Media & Stories

AWSP / WASA Conference 2025

Erica represented the team at this annual conference for over 2,200 education leaders from Washington state. We also got to meet some awesome sideby community members in person! At our booth, we heard from principals, vice principals, deans, curriculum coordinators, and superintendents about the conversations they’re having around AI in their schools. Check out the trends we found in shared grapples and insights.

sideby Sundays with our co-founder & cto

This week’s sideby sundays reflects on what a once-a-year pond skim can teach us about learning: not the kind you cram, but the kind you build over time. sideby cofounder mike mendelson shares what it means to stay in it, try again, and trust that real understanding takes repetition, timing, and a willingness to fall.

💭 "Because I’m going to stay in it, I’m going to learn, eventually, to take some funny vehicle across this pond."

sideby Sundays with our co-founder & cto

In this week’s sideby sundays, our cofounder & cto Mike Mendelson reflects on a year of teaching AP Precalculus where test prep came last, not first. Two weeks out, his students are just now diving in. Why wait? Because sometimes, the best learning comes from cutting late.

💭 "Maybe, condensing the time where we focus on the test might be a part of the answer to the question: what's the right balance of testing and teaching the good stuff."

The 2025 AI Innovation Summit

Our co-founder and CTO Mike Mendelson led sessions at the AI Innovation Summit in Seattle, sharing how educators are building AI fluency through sideby’s peer-to-peer model. He spoke to the power of conversation, not content, in shaping how schools adapt to emerging technology.

AI is not the Segway

I get it. I’m a critical consumer here even though I am advocating for mass consumption of AI in education. Mass critical consumption. Mass aware and thoughtful consumption. Mass study Joy Buolamwini’s Ted Talk, join The Algorithmic Justice League, learn from this article about the magnitude of bias, apply UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework etc etc etc. Mass led by us for us consumption in education. because it’s not the Segway. (And if you don’t know what the Segway is, perfect.) I’m talking to folks in education, at schools and universities as an insider and outsider, and sometimes it sounds like people are talking about the Segway when they’re talking about AI in education…

Valuing Teachers for more than just the climb

It's like staying in a school, actually teaching and working in a school for years (more than two years if you want to really get down to it), is somehow an indication of your worth in the field of education. Meaning your worth is inversely connected to your years looking at students in the eyes every day…