My three themes for ISTE this year:
🤝 Teamwork, 🏃🏻‍♂️‍➡️Leadership, and 🧗‍♀️A New Perspective

Sharing them as 3 stories from the week in San Antonio…

🤝 Teamwork

While chatting on the outskirts of our booth with a district leader, the conversation turned to Pear Deck. Our incredible Director of Product Management, Manny Sevillano, was at ISTE with us, so I looked behind me to find him.

The second I turned around, one of our other amazing staff members, Eline Millenaar de Guzman, was there and asked who I was looking for. I said, “Manny, but I can go find him…” and before I could finish the sentence, she had run off to grab him and bring him into the conversation.

This meant zero time spent away from the conversation and the ability to bring in the right person at the right time to keep the discussion running smoothly.

That is just one tiny example of how well the team worked together to pull together our ISTE experience…

🏃 Leadership

One of our amazing partners, OETC (h/t Thomas Richards Stephen Yamada & Amber Watkins), asked us to grab lunch during the conference. When I was walking our leaders through the plans for the conference, our CEO, Rich Preece, called out that he wanted to prioritize it and shifted his schedule to make sure he was there.

As it happens when you’re the leader of a popular edtech SaaS organization at a huge EdTech show, everyone wanted time with him and he was spending as much time as possible talking with our school and district leaders.

When it was time to leave for the meet-up with OETC, I found Rich RUNNING through the expo hall to make sure he gave our customers the most possible time but also getting to the Uber to be on time for our partners…

Many leaders were absent from ISTE, but ours were there in force and prioritizing schools and partners over all else!

🧗‍♀️A New Perspective

Finally, this was my first big conference with GoGuardian and I arrived after their plans were baked.

So, this was the first ISTE that I didn’t have any sessions, booths to build, esports on the mainstage, or other large commitments. On top of that, I’d only met a few folks from our team in person.

Our sales teams, product leaders, and marketing team were so welcoming that I immediately felt at home. Walking the show floor (which I rarely had time to do in years past) and seeing so many partners and amazing school/district leaders reconnected me with my network.

Finally being able to bridge the gap and re-engage as “Doug from GoGuardian” made the transition to the new gig feel complete.

🙏🏻 Thanks to the our teams for making my first ISTE at GoGuardian 🩵 and Pear Deck Learning 🍐 a great one!

The Short Version:

EDU/X stands for Education Experience Design — a mindset, a model, and a movement built around one essential truth:

📌 Great plans in education don’t matter if they fall apart when people come into contact with them.

In other words, strategy is important. So is content. So are systems, tools, and policies.
But none of it matters if we ignore the actual experience of students, teachers, staff, and families.

📌 EDU/X is about designing with those experiences and stakeholders in our minds and in the room.

---

The Long Version (But Not Too Long):

The idea was born out of the marriage of my work in education and my work in the design space, owning and operating a logo and web design firm. After years of working in classrooms, districts, and in the edtech industry, I kept seeing the same pattern:

1. Smart people made well-intentioned decisions.
2. The rollout looked great on paper.
3. But when it hit the real world? It missed the mark.

Why? Because experience wasn’t part of the design process.

In the world of UX (User Experience), this would never fly. You’d never launch a product without testing how it feels to use, how it flows, how it supports the goals of its user. You’d design with intention.

EDU/X is that same principle — applied to education.

Even better news, rather than replacing the humans in this process, generative AI is enabling even more ability to scale these ideas than ever before!

---

The EDU/X Impact Framework

We’ve built a model that looks at five key attributes:

• Pedagogy – How we teach
• Content – What we teach
• Technology & Tools – What supports we use
• Community – Who we involve
• Learning Environment – Where and how learning happens

Each area has intangibles (things like agency, simplicity, connection) and measurables (actual data points you can track). And the model is flexible to meet your needs and goals, not “one-size-fits-all”.

And the whole point? To help you build education experiences that actually work for the people experiencing them.

---

Why it Matters

Because every day, in every classroom, in every district and organization… people are experiencing what we create.

We can’t afford to be blind to that.
We have to design better — not just from the top down, but from the inside out.

And if we do it right?
We build systems that are inclusive, responsive, and wildly more effective.