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ISTE 2025 · Part II of The Crossover Archives

San Antonio is a city that sneaks up on you.

You walk out of the airport into the heat, take a taxi to the Riverwalk, and before you’ve processed the temperature shift, you’re standing on a cobbled pathway between water, music, restaurants, and tourists. It’s busy but relaxed — a little chaotic, but strangely welcoming.

I hadn’t been to the US before. I’d certainly never been to Texas.

Like most people attending ISTE for the first time, I arrived with a mix of curiosity, mild anxiety, and a sense of purpose I hoped would hold its shape once things got loud.

What unfolded over the next few days wasn’t dramatic or cinematic — no big revelations or chance encounters with AI executives in elevators. It was subtler than that, and in a way, more important. The real learning happened in three layers: the conference, the conversations, and the quiet moments in between.

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1. The Scale of ISTE Hits You First

ISTE is enormous.

You know it intellectually, but nothing prepares you for the sheer volume of people, sessions, vendor stalls, and competing ideas. It’s like standing in the middle of a global education marketplace where every possible future of learning is being sold, pitched, or demonstrated – at full volume.

Walking through the conference centre, I realised quickly that AI was no longer a fringe topic. It wasn’t tucked away in a breakout room. It was everywhere — woven into demonstrations, whispered in corridor conversations, and debated openly in sessions.

This was the biggest shift from the New Zealand context: the conversation wasn’t “Should we use AI?” but “How do we use it well?”

The baseline assumptions were different. The urgency was different. And the sense of possibility was… refreshing.

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2. Educators Are Far More Pragmatic About AI Than Institutions Think

One of my goals was to talk to as many educators as possible — not policymakers or vendors, but teachers, coaches, principals, and instructional designers who were actually trying to make things work.

What I found was encouraging:

• Most educators want to experiment with AI.
• Many are already using it quietly, even if their institutions haven’t caught up.
• Almost everyone feels the pace of change – but doesn’t feel helpless.
• The anxiety is less about “AI replacing teachers” and more about “How do we keep up?”

More than once, I heard a version of the same sentiment:

“We just need someone to show us what good looks like.”

It reinforced something I’ve been writing about for years: teachers aren’t afraid of technology; they’re afraid of being unsupported while everything shifts around them.

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3. AI Was Everywhere, and Nowhere Near Finished

The vendor hall is its own ecosystem.

Imagine hundreds of stalls, each claiming to be the next major platform for personalised learning, assessment, student analytics, or curriculum design — then add AI to every second marketing tagline.

Some tools were genuinely impressive.

Some were rebranded versions of older products.

Some were clearly built quickly to ride the wave.

What stood out was not the tools themselves, but the pattern:

AI in education is still in its adolescence — powerful, promising, but inconsistent.

This reinforced a belief I’ve held for a while: we are still early.

There is massive room for educators, designers, and system leaders to shape how this technology is used. The future is not predetermined. It’s still open territory.

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4. The Conversations Were the Real Conference

You go to ISTE for the sessions, but you stay for the people.

Some of the best moments happened in hallways, cafés, or while waiting for sessions to begin — short, honest exchanges with educators from the US, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere.

A pattern emerged:

• Everyone could feel change accelerating.
• Most were overwhelmed, but in a productive way.
• Almost nobody felt their institutions were moving fast enough.
• Many were quietly building prototypes, workflows, guides, or internal training — without waiting for permission.

I found myself having the same conversation multiple times:

AI isn’t replacing teachers. It’s replacing the version of teaching that’s trapped in old routines.

These conversations gave me something I didn’t realise I was missing: a global sense-check that the work I’ve been doing — in AI companions, micro-credentials, capability building — wasn’t just relevant. It was necessary.

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5. Carrying the Book Around Was Strange but Useful

Walking into a conference with your own book in your bag is an unusual experience. It feels slightly self-conscious, slightly ridiculous, and also strangely empowering.

But each time someone asked what I was working on, and I mentioned Education Is Over. Adapt or Die, the tone shifted. People wanted to talk. They wanted honesty, clarity, direction — and the book gave me a way to frame that conversation quickly.

It taught me an important lesson:

Sometimes the artefact speaks before you do.

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6. The Quiet Moments Were Where the Real Work Happened

In the evenings, I’d walk the Riverwalk — partly to decompress, partly to think. The city was warm, colourful, and full of small dramas unrelated to AI or education. That’s the useful part of travel: you’re living someone else’s normal for a week.

In those moments, I realised two things:

1. I’d been thinking too small.
2. The work I wanted to do needed to operate at a global level, not a local one.

It wasn’t a dramatic revelation. More like a steady internal click — as if San Antonio handed me a wider frame and said, “Look again.”

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7. No Single Event Changed Everything — but the Accumulation Did

If you ask me what the “big moment” of the trip was, I couldn’t point to one. There was no keynote that changed my worldview, no chance meeting that shifted my career.

Instead, ISTE was a slow saturation — a week of immersion that recalibrated my thinking.

It left me with:

• a clearer understanding of the global AI education landscape
• a stronger sense of urgency
• a broader network of people doing good, difficult work
• and the quiet but firm belief that I was exactly where I needed to be

Sometimes that’s enough.

Sometimes that’s everything.

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Next: Part III — The Return and What the Trip Set in Motion

Part III will trace the unexpected part of the story:

how returning to Aotearoa kicked off a cascade of projects, frameworks, and shifts that I didn’t see coming — and why the real transformation happened after the trip, not during it.