ChatEDU – The AI & Education Podcast

Uncover how AI is transforming education publishing, navigate screen time policies, and meet a viral tech raccoon!

Before diving into AI and edtech, Matt and Liz break down the viral internet sensation of Jimothy, a Seattle raccoon with short spine syndrome who inspired a developer to create a retro eight-bit video game.

The Rundown

Sally the Robot Paused: A New York school district puts its controversial humanoid classroom robot pilot on hold following community pushback.

Gemini Notebook Collections: Google rolls out top-level navigation and collection folders to help users organize their numerous notebooks.

ISTE Releases Stretch: The organization announces the broad release of its specialized educator chatbot trained exclusively on vetted materials.

Human Intelligence Certificate: An academic proposal suggests students prove unassisted thinking through in-person tasks before integrating AI into studies.

Substack AI Detection: Substack partners with Pangram to help readers identify AI-generated text in published posts.

North Carolina Screen Time Guidance: The state issues purpose-driven framework guidelines rather than hard hourly limits for student devices.

Schools Beyond Screens Moratorium: A national coalition calls for a complete generative AI moratorium across all school districts.

Student Advocacy in Washington: A high school student argues that schools must actively teach practical civic advocacy skills to help youth shape legislation.

Beneath the Surface

Low and Slow: Avoiding the Hype with Alexandra Walsh Alexandra Walsh, Chief Product Officer at Amplify, joins Matt and Liz to discuss how a major educational publisher thoughtfully balances innovation and quality. She explores internal AI workflows, teacher-mediated tools like discussion moments, and the vital importance of maintaining human connection in classrooms.

Bright Byte

Engineers have successfully tested a forty-gram autonomous micro drone designed to track and eliminate disease-carrying mosquitoes mid-air using ultrasonic sensors and AI software.

Say hi to Matt on the road: 

New Jersey Association of Independent Schools - August 11th
https://members.njais.org/integratedEvents/home/2026-INNOVATION-COLLABORATION-CONFERENCE

RIACTE - August 14th - Sponsored in part by the National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing
https://www.nextgenmfg.org/event-details/rhode-island-acte-summer-conference

Announcements

Purchase Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday
Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77

Seeing through the Machine – Teaching Bias as an Equity Practice in AI - Dr. Elizabeth Radday - https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a

Check out our middle / high school Student AI Literacy course - ​​⁠⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠⁠

Explore Skills21’s FREE social media literacy curriculum - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.skills21.org/social

Address Screen Time concerns - skills21.org/ai/screenshift

Sponsors

The National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing: Your Gateway to Next Generation Advanced Manufacturing - https://www.nextgenmfg.org

Links

Beneath Surface with Alexandra Walsh
https://amplify.com/
LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/fyxczf62

8-Bit 'Jimothy': Viral Sensation Gets a Video Game
https://tinyurl.com/2ez4z4c7

NY Classroom's Humanoid Robot Meets Backlash
https://tinyurl.com/bddm7m53

Google Is Fixing the Biggest Problem With Too Many Gemini Notebooks
https://tinyurl.com/ykh7tfch

Stretch, ISTE's Chatbot, Is Ready to Go
https://tinyurl.com/ydvhmf4w

Students Should Prove They Don't Need AI Before Using It
https://tinyurl.com/5tesaru3

Substack is adding an AI detection feature
https://tinyurl.com/aeyyb3yb

New DPI screen guidance stops short of time limits
https://tinyurl.com/2786k9v4

Screen Time Guidelines Shift as Research Grows More Nuanced
https://tinyurl.com/3t7tek8r

Students can shape policy. Why don't schools show them how?
https://tinyurl.com/yzthbkwr

A Drone That Hunts Mosquitoes
https://tinyurl.com/y95hcycy

In this ChatEDU Check-In: Deep Fake Epidemic, Matt explores a report from Common Sense Media on teenagers and AI-generated sexual content." This research marks the third summer report from Common Sense Media examining digital safety risks facing youth. It details how manipulated imagery is impacting adolescents across mainstream social channels.

Key Takeaways:
Nearly half of all teenagers report encountering AI-generated explicit content, most often by accident while scrolling mainstream platforms.

A significant number of adolescents have personal experience with deepfake imagery featuring peers or people they know in real life.

While most teens express deep concern about non-consensual deepfakes, only 20 percent have ever discussed AI-generated sexual content with an adult.

Matt’s Two Cents: District and school leaders must take proactive action by updating student handbooks and board policies to address deepfakes, following state legislative efforts such as Illinois requiring deepfakes in district cyberbullying policies. Beyond policy implementation, schools must prioritize open conversations with students to bridge the communication gap and help mitigate digital safety risks.

Article:
Teens and Explicit Deepfakes in the Age of AI
https://tinyurl.com/5a4mvhtr

In this ChatEDU Check-In: MLB BANS AI, Matt explores Major League Baseball banning real-time AI programs in team dugouts. Major League Baseball restricted dugout iPads to prevent teams like the New York Mets from using custom software to guide live game strategy. The decision highlights an ongoing debate across sports and education on whether real-time technology enhances or undermines decision-making.

Key Takeaways:
MLB disabled custom tabs on dugout iPads to block real-time AI tools from recommending live pitch calls and substitutions.

The New York Mets heavily invested in custom pitch-selection AI, which drew league attention and triggered the broader crackdown.

Players and managers expressed surprise over real-time tech influence, though many acknowledge organizations must adapt to emerging technology or risk falling behind.

Matt’s Two Cents: While sports leagues may try to carve out tech-free environments, real-time AI decision support is already commonplace across industries like health, aviation, and education. School leaders should focus on identifying the right tools for informed decision-making and teaching users to navigate AI fallibility rather than attempting temporary bans.

Article:
MLB restricts dugout iPad use to prevent AI help with strategy. Ottavino says Mets were involved
https://tinyurl.com/mpjca3z5

In this episode of ChatEDU, The Digital Dollar Bin: The Rise of Cheap, Unaligned AI Curriculum, Matt and Liz kick it off with a hilarious look at a viral YouTube short featuring tech founder Palmer Luckey. They discuss Luckey using a wild, highly detailed roleplay prompt about a university professor under investigation just to force ChatGPT to generate a complete list of alcoholic beverages mentioned in Jimmy Buffett songs.

The Rundown

Google rebrands NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook while introducing code execution capabilities and cloud computing for advanced analysis.

University of Minnesota researchers develop a tool designed to strip AI writing tells and formatting patterns from research papers.

A Common Sense Media study reveals that Google's embedded AI Overviews consistently fail safety checks regarding mental health, substance use, and academic integrity on underage accounts.

An Anthropic study demonstrates that Claude's core values, warmth, and rigor shift significantly depending on the language used and the specific model version.

Illinois released 409 pages of school AI guidance covering deepfakes, SEL scenarios, and high-stakes ethical boundaries.

Tech executive Steve Sinofsky compares modern university laptop bans to early 1980s efforts to ban portable computers and word processors.

The FCC opens a top-to-bottom review of E-rate, raising educator concerns about cuts to school broadband funding.

The Beneath the Surface

Matt and Liz examine low-cost AI lesson planning tools and their effect on instructional quality, including efforts to ground AI in district curriculum through Brisk and Claude for Teachers. They close with a University of Pennsylvania study from Türkiye linking generic AI assistants to worse student outcomes.

The Bright Byte

After Venezuela's twin earthquakes, civilian developers used Claude Opus and Replit to build relief platforms in hours, collecting missing-person reports, mapping hospital capacity, and coordinating aid.

Say hi to Matt on the road: 

New Jersey Association of Independent Schools - August 11thhttps://members.njais.org/integratedEvents/home/2026-INNOVATION-COLLABORATION-CONFERENCE

RIACTE - August 14th - Sponsored in part by the National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing
https://www.nextgenmfg.org/event-details/rhode-island-acte-summer-conference

Say hi to Liz on the Road

Global Teaching Dialogue | Fulbright Teacher Exchanges
https://share.google/F2CwJdKGIVoe7RIHg

Announcements
Purchase Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday
Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77

Seeing through the Machine – Teaching Bias as an Equity Practice in AI - Dr. Elizabeth Radday - https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a

Check out our middle / high school Student AI Literacy course - ​​⁠⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠⁠

Explore Skills21’s FREE social media literacy curriculum - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.skills21.org/social-balance⁠⁠⁠

Address Screen Time concerns - ⁠skills21.org/ai/screenshift⁠

Sponsors

The National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing: Your Gateway to Next Generation Advanced Manufacturing - https://www.nextgenmfg.org

Links

Panodime - Posting something insane an AI executive said every day in 2026
https://tinyurl.com/5yjpf833

NotebookLM Is Now Gemini Notebook
https://tinyurl.com/4jrttj8h

AI 'Humanizer' Tool Alarms Scientists
https://tinyurl.com/2s35uyf7

Report: Google's AI Search Poses Risks to Kids
https://tinyurl.com/2sszrsup

Claude’s values across models and languages
https://tinyurl.com/2aszvyxp

The '&udm=14' Trick Google Users Are Using
https://tinyurl.com/5ye5dmke

Banning AI in Law School: We've Seen This Before
https://tinyurl.com/rzb6mh45

FCC Weighs Cutting Subsidy for School Internet Bills
https://tinyurl.com/4bbb7ncv

Introducing Claude for Teachers
https://tinyurl.com/mr2b5w43

Our District Blocked Anthropic's Claude for Teachers
https://tinyurl.com/358r3ee4

Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price
https://tinyurl.com/2ebcrv85

In this ChatEDU Check-In: AI Isn't Smarter Than Babies, Yet, Liz explores how human infants develop language and spatial awareness far more efficiently than modern AI models. While machine learning algorithms require vast mountains of video and text data, infants possess an innate cognitive framework that allows them to learn rapidly from minimal input. This episode highlights the fundamental gap between statistical pattern matching and genuine human intuition.

Key Takeaways:
AI models fail to grasp basic physical reality and common sense when tested on first-person video captured by infant-mounted cameras.

Human infants acquire language and spatial reasoning with remarkable efficiency, whereas algorithms require thousands of hours of data to achieve fractional understanding.

Statistical pattern recognition cannot replace the innate conceptual framework children use to understand physical objects and social dynamics.

Liz’s Two Cents: While researchers work to make artificial intelligence more efficient and intelligent, biological learning remains superior. For school leaders, this reinforces that human cognitive development, intuitive reasoning, and real-world experience cannot be easily replicated by digital tools.

Article:
AI Isn’t Smarter Than a Baby—Yet
https://bit.ly/4fefopr