The Buzz

Classy Vibing with AI begins June 9th. Join me and a cohort of educators as we explore the ins and outs of developing apps, tools, and games with AI.

Each week of the class brings a fresh topic and optional assignment. Yes, I give kind, helpful, and specific feedback on all assignments.

Week 1: 🎲 Shake Things Up

June 9, 2026: Vibe code custom randomizers and reveal tools that add a spark of spontaneity and surprise to any lesson.

Week 2: 🧰 Build Your Toolbox

June 16, 2026: Engineer practical classroom tools, such as custom word games, link generators, and bell-ringers that are tailored exactly to your daily needs.

Week 3: 💓 Bring It to Life

June 23, 2026: Transform static content into dynamic and interactive experiences where students can drag, sort, and manipulate objects right on the screen.

Week 4: 🏆 Design the Win

June 30, 2026: Go beyond simple review by designing engaging games and interactive challenges that captivate students and make learning stick.

Read my previous post all about this summer workshop.

"I can't believe I built this." That’s the feeling Kathryn had after participating in Classy Vibing with AI. Watch her talk about the workshop. She'll inspire you to join the June cohort!

What is it actually like inside my online workshop? Chad gives you a peek into the supportive community that helped him build awesome educational apps.

Register for Classy Vibing with AI through Learning in Hand.

Last week, a preschool teacher had a folder full of photos and needed a quick way to turn them into a slideshow video with music for the last day of school. No time to resize and arrange dozens of images in a video editor. She asked if I had a solution, so I vibe coded Reel Fast.

Before I started building with Gemini, I asked AI if it was even possible for a single-page HTML web app to turn images into a video. I assumed the answer would be no, but modern browsers are surprisingly powerful! They can handle image processing, transitions, music, and video export right inside the browser window.

The really important part is that everything happens locally on the device. Photos never need to be uploaded to a server, which means private student images stay on the teacher’s computer.

This is what continues to amaze me about vibe coding. You can start with a real classroom problem in the morning and end up with a working solution before lunch, even if you’ve never built something like it before.

And, I just love having the Teacher Hive platform there to easily publish the HTML.

Teacher Hive has hundreds of apps, and bookmarks are how you keep track of the ones you'll want to come back to. While logged into Teacher Hive, tap the bookmark icon on any app and it lands in your Saved list, which gets created automatically the first time you bookmark something.

Once you've saved a few, bookmark lists are the next move. You can make up to 20 of them, named however you want, like "End-of-year activities," "Brain breaks," or "Sub-day favorites." When you bookmark an app, the pop up message lets you drop it straight into the right list instead of always defaulting to Saved.

Click your profile picture in the top-right corner of Teacher Hive and choose My Bookmarks. This is where you can add, rename, reorder, and delete lists.

Lists can be public, too. Flip the toggle on any of your lists and you'll get a URL like teacherhive.app/user/tony/randomizers. Send it to a colleague and they can browse the whole collection, which is a much nicer way to share than copying and pasting ten app links one by one. Publics lists are also displayed on your Profile page.

Bookmark something this week, and if a list of yours is worth sharing, flip it public and pass the URL along. Feel free to share through email, newsletters, and social media.

You are cordially invited to join my summer online workshop.

Classy Vibing with AI is all about helping teachers build their own apps. You bring the ideas, and AI writes the code. It's about useful, creative, clever tools made by educators who know exactly what students and teachers need.

June is the perfect month for this kind of work. Your brain finally has room to wander a little. To experiment. To make weird stuff. To build something just because you’re curious what would happen.

In this workshop, we’ll take your ideas and turn them into classroom-ready tools with polish, personality, and purpose.

We’ll explore things like:

1. Giving AI a better game plan. Learn how to create a simple Product Requirements Document (PRD) so the AI isn’t just guessing what you want.
2. Making apps feel legit. Add splash screens, pop-ups, notifications, animations, and other details that make an app feel smooth and intentional.
3. Adding fun without adding chaos. Points. Progress bars. Sound effects. Tiny celebrations. Retro game vibes. The little things that bring moments of delight.
4. Building for joy. Most projects solve real classroom problems. Others are just playful excuses to practice. Both are worth making.

One of the coolest parts of these workshops is seeing teachers build alongside each other. Someone shares an idea, someone else remixes it, and suddenly an entire school has a growing collection of custom-made tools.

If you’ve already been experimenting on Teacher Hive, this workshop will help you level up. If you haven’t built anything yet, that’s fine too. You’ll fit right in.

Groups of 5 or more receive discounted pricing. Purchase orders are welcome.

Ready to build something? Register here: learninginhand.com/classyvibing

See what’s possible on Teacher Hive. Check out my apps. teacherhive.app/user/tony

I needed a quick way to blur student faces in photos, so I vibe coded an app called Secure Obscure. The selection and blurring all happen directly in the browser, so images never leave your device or get uploaded to a website. When you’re working with student photos, that kind of privacy matters.

I vibe coded my Secure Obscure app with Gemini. My initial prompt was:

I would like to build an HTML app where I upload an image. Then I'm given a lasso tool, circle tool, and rectangle select tool used to blur parts of a photo, mostly faces in a photo. The user can control the level of blur. When done, the photo can be downloaded.

I also used my App-ily Ever After Gemini Gem to brainstorm names for this app. I’ve trained the Gem to suggest playful app names using alliteration, rhymes, portmanteaus, and phrase swaps. After generating several ideas, I landed on a rhyming name.

Like most vibe coding projects, the Secure Obscure took several rounds of revisions. I hit a wall when Gemini just could not get the blur feature working correctly on my iPhone. We went through about 10 iterations, and the selected parts of the image still wouldn’t blur on mobile devices.

So I copied the HTML code into Claude and explained the issue. Claude reviewed the code, spotted the problem, and fixed it after two more iterations.

That experience reminded me that building with AI is often less about finding the perfect chatbot and more about knowing when to switch tools. One AI helped me name the app. Another helped me debug it. Sometimes the fastest path forward is a second opinion from a different chatbot.

This week I subbed in a fourth grade classroom. The plans had me teaching Bridges Math Unit 7, Module 1, Session 4: Equivalent Fraction Fill. I’ve taught Bridges before, so I know the routine. This lesson uses paper fraction bars and a spinner for a whole-class game.

Instead of juggling all that under a document camera, I asked Google Gemini to turn the paper game into a full-screen digital activity for the classroom touchscreen. I named it Fraction Fill.

Along with the game rules, here are some of the prompts that made a difference:

1. Design for the big screen → Keep everything on one screen. No scrolling.
2. Take up the whole display → Include a full screen button.
3. Add a Start button → Don’t begin or assign teams automatically. Use a big Start button so I can kick things off when I’m ready.
4. Make turns obvious → Add an arrow above the active team and gray out the other side so everyone can see whose turn it is.
5. Plan for learning moments → If a fraction is incorrect, don’t cover up what the student entered. Let us see and talk about it.
6. Include a celebration → Show a message for the winning team and add a glowing border in their color.
7. Show the board at the end → Keep the final board visible so we can review and discuss.

So much of vibe coding is about anticipating actual classroom use. If you picture the lesson playing out, you’ll write better prompts. For Fraction Fill's second game, teams were already strategizing about which fractions were easier to place.

My district join a student data privacy consortium this year and we have them vet all of our approved tools to get signed Data Privacy Agreements. I recently submitted GitHub Education as a means to host files to use in Vibe Coding projects. They (GitHub) refused to sign an agreement. Does anyone know of another education platform where files (audio, video, & image) can be stored for free and retrieved in Vibe Coding projects?

When you build an app for Teacher Hive, it’s easy to move on as soon as it works. Before you do, add your name somewhere in the app.

I usually include a simple line like:

Developed by Tony Vincent. Coded with Gemini.

I link my name to my website so people have a way to contact me if they have a question, an idea, or even a bug to report.

Even though your app might show your name inside Teacher Hive, every app can also be opened directly using its apphive.us link. That means people can land in your app without ever seeing Teacher Hive, so they won’t see your name unless you’ve built it into the app.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. A small footer on the main screen works. An About page is another easy option. You could also tuck it into a menu, a help section, or a quick splash screen when the app loads.

I also include the AI I used because it reflects how the app was actually made. It’s a simple way to be transparent, especially if students are using what you’ve built.

You vibe coded it, but you still made it, so take credit for your ideas and the experience you created.

You know that little “Saved!” message that pops up? Or the box that makes you confirm before deleting something? Those have names. Most of us just never learned them.

They’re all part of the user interface, or UI. The pieces of an app that respond when you click, tap, or type. You’ve used them forever. You just haven’t needed to talk about them… until now.

With vibe coding, the words you use matter. If you tell AI “make something pop up,” you’ll get a result, but it might not match what you pictured. When you know the name for it, you can be specific, and the output gets a whole lot better.

That’s why Shana Ramin made UI Elements. It’s a place to click around, see these pieces in action, and finally put names to the things you’ve been using all along.

An icon is like a book cover or movie poster for your app. It shows up small, so keep it simple. Bold, unique, and easy to recognize works best.

When you add an app to Teacher Hive, you can upload a custom square icon. Aim for 512 × 512 pixels. If you skip this step, Teacher Hive creates a simple default icon. You can always update it later.

Your app’s icon appears in several places:

1. Teacher Hive website
2. Browser tab (favicon)
3. Social media previews
4. Phone or tablet Home Screen

Try adding your app to your device’s Home Screen. It’s pretty satisfying to see it alongside your other apps.

Add your app to an iPhone or iPad Home Screen:

1. Open your app in Safari
2. Tap Share
3. Tap Add to Home Screen
4. Tap Add