New York Comic Con 2025

Once again, I had the honor of receiving a professional educator pass for NYCC. Every year, NYCC is a weekend event in October and the Thursday is considered a professional day. This means that some industries, such as education, has specialized panels related to the field.

Storytelling Panel

I love attending and this year was no different. I went to two panels: one about Minecraft in the classroom and one about storytelling through comics. Both panels were incredible. I did get up and ask a question during the storytelling session because these weren't teachers, they were professional writers who make a living in comics. I said that not everyone that wants to be a writer will be as successful as they are and what advice they would give students. The advice was great. One writer said that he didn't start as a comic book writer, he had a "real" job. He would write before work, and write after work, and just write whenever he found time. He said if you really enjoy it do it for that reason and the success will hopefully follow.

Starfleet Academy
Orientation Certificate

I checked out the Starfleet Academy display. I received my cadet ID card, and after going through the orientation activities, I was declared undeclared. That's right, I aparently don't have an assigned discipline for Starfleet Academy so I can go any direction from command to science officer.

In the expo hall, I once again met representatives from different publishing companies and receiving free Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs). I am planning to create an updated free eBooks blog post soon because there are so many new resources, along with changes from my original post five years ago. 

Superhero coffee anyone?

Of course I also needed to fuel up on every educator's favorite energy source, coffee. How cool is this company that creates comic branded coffee varieties. I'm not actually sure which superhero coffee I had because I ordered a mocha latte from the booth, but it was the perfect pick-me-up.

Another great teacher resource I discovered at this years event was directly from the New York City Department of Education.

"The Civics for All Comics Group began in early 2020 as a collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and various comics creators to publish non-fiction graphic texts for educational use. Spearheaded by the Department of Social Studies & Civics, the imprint has published thirty-eight comics as of July 2025. In addition to publishing comics, the Civics for All Comics Group regularly presents at conferences and freely shares its resources to educators and schools throughout the country."

While they had stacks of comic books at their booth to take, what I took away from them was the digital resources. All the comic books are available for free on their website and range from civil rights to historical events and more. They have comic books for all grade levels and unit areas.

Superman

Finally, a non-education related awesome thing happened this year for me. Every year Funko requires reservations to get on their line to make a purchase of limited edition Pops. For the first time, I managed to snag a covited reservation and got on line at 2:00pm. After scanning my badge to verify my reservation, I was handed a flier showing all the available Pops along with three raffle tickets. A few of the designs I was interested in already sold out for Thursday (they limit each day so they have through Sunday) but I did get a really cool Superman, with the NYCC sticker showing it's limited status.
 

Shrunken Head in a Jar

While many people walked away after they made their purchases, I hung around for the raffle and I'm so glad I did. I won a super limited edition (only 25 made specifically for Comic Con raffles) shrunken head in a jar. It is probably the most unique thing I could have brought home from Comic Con.

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Disclaimer: I received free access on Thursday of New York Comic Con (NYCC) through their educator professional pass program.

Introducing Sparky

Wearing Elphaba's hat in
front of the Wicked display.

Once again I was fortunate to attend the Thursday professional day at New York Comic Con. This year, I unfortunetly missed the panels I wanted to attend due to my train being delayed in New Jersey but I still got to enjoy a few hours and explore some great exhibits.

There were tons of comics, movies, books, and more. I didn't take many selfies this year but I did snag a photo at the Wicked display. I also spoke with publishers again. There are some great books coming out this year including the new prequel to The Hunger Games which will be based around Haymitch's story.

Sparky
Your Spark of Inspiration

I also introduced my new travel companion, Sparky, to a few people. Have I told you about Sparky yet? No? Well, let me introduce you. When I was traveling full-time for my previous role, I saw some amazing things when I visited classrooms—from Pinterest-worthy bulletin boards to random “Little Libraries” in airports. I wanted to share these sparks of inspiration and turn it into a social media campaign.

For a while, I had a vision of creating a personal mascot. However, I couldn’t come up with a unique idea that I could actually bring to life. I thought about doing something like Flat Stanley (where the idea stemmed from), but I wanted it to be a little more three-dimensional. My favorite Disney character has always been Figment—sorry Mickey. I found Sparky on a random shelf at a local store and immediately fell in love with this purple dragon. Sparky is a Ty Puffie named Spark, a bean-based stuffy about the size of a tennis ball. I know the name Sparky doesn’t sound like an original rename, but I love names that end with the "E" sound. I’m Cor-E. My dog is Ben-E… you get it. Thus, Spark-E was born.

Sparky already has a social media presence, and their website is a work in progress. Check out their link page for all the profiles or head over to their website, Sparky Inspires. Most handles are @SparkyInspires, but if that wasn’t available, I added the number 42. I couldn’t decide on Sparky’s gender, and after some thought, I chose to make them non-binary. After all, Sparky is an inanimate object.

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Disclaimer: I received free access on Thursday of New York Comic Con (NYCC) through their educator professional pass program.

Return to the Classroom

 I've been thinking of this for a while. When I go out to schools, why do teachers listen to me? I may be considered an expert in educational technology but I haven't been in a classroom in years. When I was teaching, I always hated those so-called experts that rode in on their hypothetical white horse to serve as the white knight saving the day with a new program or software. Something that they claim would make my life as a teacher that much easier.

This past year my career has gone through a lot of changes. While I'm looking for my next adventure, I decided to return to the classroom. This decision though included a decision within the decision. I know that I'm the type of person that wouldn't want to leave mid-year but I also knew I wanted to keep looking for a new role that would allow me to work with a variety of educators and continue presenting at conference.

As this new school year begins, I have placed my name on the substitute teacher list for a few local organizations. This past week, I spent the entire week in one high school classroom while they waited for a new teacher to finish on-boarding. This opportunity was even more interesting because Sunday night, the charter school system where I was substitute teacher was hit with a network outage that lasted the entire week.

This was my first time in a classroom since pre-Covid shutdowns and there I am in a room full of high school students with Chromebooks who can't use their Chromebooks. Not only was the outage the internet, but also the VOIP phone lines, email systems, and loudspeakers. It was crazy to see how much this school relied on their network. A news article about the outage showed the network's administration "...stated the issue did not impact classroom instruction. However, students and parents disagreed, especially since much of the instruction is online and Chromebooks are used."

I walked into the building as was told students had assignments on Google Classroom to complete. Ten minutes later, the dean of students walked in with a stack of photocopies. The students even asked what the packets had to do with Physics and Chemistry (the classes I was responsible for) because they were articles about famous scientists with ELA style questions. The dean told me she found them in the previous teacher's emergency files because even the copy machines were down due to the network. 

I spent a full week with these students and Monday afternoon, after speaking with the dean, I bought some offline supplies in. While students were still provided packets every day, I had the dean's permission to do other things. I understand that Physics and Chemistry aren't the same but I am not a Chemistry teacher and I also didn't want to do anything too extreme while a guest in the school. We ended up doing the paper tower challenge. This is an activity I normally do as an ice breaker for adults but it was great for the students. Each group was given six sheets of copy paper and one foot of tape. I then gave each group one text book form the book shelf.

Since I was a guest, I didn't not take any pictures in the classroom but I was very impressed by the engineering skills these students demonstrated. I'm excited to see where I'm sent next.

Learning Through Play

I recently saw a teacher post online about creating a coordinated plane battleship game. And this got me thinking because the whole premise of battleship is the coordinated plane.

Throughout our childhood and the childhood of our students many board games have been played. Many of these board games have academic relationships and I think it's something that has been discussed but not often enough. So here are a few of my favorite games along with how they can be related to curriculum and standards.

Monopoly
Monopoly is probably the most easiest game to justify because you are learning a lot of skills within the game that relate to both mathematics and economics. For a social studies or business teacher with an economics class, The history of Monopoly along with the practical gameplay easily help students to recognize how business works along with concepts such as taxes and mortgages. Just make sure you find an older version since newer Monopoly boards have a flat tax instead of the 10%. Lazy game producers.

Scrabble

Spelling anyone? Scrabble rewards the use of less common letters more than popular letters. Additionally there is a strategy involved when players try to time their words to reach the triple word score or a double/corner word. Additionally points can be scored by building on another word. For examples if the word run is on the board, add n i n g to make it running and  scoring even more points.

Battleship
Battleship is a game that teaches strategy and the mathematical concept of coordinated planes. Students have to know their XY axis along with being able to track and plan ahead for the different ships.

Guess Who?
Guess Who is a classic game where you can only use yes or no questions to narrow down the suspects until you solve the problem. This helps younger students learn how to be descriptive along with organizational skills to track the different characters.

Operation
Operation on its face value is not truly academic because no student is going to be presiding over a surgery where they are removing a funny bone from someone's arm. However the game itself in its construction is academic. When students are playing operation, they are learning about circuitry because in order to make the light bulb light up and buzz the circuit needs to be complete. The gripper is in essence the switch. I have even seen some students use a MakeyMakey with foil and cardboard to build their own version of Operation.

Mousetrap

Rube Goldberg machines are a favorite of science teachers while teaching about simple machines. From pullies, to screws, Mousetrap is a great example of these complex collections of simple machines.

No not all board games are created equal and there are definitely a few which do not serve any academic value. However even those games can most likely be justified or potentially modified. Have students multiple two dice instead of add. Or 

Powerful Algorithms are Not AI

A while back I wrote a post that explained my personal feelings regarding the difference between gamification and game-based learning. I feel like now there is a new confusion going around the education industry. Powerful algorithms versus AI. Artificial intelligence learns and grows on its own whereas powerful algorithms are just that. An algorithm has limitations. 

An example of a powerful algorithm used in education would be something like voice to text or the opposite; text to speech. You will notice when you use one of these tools that there will be limitations. For example it may pronounce a word incorrectly or it may write the wrong thing when you talk. This is because while it is powerful it does not learn the more it is used.

AI on the other hand learns on its own. Yes it is still a type of algorithm but it is a much more powerful algorithm that has the ability to pull from its previous experiences. This is why the more people that are using AI the better the AI is becoming. It is also why we need to hope Sarah Connors is ready for us in the future because we are leading the path to the robots revolution.

If you are attending workshops and conferences on AI please remember to take it with a grain of salt. Some of these so-called experts are not experts at all. Honestly I think it's impossible to be an expert at this point because AI is still such a new technology in the education field.

Now when Data becomes a real person, I'll be first in line at Comic-Con to get his autograph.

Comic Con 2023

Welcome to Good Burger

 I once again received a professional pass to New York Comic Con as an educator. This year, I only went for the one day but found it to be enough without getting overwhelming.

The day started with a quick stop at the Paramount+ booth where they were hosting a game version of Good Burger, because the movie will be coming out shortly. I then walked around the expo floor for a bit before heading to the panel sessions.

On Thursday at Comic Con, the New York Public Library works to organize educational panels and I sat to listen to some educators discuss "Kids as Content Creators: Engaging Media-Savvy Students". During the session, the teacher was talking about this cool program, Pixton, to allow students to create custom comic books. The most interesting part though was not from a presenter, but from the woman sitting behind me. While they were discussing the cost for the subscription and how they fundraised, she muttered under her breathe that the New York Public Library provides Pixton to all library card holders. This got me interested to go home and see what else Philly offers that I may not know about.

Continuing Education Credit
for NY Teachers

While at Comic Con, I walked around the expo floor and spent a good amount of time speaking with the publisher's booths. Last time I attended I learned about a few Advanced Reader Programs so I was excited to see if there were any new resources out there. 

Overall, I had a great day. Knowing that NYCC allows educators to apply for the professional pass is amazing and the Thursday sessions for educators are a great way to see how others are using literature, pop culture, and technology to work with students. Thursday is typically the slowest say of the weekend but when walking in the expo hall, it was shoulder to shoulder. I can't imagine how crowded the weekend would be.

Walter Emanuel Jones
Original Power Ranger

For the big stars that were signing autographs or doing professional pictures, they had a separate area, but other less popular (but still really cool) celebrities were sitting at strategic booths throughout the expo hall. I didn't pay for a selfie, it was $60, but I thought it was cool that I recognized one of the B list celebrities that were sitting at a vendor's booth. The original Black Power Ranger, Walter Emanuel Jones. He was also in the Nickelodeon show Space Cases. I loved Space Cases and always thought it was kind of a kids version of Star Trek. The group of misfit students snuck onto a ship and then launched lightyears away. Similar to Star Trek Voyager, they had to work together to find their way home on a seven year journey. 

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Disclaimer: I received free access on Thursday of New York Comic Con (NYCC) through their educator professional pass program.

Pay to Play?

I've recently been wondering something and it's been stuck in the back of my head and I want to bring it out.

Imagine you are a child and your parent wants to be able to brag about you so they buy your way onto a team. Example, Draco Malfoy in Chamber of Secrets when he joins the Quidditch team after his father buys the entire team broomsticks.

Now you didn't really earn your place on that team but you still go around bragging to people and acting superior because you were on the team. Everyone on the team knows you're only there because of the equipment your parents bought but you still act high and mighty.

Now imagine that you are a child who has no idea that this is going on. Perhaps the broomsticks were donated anonymously to the school specifically for the team and your name is on the roster the next day.

The same situation where your parent bought your way onto the team, should you realize it? Notice that correlation? And what should you as that child do? Taking this thought a step further what happens if you know one of your classmates is a better player. Do you take the position that was purchased for you or do you step aside?

This scenario is just one extreme example of a complex issue revolving around equality in education. Parents, rich or poor, will do almost anything for their children. However, I often wonder if we're really just hurting the future.

There are cases circulating the news such as a story from 2016 that pops back up often regarding a teenager who drove drunk and got in an accident. His lawyers argued "Affluenza" as the defense. This teenager was raised to believe actions didn't have consequences because his parents would buy him out of trouble. How many more stories like this never made national headlines?

The point I'm trying to make in this rambling, both fictional and real examples, is I want to know if there's something we can do to stop this from happening? It's not just students. I recently received an email that I had been selected for an award. To accept the honor, I would have to pay $2000 for processing, press releases, and other things related to the "honor" and it made me start questioning how many people brag about honors that they really just paid for.

I know sometimes someone else is paying for these awards. For example, I'm in a regional organization and every year we honor one person with a national award. The regional organization has the authority to select our winner, but we pay the national organization for everything that the winner received such as the plaque, medal, award ceremony attendance, and more. So we are technically paying to give the award. The difference is that the recipient is not paying, the provider (sort of) is paying. I also understand that things like the physical award does cost money even if the title itself doesn't. Is an email and social media post as exciting as a plaque to hang in one's classroom?

Enough of my rambling today on paying for awards. Often when I see the list of recipients, like "30 K12 Influencers to Follow" I know right away know that it's well deserved. Just don't pop my bubble by telling me someone paid to make that list because I know a bunch of the people on the list and know they deserve recognition.