Topic: Technology and Innovation | Teacher-Created AI Tools
Presenter: Henrique Miguel S. Casal Ribeiro
Presentation details
Most English teachers use educational technology; far fewer make it. The tools arrive finished, built around someone else's idea of what a classroom needs. This workshop takes the opposite position: that teachers can build small, fit-for-purpose language learning tools themselves, with an AI assistant and free platforms, no coding background and no budget required.
To prove it, I'll build one live. Using a custom Google Gem set up to guide the process, I'll take an idea from someone in the audience, a gap they actually have in their teaching, and we'll turn it into a working app on screen, from rough idea to running prototype. You'll see every decision as it's made, including the false starts, and you can follow along with your own idea as we go.
I'll start by showing BizSlang, a Business English idiom translator I built this way with a free AI API, as proof that a teacher's pedagogical knowledge, not technical skill, is what drives the result. Then we build something new, together.
By the end you'll know how to prompt an AI assistant into producing something usable, where to host it for free, and how to recognize when a classroom problem is worth a quick custom build. No programming is assumed. Nervousness about technology is treated as a fair place to start, not a problem to fix.
The real point is agency. A teacher who can build stops waiting for decisions made elsewhere and starts shaping technology around the learners actually in front of them.
Bring an idea. We'll build it.
About the presenter
Henrique Casal Ribeiro lives in Portugal. He teaches ESP at Lusófona University and delivers corporate English training at an IT company. He has taught for 26 years, online since 2016, and researches connectivist professional development for online English teachers as a doctoral candidate at NOVA FCSH / Universidade Aberta.
He created the language learning apps Capsulingo and BizSlang, and wrote the book Teaching English in the Digital Age: Online Practices and Innovations (2024).