April Pelfrey

@NeilPlotnick @csteachersorg @massteacher @NEUnion We have an AI themed cluster (ES,MS and HS) in our district.

Is there a place for a dedicated AI high school? chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/0… @csteachersorg @massteacher @NEUnion

@JoJoFromJerz Everything. Sadly, we live in a time where nothing our administration says or does can be trusted.

If Hegseth lied about a deadly attack on our forces, what else is he lying about?

Join the #ResponsibleAI Fellows next Tuesday for the last session of their AI in Action series! See how teachers like you are integrating AI literacy, ethical reasoning, computational thinking, and responsible tool use into their classrooms. Register at hubs.ly/Q049wMMy0

Applications are officially open for the CSTA #ResponsibleAI Fellowship! 🚀 This 6-month leadership journey is designed for K-12 CS educators who want to bring ethical, inclusive, and innovative AI education to every classroom. Apply by May 1: hubs.ly/Q048GS-60

Christina Koch was a firefighter at the South Pole at -111°F before she ever applied to be an astronaut. That was maybe the fourth most interesting line on her resume. She grew up in North Carolina, got three degrees from NC State, and her first real job was building deep-space instruments at NASA. Then she left for Antarctica. Spent three and a half years bouncing between the Arctic and Antarctic as a research scientist, including a full winter at the South Pole base. That means going months without sunlight or fresh food, with a crew of about 50 people and no way out until flights resume. While she was down there, she also joined the glacier search-and-rescue team. After coming back, she went to Johns Hopkins and built instruments for two NASA missions (one of them is still orbiting Jupiter right now). She figured out how to start a tiny vacuum pump that NASA designed for a future Mars rover. Johns Hopkins nominated it for their Invention of the Year in 2009. Then she went back to the field. More time in Antarctica and a stretch up in Greenland. A government research station in northern Alaska, near the top of the world. Then she ran another one in American Samoa, near the equator. In 2013, NASA selected her from 6,300 applicants. Eight people got in. Her first space mission was supposed to be a normal rotation on the International Space Station, but NASA extended it. She ended up staying 328 straight days and orbiting Earth 5,248 times, covering about 139 million miles (roughly 291 round trips to the Moon). Up there, she ran over 210 experiments, including tests of cancer drugs in zero gravity and 3D printers that can build structures close to human tissue. Six spacewalks, 42 hours floating outside the station. She learned Russian for the training. She flies supersonic jets. Right now, Koch is on Artemis II, heading for a flyby behind the far side of the Moon. The crew launched on April 1 and is on track to travel about 252,000 miles from Earth, which would break the all-time human distance record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. That record has stood for 56 years, and it was set during a disaster that nearly killed the crew. Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts, is 92 now. He told Koch: "I heard you're going to break our record." Nobody had left Earth's neighborhood since December 1972. Koch and her three crewmates are the first in 53 years, and they are coming home at about 25,000 mph. That is faster than any crewed spacecraft has ever come back through the atmosphere.

Teachers, do you have high school seniors interested in pursuing tech after graduation? 🚀 The CodeHS Scholarship is open now. Ten students will each receive a $1,000 award to support their first year of post-secondary education, along with opportunities to connect with other CodeHS Scholars and the CodeHS team through virtual meetups. 🗓 Deadline: May 20, 2026 at 11:59 PM CT 🔗 Learn more: buff.ly/Z1Sr7NF

Thinking about joining hundreds of K–12 CS educators at #CSTA2026 in New Orleans? Now’s the time. Register in the next week to lock in Early Bird pricing and save $200+ on our annual conference. Learn more and register at hubs.ly/Q044xZ7N0

I spent 15 years in industry prior to teaching and have been in education for 12 years. I teach Artificial Intelligence and think it is important for all students to have AI literacy skills before graduating but this is an absolutely terrible idea. It shows how little those outside education truly understand about what it is like to be in a classroom. Poor Plato doesn’t stand a chance in a room full of 35 adolescents.

This is exactly how AI should NOT be used in education SMH. Plenty of good uses, but this ain’t it yall. Can you imagine Plato handling an 8th grade double-block ELA class like I had to my first few years teaching? Laughable.

The clock is ticking! ⏰ Enter the ISTE+ASCD Win One, Bring One Sweepstakes for a chance to win: • Free conference registration • Discounted rate for a colleague 🗓 Enter by April 27 Tag who you’d bring 👇 hubs.li/Q047_phw0

Atlanta, registration is now open for the 2026 Summer Youth Employment Program. Youth ages 14–24 can apply for paid summer jobs, and employers can sign up to host. Learn more and apply: atl.direct/summer-youth-e…

The CodeHS Scholarship application is now open! Ten students will each receive a $1,000 scholarship, plus valuable networking opportunities to help them take their next steps into the tech world. If you teach seniors, now’s the perfect time to share this with your students and help them put together a strong application. This step-by-step guide walks through everything they need to know: buff.ly/WVZ0F9A

Are you a student interested in tech policy? Apply for the Summer 2026 Google Public Policy Fellowship before April 9 for the opportunity to spend the summer working at an organization at the forefront of the debate → google.com/policyfellowsh…

Mark Cuban just described the sharpest divide in the modern economy. And most people are already on the wrong side of it. Cuban: “There’s two types of approaches to AI. Some people who use it so they don’t have to learn anything, and some people who use it so they have the opportunity to learn everything.” Two sentences. The entire future of human capital compressed into a single binary. The first group sees the most powerful knowledge infrastructure ever built and uses it to avoid thinking. They offload reasoning, skip the friction, and call it efficiency. What they’re actually doing is hollowing out the one thing that can’t be replicated. Their own cognition. Cuban: “AI is a tool, it’s a way to learn, it’s a democratization of knowledge.” For centuries, elite knowledge was locked behind institutions, geography, and capital. The right university. The right city. The right network. Entire generations of potential buried because the information was never accessible. That wall just came down permanently. The second group understands what that actually means. Same tool. Compressing decades of learning into months. Entire disciplines on demand. Mental models that once required years of expensive education now available to anyone willing to ask the right questions. The knowledge is democratized. The ambition is not. That’s the divide Cuban is actually describing. Not technical literacy. Not access. Pure cognitive initiative. The first group is outsourcing their mind. The second is expanding it. Atrophy doesn’t announce itself. It just arrives.

Bad Bunny with a powerful message during his Super Bowl halftime show: "The only thing more powerful than hate is love" ❤️

Bad Bunny held up a football at the end of his Super Bowl halftime show that reads: "Together, We Are America"

My heart goes out to our Olympic athletes right now — as they attempt to navigate an extremely difficult time to be an American on the world stage. Trump is the worst of America. These elite athletes are the best. We can stand with them and against him at the same time. 🇺🇸

Nothing says Happy Black History Month like the president of the US sharing a racist video of the Former President and First Lady. How I miss the days when the President was an actual respectable, intelligent, not racist leader. Instead we watch the current president remind us every day that he is an evil, racist, sexist, lunatic. At what point do we stand up and say we have had enough? When do we decide that he has finally gone too far because for me that was years ago! And yet here we are same crazy evil stuff just a different day. You should be beyond angry about what is going on in our country.

Say a prayer for the Duluth family. This one hits hard. Sylvia was the best example of the kind of impact good teachers make on all those around them with an unmatched sense of humor and a heart of gold. 💜

This #MLKDay, remember my father by: Amplifying and advocating for the end of state-sanctioned and facilitated violence against Black and Brown immigrants and against people, period. Speaking up for people who are suffering genocide in Sudan. Palestine, Congo, and other nations. Calling and writing your Congresspersons in support of democracy as opposed to dictatorship. Supporting policies to eradicate poverty (higher minimum wage, affordable housing, etc) Learning the truth about and challenging anti-Black racism, which is still prevalent in healthcare, media, lending practices, the criminal “justice” system, etc. #MLK #MartinLutherKingJr #MLKDay2026