#368 – Ditch That Textbook, with Matt Miller

In this episode of Unpacking Education, Matt Miller, the dynamic force behind the popular Ditch That Textbook blog and movement, shares his insights into education and technology. A former Spanish teacher turned edtech advocate, Matt shares his journey from traditional textbook-driven teaching to innovative, tech-infused strategies that engage students and spark creativity. Matt comments on the role of teachers in an AI-driven world, explores practical classroom applications of artificial intelligence, and highlights free resources from his Ditch That Textbook website, including an AI Teacher Toolkit and the annual Ditch Summit. Packed with actionable ideas, this conversation reaffirms the critical role of teachers in shaping the future of education.

Hi, I’m Matt Miller. I love supporting teachers and saving them time. I’m all about deep, meaningful, FUN blended learning. And you can do it.

Matt Miller, founder of Ditch That Textbook

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• AI in the K–12 Classroom (article collection)
• Top 10 Ways Educators Can Use AI Tools, with Aaron Maurer (podcast episode)
• The A.I. Roadmap: Human Learning in the Age of Smart Machines, with Dr. John Spencer (podcast episode)
• AI in the Secondary Classroom, with Julie York (podcast episode)
• MagicSchool, an AI Tool for Educators (podcast episode)
• Academic Integrity in the Age of AI (podcast episode)

Resources to Support Teachers

Matt knows that teaching is hard. As a way to support teachers and give back to the profession, Matt has packed his Ditch That Textbook website with free resources. In this episode, he shares insights that draw on his experiences as a Spanish teacher and ed-tech advocate. Among his tips, Matt shares strategies and resources for ditching traditional teaching strategies, embracing technology, and fostering creativity in the classroom. From storytelling techniques to leveraging AI tools, Matt provides practical approaches that save time and spark engagement.

As he shares tools and strategies, Matt reminds us of the enduring importance of teachers in preparing students for the future. “We’re going to need teachers more than ever,” he says. Tune in to discover how to access free resources—including an AI Teacher Toolkit—insights from his popular Ditch Summit, and strategies to empower educators to thrive in this rapidly changing world. The following are a few highlights from the episode:

• About Our Guest: Matt Miller is an educational technology expert from Indiana. He is a former journalist and Spanish teacher who has established the successful Ditch That Textbook website.
• A Shift to Technology: Matt began his career teaching straight out of his textbooks, using the questions at the end of the chapters and assigning worksheets and workbook pages. Matt says, “It just wasn’t working.” In response, he started trying new approaches that included conversational activities, creativity, and technology. In the process, he established his Ditch That Textbook blog, which is now 10 years old and features over 800 articles about teaching with technology.
• A New Teaching Identity: When Matt was struggling at the beginning of his career, he would ask himself, “Can I salvage something out of this and make it better the next time, or is this something that I just need to ditch?” Little by little, he ditched traditional teaching strategies and embraced more creative and tech-rich approaches. He reflects, “The more that I did it, the more that I realized that it really sort of reflected who I was as a teacher and helped me find my teacher voice, like, ‘Who am I? How do I show up in the classroom as a teacher?’”
• Ditch That Textbook: Matt’s website, Ditch That Textbook, began as a blog that shared what he was doing in the classroom, both what worked and what didn’t. As he learned more and grew as a teacher, he looked for a way to give back and help other teachers solve problems and save time. That led to Matt filling his website with lots of free resources, like Google Slides, PowerPoint, and Canva templates. Other resources include his conference presentations and eBooks. He says that the goal is to give away as much as he can for free.
• Ditch Summit: The annual Ditch Summit is a free, online professional learning opportunity featuring over a hundred archived recordings and new ones each year. The Ditch Summit runs annually from December to January. Past sessions have featured artificial intelligence, tech integration, creativity, inquiry, teacher wellness, and other best practices.
• Back to the Classroom: During the spring of 2024, Matt returned to his Spanish classroom for a semester after having been focused on edtech leadership for the previous 8 years. His wife was teaching at that school, and his two daughters were students there. He says, “When the three most important ladies in your life come to you and go, ‘Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.’ I mean, what are you going to do? You say, ‘Yes.’ And so, I went back to the classroom and taught a full load of high school Spanish classes. And it was great.”
• A Chance to Reconnect and Apply: His return to the classroom gave Matt a chance to reconnect with the teaching experience. He says, “I got to remember what it was like. I went through the daily grind of coming up with engaging lessons for students—and trying to find ways to make it interesting to them, and to help it to stick, and help them to get those repetitions that they need.” He adds, “But it also gave me a chance, too, to try out some of the new practices and the new technology that I’ve been talking about.”
• A Welcome Return: Matt says, “It was just a fantastic experience, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I started doing it again—all of those little interactions with the students, and building relationships with them, and going to the events, and just getting to know the kids and everything.”
• A Few Differences: Matt noticed a few differences upon returning to the classroom after 8 years. “The students are on their phones more, and the phones are more of a struggle.” Social media plays a bigger role and attention spans may have been a little shorter in some regards. Despite these differences, most of the teaching experience remained the same.
• Still Much the Same: Matt recalls, “The similarities were the things that struck me the most. . . . Kids are kids. The content is still the content.” While the little things that they love to spend their time doing had changed, the core engagement in the lessons and the things that help students really connect with the content remained much the same. He says, “They were still teenagers, wrestling with the same issues that teenagers have always wrestled with and laughing at the same dumb jokes.”
• A Classroom Win: Matt found that one of his favorite strategies from the past—storytelling—was still highly effective. He says, “That is still a hit now because it gives us an opportunity to bring in some creativity, and some fun, and some spontaneity.”
• A New Strategy: Matt embraced AI image generators on his return to the classroom. He would generate images and then use them to apply Spanish vocabulary. He explains, “What I’ve been able to do now is take . . . Spanish vocabulary that my students need to learn and just pack them into an image, and then I’m able to put that image up on the screen, and then just ask the students a million questions about it.” This tool saved him a lot of time since he shares that he previously “had to go out on Google images and just go fishing, just in hope of catching the right image that had the right words and everything. Now, I can just ask for those images.”
• A Teachable Moment: Matt found that he could leverage the use of AI as a teachable moment by having students share what they notice about the AI and how they might be able to tell it’s AI-generated and not a real photograph. Matt recalls, “I started to find that there were little ways that I could introduce AI literacy concepts into class without teaching a unit on artificial intelligence and . . . within the confines of my curriculum.”
• Integrating AI: Matt says that we can’t approach AI with a sledgehammer and only worry about the challenges, like cheating. Instead, he says, “We just have to figure out how it fits, and where we should use it, and where we shouldn’t use it. And how do we protect students’ data privacy, and how do we protect ourselves against the bias, and when do we use it and when don’t we use it?” The key is to embrace the nuances and figure it out together.
• Approaching New Technology: “We worry about it,” says Matt. “We wring our hands, and then we start to try it, and we start to use it. We start to realize, ‘Oh, wow, the real world is using this. We’re going to have to respond.’ And so, we try, and we fail, and we stumble, and it’s messy, and it’s inaccurate, and it’s complicated, but we start to find ways to do it, and little by little, out the other end, we start to find ways that it fits. And then, it becomes a natural, meaningful, constructive use of that new innovation. And we’re very much in that with AI right now.”
• An Eye on 2025: As Matt looks to 2025, he thinks that customized AI chatbots will become more popular. Though they’ve been available for more than a year now, many teachers are still catching up to those options. More broadly, he believes that we need to focus on transferable human skills. He says, “I think, if we really want to prepare students for this AI future—the thinking, and problem-solving, and resiliency and, some of those, like, very, very human skills—those timeless human skills are going to be so important because we’re going to need to be able to be nimble, and to adapt, and [to] adjust to whatever comes our way. And if the workforce changes, we’re going to have to be willing to do that. So we’re going to have to be able to solve problems and think on our feet. And to be able to think critically about something, to figure out: ‘Is this good or bad? Do I use it, or do I not use it?’” Matt believes those are the skills that we need to equip our students with.
• Toolkit: Matt shares about his free AI Teacher Toolkit, a “25-page PDF with a ton of great stuff.” It has resources for teachers as well as a printable guide for parents. Teachers can find it on his website at ditch.link/toolkit.
• Matt’s One Thing: “We’re going to need teachers more than ever,” says Matt. In the age of AI, “It’s those crucial thinking skills. It’s those very human skills that I think are going to really equip us as we go forward into the future, in the near term and in the long term, and teachers are already fantastic at that. . . . If anybody’s worried about the impact of AI on the teaching profession, I think if we really want to equip kids for the future, we’re going to need teachers, and we maybe need them more now than ever.”