Hillary Summerbell is the founder and CEO of Summerbell, a literacy technology company redefining how visual dyslexics engage with text. A fourth-generation Washingtonian and lifelong creative, Hillary brings a designer’s eye and an inventor’s persistence to the world of EdTech. After a career in interior design and entrepreneurship, Hillary built on the academic research of positional arc reading and elevated it through technology, creating Summerbell. Her work has delivered measurable gains in reading fluency and comprehension, transforming an academic idea into a tool used by students, parents, and educators nationwide.

Hillary and I talk about her visual dyslexia and how it influenced the creation of Summerbell, which reformats text into an arc for easier comprehension. She gets into the challenges of developing Ed Tech and how teachers can best use Summerbell with AI.

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode178.

Pia Dandiya is a first-generation American educator running for Congress in the district where she was born and raised to fight for kids and expand opportunity for every Floridian. She began her career as a teacher in low-income schools and went on to become one of the youngest high school principals in the country, founding a school where every graduate earned college admission despite most students living below the poverty line. She later served as a White House Fellow working on education and domestic policy and worked at the intersection of technology and education at Apple.

Now that she’s running for congress, Pia and I talk about why she ran in the first place and how her experience in education motivates her to work on a national level. We also get into how she wants to fix our education system.

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode177.

Today I’m doing a solo episode! I haven't done a solo podcast episode in a while, but I thought I'd come in and talk to you all about what I'm seeing in the world of curriculum development. I've been working in this field for almost 20 years, which is wild. But I've really seen some shifts and some things that have stayed the same. And so as you think about maybe considering curriculum development as a next career path for you, I want to talk about some of the top skills you need.

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode176.