defaulting to SchoolAI as the one tool they’d still allow. This week the story jumped several levels up the chain — it wasn’t a district writing the rules anymore, it was Google.

This Week’s Trending Tool: Google Gemini — specifically its new “Guided Learning” mode — dominated every other story this week. On November 3, Google said Gemini would be off by default in Classroom and that its AI Overviews in Search would be replaced by Guided Learning on school accounts; districts that wanted AI fully off would also lose Search, since the two are “deeply integrated,” per VP Chris Phillips. By November 4, after former FTC chair Lina Khan, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Senator Bernie Sanders all accused Google of coercion, the company backtracked and said schools could decline Gemini while keeping Search after all.

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KEYNOTE 180

Teach · Lead · Learn · Grow — with AI EdTech

AI EdTech Weekly Brief

Issue No. 10 · November 2, 2026 — prepared by Keynote 180 for educators & education leaders.

Recap: Last week’s top story here was Maryland’s AI-policy divide spilling into the ballot box, with more than 135 school-board candidates across 24 districts split over how far AI rules should go — and several districts still missing the state’s fall policy deadline. This week one of those stragglers moved first: Howard County’s Board of Education approved a nine-standard AI policy on October 29, making it the first of Maryland’s four late districts to act.

This Week’s Trending Tool: SchoolAI is this week’s quiet through-line. In South Carolina, Clover School District blocked nearly every other AI platform on student devices and built its interim rules entirely around SchoolAI, the one tool it still allows. In Missouri, Webster Groves School District used its own AI family information night to show parents exactly how SchoolAI’s classroom chatbots work — and how little else students can reach on school devices. Two districts, two states, the same quiet default: when educators get nervous about AI, SchoolAI is where they’re parking it.

KEYNOTE 180

Teach · Lead · Learn · Grow — with AI EdTech

AI EdTech Weekly Brief

Issue No. 9 · October 26, 2026 — prepared by Keynote 180 for educators & education leaders.

Recap: Last week’s top story here was Maryland’s AI-policy deadline, with four districts missing the state’s fall cutoff for a formal AI-use policy. This week Maryland Matters reports that governance gap has become a campaign issue: across more than 135 candidates running for seats in the state’s 24 school districts, Capital News Service found deep disagreement over how far AI rules should go, with no consensus in sight before voters decide in November.

This Week’s Trending Tool: Project Read AI, the reading-fluency tutor built by Madison entrepreneur Vivek Ramakrishnan on University of Florida Literacy Institute curriculum, is this week’s most talked-about EdTech adoption story. More than 1,000 schools and nearly 300,000 teachers have signed up, and a UF research scientist’s early analysis of a struggling Indiana district linked heavier tutor use to stronger reading gains — but the study covered only four schools with no random assignment, and the researcher himself says the platform isn’t yet fully evidence-based. Scale is outrunning proof, and that gap turns out to be this week’s running theme.

KEYNOTE 180

Teach · Lead · Learn · Grow — with AI EdTech

AI EdTech Weekly Brief

Issue No. 8 · October 19, 2026 — prepared by Keynote 180 for educators & education leaders.

Recap: Last week’s top story here was Frederick County, Maryland’s school board voting 6-1 to ban AI for every grade, pre-K through 12, just weeks after piloting Google’s Gemini. This week the same fault line widened statewide: the Baltimore Sun reports that despite a Maryland law requiring every district to adopt a formal AI-use policy by this fall, four districts are now on track to miss that deadline. One county banned the technology outright; others still can’t produce the paperwork to govern it at all.

This Week’s Trending Tool: AI for All: Essentials for Educators — the federal AI-literacy course Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, unveiled with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), is this week’s most contested EdTech rollout. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation says the course pushes adoption ahead of safety and efficacy evidence, pointing to a British Columbia survey in which more than 80% of teachers worried about students growing dependent on AI. Its backers frame it as foundational AI literacy for every classroom; its critics say the sequencing is the problem — train first, prove it works later.

KEYNOTE 180

Teach · Lead · Learn · Grow — with AI EdTech

AI EdTech Weekly Brief

Issue No. 7 · October 12, 2026 — prepared by Keynote 180 for educators & education leaders.

Recap: Last week’s top story was Texas’s own education agency quietly working to place Alpha School’s AI platform, TimeBack, into public-school pilots months after the State Board of Education had rejected the same technology’s charter bid over unverified “learn twice as fast” claims. That same tension between official enthusiasm and official caution carried straight into this week — except in Frederick County, Maryland, it was the school board, not the state, pulling the brakes, banning AI outright for every grade just weeks after piloting Google’s Gemini.

This Week’s Trending Tool: ChatGPT for Teens — OpenAI’s teen-safety version of its chatbot, launched August 18 with promised parental controls, is this week’s most contested EdTech product. A Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute report (Oct. 6) and TechCrunch (Oct. 7) found the tool kept teens engaged through mental-health crises, missed more than a quarter of warranted crisis referrals, and sent parental notifications inconsistently — earning an “unacceptable risk” rating even as OpenAI disputes the testing methodology and cites its own usage data showing most teens spend under 15 minutes a day on the product.