ChatEDU – The AI & Education Podcast

In this 100th episode milestone of ChatEDU, Major Shift - Durable College Majors in 2026, Matt and Liz dive into a rapidly shifting landscape where AI drives government policy, corporate restructuring, and student behavior. The hosts also discuss a surreal exit interview between Anthropic and its retiring Opus 3 model.

The Rundown

Anthropic vs. DoD: Anthropic is labeled a national security risk after refusing unrestricted military use, while OpenAI moves in to secure classified government contracts.

Block’s AI Layoffs: Jack Dorsey cuts 4,000 jobs at Block, citing AI as the primary tool allowing for smaller, flatter, and more efficient teams.

The Einstein Agent: A controversial tool that autonomously logs into Canvas to watch lectures and submit work, sparking a major crisis in academic integrity.

Edia’s Creative Funding: An AI attendance platform in Albany County is being funded by revenue from school bus safety camera fines.

The Rhithm Project: A new strategy to reach 10 million people to combat relational displacement and keep human connection at the center of youth development.

Pew Teen Study: New data shows 54% of teens use AI for school, with 59% reporting that AI cheating is now a regular occurrence in their schools.

Beneath the Surface: The Major Shift

The hosts analyze a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study on the 2026 labor market. While engineering remains a top earner, Computer Science is seeing a hiring hangover, and high touch fields like Nursing and Special Education show the most stability.

The Bright Byte

Insights from the Stanford Education AI Summit highlight how AI is bridging the digital divide through ASL translation and scalable tutoring for low connectivity environments.

Announcements

Come join us! AI in Education: Spring 2026 Conference.
https://www.skills21.org/event-details/ai-in-education-spring-2026-conference

Follow us on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/@ChatEDUEdAdvance

Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday
ASCD:⁠ ⁠https://tinyurl.com/bde652nn⁠⁠
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77
Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/bdckf6zw

EdAdvance is offering a Middle and High School Student AI Literacy course — email [email protected] to bring it to your district. ​​⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠

Skills21’s FREE social media literacy course. Check it out here -⁠ ⁠https://www.skills21.org/social-balance⁠⁠

This episode is sponsored by The National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.nextgenmfg.org⁠⁠

Links

Model deprecation commitments for Claude Opus 3
https://tinyurl.com/3d4wnuf8

The whole thing was a scam
https://tinyurl.com/yrt7wemj

What Jack Dorsey’s Block Layoffs Mean for the Job Market at Large
https://tinyurl.com/327mmdw7

AI reshaping JPMorgan Chase’s workforce as bank plans ‘huge redeployment’
https://tinyurl.com/7dwf95h5

Agentic AI Can Complete Whole Courses for Students. Now What?
https://tinyurl.com/5cjsp662

Edia Implementation and Reimbursement Plan
https://tinyurl.com/526nfjsk

Building Toward a Tipping Point
https://tinyurl.com/3bspztny

How Teens Use and View AI
https://tinyurl.com/2s429bdm

College majors that have the highest earning potential and lowest unemployment rates
https://tinyurl.com/yetn8wcn

Revenge of the English majors
https://tinyurl.com/58kvvjwr

2026 Stanford AI+Education Summit
https://tinyurl.com/yehj7enw

Fluttering Creations
https://www.flutteringcreations.com/

In this ChatEDU Check-In: Measuring the AI Skill Gap in the Classroom (For Teachers), Matt explores the launch of the Futurenav Adapt AI assessment by ETS and the current state of teacher AI competency. The episode highlights the tension between the widespread, self-taught use of AI tools by educators and the lack of formal institutional guidance or standardized skill metrics. It examines how schools are navigating the shift from individual teacher initiative to necessary district-wide oversight and legal safety.

Key Takeaways:

A new assessment from ETS, Futurenav Adapt AI, has been launched to create a standard for evaluating how educators recognize, navigate, and ethically implement generative technology.

Despite nearly all districts utilizing some AI tools, a significant training vacuum exists, leaving the majority of teachers to teach themselves basic terminology and prompt engineering on their own.

Relying on the individual initiative of motivated teachers to vet AI tools creates operational and legal risks, especially since only two states currently require districts to have a formal AI policy.

Matt’s Two Cents: While standardized assessments could provide helpful data for custom professional development, we must avoid the "one size fits all" trap. A teacher’s required AI skill set varies wildly by discipline and grade level, and ultimately, these skills must map directly to district priorities. Whether the goal is improving seventh-grade writing or achieving broad AI literacy for a portrait of a graduate, teacher training must be targeted rather than generalized to be truly effective.

Sponsored by: Eduaide.Ai

Eduaide is an AI-powered workspace designed for real classroom planning with practical tools like grade-level evaluators and classroom-ready graphic organizers. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at https://www.eduaide.ai/.

In this ChatEDU Check-In: What AI Power Users Actually Do!, Matt explores Anthropic’s New AI Index and what sets top AI users apart from the rest. The episode examines how users interact with generative models, specifically highlighting the difference between simple iteration and true strategic steering. It underscores the growing need for critical discernment as AI outputs become more visually polished.

Key Takeaways:

Most users now treat AI as a work in progress by iterating on responses, yet only thirty percent actually steer the AI by questioning its logic or pushing back on assumptions.

Polished outputs, such as formatted documents or apps, create a discernment gap where users are less likely to identify missing content or verify facts.

High level AI fluency requires mastery of description, delegation, and discernment, with the ability to evaluate and question the machine being the most critical and rarest skill.

Matt’s Two Cents: Kudos to Anthropic as they keep cranking out these great research pieces based on the mountains of chat (and now vibe coding) data they have to analyze. Matt also shares his favorite Gemini Gem right now which is a student AI Chat Autopsy simulator designed to get at some similar takeaways. 

⁠https://gemini.google.com/gem/1ju4IL2_8WWnkKfZGPGeFsWSLDhc7vhut?usp=sharing⁠ 

Sponsored by: ⁠Eduaide.Ai⁠ Eduaide is an AI-powered workspace designed for real classroom planning with practical tools like grade-level evaluators and classroom-ready graphic organizers. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off an Eduaide subscription with code: ChatEDU at⁠ https://www.eduaide.ai/⁠.

In this episode of ChatEDU, Beyond the Tech Ban: Shielding Focus and Fluency, Matt and Liz weather a New England “snowpocalypse” to tackle a provocative question– Is edtech making Gen Z less cognitively capable than their parents? They begin with a playful (if “unscientific”) recap of the NPR David Green vs. Google NotebookLM lawsuit experiment before diving into the cognitive decline debate.

The Rundown

Gemini Music: Google’s new Lyria integration for high-quality audio and lyric generation.

NotebookLM Update: The highly requested ability to edit and annotate AI-generated slide decks.

Corporate Mandates & Monitoring: Amazon tracks AI adoption through its “Clarity” system; Accenture requires AI adoption for summer promotions; and Block mandates weekly “AI achievement” emails, reportedly causing some AI burnout.

IBM’s Strategy: A tripling of entry-level hiring with a focus on human-centric soft skills.

CS Enrollment Shifts: Students are moving away from traditional Computer Science toward AI-specific majors at MIT and UCSD.

Cybersecurity Crisis: Sophisticated AI-powered phishing in schools amidst declining federal support.

Alpha School Expose: 404 Media’s investigation into surveillance, scraping, and high hallucination rates.

Magic School’s AI OS integrating SIS data; Liz’s finding of 10% AI grading swings; and a push to frame agents like Raina as tools, not “BFFs.”

Beneath the Surface

The hosts critique expanding screen time bans and propose a “Quality Screen Time Index,” using SAMR to distinguish basic substitution from transformative AI use.

Bright Byte

Matt and Liz wrap up with a breakthrough from OpenAI’s latest reasoning model, which solved a decades-old gluon physics problem, proving the formula wasn’t zero and generating a 12-hour proof later confirmed by scientists.

Announcements

Celebrate our 100th episode:⁠ ⁠skills21.org/chatedu100⁠⁠

Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday
ASCD:⁠ ⁠https://tinyurl.com/bde652nn⁠⁠ 
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77
Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/bdckf6zw

EdAdvance is offering a Middle and High School Student AI Literacy course — email [email protected] to bring it to your district. ​​⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠ 

Skills21’s FREE social media literacy course. Check it out here -⁠ ⁠https://www.skills21.org/social-balance⁠⁠

This episode is sponsored by The National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.nextgenmfg.org⁠⁠

Links

NPR Host Sues Google Over NotebookLM Voice
https://tinyurl.com/muzvhcb6

Gemini Can Now Create Music
https://tinyurl.com/ytaj2jhs

Google Fixes NotebookLM’s Most Annoying Slide Deck Flaw
https://tinyurl.com/42vxnz43

Amazon Tracks AI Use; Accenture Ties Promotion to AI
https://tinyurl.com/yc4dmey6

Dorsey’s New Company Falters Amid AI Mandate
https://tinyurl.com/mw579faj

IBM to Hire Entry-Level Talent in the AI Era
https://tinyurl.com/3xz84yd9

The Computer Science Exodus
https://tinyurl.com/4rune56n

Why AI Threatens School Cybersecurity
https://tinyurl.com/3t74zn5h

Stocks Slide After Launch of Claude Security Tool
https://tinyurl.com/hpzpzwt3

Inside an AI-Powered Private School
https://tinyurl.com/34rzhs49

MagicSchool
MagicSchool.ai

Student Companionship and Responsible AI in Schools
https://tinyurl.com/4j74d6rb

Department of Labor's Artificial Intelligence Literacy Framework
https://tinyurl.com/3d6zt7wv

IQ scores fall worldwide
https://tinyurl.com/dbsetjbn

Is Screen Time Hurting Literacy?
https://tinyurl.com/msvbr3uf

‘AI Bill of Rights’ reaches Florida’s K-12 schools
https://tinyurl.com/4zdwtha2

Digital Learning & AI Literacy Evaluation
https://www.edadvance.org/ai

AI Solves a "Zero" Mystery in Physics
https://tinyurl.com/5a9t7wd9

In this ChatEDU Check-In: Make Them Read!, Liz explores the systemic decline of long-form reading in classrooms and the rise of the "excerpt culture." This episode examines how the shift toward clips and samples over the last fifteen years has eroded student attention spans and basic reading skills.

Key Takeaways:

The transition from full-length novels to abbreviated samples reflects a broader cultural shift that prioritizes the "reel" and the "clip" over deep literary engagement.

Requiring students to commit to long-form texts acts as a strategic resistance to the monetization of attention, allowing them to reclaim their focus from digital distractions.

Authentic comprehension and original voice are best developed through "flash essays" and unassisted, timed tasks that remove AI bumpers and force students to confront intellectual uncertainty.

Liz’s Two Cents: There is a profound tension between "meeting students where they are" and the pedagogical necessity of waiting for them to catch up to the heights of great literature. If educators treat declining attention spans as a terminal condition rather than a challenge to be met with more rigorous engagement, they risk making the "end of reading" a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Article Link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/youth-reading-books-professors/685825/?taid=69814c1dbe49b700014af753&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Sponsored by: Eduaide Eduaide.ai where good ideas become great lessons. Take advantage of our special offer: 50 percent off at eduaide.ai.