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A classroom should not feel like a different tech puzzle every time you walk into a new room, yet that’s the reality in many schools with a mix of projectors, older monitors, and newer interactive flat panels. From the KAST conference in Louisville, Kentucky, we sit down with Andrew, AirTame’s Education East territory manager, to talk about a simple idea with big impact: make screen sharing consistent so teachers can spend less time troubleshooting and more time teaching.

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Chromebooks are everywhere in K 12, but keeping them working is the part no one advertises. From the CAST Conference in Louisville 2026, we sit down with Kendal Shomura from Vivacity Tech to talk about what it really takes to keep devices in students’ hands without burning out your IT team or blowing up your budget.

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Reading growth doesn’t always come from a brand-new curriculum. Sometimes it comes from one small shift: letting students have real choice in what they read. From the floor of the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Emmie and Shantale, ECU ambassadors and graduate students focused on reading and literacy instruction, to talk about what’s working right now with real learners. 

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Water is the quiet thing we all depend on, until someone treats it like it’s sacred and suddenly you can’t stop paying attention. From the floor of the NCRA conference in Winston-Salem, we talk with author and educator Carol Tremboth about the Native Water Walkers and why their prayerful, relentless miles around the Great Lakes belong in every conversation about clean water, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous activism. Carol shares how her books bring readers to the shoreline, where sacred words, tobacco offerings, and community connection turn “water protection” into something you can feel.

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A lot of reading struggles aren’t about effort, they’re about abstraction. When phonics rules live only on a worksheet or a whiteboard, many kids never get a concrete “click” moment. From the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Meagan Beam, founder of Otter Reading, to talk about a hands-on reading tool she built for the exact problems she kept seeing in her own classroom.

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Letters can be surprisingly hard for young kids. They’re just shapes until a child can link each squiggle to a sound, then blend those sounds into real words. From the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Vicki Norris, a trainer at Letterland International, to talk about a character-based approach to phonics that helps children make that leap with less struggle and more joy.

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Stories can change a kid’s life when they finally feel recognized on the page. From the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with middle grade author Bobbie Pyron to talk about why fiction isn’t “extra” in literacy work, it’s a direct path to empathy, compassion, and deeper reading engagement for young people. If you care about children’s literature, school libraries, or helping students connect with books again, this conversation lands right where the work gets real. 

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A blue-and-white teacup doesn’t sound like a doorway into history, until you hear what it unlocks in Half Truths. Recording live from the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with author Carol Baldwin to talk about her debut young adult historical novel set in Charlotte in 1950, a city shaped by segregation and the unspoken rules of the Jim Crow South.

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AI is everywhere in students’ lives, but what if we used it to push them outside instead of pulling them deeper into screens? From the floor of NCRA in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, we sit down with author Jo Watson Hackl to talk about a surprisingly grounded approach to AI in education: using technology responsibly to strengthen student engagement, spark curiosity, and support reading and writing through real-world observation of nature.

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Literacy is getting rewritten in real time and educators don’t have the option to sit it out. From NCRA in Winston-Salem, we sit down with Hiller Spires, Professor at NC State University and NCRA president-elect, to talk about what comes next for literacy instruction as technology accelerates and classrooms adapt on the fly.

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