ISTELive 26: Google's first, Microsoft's counter, the cyber backlash.

What you're walking into

ISTELive 26 runs June 28 through July 1 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, co-located with the ASCD Annual Conference 26 under one registration. Roughly the same crowd as last year's San Antonio edition, with the conversation moved sharply by one announcement. On February 23, 2026, ISTE+ASCD announced a three-year partnership with Google that puts free Gemini access and AI literacy training in front of six million US educators. Microsoft is sitting in the same building as a Year-Round Mission Sponsor. The hallway question for four days is simple. Whose platform owns the teacher's morning routine in 2027.

The year's headline: Google's flag, and what Microsoft is doing about it

Two announcements set the agenda for this conference, and they landed on consecutive days.

On February 23, 2026, ISTE+ASCD and Google announced a three-year partnership. Free AI literacy training and Gemini access for six million US educators (The 74, eWeek). Neither side disclosed the price tag attached to Google's commitment. The next morning, February 24, Microsoft's Senior Director of Education and Workforce Policy testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee under the title 'Teaching in the AI Age' (Microsoft On The Issues). Two platforms planted a flag in the same week. Neither one is leaving the field.

ISTELive 26 is where the procurement decisions get made. The Year-Round Mission Sponsor logos on the ISTE landing page list two names: Microsoft and Google. The Gold tier underneath them is Lenovo, Dell Technologies, Instructure, and GM. Hardware vendors and an LMS, plus an automaker funding the workforce pipeline.

The operative question for any district CIO walking the show floor: which integration are you betting on for the next three years, and what does the exit ramp look like if your state's data-privacy law catches up with the rollout. The CoSN 2026 State of EdTech report, published in early May, named cybersecurity the number-one district concern and explicitly called for AI guardrails before deployment (GovTech). Districts are being asked to pick a vendor partner faster than their governance can keep up.

That's the headline. Everything else at this conference rotates around it.

Featured Voices to track, and the questions to ask them

ISTE's full agenda was still rolling out in waves as of mid-May. As of writing, three Featured Voices are publicly confirmed.

Heather McGowan, future-of-work strategist, announced as a Featured Voice on April 13 (ISTE Instagram). Her recent work, including 'The Empathy Advantage' and her Forbes columns, has focused on how leaders design learning environments and workplaces under sustained uncertainty. The question worth bringing to her session: when she gets specific about teacher-replacement risk versus teacher-augmentation, where does she actually land. The honest answer is the one most keynoters dodge.

Chacko Abraham, Ed.D., Featured Voice. Public signal on Abraham was thin in the search bundle, which is normal for a Featured Voice three weeks out. Watch the session for his angle on equity in district-scale AI rollouts. The follow-up question afterward: who in your district isn't getting Gemini access yet, and why.

Deborah Higdon, Ed.D., Featured Voice. Same gap in public signal. The question that earns attention from the people on the panel with her: what does her implementation framework say to districts that standardized on Microsoft 365 a decade ago and are now being asked to layer a Google partnership on top of it.

If you can't get into a Featured Voice room, work the policy track instead. The session that matters most this year is the one where someone from the Department of Education describes the new discretionary-funding-priority rule that K-12 Dive covered in April. That rule decides who gets the grants. That rule decides who keeps the lights on next budget cycle.

Breakouts where the conversation actually lives

The agenda is huge and the breakouts vary wildly in usefulness. Four kinds of sessions are worth the elbow grease.

1. The CoSN-aligned cybersecurity tracks. The May 2026 CoSN report flagged cybersecurity as the number-one district concern (GovTech). Any session featuring a sitting district CTO talking through how they secured a Google or Microsoft AI rollout against their state's student-data-privacy law is signal. Most other cyber sessions will be vendors pitching SIEMs.
2. The new federal grant-priority sessions. The Department of Education's April final rule weights AI initiatives across multiple discretionary grant programs (K-12 Dive). The room covering 'how to write a grant under the new priorities' will be full. Listen for which states already have application templates circulating.
3. The K-12 and higher-ed bridge sessions. eSchool News in May named structured collaboration between K-12 and higher ed as a research-to-practice problem (May 11). ISTELive's joint format with ASCD makes this conference one of the rare venues where both audiences are physically in the same hall. Look for the panels with both a university faculty member and a sitting K-12 administrator on the same stage. Skip the ones with three university faculty and a moderator.
4. The Computer Science Teachers Association sessions. NSF awarded CSTA $11M in March to expand AI training for K-12 teachers (GovTech). CSTA leadership will be at the conference. The question to bring them: how do you scale AI-teacher training in districts that haven't yet figured out who owns the laptop refresh.

Skip any session whose title is three buzzwords stacked together. The good sessions name a specific district, a specific protocol, or a specific dollar figure.

Booths to walk, and what each is actually selling

Two Year-Round Mission Sponsor names sit at the top of the page. Under them, the Gold tier. Here is what each is doing this year.

Microsoft. Says: Copilot for Education, Microsoft 365, Teams, Learning Accelerators. Selling: defending its installed base before Google's six-million-educator deal converts open share. Microsoft already owns most district IT stacks through 365 procurement. The booth conversation worth having is about the school district that is half Microsoft, half Chromebook today, and which side picks up the AI policy.

Google. Says: Gemini for Education, Chromebook, Workspace, the new ISTE+ASCD partnership. Selling: the second decade of 'free for teachers, then sticky.' Apple did this with iWork. Microsoft did this with Office 365 Education. Google's three-year ISTE+ASCD partnership is the same play translated into the Gemini era. The booth question: who gets de-prioritized when an educator has free Gemini at home and a paid Copilot license through the district.

Lenovo (Gold). Says: ThinkPad plus Chromebook for education. Selling: the hardware partner who ships whatever the district picked, which is its own form of leverage. The conversation: lease terms on the new Copilot+ PCs with on-device inference versus the cheaper Chromebooks the IT director already trusts.

Dell Technologies (Gold). Says: classroom devices, district IT services. Selling: the alternative procurement story for districts wary of locking too tightly to one cloud. Dell has the rare credibility to be the multi-cloud answer in a market that quietly wants exactly that hedge.

Instructure (Gold). Says: Canvas LMS. Selling: the LMS layer where everyone else's AI integration lives or dies. Canvas's roadmap on Gemini and Copilot integrations is the spec that determines what teachers actually see in the classroom. Stop by. Ask about gradebook write-back latency.

GM (Gold). Says: workforce development partnership. Selling: an automaker's early bet that high-school CTE will need a vendor partner. GM as an ISTELive sponsor is a strategy signal more than a booth visit, but worth a five-minute conversation about what the manufacturers are now expecting from K-12.

Three things the hallway will debate, one thing nobody will say

Three open questions for the hallways.

First, whether Google's six-million-educator partnership locks Gemini in as the default before districts have data-governance answers in place. The CoSN report says no. The federal grant priorities say go. The hallway will try to reconcile those two signals over coffee.

Second, whether the joint ISTELive plus ASCD format actually serves both audiences or quietly dilutes them. ASCD's instructional-leadership focus and ISTE's tech-implementation focus do not overlap as much as the unified registration page suggests. Watch for separate ASCD-only side meetings and after-hours dinners. That's the tell.

Third, whether the Department of Education's April final rule survives the next reorganization. Federal grant priorities have a habit of being walked back six months in. District CFOs will be asking each other, quietly at the bar, whether to write the application now or wait until October.

One thing nobody will say from a keynote stage.

The Google partnership is the same vendor-funded teacher-training pattern Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have run for two decades. Free certification, free professional development, free seat licenses for teachers, then a generation of educators standardize on the platform, then districts standardize on it too because retraining the teacher base is expensive. The pattern works. The six-million-educator deal is a customer acquisition pipeline dressed as a public service. No keynote will name it that way, because both platforms are paying for the keynote stage. The question for any K-12 leader actually doing the math: how do you negotiate procurement terms in 2029 against a teacher base trained on one specific stack who would have to retrain to switch.

Nobody on the program is going to ask that question publicly. Worth carrying into the booth conversations yourself.

After Orlando

Orlando is a 200-card week. By Monday morning, the principals you met Tuesday have already forgotten which face matched which problem they were trying to solve. The warm window closes inside 72 hours. That is the entire point of Met.

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