You know that feeling in late June when the school year finally lets go of you? For most of my career, that first quiet week of summer came with a strange side effect: I'd already start thinking about next year's lessons. Not because I had to yet — but because I knew how many late nights of planning were waiting for me come August.
If you've ever stared at a blank planning doc at 10 p.m., trying to bend a lesson to fit one specific state standard, you know exactly what I mean. We ask teachers to be curriculum designers, software engineers, data analysts, and creative directors — usually all before first period. That “blank page problem” is real, and it's one of the quiet reasons so many great educators burn out.
That's the backdrop I carried into ISTE + ASCD 2026. And it's why one booth in particular stopped me in my tracks.
The Moment It Clicked
The Kira booth was packed — the kind of crowd you notice from across the exhibit hall. I squeezed in expecting another “AI can do it all” pitch. What I got instead was a conversation about giving teachers their time back.
“The only thing that's going to stop you when it comes to Kira is your imagination,” Harl, one of the folks leading the demos, told the crowd. “One sentence is going to get you there.”
One sentence. I'll admit I was skeptical. But over the next few minutes — and four separate conversations I ended up having with the team — I started to see curriculum planning in a genuinely new way.
The End of the Blank Page
Here's the piece that hooked the lesson-planner in me: Kira's Lesson Studio.
Instead of starting from nothing, you tell Kira what you're teaching and which standards you're aligning to — Connecticut science objectives, Tennessee computer science standards, whatever your state requires — and it generates a structured, ready-to-teach lesson in seconds. (That's not a hypothetical scale, either: the entire state of Tennessee recently adopted Kira to power its computer science curriculum.)
But the part I appreciated most is that these outlines are pliable. The AI does the heavy lifting of the first draft, and then you — the professional in the room — stay the authority. Swap an image. Add a video. Turn a multiple-choice question into a matching game. Kira handles the busywork; you keep the pedagogy.
That's the reframe I keep coming back to: AI isn't the curriculum planner. You are. Kira just clears the runway.
From Idea to Interactive: “Vibe Coding”
Once I got past lesson outlines, the team showed me the thing everyone at ISTE was buzzing about: “vibe coding.”
In the Activity Studio, you describe an interactive activity in plain language and Kira builds it — generating the actual code behind the scenes so you don't have to. They call these Action Tiles, and they're automatically tagged to your standards and objectives, so rigor is baked in from the start.
I watched a teacher build a water cycle game for elementary students, a math equations race, and a pendulum simulator for accelerated science kids — each one from a sentence or two. Then came the moment that made the whole room lean in. She asked Kira to theme the water cycle game around her school's identity: “Make it green and blue, and add our Tiger mascot.” Seconds later, the buttons changed color, a Tiger appeared to guide students, and celebratory animations bounced across the screen.
And because Kira keeps a version history, she could experiment fearlessly — if a change made the activity worse, one click “backed it up” to an earlier version. As someone who has absolutely broken a perfectly good resource by “improving” it, I can't overstate how freeing that is.
One more detail told me these folks actually understand classrooms: fuzzy logic. When a student clearly grasps a concept but fumbles the spelling, Kira recognizes the intent and gives credit for the thinking — instead of penalizing the typo. Mastery over mechanics. That's the way I always wanted to grade.
Planning That Plans for Every Student
If lesson creation is where Kira saves you time, differentiation is where it honestly moved me.
True differentiation — meeting 30 different needs in one room — has always been more aspiration than reality. The “Ask Kira” tools change that math. In about the time it takes to call attendance, a teacher can:
- Rewrite a complex history lesson for a student reading two grade levels below,
- Instantly translate a science lab into Spanish or Korean for a new multilingual learner, and
- Generate a targeted, auto-scored 15-minute remediation that fills a specific gap without pulling a student away from the core lesson.
Underneath it all are the Student Atlas and Class Atlas — dashboards built on the Zones of Proximal Development that show you exactly where each learner stands against a standard. New students even start at “Tier 0,” which simply means we need more data — an honest, humane way to begin.
What struck me most is how that data changes the relationship. When you can see precisely where a student is stuck, you stop being the “bad guy” assigning arbitrary extra work and become a personalized advocate. The conversation shifts from punitive to curious. That's not a tech feature — that's a better classroom.
The Part That Won Over the Instructional Coach in Me
I've spent enough years around school technology to get nervous the moment a tool starts touching student data. In most EdTech setups, the scary part isn't inside any single app — it's the “handshake,” the point where data passes between platforms and subscriptions. Even two secure tools can create a vulnerable seam between them.
Kira's answer is refreshingly simple: don't hand off the data at all. Everything — creating content, student interaction, and the analytics behind it — happens inside a single ecosystem, built from the ground up to be FERPA, COPPA, and COPPA 2 compliant. “Privacy by design” isn't a checkbox on a slide here; it's the foundation. For any administrator weighing AI adoption, that's the difference between “maybe” and “yes.”
From Podium to Partner
For decades, “school” has looked the same: a teacher at the podium, students at desks. What I kept feeling at that booth was permission to break the mold — to hand the technical and administrative drudgery to a tool that's genuinely good at it, and get back to the part of teaching that made us all sign up: mentoring kids and building something alongside them.
That's why the little purple octopus on Kira's logo stuck with me. Behind it is a platform that gives students the agency to create their own future — and gives teachers the time to help them build it.
So here's the question the team left me with, and I'll pass it along to you: If you could use one sentence tomorrow to build any interactive activity for your students, what would it be?
Ready to try it? Sign up and start your first “one-sentence” project at kira-learning.com. Look for the purple octopus on LinkedIn for weekly drop-in sessions and tutorials, and tap into Kira's free, educator-built trainings.
Want the deeper conversation? I unpacked all of this with the Kira team on the podcast — give Rethinking Education with Kira: 5 Ways AI Is Changing How We Teach a listen.Jeff Bradbury is Your Digital Learning Coach — creator of TeacherCast and host of the TeacherCast Podcast Network — helping educators save time and maximize their impact in the classroom.
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