When I was at my professional conference a couple weeks ago I was walking through the vendor area and I happened to stop at one of the booths. I got talking to a guy who worked for a business that sells Chromebook parts. If you aren't familiar with Chromebooks, they are laptop style devices that run the Chrome browser as their operating system.
It's actually more like Android now, but they still call them Chromebooks. Many school districts have shifted to using Chromebooks in their classrooms for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the devices are relatively cheap at around $200 to $300. Second, they are very easy to manage thanks to the Google Workspace Management console. Finally, they integrate fully with Google Workspace, so if you are already running that it's a no brainer. If you run an Office 365 tenant, it's a bit more of a gray area, but Microsoft is starting to come out with their own devices.
Anyway, we have about 1200 Chromebooks in the school district I work for. Probably more than that, but I have never actually counted. That means a lot of breakage to fix. Some districts send their devices out for repairs, but we prefer to handle everything in-house. I did it myself before we hired 
As I said, lots of companies have sprung up over the past decade or so that sell parts. The booth I stopped at was a new one and when the vendor found out I was a tech and not a teacher he reached under the table and handed me the tool kit you see above.
It's actually a nice kit, the only thing missing is a pry tool. You can find lots of kits like this all over the Internet. Sites like Alibaba sell them really cheap from a variety of vendors.
Which leads me to the real point of this post. As styles, processes, and tools adapt, so does the market. What worked 20 years ago doesn't necessarily work now, and what seems wild and crazy now will probably seem commonplace in 20 years.
Like AI
Take AI for example. If I had to guess, of the hundreds of breakout sessions offered at this conference, at least 60% of them were geared towards AI. Like the rest of the world, education has taken a keen interest in the promise and plague of AI. Probably not for the same reason as the rest of the world though.
While most educators are more worried about how students are going to use AI to cheat, there is a growing number of educators who are exploring the benefits and utility of AI. For example, let's say you have a student in your classroom that is lagging behind the others. You want them to do the same work, but you want to adjust it so that they can manage it. Instead of writing up two separate lessons, you write one lesson for most students, and then have ChatGPT (or whatever) modify the lesson to adjust the difficulty for a lower skill level.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, many of the sessions I attended seemed to be the same information about AI just presented in a different way. Different speakers had different methods and personalities for giving us the information, but at its core, it was the same information.
There were however a handful of speakers who presented some interesting tools and ideas. I once heard that if you can take away three things from a meeting, conference, whatever, then it was worth it. From one speaker alone I was able to get three pretty cool tools, so it was definitely worth it. Plus a free tool kit!
Notebook LM
Notebook LM is a pretty cool tool from Google that lets you create your own personalized AI. Products like Gemini and ChatGPT pull from the whole Internet, so some of the sources aren't always reputable or kosher. What Notebook LM allows you to do is load your own sources into the platform (up to 200,000 words or something like that), and then you can ask it questions via a chat dialog.
For example, let's say you are doing research on stomach cancer. You could then load in articles from reputable sources like The New England Journal of Medicine or published works from John's Hopkins Doctors to create an AI expert in the subject you are focusing on. The possibilities are endless.
Sure it's a little more work than just typing something into ChatGPT, but you at least know the info you are getting is accurate and legitimate.
There is a downside though... It's only available in the US to users 18 and older. Sorry rest of the world!
Goblin Tools
Goblin Tools might surprise you a little with it's spartan presentation. I urge you not to be fooled though, there are a lot of interesting and helpful tools on this page. There are six tools in total and I am going to start at the end.
Chef allows you to list individual ingredients and then it will tell you some things you can make with those ingredients. Have a bunch of stuff in your fridge but don't know what to do with it? Type those items into Chef and let it do the hard work. If only it did the cooking for you too!
Compiler is a tool that allows you to turn a brain dump into actions. You know those brilliant ideas you get at 10 PM at night, but then the next morning you have no idea how to make it happen? Throw it into compiler and let AI break it down into manageable action items for you.
Estimator works in a similar way, but it basically just guesses a timeframe on how long it might take to get a specific project completed.
Judge is a kind of cool one. Have you ever gotten an email from someone and you aren't quite sure what the "tone" is? Is the person mad at you? Are they just a dick? Are you being overly sensitive? Judge allows you to paste that text into the program and then it uses AI to judge the meaning and intent of the text.
Formalizer works in a similar way, but it allows you to adjust a piece of writing for a specific audience. Writing something really technical, but you are more of a laid back writer? Run it through formalizer and watch the magic happen.
Magic To Do is the last (or first) tool and similar to compiler, it allows you to break down a todo list into more manageable tasks.
Data GIF Maker
Finally, I'm not sure if this one is totally AI related, but Google Data GIF Maker allows you to take data and create visualizations from it to present it in a more dynamic way. Why just take a screenshot of a BTC chart for your post when you can use Data GIF Maker to bring that same data to life. I haven't played around with this one too much yet, but I am looking forward to trying it out for a future post.
As you can see, I brought back at least three new tools, ideas, or concepts from my recent trip, so it was definitely a success! Let me know in the comments if you have used any of these tools before or if you are looking forward to trying them out!
If you want even more resources, you can find them here
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 