Support Students with Disabilities’ Independence with Mobile Devices
This brief examines how mobile devices can support the independence of students with intellectual disabilities as they navigate college campuses and community settings. Drawing on Dr. Hester’s discussion of her collaborative work with Lori Cooney and Dr. Don McMahon, it explains how Google My Maps can be customized according to individual students’ destinations, preferences, support needs, and person-centered plans. The brief also considers how mobile technology can be incorporated into teacher preparation, how educators can develop more balanced perceptions of mobile devices, and what future research is needed to strengthen technology-supported transition and inclusive postsecondary education practices.
Episode 3: Rethinking AI Literacy Through Human Agency
This episode asks a related question: What does it mean to be AI literate while remaining an active human agent?
What Does the Research Actually Say About AI in K-12 Classrooms?
Artificial intelligence tools are entering classrooms faster than the research base evaluating them can keep up with. For educators, that gap creates a real dilemma: how do you make sound instructional decisions about AI when rigorous evidence remains so thin? This post summarizes a new report from Stanford’s AI Hub for Education, The Evidence Base on AI in K-12: A 2026 Review (Fesler et al., 2026), which offers one of the clearest pictures yet of what we currently know and, just as importantly, what we don’t.
Vibe Coding for Special Educators: Building Custom Classroom Tools Without Code
What if the most powerful assistive technology tool for your classroom was not something you ordered from a catalog but something you built yourself, in an afternoon, without writing a single line of code?
CIDDL Research and Practice Brief: Digital Accessibility and Accessible Educational Materials
This brief explores what digital accessibility means in practice, why it matters for students with disabilities, and what teacher preparation programs and school leaders can do to build educator capacity in this area. Drawing on Cynthia Curry’s decades of experience and her current leadership of NCADEMI, the brief highlights the most pressing challenges schools face, and the opportunity to embed. accessibility into existing instructional initiatives, and practical resources educators and preparation programs can use to get started.
From Blank Page to Literature Review: How AI Can Support Early-Stage Research and Writing Over the Summer
Conversations about AI in education often fall into two camps: advocates who emphasize its potential and skeptics who warn about its risks. Yet both perspectives tend to ask the same central question: Should students use AI? While this question is important, it may not be the most meaningful one for understanding what is actually happening in classrooms. A more productive question might be: What happens to students’ thinking when they use AI, and under what circumstances does AI become more beneficial or risky? This shift moves the conversation away from simple approval or rejection of AI and toward a deeper examination of how learning itself is changing. In our recent paper by Seung and Dr. Basham (2026), Cognitive Offloading in the Age of Generative AI: What Does It Mean for Students With Learning Disabilities? (published in Learning Disability Quarterly), we explore this question through the lens of cognitive offloading, a concept that helps explain how students redistribute their mental effort when using AI.
Cognitive Offloading in the Age of AI: Opportunities, Challenges, and Mechanisms
Conversations about AI in education often fall into two camps: advocates who emphasize its potential and skeptics who warn about its risks. Yet both perspectives tend to ask the same central question: Should students use AI? While this question is important, it may not be the most meaningful one for understanding what is actually happening in classrooms. A more productive question might be: What happens to students’ thinking when they use AI, and under what circumstances does AI become more beneficial or risky? This shift moves the conversation away from simple approval or rejection of AI and toward a deeper examination of how learning itself is changing. In our recent paper by Seung and Dr. Basham (2026), Cognitive Offloading in the Age of Generative AI: What Does It Mean for Students With Learning Disabilities? (published in Learning Disability Quarterly), we explore this question through the lens of cognitive offloading, a concept that helps explain how students redistribute their mental effort when using AI.
CIDDL Office Hours: Introducing CIDDL AI Studio: A Space to Build, Think, and Solve Together
The May 19 CIDDL Office Hour highlighted the CIDDL AI Studio, a free six-week collaborative experience designed to deepen AI literacy.
Reality, Augmented: What AR Means for Students with Disabilities
Roughly two-thirds of U.S. states have enacted legislation restricting student phone access during the school day, and more than half of countries worldwide have followed suit (D’Addio, 2025; Prothero et al., 2026). Nearly 5,000 schools deployed them by 2026 (Allcott et al., 2026). The pace has outstripped the evidence.
Build Your Own AI Assistant: A Practical Guide to Custom GPTs for Educators
Artificial intelligence does not have to be a black box. In a recent CIDDL webinar, Drs. James Basham, Trey Vasquez from the University of Kansas, and Matthew Marino from the University of Central Florida walked educators through one of the most practical applications of large language models available today: building a custom generative pre-trained transformer, or GPT, trained on information you already trust.