2026 Elevated Teaching Summit

This interactive session explores how teachers can guide students through a structured reading process that promotes inquiry, collaboration, and deeper understanding of texts. Participants will learn practical strategies to prepare students to engage with a text, facilitate collaborative reading and annotation, and extend learning beyond the text through meaningful discussion and reflection.

Using an Activate – Engage – Extend framework, the session will model strategies that help students build curiosity before reading, collaboratively analyze and annotate during reading, and synthesize their thinking after reading. Educators will experience classroom-ready routines that support student inquiry, structured collaboration, and deeper comprehension across content areas.

Participants will leave with concrete tools to help students:
• Prepare for reading through inquiry-based activation strategies
• Collaboratively read and annotate complex texts
• Extend understanding through discussion, synthesis, and reflection activities

The session emphasizes practical, student-centered strategies that foster meaningful engagement with texts while building critical thinking and collaborative learning skills.

We will show how WICOR strategies can be utilized for every learner, with an emphasis on special education access. We plan to model and showcase at least one strategy for every WICOR element that can be used in most classrooms.

Discover Nearpod while experiencing an interactive lesson exactly the same way your students will. Briefly explore the Nearpod platform as a teacher, beginning with the Nearpod Library of lessons. Find, edit and learn to launch lessons in Live or Student-Paced mode.

In this intermediate workshop, participants will discover how to combine differentiated instruction principles with the use of Nearpod for lesson creation and delivery. Participants will explore how Nearpod provides formative data that can help determine differentiated learning pathways, and then uncover how to adjust the lessonprocess content or product to suit the needs of all learners. All this can be created with Nearpod’s interactive and academically engaging media and activities.

This open workshop gives educators dedicated time to create with Nearpod on their own terms. Whether you want to refresh your skills in the Nearpod Lesson Builder, develop a new lesson or activity, or explore the latest AI-powered features in lesson creation, a knowledgeable facilitator will be on hand throughout to answer questions and offer support as you work. All you need is an active Nearpod account and a basic familiarity with the platform. Come ready to create! 

Differentiating learning using AI to generate textinvolves leveraging large language models to createpersonalized educational content tailored to meetthe needs of students. Learn how text generationand Nearpod can facilitate differentiation in learning,promote engagement, mastery, and equity ineducation, and empower students to achieve theirfull potential