Classroom tech, explained teacher to teacher.
SPS Digital Learning Hour follows Springfield Public Schools educators as they talk through technology, classroom routines, and student engagement. Led by Mike Thomas, the show mixes district updates with interviews and step-by-step reflections on tools teachers can actually use.
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SPS Digital Learning Hour is a grounded K-12 technology show centered on Springfield Public Schools and the teachers using digital tools with students. It is practical first. Mike Thomas, the Bearded Tech Ed Guy, moves between district announcements, educator interviews, and guided reflections on classroom books and tools. The show spends a lot of time on game-based learning because games give it a concrete way to talk about motivation, failure, feedback, choice, and collaboration. Those ideas stay connected to school routines. Episodes in the Power Up Your Learning series walk through chapters from Power Up Your Classroom, using classroom examples to ask what students need before gameplay can support real learning. Safety matters. Students need room to make mistakes, celebrate each other, rely on peers, and try again without losing all their progress. The show is especially useful when it slows down over a single classroom move. Quizlet Live becomes less about a named product and more about collaborative formative assessment. A student-designed board game becomes a lesson in audience, challenge, purpose, and design. Breakout EDU becomes a bridge between escape-room thinking and instructional structure. Interviews bring a different texture. Conversations with educators surface early-childhood technology in action, from Kibo robots and programming blocks to remote routines that helped families see the rigor inside the classroom day. The show also has a district-memory quality. It notes district news, teaching awards, professional learning opportunities, and the ordinary updates that shape a teacher's week. Its appeal comes from that mix of local specificity and transferable practice. Springfield educators will recognize the internal references, but teachers outside the district can still hear usable questions: What are students actually doing? Where does choice live? How does technology help them talk, build, practice, assess, and recover from mistakes? The production is unpolished in a useful way. It sounds like a teacher thinking through the work with other teachers, and that makes the show feel more like a conference-room conversation than a sales pitch.
Made for: Designed for K-12 educators, instructional technology staff, and school leaders who want classroom-tested ideas for digital learning, assessment, student engagement, and game-based instruction.
What sets it apart: Its strength is local, specific practice: Springfield Public Schools updates sit beside teacher interviews and book-study episodes that turn edtech concepts into concrete classroom moves.
We're bringing you the latest news in the Springfield Public Schools in regards to technology along with inspiring interviews from teachers who are using technology in the classroom. We'll also inform you of latest updates, practices, and news as it pertains to our district.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Mike Thomas connects classroom technology to instructional purpose through practical teacher conversations and carefully structured lessons on game-based learning.
Mike Thomas keeps SPS Digital Learning Hour close to classroom practice, moving between teacher interviews and solo discussions of game-based learning.
Minecraft empathy lessons and cat-topped robots: your lesson plan can afford a little play.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A farewell episode that uses remote learning to show the rigor and relationship-building inside early childhood classrooms.
The episode ends with Mike Thomas’s farewell after 12 years in Springfield Public Schools, then turns to Faye Dolson and Anna Meyerhoff reflecting on what remote learning exposed in kindergarten and preschool.
A practical chapter on the classroom habits that make game-based learning work.
This level of Power Up Your Classroom: Reimagined Learning Through Gameplay turns to classroom culture, showing how games can shape the way students connect.
A book-study episode makes game-based assessment feel practical, collaborative, and closely tied to student motivation.
Level Five of Power Up Your Classroom frames assessment and feedback around a simple classroom question: who is winning? Mike Thomas's discussion of Lindsay Blass's section begins with a recognizable gap between a teacher's interest in tracking mastery and students' less…
Student-made games get a practical frame for classroom planning.
SPS Digital Learning Hour reaches level four of its Power Up Your Learning journey with a clear shift toward game-based learning and the classroom changes that follow when students build and run the game.
A grounded look at letting students struggle, reset, and keep learning.
Game thinking gives the episode a clean route into classroom failure. A student makes the wrong move, returns to the last save, keeps what has been earned, and tries again.
A practical guide to giving classroom games a clear instructional purpose.
This Power Up Your Classroom installment frames classroom game design as instructional planning, moving from the page 37 framework into objectives, standards, tools, actions, challenge, assessment, and next steps.
A practical first level on gamification and game-based learning, grounded in classroom examples teachers will recognize.
Gamification gets a practical classroom tryout here, starting with the basic distinction between gamification and game-based learning before returning to the instructional objective an activity is meant to serve.
Minecraft becomes a classroom tool for participation, empathy, and conflict work.
This episode works best once it settles into the full teacher interviews on Minecraft in education. The strongest stretch comes with the move into remote Second Steps lessons, where a teacher notes that 40-minute sessions can start to feel like talking at kids for too long.
Classroom practice, school change, and AI with purpose.
Media literacy, tested against real feeds.
Business stories with practical connective tissue.
Edtech talk with classroom sense and snacks.
Free classroom tech, tested by a teacher.
Campus AV talk from the people maintaining it.
Mike Thomas opens the hour from a conference room in Central Office and says this is his final episode after 12 years in the Springfield Public School District.
Mike Thomas opens from a conference room in Central Office with the Digital Learning Department, then moves into level six of Power Up Your Classroom Reimagined Learning Through Gameplay by Lindsay Blass and Kate Tolney.
Mike Thomas examines Level Five of Power Up Your Classroom: Reimagined Learning Through Gameplay, focusing on game-based assessment and feedback.
Mike Thomas records from a conference room in Central Office.
Mike Thomas of SPS Digital Learning Hour explains Level 2 of Power Up Your Learning, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” by connecting classroom choice to games, menus, and student-directed projects.
Mike Thomas uses SPS Digital Learning Hour to explain Level 3, “On Your Mark: Structure, Design, and Purpose,” from Power Up Your Classroom: Reimagined Learning Through Gameplay by Lindsay Blass and Kate Tolney.
Mike Thomas interviews Melissa Zeitz, a computer science teacher at Alfred D.
Mike Thomas defines game-based learning as using gameplay to meet instructional objectives and gamification as adding game-design elements to instruction.
SPS Digital Learning Hour host Mike Thomas introduces a series on gamification and game-based learning built around Lindsay Blass and Kate Tolney’s book Power Up Your Classroom.
Mike Thomas records from Central Office.
Host Mike Thomas announces district tech updates and introduces an interview with a teacher using technology in the classroom.
Host Mike Thomas introduces the podcast, discusses updates on GCN and TeachPoint, and previews a discussion on the Digital Learning Playbook Module 2 about the first days of school.
Host Mike Thomas introduces the podcast, promotes a blog post about PowerPoint's live presentation feature, and previews an interview with teacher Karen Potter about using technology in the classroom during COVID.