eetings from Orlando, where ISTE today shipped Stretch, the educator chatbot it has spent three years building and re-building. We first saw Stretch demo'ed at ISTELive 23 in Philadelphia, so it was good to see how far the product has come. It runs only on vetted ISTE and ASCD materials — no stray cookie recipes this time — and now comes with a wellness coach for teachers running on empty. "Building AI apps is not easy," ISTE's Joseph South said, and three years of re-engineering back him up.

ISTE also expanded its "Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate" here — now 30 skills across six roles students play when working with AI. Richard Culatta framed the point plainly: teaching AI "as a way to support us being better at being human" is far more meaningful than teaching what AI is.

That's the thread I kept pulling on all day. I moderated a panel this afternoon on trusting AI in schools, and I kept coming back to the same thing: the technology only earns its place if it deepens the relationship between a school and the students and families it serves. My colleague Carlos Zavala landed in the same place on his panel about technology and relationships — chronic absenteeism doesn't yield to harder tracking so much as to trust.

The numbers make the case. Chalkbeat's look at four figures behind the absenteeism crisis shows rates barely budging — 22.6% of students chronically absent last year, down less than a point. The districts moving that number, like Detroit with its family health hubs and home visits, are the ones treating attendance as a relationship problem rather than a compliance one.

More below.

— Thomas

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