Tuesday · August 4
4:00–4:55 PM
The Shortcut Lab
Zambezi · hands-on breakout
THE KEYNOTE QUESTION
What is learning when AI can do the work?
A polished artifact no longer tells us enough. This companion helps you name the human work, audit one task, and redesign one piece so understanding becomes visible.
The current audience release is open now. Live-event polling stays separate, and nothing you enter in the planning tools is sent to us.
BEFORE YOU USE ANY OF THIS
This companion is built for adult educators, not for independent student use. The examples are illustrative, and anything an AI produces needs your review before it reaches a student or family. Whatever you try: follow your school or district's policies on AI, student data, and privacy—including your FERPA and COPPA obligations—and keep student information out of unapproved systems. Your professional judgment governs.
KALAHARI · AUGUST 4–5, 2026
One place for both days.
The complete keynote experience, breakout materials, standards demonstration, downloadable tools, and source trail are collected in the unified Resources library.
Wednesday · August 5
8:30–9:25 AM
The Shortcut
General session · keynote
Wednesday · August 5
10:30–11:25 AM
The Shortcut Lab · encore
Nile and Orange · hands-on breakout
WHAT WE PROTECT
Five capacities. One destination.
The products may change. These are capacities a learner must develop—not five new things to submit.
Memory
Internal material thinking can work with.
Judgment
Deciding what is true, useful, ethical, and worth doing.
Dialogue
Making thinking public through listening, pushback, and revision.
Productive Struggle
Purposeful friction where skill and durable understanding form.
Agency & Authorship
The learner's ownership of thought, choice, revision, and action.
THE DESTINATIONAuthentic understanding
PARTICIPATE
Capture what you are noticing.
Optional reflection for the keynote or the ride home. Nothing is submitted, scored, or sent anywhere.
Private by design: entries stay in this browser unless you copy or export them. Work from a de-identified example—no student names, student work, or family information.
AUDIT
What does this task actually prove?
Use a real assignment, prompt, discussion, check-in, project, or assessment. Be literal before you redesign anything.
Private by design: entries stay in this browser unless you copy or export them. Work from a de-identified example—no student names, student work, or family information.
REDESIGN
Make one piece of human work unavoidable.
Do not rewrite the entire assignment. Choose one capacity, one component, and the smallest move that makes learning visible.
Private by design: entries stay in this browser unless you copy or export them. Work from a de-identified example—no student names, student work, or family information.
STANDARDS DEMO
The tool can build the path. The teacher chooses the destination.
A step-by-step walkthrough of the live Unpacking Standards tool: pick a real first-grade Ohio standard, watch its own words come apart, and see every planning resource it hands back — with the teacher's judgment kept in charge at every step.
Real captures of the live tool. Every screenshot and screen recording below was taken from the working tool at whatlearningbuilds.org using the official Ohio Grade 1 Mathematics 1.OA.7 wording. It contains no student data, and teachers can follow the same steps at their own pace — or jump straight in with the link at the end.
Find the standard
Start from the official wording
Search by code or plain words — here, Ohio Mathematics 1.OA.7: 'Understand the meaning of the equal sign, and determine if equations involving addition and subtraction are true or false.' Every standard in Ohio's core four is listed, and coverage is stated honestly: unpacked standards say ready, the rest say not yet covered — never silently filled in.
Teacher judgmentThe teacher picks the destination before AI organizes anything. The tool starts from the official text, never a paraphrase.
1 of 7
DECIDE
Write the boundary students can understand.
Color the task part—not the whole assignment. The because clause names the learning, not merely the rule.
Private by design: entries stay in this browser unless you copy or export them. Work from a de-identified example—no student names, student work, or family information.
RETURN LATER
Leave with a usable artifact—not another open tab.
Export your private working copy, revisit the tools, or go deeper into the ideas and evidence behind the keynote.
Keep your work
Download a plain-text copy that opens anywhere and can be pasted into a planning document or LMS.
Reuse the Lab
Run the audit and redesign again with a PLC, department, grade band, intervention team, or counseling team.
Follow the question
Read the source notes behind learning, understanding, achievement, tools, cognitive effort, and human flourishing.
ONE QUESTION TO KEEP
What did this task require the student to do that mattered?