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Signal or Noise? Sorting Through AI at ISTELive and ASCD Annual 26

Authors: Philip Garza; info@ciddl.org

I went into ISTELive and ASCD Annual 26 expecting AI to show up often. I did not expect it to show up everywhere I turned, in the session catalog and on the expo floor alike. As a Graduate Research Assistant supporting CIDDL, the Center on Inclusive Design and Innovation in Learning, I work on AI and assistive technology research daily. I am not AI averse. Even so, the sheer volume at this conference gave me pause. This post is not an argument for or against AI in schools. It is simply a look at the numbers, drawn from the conference's own program search, with a few observations as an attendee.

What the Program Search Shows

The ISTE+ASCD conference program search lets attendees filter sessions by keyword. A search for “AI” returned roughly 920 session listings across the four-day event, spanning Saturday's virtual preview through Wednesday's closing mainstage. That count includes every format the conference offers: research papers, posters, panels, idea labs, interactive sessions, innovator talks, model lessons, and turbo talks, plus a separate category the program calls “hosted activities,” which are sessions run by exhibitors inside the expo hall.

A rough breakdown by format gives a sense of where AI content is concentrated:

  • Hosted activities (vendor-run sessions in the Solutions Hub Expo): about 250
  • Interactive sessions: roughly 320
  • Innovator talks: roughly 165
  • Turbo talks: roughly 160
  • Panels: 50
  • Idea labs: about 49
  • Research papers: 34
  • Mainstage sessions: 9

Even allowing for some imprecision in a keyword search like this one, a large share of the non-vendor program, the sessions proposed and reviewed through the regular conference process, also touched AI in some way. The poster track alone included a recurring theme labeled “Innovating with STEAM and AI,” used across multiple individual poster presentations.

A Sample of What Educators Presented

The breadth of topics was the more interesting story than the raw count. A short, representative sample of session titles from the search results:

  • Beyond Prompts: Using AI to Teach Executive Function and Critical Vetting
  • The Great AI Debate: Provocations for the Field
  • Seeing Isn't Believing: Teaching Verification in an AI World
  • Mirror or Mirage? What AI Images Reveal About Bias
  • Keeping Gen Alpha Human: A Framework for AI in Schools
  • Designing Equity: Implementing AI as the Ultimate Differentiation Tool
  • Are My Students Prepared for Employment in AI and Automation?
  • Riding a Wave Through Sand: How AI Is Changing Internet Literacy
  • Enhancing Accessibility in Special Education Through AI (the session I presented, in the Instructure accessibility track)

These titles range from skeptical to enthusiastic, from classroom practice to policy debate. That range is worth naming. The session catalog was not a single chorus of AI boosterism. Plenty of presenters were asking hard questions about bias, verification, equity, and what gets lost when AI enters a classroom.

The Expo Floor Told a Different Story

The vendor side of the conference felt less varied. All three Mission level sponsors, the top sponsorship tier, built their entire conference presence around AI:

  • Microsoft Education ran a Learn Live Classroom built around Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, AI agents, and Learning Accelerators.
  • Google for Education hosted a Google AI Educator Series Playground, with free Gemini training, and a Chromebook Plus for every participant.
  • CodeAI, the organization formerly known as Code.org, rebranded entirely around what it calls digital fluency.

Beyond the Mission sponsors, a noticeable cluster of exhibitors had put “AI” directly into their company name: AI Code Skills, AI Made Fun, Airia, Chalkie AI, Colleague AI, Starbridge AI, TrekAi, and Zunzun AI, among others. The conference also added two new dedicated AI experiences this year, the Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate Pavilion and the AI Educator Series Playground, both built from the ground up around the topic.

Walking the Solutions Hub Expo, it became difficult to find a booth that was not making some AI claim, whether the product was an LMS, an accessibility tool, a device, or a curriculum platform. For a teacher trying to evaluate options in a single afternoon, that is a lot of noise to sort through, even for someone who follows this space closely.

A Neutral Observation, Not a Verdict

None of this means the technology lacks value. Many of the sessions above offered genuinely useful, classroom-tested approaches, and free professional learning opportunities like the Google AI Educator Series lower the barrier to entry for teachers who want structured training rather than a sales pitch. The volume also reflects real demand. Districts are asking questions about AI, and educators are showing up to answer them with research and practice, not just marketing copy.

At the same time, the density of AI branding in the expo hall raises a practical problem for any teacher trying to make a purchasing or adoption decision. When every product claims an AI feature, the claim itself stops doing much work. The ISTE Seal and the EdTech Quality Collaborative's evaluation framework, covering safety, evidence, inclusivity, usability, and interoperability, exist precisely because vendors needed a more reliable signal than the word “AI” printed on a banner. That framework is worth knowing about if you walk a future expo floor and want a way to filter signal from noise.

I do not have a tidy conclusion here. The numbers speak for themselves: AI was present in roughly nine out of every ten sessions this search could find, and it dominated the vendor floor even more visibly than it dominated the program. Whether that balance feels exciting, exhausting, or both probably depends on where you are standing when you read this.

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