Welcome to episode 364 (“The Rise of Gemini AI”) of the EdTech Situation Room from December 3, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) discuss the “rise of Gemini” following the release of Google’s Gemini 3.0 and reports of OpenAI declaring a “Code Red.” The hosts debate Australia’s move to enforce a social media age limit of 16 and the potential banning of VPNs. Conversation also turns to academic integrity, featuring a breakdown of The Simpsons’ take on AI cheating, the risks of adversarial detection, and the changing nature of software engineering with “vibe coding.” Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Google Gemini 3: A New Era of Intelligence (Google Blog, 18 Nov 2025)

* OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Declares “Code Red” As Gemini Gains 200 Million Users In 3 Months (Ars Technica, 02 Dec 2025)

* Marc Benioff’s response to Gemini 3

* Black Students Are More Likely to Be Falsely Accused of Using AI to Cheat (Education Week, 18 Sep 2024)

* AI may be scoring your college essay. Welcome to the new era of admissions (AP, 2 Dec 2025)

* Our Response to AI Cannot be Adversarial (Marc Watkins Substack, 1 Dec 2025)

* I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. (Huffpost, 29 Nov 2025)

* “The Simpsons” season 37 episode tackles AI cheating and Chalmers’ slime craze (The Express Tribune, 7 Oct 2025)

* VIDEO: Bart Gets Caught Using CheatGPT On His Homework | The Simpsons

* Simpson’s Fandom Wiki: Keep Chalm and Gary On

* Anthropic Studied Its Own Engineers to Assess How AI is Changing Work (Times of India / Anthropic, 3 Dec 2025)

* Republicans drop Trump-ordered block on state AI laws from defense bill (ArsTechnica, 3 Dec 2025)

* Australia to enforce social media age limit of 16 with fines up to $33 million (AP News, 3 Dec 2025)

* Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing (EFF; 13 November 2025)

* How institutions worldwide used Google for Education tools in 2025 (Google Blog, 3 Dec 2025)

* AI Literacy from Google

* Commodore 64 Available Again

* Jason’s Geeks of the Week: GooseAI - https://antigravity.google/

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Gemini AI GEM replacements for my CustomGPTs: Social Media Post Formatter - Design - Create - Share Lesson Builder and Podcast: “Michael Burry Speaks” - Holiday Tech Gadget Wish Lists

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* Anthropic Accidentally Gives the World a Peek Into Its Model’s Soul (Gizmodo, 01 Dec 2025)

* Why Academics (and Educators) Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky (Impact of Social Sciences, May 2025)

* ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants (Brennan Center for Justice, 21 Nov 2025)

* “Digital Citizenship in the Surveillance State” from 2016

* Solar’s Growth in US Almost Enough to Offset Rising Energy Use (Ars Technica, 26 Nov 2025)

Episode 364 is also available on YouTube in two formats: Portrait mode optimized for mobile phones, and Landscape mode optimized for laptop / desktop computers!

Welcome to episode 363 (“AI Upgrades, Privacy Tradeoffs”) of the EdTech Situation Room from November 12, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) unpack OpenAI’s pushback against a court order that would expose 20 million user chats in the New York Times lawsuit, and what that means for “private” AI conversations in schools and beyond. They explore GPT-5.1’s new “personalities,” emerging competitors like DeepSeek and Mistral, and the complex tradeoffs between powerful new models, copyright, and training data ethics. The conversation turns to Google’s latest moves with Gemini agents, AI “Workspace flows,” NotebookLM for Students, and Canva’s expanding AI features, all framed as tools that can act as thought partners rather than shortcuts for learners. Wes and Jason also dig into media literacy practices like hyperlinked student writing, keeping AI chat logs for transparency, and reclaiming news feeds with trusted voices instead of doomscrolling social media. Rounding things out, they touch on FBI efforts to unmask the operator of Archive.today, a CRISPR-powered attempt to revive an ancient gene to treat gout, and their Geeks of the Week: rolling your own AI-powered email with Thunderbird/ThunderAI and experimenting with StreamYard’s new multi-aspect-ratio streaming setup, plus a webinar on AI superprompts and “The Anxious Generation.” Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* OpenAI Fights Order To Hand Over 20 Million Private ChatGPT Conversations (Ars Technica, 12 Nov 2025)

* Can I Upload That? AI, Copyright, and Our Classrooms (TCEA, Miguel Guhlin, 3 Nov 2025)

* Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

* OpenAI Walks a Tricky Tightrope With GPT-5.1’s Eight New Personalities (Ars Technica, 12 Nov 2025)

* https://aiinside.show/

* Google’s New AI Studio Vibe Coding Push: Create Full-Stack Apps in a Weekend (Geeky Gadgets, 7 Nov 2025)

* NotebookLM for Students

* YouTube’s AI Power-Up: How We Got Even More Helpful This Year (YouTube Blog, 12 Dec 2024)

* AI and Learning: A New Chapter for Students and Educators (Google Blog, 6 Nov 2023)

* Guided Learning in Gemini: From Answers to Understanding (Google Blog, 6 Aug 2025)

* Google Gemini’s New AI Agent Upgrade is INSANE! (Automate Tasks Across Google) (YouTube)

* A New Chinese AI Model Claims To Outperform GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 – and It’s Free (ZDNet, 7 Nov 2025)

* https://www.deepseek.com/ (don’t use the Deep Seek App…)

* https://chat.z.ai/

* https://www.quinengine.com/

* https://www.kimi.com/en/

* https://lmarena.ai/

* From France, $60 per year for educators: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

* Canva Keynote 2025: The Imagination Era (1.5 hours)

* The FBI Is Trying to Unmask the Registrar Behind Archive.Today (Gizmodo, 7 Nov 2025)

* Scientists Revive an Ancient Human Gene That Could Help Cure Gout (SciTechDaily, 9 Nov 2025)

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Streamyard MARS (Multi-aspect-ratio Streaming) - I Want You to Understand Chicago - Reclaiming Our News Feeds - 17 Nov Webinar: AI Superprompts and “The Anxious Generation”

* Jason’s Geek of the Week: Roll Your Own AI Email with Thunderbolt and ThunderAI

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid (The New Yorker, 27 Oct 2025)

* Yes, LLMs Can Be Better at Search (Mike Caulfield Substack, 10 May 2025)

* Sam Altman Served With Subpoena While Onstage at AI Safety Forum

* Apple and WhatsApp Targeted With Spyware by Israeli Firm Paragon (The Guardian, 10 Nov 2025)

* The Last Days of Social Media (Noema, 2 Sep 2025)

* The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens (The Atlantic, 21 May 2024)

* IKEA Just Announced 21 Smart Home Gadgets — Here’s the Ones I’m Buying (Tom’s Guide, 7 Nov 2025)

Episode 363 is also available on YouTube in two formats: Portrait mode optimized for mobile phones, and Landscape mode optimized for laptop / desktop computers!

Welcome to episode 362 (“Browsers Gone Agentic”) of the EdTech Situation Room from Wednesday, October 29, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) unpack the fast-moving world of agentic AI browsers—Atlas, Comet, and an open-source “BrowserOS”—including why they’re built atop Chromium, where they currently feel clunky in real workflows, and how prompt-injection and data-exfiltration risks translate to concrete school safeguards (sandboxing/air-gapping, limiting LMS credentials, and policy updates). We review TechCrunch’s warning on “glaring” browser-agent risks, Perplexity’s Comet prompt-injection mitigations, and real-world demos that show why an agent could plausibly log into an LMS and complete assignments—raising new academic-integrity and supervision questions for districts. Beyond the browser, we explore creator-tool shifts—Adobe + Google AI model integrations, YouTube Shorts/Studio nudges, and Meta’s AI editing tools in Instagram Stories—and how educators can balance creative possibilities with a rising tide of AI “slop.” We also dig into media-literacy lessons from “Grokipedia” vs. Wikipedia: edit histories, transparency, bias, and why source-checking remains a must-teach habit. Rounding out the hour, the duo spotlights a readable primer on quantum computing’s looming “Q-Day” encryption risk—and why starting the transition to quantum-safe practices belongs on IT roadmaps now. Wes also shares how our new Substack-first post-production workflow (YouTube → Substack with full link lists) is keeping the back catalog current and easier to find.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Adobe and Google team up to offer more AI models and YouTube integration (TechRadar; 29 October 2025)

* Elon Musk launches Grokipedia — an encyclopedia where AI gets the last word (Cointelegraph; 28 October 2025)

* The glaring security risks with AI browser agents (TechCrunch; 25 October 2025)

* Reference to Oct 22 Windows Weekly from TWiT

* Mitigating Prompt Injection in Comet (Perplexity Blog; 22 October 2025)

* What is Education Pro for Perplexity?

* BrowserOS

* Instagram users can now use Meta AI editing tools directly in IG Stories. (TechCrunch, 23 Oct 2025)

* CustomGPT for EdTechSR podcast post-production

* Chat transcript example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6902be89-2950-800e-aabf-cea6567ca611

* Custom GPT: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68fd20ce2f1c8191ac7f3fb207ca6487-edtechsr-podcast-post-production-oct-2025

* Quantum Computing Is Coming for Your Digital Secrets (The Walrus, 2 Oct 2025)

* Elon Musk Launches Grokipedia, an AI‑Powered Wikipedia Rival (The Washington Post, 27 Oct 2025) - paywall free

* grokipedia.com

* Turing Test (WikiPedia)

* HBO Silicon Valley

* Wes’ Geek of the WEek: My Pinboard

* Jason’s Geeks of the Week: Software Treats: Gemini Desk and Ollama + Thunderbird + ThunderAI

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* Anthropic Reaches Settlement With Authors Guild Over AI Copyright Dispute (Authors Guild, 21 October 2025)

* What Past Education Technology Failures Can Teach Us About the Future of AI in Schools (The Conversation, 18 October 2025)

* Senators announce bill that would ban AI chatbot companions for minors (NBC News; 28 October 2025)

* Open AI Non/For Profit

* Built to benefit everyone (OpenAI News; 28 October 2025)

* The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership (OpenAI News; 28 October 2025)

* Projects Sharing Available to All

* The Majority View of AI (Anil Dash; 17 October 2025)

* Why Open Source May Not Survive the Rise of Generative AI (ZDNET, 28 Oct 2025)

* Homework Faces an Existential Crisis — Has AI Made It Pointless? (L.A.Times, 25 Oct 2025)

* The Homework Apocalypse (Ethan Mollick; 1 July 2023)

Episode 362 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 361 (“AI Workflows for Educators”) of the EdTech Situation Room from October 22, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) kick off with the surge of AI-first browsers—OpenAI’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and DIA—what an “agentic” web experience looks like (multi-tab summaries, draft-my-email helpers, even automated shopping), and why the launch details matter (Mac-only at first and Chromium-based). We examine the trade-offs for schools—tracking, data monetization, and prompt-injection risks that could expose logged-in accounts—and why IT directors are wary of mixing these new browsers with corporate or school Google accounts. From there, Jason demos a highly practical admin workflow: loading student, parent, and teacher handbooks into NotebookLM to compare policies, highlight inconsistencies, and spot places where one handbook goes deeper than another—a real-world time saver for leaders. We share classroom-ready prompting patterns (like “explain it for a sixth grader”) and lean on Mike Caulfield’s SIFT-style verification when sense-checking AI outputs; we also note the many avenues to a free year of Perplexity Pro (EDU address, PayPal promos). In the news roundup: AI-aided earthquake detection; a cautionary tale on sycophancy and bias in medicine; the long tail of the AWS outage (including unhappy smart beds); lingering fallout from the Jaguar Land Rover attack; plus lighter items from “AI toilet” to “Napster’s back.” We close with Geeks of the Week: running private, local AI with Ollama and the Native Mind Chrome plugin for on-device summaries and email assists, and iRig Pre 2 for piping XLR mics into an iPhone—a setup Wes used for a thousand-view livestream.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* ‘Like Putting on Glasses for the First Time’: How AI Improves Earthquake Detection (Ars Technica, 10 October 2025)

* When Sycophancy and Bias Meet Medicine (Ars Technica, 22 October 2025) - AI summary for a 6th grader

* ChatGPT Atlas

* AI Toilet, anyone?

* Napster’s Back!

* Jaguar Land Rover Struggling 8 Weeks After Most Expensive UK Cyberattack (Ars Technica, 22 October 2025)

* Smart Beds Leave Sleepers Hot and Bothered During AWS Outage (Ars Technica, 22 October 2025)

* The AWS Cloud Outage Has a Long Tail (Wired, 21 October 2025) - paywall free version

* Mentioned in the show:

* www.perplexity.ai/comet

* www.diabrowser.com

* Stupid Prompting Tricks (Frontier Learning Lab)

* home.truemark.ai

* SIFT Toolbox for AI

* Jason’s Geeks of the Week: Ollama / Native Mind

* Wes’ Geek of the Week: iRig Pre 2

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* 7 Prompts I Use for Every AI Chatbot — and They Work for Just About Everything (Tom’s Guide, 20 October 2025)

* Anthropic Reaches Settlement With Authors Guild Over AI Copyright Dispute (Authors Guild, 21 October 2025)

* What Past Education Technology Failures Can Teach Us About the Future of AI in Schools (The Conversation, 18 October 2025)

* WordPress Sites Hacked With Sneaky Malware Spread via Blockchain (Mashable, 21 October 2025)

* Google Claims to Have Quantum Advantage With a Potentially Useful Algorithm (Ars Technica, 22 October 2025)

Episode 361 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 360 (“Agentic AI Arrives”) of the EdTech Situation Room from October 8, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) dive into OpenAI’s newly announced agent platform and what “agentic” workflows could mean for classrooms and district offices—from ChatGPT orchestrating apps like Canva and Figma to recreate and edit an org chart on the fly, to MCP-style integrations that let LLMs read and write across Google Docs and other services. They connect the dots to practical automation teachers can use today (think: N8N/Make-style flows moving into mainstream AI tools), and discuss why this matters for instructional design and school operations.

The hosts then pivot to AI search literacy in light of Google’s evolving AI Overviews and headline-grabbing limitations (e.g., the “Trump”/“dementia” query story), arguing for explicit classroom instruction on how to interrogate AI answers and source them, not just accept them. They also unpack the “AI bubble?” conversation—sky-high capex, energy/water constraints, and the sustainability of business models—as highlighted by the Deutsche Bank warning and the data center buildout arms race.

From there, it’s digital resilience: a recent multi-state 911 outage traced to fiber cuts becomes a teachable moment about infrastructure dependencies and continuity planning for schools. Along the way, Wes shares a media-diet project—“Reclaiming Our News Feeds”—plus a DIY “federated reader” built with AI-assisted vibe coding that funnels newsletters into a Mastodon channel for Flipboard reading.

Concrete classroom takeaways abound: Jason’s recent vibe-coded Chrome extension, real SIS database-query bots improving efficiency, and why NotebookLM shines when paired with open textbooks and teacher-created materials. The Geeks of the Week include Wes’s trio—Spooky Scratch Stories, ORCID, and Vibe Coding with AI—and Jason’s PSA that educators with .edu emails can snag a year of Perplexity Pro (with notes on privacy tradeoffs), plus thoughts on Gemini for schools and the LM Arena model rankings.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Deutsche Bank Issues Grim Warning for AI Industry (Futurism, 24 Sep 2025)

* Introducing AgentKit (OpenAI, 8 Oct 2025)

* Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia (The Verge, 30 Sept 2025)

* Reclaiming Our News Feeds (Heal Our Culture on SubStack by Wes Fryer, 29 Sep 2025)

* AT&T attributes mass 911 outages in 3 states to fiber cuts made by ‘third parties’ (AP News, 26 Sept 2025)

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Spooky Scratch Stories - ORCID - Vibe Coding with AI

* Jason’s Geek of the Week: Perplexity free for students

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* 6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash (TechCrunch, 18 June 2025)

* Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing (WP Tavern, 24 Sep 2025)

Episode 360 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 359 (“Phishing Meets Copilot”) of the EdTech Situation Room from September 24, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) unpack how AI is reshaping both the attack surface and the classroom: we start with MIT Tech Review’s claim that 80% of ransomware now uses AI, then swap real-world spear-phishing stories and practical school-IT hygiene—like rethinking public staff email directories to reduce pattern-based credential attacks and mass phishing. From there we zoom out to information warfare and media literacy via PRX’s “GoLaxy Papers,” a report on targeted AI personas trained on individuals to covertly influence U.S. audiences—prompting a broader conversation about nation-state psy-ops and what educators can do to help students (and themselves) discern manipulation at scale. We also discuss the shift to short-form video: TikTok’s pull on teen news habits, YouTube’s push to Shorts, weak sponsor-disclosure norms among creators, and why this all raises the stakes for day-to-day media-literacy instruction.

On the tools front, Microsoft’s strategic partnership with Anthropic brings Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1 into Copilot—expanding multi-model options for educators and admins—and we map concrete “first-week” workflows inside Office apps. We tie that to “vibe coding” (prompt-based programming) as a teachable practice: Wes shares a personal project (an AI-assisted AppleScript/JS “federated reader” that curates newsletters and posts to Mastodon) and floats the idea of a high-school vibe-coding elective. We balance the security talk with a hopeful AI-in-healthcare segment—Nature-reported work (via ScienceAlert) on a model trained on UK Biobank data that forecasts 1,000+ diseases years in advance, and what “predict-then-prevent” might mean for future wellness curricula. Finally, Jason gives early impressions of Apple’s new iPhones (hello, 17 Pro Max) alongside pragmatic upgrade advice for families on carrier plans.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Google Gemini for Students

* Claude on Copilot

* Scientists Train AI to Forecast Over 1,000 Diseases, Years in Advance (Science Alert; 19 September 2025)

* 80% of ransomware attacks now use artificial intelligence (MIT Technology Review, 8 Sept 2025)

* The GoLaxy Papers: Inside China’s AI persona army (PRX Podcast, 19 Sept 2025)

* Vibe Coding: How Prompt-Based AI Is Transforming Software Development (Forbes, 23 Sept 2025)

* By some measures, TikTok has grown bigger than Facebook or Instagram in the US (Sherwood News, 17 Sept 2025)

* The Firing of Educators Over Kirk Comments Follows a Familiar Playbook (NY Times, 22 Sept 2025)

* OMGGGGG NEEWWWW IPhoneeeee!

* nanobanana.ai

* obsidian.md

* An Introduction to MCP and Authorization

* www.descript.com

* code.visualstudio.com

* Jason’s Geek of the Week: nativemind.app

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: January 2026 Thrive Conference - Kahoot Quiz from YouTube Video via OpenMCQ

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* Mixtral for Students/Educators

* Audible’s new AI “Ask a Question” feature lets you interrupt Jane Austen (TechRader; 19 September 2025)

* DeepMind AI safety report explores the perils of “misaligned” AI (ArsTechnica, 22 Sept 2025)

* Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages (Times of London, 4 April 2025)

* “China Keeps the Algorithm”: Critics Attack Trump’s TikTok Deal (Ars Technica, 17 Sep 2025)

* China Blocks Sale of Nvidia AI Chips (Ars Technica, 17 Sep 2025)

* Security Analysts Flag Rise in Russian-Created Misinformation Posts (ABC News, 23 September 2025)

* UN aviation gathering opens under shadow of cyberattacks, geopolitical tensions (Reuters, 23 Sept 2025)

Episode 359 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 358 (“Gemini AI Everywhere”) of the EdTech Situation Room from September 3, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) unpack Google’s sweeping shift from Assistant to Gemini—from phones and smart speakers to the classroom—and what those defaults mean for teachers, students, and families. We discuss how AI is changing the competitive landscape (and even how policymakers are thinking about antitrust in a world of fast-moving AI features and “set-by-default” experiences), plus the practicalities of turning on Gemini in school domains and coaching staff on safe, effective use. The guys trade stories about AI’s real-world hiccups (hello, drive-thru fails), the uneven impact on jobs (including translators), and the privacy lines around smart-home ecosystems (Google Home vs. Home Assistant, Zigbee/Z-Wave, and local control). On the developer side, we explore new AI coding copilots like Google’s “Jules” and popular editor integrations (e.g., Cursor/VS Code), along with hands-on image-generation progress (“Nano Banana” and friends) and why prompt-injection and AI safety habits matter more than ever. We wrap with quick looks at model comparison tools (LM Arena), tips for school leaders enabling Gemini, and our Geeks of the Week.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Gemini Is Replacing Google Assistant on Google Home Devices from October 1 — Here’s What We Know (Tom’s Guide, 3 September 2025)

* AI Killed My Job: Translators (Blood in the Machine, 21 Aug 2025)

* Someone Ordered 18,000 Cups of Water at an AI Drive-Thru — Now Fast Food Chains Are Reconsidering (ZDNet, 3 September 2025)

* Google Unveils Jules, Its Autonomous Coding Agent (Geeky Gadgets, 2 September 2025)

* How AI Upended a Historic Antitrust Case Against Google (Tech Policy Press, 3 Sept 2025)

* Jason’s Geek of the Week: lmarena.ai

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: DIY Home Assistant IoT Setup (video) - Wes’ Flipboard magazine iReading - Federated Reader

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* NASA and Google Test AI Medical Assistant for Astronaut Missions to the Moon and Mars (Space.com, 3 September 2025)

* Chatbots Are Susceptible to Flattery and Peer Pressure (The Verge, 3 September 2025)

* AI Inside Podcast

* Tech Policy Press

* Video: “I got a private lesson on Google’s NEW Nano Banana AI Model”

* Google AI Studio

* Prompt Injection

* Model Context Protocol: Introduction

Episode 358 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 357 (“AI Tinkering Playbook”) of the EdTech Situation Room from August 27, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) lean into the tinkerer’s mindset—treating AI as a thinking partner you iterate with, not a magic box—while swapping classroom-ready examples and PD patterns. They open with hands-on strategies for NotebookLM as a quasi custom-bot for staff handbooks and new-teacher docs, showing how a short “read this first” instruction turns NotebookLM into a practical helpdesk for policy Q&A. Then it’s a tour of PD formats that work: an advanced, build-something-together session (“Build-a-Bot”) where teachers leave with a functioning helper tailored to their workflow, and a foundations session (“Prompting is Teaching”) that frames promptcraft through how teachers already model, iterate, and improve student work. On the creative side, the hosts compare Nano Banana image edits (Wes’s Tetons photo… now featuring Ronald & Grimace!) with Qwen’s new image modifier, plus Freepik’s growing AI toolkit—concrete examples of “try it, test it, share it” tinkering educators can adopt tomorrow. Headlines include Meta + Midjourney model news, an Apple iPhone event preview, and a trio of security stories: an AI-assisted worm in the wild, Anthropic disrupting automated disinfo/attacks, and research on tricking AI browsers—reminders to keep beating the drum for password managers and unique passphrases. Geeks of the Week: Play with international AI models (Mistral, ZAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, Reka, Kimi) to broaden your toolkit, and Home Assistant Green for a private, resilient smart-home lab teachers can learn from and automate around.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* NotebookLM (Google’s AI notebook tool)

* Mike Caulfield “SIFT” fact-checking prompt

* OpenMCQ (Montana Digital Academy)

* Nano Banana : A Free AI Image Editor That Could Be Photoshop’s Biggest Rival (Geeky Gadgets, 22 Aug 2025) - Nano Banana - example

* www.freepik.com

* chat.qwen.ai (image modifier)

* Digital Learningpalooza https://www.deelac.com/digital-learningpalooza/

* Matt Wolfe on YouTube about AI: https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow

* Someone Created the First AI-Powered Worm That Can Spread Automatically (The Hacker News, 26 August 2025)

* Anthropic Disrupts AI-Powered Disinformation Campaign Targeting Global Elections (The Hacker News, 27 August 2025)

* Frontier Learning Lab Substack: frontierlearninglab.substack.com

* Jason’s Geeks of the Week: Play with International AI

* mistral.ai/

* chat.z.ai/

* chat.deepseek.com/sign_in

* chat.qwen.ai/

* app.reka.ai/chat

* www.kimi.com/

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week:

* Home Assistant Green

* 7 Laws of Good Web Design: www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/54749294891

* Google Site Milestone 1: www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/54749513344

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* Meta partners with Midjourney on AI image and video models (TechCrunch, 22 Aug 2025)

* schoolai.com

* www.playlab.ai

* “Build a Bot Workshop” (intermediate) and “Prompting is Teaching” (basic)

* Deciphering Apple’s Awe-Dropping iPhone 17 Event Invite (CNET, 26 August 2025)

* Experts Find AI Browsers Can Be Tricked Into Performing Dangerous Actions (The Hacker News, 20 August 2025)

* This Famous Star Is a Total Fraud, Astronomers Say (Gizmodo, 19 Aug 2025)

* Sabrina Romanov on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sabrina_ramonov

Episode 357 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 356 (“Beyond AI Hype”) of the EdTech Situation Room from August 20, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) kick off with a few live-stream hiccups and then dive straight into back-to-school realities: district and state momentum around student cell-phone restrictions, why policies alone aren’t enough, and how schools can pair limits with media-literacy and tech-ethics instruction that actually sticks. From there, the conversation turns to Montana Digital Academy’s new Frontier Learning Lab—what it is, why it exists, and how “AI playdates” are helping educators move beyond four unhelpful AI narratives (cheating machine, rots your brain, superpowers, saves time) toward balanced classroom use. Jason shares hands-on experiments with the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—including an Obsidian-based assistant (“Astro”) that reads and writes to notes, drafts emails, and even manipulates Google Docs—illustrating both the promise and brittleness of bleeding-edge workflows educators may soon adopt. Alongside AI productivity talk, Wes and Jason spotlight ethical use and accessibility wins (e.g., better alt text and WCAG-aligned habits) and share practical classroom moments—like using ChatGPT to synthesize student survey responses—while stressing that professional judgment and literacy matter more than hype. They also highlight concrete educator tools such as Montana Digital Academy’s OPEN MCQ and swap “Geeks of the Week,” from MCP resources in Obsidian to media-literacy gems like Digital Digging and Mike Caulfield’s classic Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, plus Wes’ Pinboard flow for sharing recommendations. Throughout, they argue for thoughtful professional learning and a steady, human-centered approach to AI—one that acknowledges both the risks and the transformative possibilities in classrooms today.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* 4 Predominant Narratives with AI (that are not helpful)

* AI is a cheating machine

* AI rots your brain

* AI creates superpowers for you

* AI will save you time

* Wes’ recent posts on AI

* 2025 Civics of Technology Conference (homepage)

* Civics of Tech Conference Day 1 Reflections

* Is Any AI Use Ethical?

* AI clear use cases

* ALT text - W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0

* She Knows ALT Text (Custom GPT)

* Troubleshooting tech issues (WordPress, Linux VPS, other geek squad stuff)

* Recipe and cooking instructions

* OPEN MCQ from Montana Digital Academy: https://wfryer.me/openmcq

* Missouri Districts Begin New School Year with State‑Mandated Cell‑Phone Ban (Missouri Independent, 20 Aug 2025)

* Back to School: Iowa Students Will Return to Class With Cell Phone Restrictions (KCCI, 18 Aug 2025)

* New State Laws Bring Major Changes for Texas Schools (Texas Tribune, 18 Aug 2025)

* Jason’s Geeks of the Week: Get started with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Obsidian

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Mike Caufield - Podcast: Digital Digging - The Shitification of Google - Wes’ social bookmarks (Pinboard) for #edtechSR

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* OpenAI Is Reportedly Building a Social Network to Compete With X (The Verge, 20 August 2025)

* BlueSky Updated Terms and Policies (Bluesky, 14 August 2025)

Episode 356 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 355 (“Protocols Over Platforms”) of the EdTech Situation Room from July 9, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) unpack their ISTE 2025 takeaways: Google’s evolving Gemini-in-Classroom roadmap, fresh AI literacy resources for teachers, and where Microsoft and Apple currently fit in the EDU stack. They dig into the rise of AI-first browsers—from agentic research helpers to privacy-focused designs—and debate what these tools mean for student data stewardship, plagiarism concerns, and authentic assessment. Building on Mike Masnick’s “Protocols, Not Platforms,” they explore how the fediverse (Mastodon, Bluesky, and open social protocols) could model healthier digital citizenship and media literacy, especially for schools looking to reduce platform lock-in. The hosts also share practical classroom workflows—NotebookLM for pre-writing and lesson prep, voice-driven chat assistants for feedback, and “AI as a thought partner” techniques to plan presentations, critique drafts, and scaffold student reflection. Rounding things out, they compare personal knowledge management and productivity picks like Obsidian and Raycast, tying these to real educator use cases and “agentic” routines that help teachers work faster, document learning better, and protect privacy by design.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Perplexity launches “Comet” AI web browser to take on Chrome and Edge — and you can use it today for $200 a month (Windows Central; 9 July 2025)

* Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (Techdirt, 28 Aug 2019)

* [PODCAST] Reclaiming The Internet with Mike Masnick and Aaron Ross (Techdirt Podcast, 8 Jul 2025)

* Gemini in Classroom: No-cost AI tools that amplify teaching and learning (Google Blog)

* Will Google’s New AI END MagicSchool? | Gemini vs. MagicSchool AI in 2025 (EdTech Hustle)

* ISTE 2025 Collection: New Chromebooks and Tools for Even Better Teaching and Learning (Google Blog, 2 July 2025)

* What’s New in Microsoft EDU, ISTE Edition June 2025 (Microsoft Education Blog; 25 June 2025)

* Apple Skips ISTE (Apple Community Forums)

* Jason’s Geeks of the Week: obsidian.md | www.raycast.com

* Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Privacy, Power and Platforms - Vibe Coding for Flickr CC 4.0 Attribution - DIA browser

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* AI Is Helping Cheaters Cheat at Chess. This Group Is Trying to Stop It (Time, 09 July 2025)

* Racist AI Videos Created With Google Veo 3 Are Proliferating on TikTok (Ars Technica, 1 July 2025)

* This Year’s Hot New Tool for Chefs? ChatGPT. (NYT; 2 June 2025 - Gift Link)

* Hardfork Interview with Pete Wells

* Mark Zuckerberg Already Knows Your Life. Now He Wants His AI to Run It (Gizmodo, 30 June 2025)

* Inside ‘AI Addiction’ Support Groups, Where People Try to Stop Talking to Chatbots (404 Media, 26 Jun 2025)

* Control Content Use for AI Training With Cloudflare’s Managed Robots.txt and Blocking for Monetized Content (Cloudflare Blog, 01 July 2025)

* Multiple AI Companies Bypassing Web Standard to Scrape Publisher Sites Without Licensing (Reuters, 21 June 2024)

* Creative Commons debuts CC signals, a framework for an open AI ecosystem (Tech Crunch; 25 June 2025)

* The Most Imminent Cyber Threat Is Called ‘Scattered Spider’ (Wired, 02 July 2025)

* Feds Warn of Possible Cyber Attacks By Iran on US Critical Infrastructure (Ars Technica, 30 June 2025)

Episode 355 is also available on YouTube.

Welcome to episode 354 (“Beyond the Town Square”) of the EdTech Situation Room from June 25, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) open with a quick check-in and the episode lineup, then dive into Creative Commons in the classroom via Flickr’s move to CC 4.0—and why explicit instruction on copyright, fair use, and open licensing belongs in digital literacy for every student . From there, they unpack free-speech narratives on U.S. campuses through a media-literacy lens—highlighting News Over Noise’s interview with Bradford Vivian and reflecting on universities as places for genuine intellectual diversity and debate . The conversation pivots to AI and assessment: what a recent MIT study using EEG really suggests about “brain-only” writing versus hybrid, tool-supported workflows (spoiler: copy-paste LLM use shows low cognitive engagement, but a structured fourth session with LLMs boosted recall and distributed cognitive effort) and how this translates into practical classroom policy, including the growing role of lockdown browsers for in-class quizzes . They also examine the civil-liberties side of edtech—biometrics, surveillance, and border device searches—through a sobering case study of a journalist’s deportation linked to online writing, and what that means for educators and travelers managing their digital footprint . To wrap up, Geeks of the Week spotlight a handy local-AI platform for Mac/Apple-silicon and API users (Witsy) and a dead-simple booklet-printing utility (BookletCreator) that Wes’ classroom is already putting to work.

Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.

🔗 Links We Discussed

* Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (MIT; 10 June 2025)

* Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn

* Reports of Bluesky’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (MATHEW INGRAM, 18 Jun 2025)

* Facebook Group Admins Complain of Mass Bans, Meta Says It’s Fixing the Problem (TechCrunch, 24 June 2025)

* AI is ruining Pinterest. Here’s why it’s such a big problem (ZDnet, 11 March 2025)

* The High Stakes of Biometric Surveillance (Tech Policy Press, 24 June 2025)

* How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation (The New Yorker, 24 June 2025)

* News Over Noise [PODCAST] Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine? (Bradford Vivian)

* Creative Commons 4.0 Has Arrived on Flickr! (Flickr, 18 Jun 2025)

* Geeks of the Week

* Jason: https://witsyai.com/

* Wes: Wes’ Pinboard - Creating Cool Websites (June 2025 media camp) - BookletCreator

🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss

* This Year’s Hot New Tool for Chefs? ChatGPT. (NYT; 2 June 2025 - Gift Link)

* Hardfork Interview with Pete Wells

* AI Company Anthropic Sued Over Use of Copyrighted Books to Train Chatbots (AP News, 25 June 2025)

* From Threads to Thoughts: How Social Media Is Shaping Public Dialogue (Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, 24 June 2025)

Episode 354 is also available on YouTube.