EdTechSR Ep 361: AI Workflows for Educators

What this episode covers

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