For educators exploring AI in the classroom
Weekly insights on AI-powered literacy, adaptive learning, and what's actually working in K-12 classrooms.
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The Evolution of EdTech — Part 1 of 13
The First Machine That Could Teach
By Clarence Stephen | March 2026 | 2,400 words | 10 min read
In the spring of 1924, a psychology professor named Sidney Pressey walked into the American Psychological Association's annual meeting carrying a contraption the size of a portable typewriter. It had...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 2 of 13
Television Was Going to Save Education
By Clarence Stephen | March 2026 | 2,300 words | 9 min read
In 1961, Newton Minow — the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission — stood before the National Association of Broadcasters and delivered one of the most famous speeches in...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 3 of 13
The Personal Computer Enters the Classroom
By Clarence Stephen | March 2026 | 2,400 words | 10 min read
If you went to an American school between 1980 and 1995, there's a decent chance your most vivid memory of educational technology involves dying of dysentery.
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 4 of 13
The Internet Changes Everything (Again)
By Clarence Stephen | March 2026 | 2,200 words | 9 min read
In 1993, there were 130 websites in the world. By 1996, over 100,000. By the end of the decade, millions. And somewhere in that exponential explosion, a teacher in rural Iowa could — for the first...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 5 of 13
The Rise of the LMS and the Standardization Era
By Clarence Stephen | April 2026 | 2,300 words | 9 min read
If you attended an American college or university between 2000 and 2015, you almost certainly used Blackboard. You probably hated it. Your professors probably hated it. Your university's IT...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 6 of 13
Khan Academy and the Democratization of Knowledge
By Clarence Stephen | April 2026 | 2,300 words | 9 min read
In 2004, Sal Khan was a 28-year-old hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in Boston. Three degrees from MIT. MBA from Harvard. By every conventional measure, he was destined for a...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 7 of 13
The iPad Generation and the App Explosion
By Clarence Stephen | April 2026 | 2,200 words | 9 min read
In June 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the second-largest school system in the United States, serving 640,000 students — announced a plan to give every student an iPad loaded with...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 8 of 13
When the World Went Remote
By Clarence Stephen | April 2026 | 2,400 words | 10 min read
On Friday, March 13, 2020, schools across the United States began to close. By Monday, most of the nation's 130,000 K-12 schools were shut. Within two weeks, over 55 million American students were...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 9 of 13
The AI Moment
By Clarence Stephen | April 2026 | 2,300 words | 9 min read
At 1:00 PM Eastern on November 30, 2022, OpenAI quietly released a chatbot called ChatGPT. No press conference, no Super Bowl ad, no keynote. Just a blog post and a URL.
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 10 of 13
Adaptive Learning Gets Real
By Clarence Stephen | May 2026 | 2,200 words | 9 min read
For seventy years, the promise has been the same: a machine that adapts to the learner. Notices confusion and adjusts. Recognizes mastery and advances. Infinite patience, infinite availability,...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 11 of 13
The Reading Crisis Nobody's Solving
By Clarence Stephen | May 2026 | 2,500 words | 10 min read
Here is a number that should keep you up at night: 130 million.
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 12 of 13
What If Every Story Could Be Seen?
By Clarence Stephen | May 2026 | 2,400 words | 10 min read
I spent eleven chapters tracing a hundred years of educational technology — from Pressey's mechanical teaching machine to Skinner's programmed instruction, from Sesame Street to Khan Academy, from...
The Evolution of EdTech — Part 13 of 13
The Future We're Building
By Clarence Stephen | May 2026 | 2,300 words | 9 min read
We've traveled a hundred years in twelve chapters — from a wooden box with four keys at a psychology conference in 1924 to an AI-powered reading platform generating illustrations in real time in...
What if every student had their own AI reading companion?
Readify uses local AI to adapt reading material to each student's level — generating illustrations, simplifying vocabulary, and tracking comprehension in real time. No student data leaves the building. COPPA and FERPA compliant by architecture, not by policy.
