Welcome back - 1/9/2026

Spring 2026 AI Catalyst Show-and-Tell Series (Bi-weekly, Starting Jan 27)

We invite you to sign up for the Spring AI Catalyst Show-and-Tell Series! The Catalyst Fall 2025 webinars focused on AI foundations. For Spring 2026, we're hosting bi-weekly show-and-tells where AI Catalysts and other peers share tips, tools, and educator workflows. Many Idaho institutions already run brownbags and drop-ins that do something similar. This is an opportunity to see what peers are doing across institutions. Sessions run every other Tuesday at 10:00 AM Mountain Time from January 27 through May 5 (7 sessions total). The first webinar features Kevin Rank, Bert Baumgaertner, and Abraham Romney presenting on Deep Research and NotebookLM tips. If you're already running brownbags at your institution and have something excellent to share, we'd love for you to present at a future session. Contact the AI Catalyst Lead at [email protected].

Call for Proposals — Innovate Idaho 2026: AI and Open Education Symposium (April 10)

Innovate Idaho 2026 is a virtual symposium on Friday, April 10, 2026 (12pm–3pm MST) as part of Open Education Week. Building on last year's Innovate Idaho AI event, this year's symposium expands to include the intersection of AI and open education, though we welcome work in either area on its own. We're looking for practical insights and creative approaches from educators, librarians, technologists, student support professionals, and researchers across Idaho's eight public institutions. Topics might include AI in teaching and assessment, OER adoption and creation, using AI tools to develop or adapt open resources, academic integrity approaches, process-oriented assessment designs, open pedagogy projects, and cross-institutional collaborations. We're accepting individual presentations (15–20 min) and lightning talks (5–7 min). Proposals are due February 12, 2026.

Full details and submission link here: https://idaho.pressbooks.pub/airesourceguide/chapter/innovate-idaho-2026-rfp/

LinkedIn post where I talked about creating the Custom bot Index - it also includes the prompt I used in the Comet agent.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevinrank_tutorial-customgpt-gem-activity-7412615651174842368-Y0cU