Larry Ferlazzo

Are Students Really Learning? How to Check for Understanding (Opinion) One of the best methods is to make student thinking visible.

Do your students actually get what they just learned? Here are a few ideas for checking understanding. @larryferlazzo.bsky.social

Good questions worth teachers asking themselves

Text from OpenAI article on its educational programs: "Agency does not emerge from basic AI use alone. Students must progress from simple tasks to deeper applications such as studying, building, creating, coding, and managing agents. But among college-age users, we see a widening global “capability overhang,” defined as the gap between what AI tools can do and how people actually use them. Even advanced student users still operate roughly 90% to 99% below how power users of ChatGPT are engaging with our tools. Educational institutions play a central role in closing that gap. Faculty and educators can help students harness AI’s full potential by embedding authentic AI use cases into coursework—assignments that use AI and mirror real professional work, such as analyzing a market, designing a product concept, evaluating a policy trade-off, or building a simple agent"

Shouldn't let OpenAI puff about education get to me, but its claim students need AI skills for future jobs and "agency", then letting slip it really means making students into GPT "power users", and making that an educational imperative, *and* planning to measure it ... 😦 openai.com/index/ai-edu...

Just Sent-Out Free Monthly Email Newsletter I’ve just mailed out the February issue of my very simple free monthly email newsletter. It has over 3,000 subscribers, and you can subscribe here. Of course, you can also join the tens of t…

Just Sent-Out Free Monthly Email Newsletter larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/06/j...

Research Studies Of The Week I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue…

Research Studies Of The Week larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/06/r...

Who’d Have Thought? Students Who Prompt AI To Create Texts They’re Interested In Are More Likely To Want To Read Them One of my first thoughts when ChatGPT came out three years ago was that it would be a great tool for students to create texts about high-interest topics that they wanted to read – whet…

Who’d Have Thought? Students Who Prompt AI To Create Texts They’re Interested In Are More Likely To Want To Read Them larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/06/w...

RICHMOND — Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill that prohibits schools from teaching that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was a peaceful demonstration or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the first Democratic state to try to shape how such events are taught.

Virginia moves to forbid schools from teaching that Jan. 6 was peaceful www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

From The New Yorker

wonder what they're going to come up with when "let's just do war crimes" doesn't work either bsky.app/profile/atru...

12 Strategies Administrators Can Use to Prevent Staff Burnout (and Their Own) (Opinion) Creating a healthier school culture begins with building trust, but it doesn't end there.

Educators share how principals can make their staff feel supported. @larryferlazzo.bsky.social

This is why I keep saying that the U.S. literally can’t win in confrontations with Canadians. They’ve got the juice we lack.

Yes

The American King Goes to War This is not what the Founders intended.

The constitution's design does not grant the president a kinglike ability to take the country to war by himself, lest he do so for self-serving reasons. That is the entire purpose of dividing that authority between POTUS and Congress. Guess what just happened? www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Reading is ‘for people with slow brains’

I played Pickleball regularly with the guy who is now the punter for the Green Bay Packers

Study Finds That Speaking An Additional Language Can Keep You Healthier Physically Nature recently published a big new study, Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries. It found that being multi…

Study Finds That Speaking An Additional Language Can Keep You Healthier Physically larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/05/s...

“Civic Learning Week” Is March 9th –13th – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources Civic Learning Week is…next week! You can find a bunch of resources at its website. Another group of organizations started something they call “Civic Season” several years …

“Civic Learning Week” Is March 9th –13th – Here Are Teaching & Learning Resources larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/05/c...

It’s The Nineteenth-Year Anniversary Of This Blog! It’s pretty wild to think that I’ve now been writing this blog for NINETEEN years! It’s had well over twenty-million visits from readers during that time, over thirty-four …

It’s The Nineteenth-Year Anniversary Of This Blog! larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/05/i...

The “Best” Ideas For Teaching About The U.S., Israeli/Iran Conflict This morning’s attack on Iran is costing lives, and is creating global instability. I’m sure lots of teachers are trying to figure out how they’re going to talk and teach a…

UPDATED -----The “Best” Ideas For Teaching About The U.S., Israeli/Iran Conflict larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/02/28/t...

outtake from Dr. Strangelove bsky.app/profile/atru...

From The New Yorker

Haitian Asylum Seeker Dies of Toothache in What ICE Calls "The Best Healthcare of Their Lives" Detention deaths are a foreseeable outcome of specific policy choices made by people in position of power. This post steps back to think through the broader trends and steps toward accountability.

Haitian Asylum Seeker Dies of Toothache in What ICE Calls "The Best Healthcare of Their Lives"
open.substack.com/pub/austinko...

Walz: "There are no Somali folks in the Epstein files"

LIEU: Will you commit to stopping ICE from doing operations at or near school bus stops, school drop off locations, and school campuses?

NOEM: Our ICE officers do targeted enforcement operations

Here are 4 districts the TX GOP gerrymandered to gain seats in November, with the Dem and GOP primary vote. Dems outvoted GOPs in every one of them.

It was easy with ChatGPT. You can create your own custom chatbot. I just told each one to use the list of resources and experts I gave it as its knowledge base, and nothing else. I had to repeat those instructions a few times, but they seem to work fine.

I’ve Created Five Free Chatbots For Teachers & Others, And Some Have Become Quite Popular – Here Links To All Of Them I have also created several free AI chatbots.  Each of them draw only from a knowledge based of resources I have vetted, and I am open to hearing suggestions of others who should be added to…

I’ve Created Five Free Chatbots For Teachers & Others, And Some Have Become Quite Popular – Here Links To All Of Them larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2026/03/04/i...

What Was Happening in Education the Year You Began Teaching? Teachers, what was the big education story when you started teaching? Find out in our interactive timeline.

This was an interesting interactive from @edweek.org -----What Was Happening in Education the Year You Began Teaching? www.edweek.org/the-state-of...

Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff believes if people had more doorbell cameras, we may have already ‘solved’ the Nancy Guthrie case The CEO revealed a suspicious car was caught on a Ring camera two miles away from Guthrie’s home, and he thinks the doorbell camera is a good example of why people should have cameras.

There’s no tragedy they won’t attempt to exploit.