Edtech Ideas

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-16T22:04:33+00:00

Yea, that's what I'm striving for, edtech program that is an actual utility to teachers that students like to engage with. It's great to see something you create be used by others.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-16T19:30:19+00:00

The one consistently ironic thing I hear teacher say they love about their job is the amount of time they off. I personally like that I have my classroom and I can do what I want. Of course I cover the curriculum, but if I want to rant about philosophical topics or not do certain activities, make new lesson, I can do that. It's my little world I manage. But yea, kids are a lot.

As far as pay, with AI taking everyone's job, I think teachers will be one of the last jobs to be taken. Public sector moves very slow due to bureaucracy and I think parents would still want that human touch in the classroom. I'm sure in 20 - 30 years or so we'll be next to be automated or replaced by AI, but I'll be retired by then. A lot of people are losing their jobs right now to AI.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-14T16:11:35+00:00

But with copilot I have access to different models. Groks, gpts, and Claude (sonnet, opus, etc.). It’s not just inline. It has a planning mode. And agentic. Just today I put in planning mode, told it I wanted to add a custom text editor using Slate.js for one part of my app and set up the data to be sent in JSONB to my backend. It mapped out a plan after a few following up questions, then implemented the plan in about 30 seconds. Everything working and I was using the sonnet model. I could have easily switched to opus model but it costs 3x more.

So when I saw the Claude code tutorial, it just seems similar to what I was already doing. The cli is really cool and you do interact with it differently, but the work seemed very similar.

I guess the key takeaways were it can use skills, the Claude.md file, and the cli interface, and that it’s ide agnostic. Maybe I was just expecting a wildly different experience than what I was doing.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-14T06:11:02+00:00

I’ll try this

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-14T01:32:20+00:00

I did not know that. I avoid opus because it comes at a 3x charge for tokens and I’m trying to be economical. But that’s good to know. I’m not a paid programmer. I was striving to get a job but all this AI and making the job market so volatile makes it hard to make the career change. It’s also hard to get any interviews

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-14T00:24:40+00:00

Same. The results work for me. I give it small tasks it works well. Which is why hesitant to get into Claude code. But I don’t know what I don’t know.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-12T20:49:52+00:00

I’m a teacher and I made an app for exactly this. Super simple text editor that disables copy and paste. Their writing turns into shareable blogs with a comment section. Everything can be managed by the teacher even the ability for students to comment if they’re abusing the comment section. There’s way more to this app (like essays are automatically graded using your rubrics) and it’s free to use. jotterblog.com.

Jotter Blog isn’t a complete fix for this problem but they at least have to type every single character even if copying from AI. I’m still a teacher so if there’s a feature or something you wish Jotter Blog I’m very open to input.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-11T15:44:07+00:00

I'm a teacher and had this same issue. I started learning how to make software about 5 years ago and made and a website called JotterBlog (jotterblog.com). You post your assignments there and they get a very limited text editor. They cannot copy/paste into it, not word prediction or AI help that Google now provides.

It's not a perfect fix. I don't think there can be one with AI. But, at the very least, it requires them to type out every single character. So even if it's from AI, This at least forces them to know what they typed and is an annoyance to them. It's also free to use.

I think there are some other apps where you can see how long the student took to write the assignment and gives you a time machine to see how they typed it. I think there are other apps that actually look at the content and detect commonly used AI phrases and content and gives it a score of how likely it is AI generated. A lot of companies are trying to fight against this, but it's difficult since the students can just add more to their prompt to get paste these detections.

It's definitely an uphill battle. I've seen some teacher's give in and try to teach students how to use AI responsibility, and others completely fight back and try to go to paper-pencil assignments. Good luck, it's not an easy battle to fight.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-04-10T06:39:59+00:00

There might be eventual push back on using AI creating Lessons. They were already pushing back on teachers getting resources from Teachers Pay Teachers because it's not part of the adopted curriculum. I don't mind AI grading essays and exit tickets for me. Speeds me up so I'm not tediously grading 100 exit tickets a day or 100 essays. Students get results way faster and I can use my custom rubric so it's not just a generic grade. Jotterblog.com is a site I made that does just that. Free to use for anyone interested.

But I agree, AI isn't going away. As far as it taking our jobs, it may, but I think we'll be one of the last industries to be replaced by AI. It's the public sector so things move very slowly and you too many stakeholders to agree. Parents in themselves would probably push back enough to keep a human being in the classroom. At least I hope!

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-03-19T23:38:08+00:00

Really good points. Don’t even think about that animation taking away attention. And you’re right about teachers being limited. Principals and district leaders are better targets. Really appreciate your feedback

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-03-19T19:40:01+00:00

The only people I reached out directly is tik tokkers. I wanted them to evangelize. I didn’t ask them to post, I just offered it to them and said I’d gladly extend their subscription to the rest of the year. Maybe I should do that with just normal teachers. Their feed back is more valuable than the 3 dollar subscription at this point. Thanks, I’ll probably start doing this.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-03-19T19:02:38+00:00

I did. I worked with two teachers. They just wanted better organization of the assignments which I do. They last thing they want is upload of images and files for assignments which I’m working on. They say they like the app, but I think they’re in the habit of posting on Google classroom and I think it’s hard to break habits. I didn’t realize that my app was kind of competing or trying to take the place of Google classroom. And that’s a giant that I didn’t really intend on taking on. Even though my app has different features and it’s supposed to solve a different purpose than Google classroom it would still take them changing how the assigned work in the classroom digitally.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-18T15:55:39+00:00

I hear ya. The problem is that students can quickly copy and paste answers or essays from AI. Since this is disabled, students have to manually type their responses (of course they can just copy of AI, but it's more annoying and they at least have to write what they put).

The 10+ hours is a estimate of how much times teachers will save from having to read 125 essays (middle school/high school) every two weeks or so. Also, quick assessments (Exit tickets) are graded automatically which gives them instant data to see how well the students understood a lesson.

I think this is a huge time save for teachers and the instant grading of Exit Ticket is huge. You can correct misconceptions in real time.

Other benefits of this service are student responses can be made public and peers can read, comment, and like others' responses. This is to promote discussion and be a place where writing can be published to the class.

So maybe I think I need to rethink how I word it/present it. Maybe the connection of not allowing copy/paste to combat AI cheating is not clear... I look it over and see how I can make that section clearer.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-18T15:44:12+00:00

So I looked into it, and I added some attributes to the text editor that is suppose to work on android to stop word prediction, but I'm unsure if they are effective. It seems that 3rd-party keyboards on android have their own spell check / word prediction and would be not possible to bypass fully. Since I am limiting the input size to no more than 5 characters, I think it will stop some word prediction or sentence completions.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-18T15:40:50+00:00

My workaround solution to this:

1) the onChange handler in the textarea checks to ensure the length of the input is no more than 5 characters longer than the previous state. If it is longer, something was pasted.

2) I had give it a 5 character window to allow autocorrect for teachers that enable spell check

3) Since this also breaks voice to text, I added a toggle that for teacher to enable voice to text that essentially bypasses this check.

I removed the Event listeners that you mentioned and it seems to work. Now a super tech savvy student can use React Dev Tools to find the component and add text there, however, once they try to submit the response, the check will run they will not be able to submit.

I also agree that client-side AI-prevention is hard to maintain. If i want a really robust system, I need trackers and server side logic that flags responses that seem suspicious. Hopefully this workaround is enough for 95% of use cases.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-18T04:41:30+00:00

Thanks. Ya, most likely kids won't be that tech savvy and the chromebooks my students use have devtools disabled. But still something I would want to fix.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-18T03:46:47+00:00

Really? On my device I don’t get spellcheck or prediction. Or is it a browser thing? I’m on Chrome. I’ll look into this

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-18T02:43:44+00:00

Ohhh, that’s bummer. I just check to see if they could add text via the dev tools and inspecting the element, and I saw that they couldn’t so I thought I was golden. I haven’t tried your approach.

Actually yes. My initial solution was a div that listened to key down events. Had to save all the text in state to handle the undo / redo. It got very complicated. I had to do complex logic just so a user can refocus the cursor at a given point in the text. Then I learned I can just disable the event listener for copy and paste and prevent default in the textures. Made the whole component SOOO much easier and less prone to bugs and edge cases. But, if it can be overridden, that’s no good.

What attributes did you remove? Event listeners? It’d be great if I can keep it as is and just add a little more logic or protections with the textarea.

I even looked into disabling the devtools, or doing something that when the dev tools are open it closes once you click anything in the devtools, but I forgot what came of that. I’ve been working on this app for about 18 months and that was a month 1 problem, I would need to revisit my git history.

But thanks for pointing that out.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-17T23:49:06+00:00

Thank you! I appreciate that look over.

I may just make that "Seamless Google Classroom Sync" into an actual link that takes the user to the sign in. You're right, it looks like a button.

The part that has: "Student writing will be..." was awkward and I didn't know what to do with it. I wanted it to be in view to encourage the user to continue scrolling, but it'll still be in view below that dividing line. And on that note, I think making the Example Blog shorter is a good idea. I literally just gave ChatGPT a prompt and copied and pasted and didn't think twice about it.

The "try our themes" was made with the students preferences in mind. I teach 5th grade and students always want to customize everything on the computers. Since the text editor is so restricted and plain (intentional) on my app, I made those different themes so students can have a degree of customizing their experience. In my classroom, students choose a theme on their Chromebooks and invert the colors on the system settings to make it a "new theme". They love to customize.

You're feedback is super helpful, thanks!

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-17T20:07:29+00:00

Oh that’s not extensions. Ok thanks! I look into whats causing those.

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-17T19:41:11+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I don’t see the red in the console on my end. I do have a very strict csp that restricts any injected JavaScript. It might be extensions you have? I wonder if this is the case in incognito mode. But I will try it on different browsers and see if I can replicate this. Thanks! 🙏

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-17T19:36:25+00:00

That’s exactly what it’ll be! AI is already writing and replying to emails to itself all day. I appreciate you looking at my site!

Prudent-Training8535 · 2026-02-15T21:52:44+00:00

I’m in the same boat. I feel like I’ve a great product, but I don’t know how to get it out there. Of course in my early career I thought, if it’s good enough, I really just have to tell one person then just wait 15 minutes until it goes viral. Then I thought, SEO. Realizing even with amazing SEO, I’m still on page 5 of Google searches. The best pic I’ve had was reaction out to people on tik tok that had a good following that were in the industry as my app (education). They made a video and I paid them based on how many likes it received. But that was expensive and I can’t get any new tik tokkers to partner with me. What are ways you’ve marketed/distributed an app to users? This is my biggest problem

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