About Learn • Teach • Tech

Hi, I’m Ben.

My 25+ year career has taken me through middle school and elementary classrooms, AVID, literacy intervention, and district-level technology integration. These days I’m a Technology Integration Specialist and I teach current and future teachers as adjunct faculty at North Hennepin Community College and Concordia University St. Paul. I’m also the Education Lead at navigating ai, where I help schools and districts figure out what responsible, useful AI actually looks like in practice, including an honest look at where it doesn’t belong.

Along the way I’ve collected a few badges: Google Certified Trainer, Magic School AI Certified Trainer, Piloting AI Certified, Seesaw Ambassador, and a stack of others I’ll spare you.

What I believe

Technology works best when it disappears into great teaching. The tool is never the lesson. The teacher and student are. If a shiny new platform doesn’t give a teacher time back or help a student learn something they couldn’t before, it’s just another login to forget.

What you’ll find here

Education is the main feed: edtech, AI in the classroom, lesson ideas, and honest takes on what’s worth your time. Everything I write about has been tested with real people, usually on a Tuesday.

Then there are the sidequests, for the parts of me that aren’t education:

• This is BANANAS! Food, snacks, and questionable banana-adjacent culinary decisions.

• Poetry: Poems from the margins of a teacher’s notebook.

• Photography: What I see when I’m not edteching.

The sidequests are opt-in. Turn them on anytime at learnteachtech.substack.com/account.

And watch for From the Archive, where I dust off favorites from the Blogger days.

Let’s connect

Want me to lead PD for your staff, talk AI with your district, or just swap tool recommendations? Find more at benknaus.com, learn about AI work with schools at navigatingai.co, or reply to any post.