EdTechSR Ep 360: Agentic AI Arrives

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. Get full access to EdTech Situation Room Podcast at edtechsr.substack.com/subscribe