EdTechSR Ep 376: Screen Time Isn't Binary

Happening now, we'd like to welcome our viewers from across North America and around the world. This is the EdTech Situation Room episode 376 for June the 17th, 2026. My name is Wes Fryer. I am coming to you from Charlotte, North Carolina, where I am a middle school media literacy and STEM teacher and currently a STEM summer camp teacher teaching this week coding in space with Minecraft and amazing animals. websites. Coming to me, coming to us as always sporting his dark glasses and his Western shirt. It's Jason Neiffer, the guru of the North, who I think basically every educational conference is currently asking, Jason, can you come speak at our event? And hi, Peggy George joining us from Phoenix. Jason Neiffer, Ph.D.: Good evening, Dr. Friar. Good evening, Peggy. Yeah, I wish that were true in part because it's good for my ego, but it's been very exciting to get some opportunities to connect with people across the United States. And sadly, and I can't remember if we talked about this last week or not, I was going to go to SD and I decided at the last minute to not go to SD. Part of it is five days in Orlando in June is not good for me. But more importantly, I need a little bit of a break. And so we've got some other folks from our team that will represent us well there. But I don't think I'm, I think we've got other things on the agenda tonight. Wes, what is this whole thing all about? Allegedly, and we're here two weeks in a row, ladies and gentlemen, it's, we've had a busy time. We talk about the technology news. So Jason and I are reading and perusing the tech news all week long, and we will throw some of these articles in a Google Doc, which I will put the link to, and we are going to talk about them. So usually we are talking about AI and every article, if you really look at it is just an AI article. So it could be the AI situation room, but I didn't want to redo our domain. So we're still the tech situation room, but we have AI articles. We've got, I think an excellent outstanding op-ed piece about screen time, several security articles, a miscellaneous article. And we always have our geek of the week and Jason will again be talking about Hermes. So if you know him as Jason Neifer, maybe Jason, Mr. Hermes Neifer. I'm not sure. He's been talking about it quite a while and I need to jump into the agentic AI world. And I am, I have not yet done that. And perhaps tonight Jason will convince me to do it. It frequently happens. That's absolutely true. Let's go ahead and start. AI is going to suck us in eventually here. Dr. Fryer, why don't you start with, because I had actually saved the link to see today, but hadn't actually opened it. Talk a little bit about Snaps, jar glasses. All right. First of all, I'll just say that my perception of augmented reality is that it's just not ready for prime time. And it's not something to get that excited about. I think the onset of AI with its generative capabilities to make a holodeck-like experience has a lot of exciting possibilities. But what we've seen from Meta, what we've seen from Apple have just been crazy expensive. This is an article from TechCrunch today. And the headline is, after unveiling ridiculously expensive AR glasses, Snaps stock takes a dive. Apparently these have been long-awaited AR glasses. And the price is retail $2,200 a piece. And the demographic here is supposed to be teenagers. However, even though teenagers wield quite a bit of power over parents and income, this isn't pocket change that we're talking about here. And the CEO on a CNBC interview on Tuesday, when questioned about the price, said, quote, the most important way to think of specs is as a computer. And so they're comparably priced to other high-end computers or high-end laptops. And to that, I would say, fine, but that's not going to replace your computer. I continue to see the ads every once in a while. We were in the Apple store a couple weeks ago when I was basically getting the lint taken out of my lightning board, as I have to do about every year. And because I need to get a case that covers that. But seeing the Apple VR glasses and on the airplane, being able to watch movies, being able to experience it, it definitely looks cool. Every single thing that Apple has looks cool. But I just don't think it is practical. So, Jason, have you actually – I have not put on the Apple AR glasses. I have used a generation back or so meta glasses because we have a classroom set at our school of 20. But what are your thoughts? Are you going to rush out and purchase the Snap? Because I know if it's a PC, the Knifer PC collection probably needs an enhancement. Yeah. This is something we're really having some deep and difficult discussions on at MTBA because one of our charges as part of our Frontier Learning Lab is to explore in this particular space. And we spent the large part of the last year experimenting, working with vendors. And then when Meta pulled out of this space, it threw us through for a real loop because we were convinced that the MetaQuest glasses or headsets were going to be the way to go. We hadn't fully invested in hundreds or dozens of them or anything. We just had a couple of test ones around the office. So that's okay. Okay. But I can tell you that your perception is correct, Dr. Fryer, that I do think that there's some amazing applications here. And the one that we keep talking about at MTBA is how do we get a human dissection experience to our anatomy and physiology students, especially our dual credit anatomy and physiology students. And that's something that there's been virtual versions of this that have endorsed by as diverse of sources as Harvard Medical School to just large R1 university biology programs. But the cost is ridiculously prohibitive for the software. Not just we're not talking just about the headset. We're talking about the software. And I have no doubt that the Snap headset has some hardware heft to it at that price. It's just not realistic for educational applications. And the part that we have absolutely tried to work through is how do you share these with smaller schools? How do you share them across the state? And we also know that we've talked to a dozen or so districts in the state that bought headsets in the last 10 years that through a grant or through a donation. And they were interesting to them for three months. And then the management was too much. And they didn't get used. They were gathering dust in a closet. And so this space remains incredibly complicated for K-12. And we're going to parlay this conversation into screen time here, I would imagine, in a few moments. But in a world where that time is being challenged, I think this is a harder sell than it was even six months ago to invest in this particular space. But we're continuing to experiment with it. For those of you watching our video, I've got the video of the MSNBC interview with the CEO. And then just even looking at the website, are these AR versus VR? Because the website here, people are out in there. I think this is an AR headset. Yeah. And for those who aren't necessarily augmented, meaning you're still seeing the world, you're just seeing projections put on the world. VR would be your, it's a complete covering headset that you're just seeing the computer screen. So interesting. I think this is the kind of technology that tech evangelists and folks that get excited about tech typically want to get excited about. Because it's really cutting edge. It's sexy. Google with Google Glass. I don't know if you, I don't think you had Google Glass. I was able to borrow some from Felix Giacomino back in the day. I think I had those for several months. And people are working on the next, whatever's next, the next big thing. This idea of being able to interact with technology seamlessly in the environment, not encumbered with the screen, but just like this guy's playing his guitar and they're playing the trap set and they're seeing all this stuff. I don't know. It is a vision, but I don't think that it is one that we need to be investing in the educational space at this point. Certainly not at that price point. Yeah. And the other piece that is an untold part of this as well is that, so how long are you going to use these bad boys? Right. I know plenty of districts that bristle at having to invest in a $600 desktop PC that they expect to last eight years, which seems to even keep those updated is a magic trick. But certainly the $2,500 snap set glasses aren't going to be supported for more than a couple of years, I would assume. And I think the biggest shot we had earlier rather than later to find more of these technologies, some application in school was meta. And the fact they are keeping their augmented reality glasses, although those seem like more still more like a party trick than they do something that has legitimate learning purpose. But the meta quest were different. They had a lot of interesting learning applications. And so I'm unhappy about that particular decision on the part of meta. And then I didn't put any of these articles in, but there's been a lot of, there's a lot of hot air in the AI news anyways, but there was some hot air over the weekend that Mr. Zuckerberg said that he acknowledges that they handled the layoffs to focus all their money on AI very poorly. And that they expected to continue to go poorly for a while here because of decisions they've already made. And yeah, that it's just disappointing to see that happen. Yeah. And I think that point about return on investment and the refresh cycle with computers, while it would be wonderful to be able to get a new machine for everybody every three years or whatever. And I've been fortunate to work at some schools that are able to do that, for instance, for faculty. That is not the norm in most public schools that I have been connected with. In fact, it's probably shocking to some people in business IT just how long schools end up using devices. But especially with the robust nature of the web and what we're able to do today with even a modest screen and memory, Chromebooks are the ruler of the K-12 classroom. And I don't think we're going to be seeing a huge move into this area of augmented or virtual reality until we have a price point that's so much better. I'm also reminded of Google Cardboard. Now, again, that's not augmented. That was like virtual reality. But you're going to be putting your cell phone right in front of your eyes. And then you're going to be able to experience more of an immersive thing. But it didn't happen either. Yeah. And that was a brilliant play on Google's part, I thought. Right? They open sourced the technology. Suddenly, you could print. You could literally have cardboard sets created. My favorite was the little red viewer things that I can't remember what those things were called. But they had put out ones that used the same technology. And they cost $12 to get a plastic one, right? So you're not even a cardboard one. And then Google just cancels the project. And admittedly, that I have seen more bad demos of AR, VR stuff than good demos of AR, VR stuff. And I won't mention the vendor because it doesn't matter. But this was six, seven years ago at ISTE when I went on a tour inside an insert major vendor here and their smart glasses. And all they did was have 3D museum objects. And it was nifty, although it really hurt my neck, actually. I still don't really understand. The second I put those on, there were some weird strings on the back of my neck. But it was amusing, but it was a party trick, right? And I don't know, in the same way that I wouldn't spend every day in a museum with my students, right? Today, we're going to start off by going and hanging around the Mona Lisa for a while. That's not the way to teach a history class. Maybe an art history class, but not history class. I think that a more fruitful area to invest in today is projection rather than thinking about putting it on your face. Two weeks ago, my sister and I were fortunate to accompany our father to Colorado for his 63rd class reunion at the Air Force Academy. And the new admissions – no, not admissions. The new visitor center of the Air Force Academy had just opened like two or three weeks before we were there. It is brand new. It's actually outside the North Gate. There are two gates to get on to the Air Force Academy, which is a military base. And they've changed policies and whatever, and the chapels had a box on it for almost eight years. And anyway, you can't just, as a visitor unless it's a football game, go on to the campus. There's this wonderful new visitor center. And I don't know if you've been, Jason, into any museums or visitor centers like this that have been done in the last few years. But rather than like an auditorium and sit down on an hourly schedule or whatever and watch like a 30 or 45-minute film, there are multiple films. And as you walk around, they're being projected in the same darkened room. The speakers are such that you hear the voices of the image that you're closest to. I'm a big fan of large format televisions in classrooms, but just also multiple screens. In fact, it was at the University of Montana. I had my most intense presentation opportunity when I think we had like four different screens in the same room for this administrator workshop. That was probably more than 10 years ago. But anyway, that's my thought that if we want to create some really immersive media experiences, the cost and also just the tech requirements of being able to get it to work and have it for enough students or whatever. I've messed with this before. When we had Google Cardboard and I was just looking, they still have the Twitter handle. It's changed to Google AR VR and it says we've moved. There's still a webpage for Google Cardboard and it says stay connected. But as soon as you click Google VR blog, it's a dead link. And so anyway, it's the work on augmented reality and virtual reality continues. But even back in the day, it was just really hard. These were huge files like gigabyte files or whatever that you had to get on individual phones. And we didn't have phones for everybody. And so did you want to try to get those on other people's phones? It was a freaking mess. And like I said, our school does have a set of meta VR glasses. And we do have students in English class and social studies and some other places having some VR experiences. But I think it's just really more of a gee whiz party trick sort of thing. And if we want to invest in students and their learning experiences, I think using the devices that students have, whatever that would happen to be, and then thinking about projection. So we can get the content that is on teacher and student devices projected in a very high fidelity and maybe large format mode would be better. I want to apologize to everybody. I don't know what's happening with links tonight, but I cannot put a link in. And even when I just tried to put the last thing into chat, I don't know if it's something with StreamYard and the API for YouTube, but usually we put the links in as we talk about them and they're just not going in. So if you go to edtechsr.com slash links, you should be able to get to our Google Doc. And that's where we've got our links, but we're not getting them into the chat tonight. Okay, Dr. Farrar, where to next? I would love to talk about this Liz Kolb screen time article, and this will be more in the category of let's rant. But this has been, and again, I'm going to try to drop the link in and it's not going to work. But you know what? Let's just share it because I've got screen sharing enabled. This comes to us from AACTE, which is an acronym for a very astute academic organization, I'm sure. But the person who wrote the article is Liz Kolb. And I happen to know Liz Kolb because, Peggy George, of the K-12 online conference. Because years ago, Liz just did a fantastic presentation about cell phones for learning. She's still at the University of Michigan in the College of Education. And the title of her article, which is from June 9th, is The School Screen Debate is Asking the Wrong Question. And I love how she starts this article by talking about COVID. She calls it, as I do too, emergency remote learning. And she talks about how this backlash that we have for edtech, it's not coming out of nowhere. It's coming out of a lot of experiences that we not only had during COVID, which were largely negative with screens and schools and teachers and students. But it's also come from a lot of devices that have been purchased and have been put into classrooms. And so her point that is 100% on track, and we talked about this, I think, in our last session, our last show, is that screen time is not a single thing. There are a lot of different kinds of screen time. How are you using your screen? It's like banning a book. Are you serious? Are you going to say that all books are evil and none of them can be in the school? There's no place for books. What is the book? What is the magazine? What is the media? Media is protein. That's a fancy word for it can be used for a lot of things. And so screen time is as well. She's got some good takeaways about screen time. I think this would be a great article to share with parents. Because, look, screen time, it was a hot topic last year. Our school and many others participated in this webinar series where Jonathan Haidt was touting his thing, which is what? We don't need any screens in schools. Let's just go back to cursive handwriting. And let's just all go to the old ways. And then life will be great. Hey, the fact is most kids have a screen in their life. In fact, they have multiple screens in their lives. And I am glad that we are taking more assertive authority over the screens and the phones in school. But we're also risking throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So talking about purposeful screen time, how passive screen time needs teacher support. We shouldn't just. And doom scrolling is not the same thing as what we're typically doing in school when it comes to devices. Younger students need co-engagement. And then the most useful screen time is active, social, and academic. So kudos to Liz Kolb. Fantastic article. I couldn't agree more. And I would like to see more conversation from school leaders in the coming school year taking on this Jonathan Haidt position that screen time is evil. We've got to get rid of screens because then schools are going to be great just like they were in whatever, 1915. Yeah, totally. And I've got an article brewing on this too. And I'm almost sure that Liz's article is better than whatever I'm going to come up with. But one of the points that I do think is really important is that I don't screen time limitations other than they shouldn't be legislation, right? That's that period, right? But also if we decide to go that route, it punishes the schools that are doing it, right? There are schools out there. I'm not saying they're the majority, but there are schools out there that have very thoughtful implementation of technology K through 12. And I think that's something that probably troubled me the most is that I would agree that we have to have a conversation about screens in classrooms. It's just it's not a legislative conversation. It's a pedagogy conversation. And banning screen time is akin to banning paper or banning book pencils or books, right? And does that mean because some books are bad that we should ban all books? No, that's not a defensible position. And so I remain extremely concerned about where all this is going. And I also perceive that we're just not having very thoughtful and nuanced conversations about it. And also that we're treating this like it's going to lead to better classrooms, right? And that's the one that I have the absolute no doubt that it will not do is lead to better classrooms. And yeah, I will continue to push on this. I hope that everyone listening that is in a position to advocate, and even if you're not, I think your voice is really important. It's time to push back on this stuff because it's just not doing anything of – it's just not going to do what we hope it does. And I'm going to encourage – hey, my chat was just frozen. I flipped the screen or whatever, and I guess the live chat is working. So thanks to Peggy, and we've got I think a friend in Idaho who is chiming in too based on the username there. Yay, the links are in there. This opportunity, which we're in episode 375 of sitting down, Jason, with you and talking about the news, it not only helps me process the crazy world that we live in, the rapidly changing world, but it really does help me sometimes decide to do things, to try a new tool, switch over to this other AI thing. But tonight, my thing is – and this goes to the ScreenTub article – is I need to get more active in my local community advocating for some of these issues. I think we'll get to some security articles, which are also AI articles, and it fits in there too. But I am not personally hearing in my local community, and Charlotte has over almost 3 million folks I think now. I'm not that I'm combing local news every day to read every news source. I'm not. But I just don't see anybody advocating for the positive, constructive uses of screen time. So anyway, that's one of my takeaways is that in addition to getting to rant here and have some of our friends and family listen to us, I want to do this. I want to write an article. I want to write an op-ed. I want to be a voice sharing what I think is an extremely reasonable position, and that is that banning all books and paper is not reasonable in schools, and it's not reasonable to ban all screens. It is important to take some assertive control and not just let the kids do whatever they want, but I need to think about that. Yeah, and in the same way that we don't let kids raid the supply closet either and just do undirected stuff, right? There's time and place for that, right, for sure, but that's not the way learning typically goes inside of a classroom. And I think that we need to be really thoughtful and cautious about, again, these are pedagogy decisions. And then also for teachers and administrators out there, if you're not, if you have classrooms where you know that there isn't serious use going on, talk to the teacher, right? Work with them. Get them access to professional learning, right? Have conversations in departments and faculty meetings about uses of screens. And, again, I used to go by the moniker of the tech-savvy teacher, and I used to give a presentation about the need for instructional authority inside of a classroom. You should be deciding when devices are out, and you should be putting them away, right? I remember this was 10 or so years ago, but one of the districts that I observed in as part of my doctoral research, their way, they were a one-to-one Apple district. They used to have what they called Apple's uptime, which is everyone closes your laptop screen, right? And that's a simple thing, but that's instructional authority on deciding when the devices get used. And I'm going to probably record a video tomorrow. I'm back at school doing summer camp, and it's taken me a while to kind of get in this mode. But I'm teaching in our eSports lab, which has completely tricked out PCs with 17 or maybe even 21-inch monitors. They're great, fast, amazing. But it is really difficult if I don't take some assertive control with my middle schoolers. And actually, I've got third, fourth, and fifth graders now for these camps over it. And I'm just simply using a Google slide that I call a screensaver, but it has to be up during the instructional time. Because if kids are sitting there clicking and doing whatever they want, their brain is absolutely not focused. Even if I have the screen frozen, which I don't have control software to do that, it's very challenging. So Peggy has asked a great question. She says, how do you do this, Wes? Get more active in your local community. Where do you go? I can certainly write an op-ed for the Charlotte Observer. We've got other news websites. I don't know if our school would let me do this, but I have participated in podcasts on our school channel. It's a little bit more sensitive since I'm not the tech director and I'm just a classroom teacher, which I love. But anyway, I could certainly, though, reach out to some leadership organizations in our community. I've presented at Rotary. In fact, it was a year or so ago after I came back from Kansas where I had told some stories about AI. My dad wrote me into doing that. I presented at one of our local Rotary organizations here in Monroe and then in Matthews. And I don't know. I just, I'm feeling very passionate about this because I think I've spent my career, and Jason, as the tech savvy teacher, you have too, advocating for the positive, even transformative powers of educational technology. And, yeah, and students too. That's, yeah, I'm going to be teaching broadcast media. This could be an optional topic for students to think about presenting. I'll be doing a camp on, what is it called? Not Media Matters, but it's, I forget what the official title is. But it's basically creating media to try and affect change. What kinds of issues are important to you? And anyway, this is something that's definitely really important to me. I feel like this touches the real, an important core of what I have been advocating for decades in schools. And I do not see a lot of articulated advocacy. I just don't see advocacy for this. That's why I wanted to share Liz Kolb's article. And what do you all think? Put it in the chat. What are the different ways we can be involved? Because we live in this crazy, fractured media environment where everyone is getting too much information. I think that is true. Email is overwhelming. The newsfeed is overwhelming. It's very challenging to share messages and deal with the quantity of information. But I do think the words we say matter and the advocacy that we do can matter. And I think this is a topic worth advocating for. Yep. I couldn't agree more. And in the end, these need to be educator decisions, right? And that said, educators, you are responsible for screen time in your classroom. If you feel as if it's distracting the kids, then I know this is tough, but you're going to have to put your thumb down on it, right? And by the way, I don't personally have a problem with cell phone bands. If that's the direction you want to go, then do it, right? But that's a community conversation and it's a teacher and administrator conversation. I understand why people would want to do that. That makes sense to me to have a source of that. But that's a different conversation than limiting screens altogether, which I think has a lot of other implications to it. And let's talk about AI. Because AI, similarly, we're seeing, I want to say Lawrence Lessig, Larry Lessig, had a post on his substack about a law school that was issuing a blanket ban for AI, for the use of AI. And Stephen Johnson, if you don't follow Stephen Johnson, who wrote just so many wonderful books, how did we get to now, innovation. He was a keynote speaker at ISTE years ago when it was, I think it was ISTE. But anyway, I think these are instructional decisions. I think that departments at a minimum, but really the instructor should have the latitude to say this kind of AI use is fine. This kind of AI use is not. The school obviously needs to say that cheating and dishonesty is not okay. It's not okay to misrepresent work as your own when it's not. We need to fully document the sources that we use and the tools that we use. And I think the AI conversations that we use, I think those should be fully documented. And that's one of the most important things we can model and we can ask our students to do. But it's similar. The legislators should absolutely not be deciding whether or not I let my, for instance, and my eighth graders in web design use AI tools. And I similarly think that I should be allowed to say, for instance, as a broadcast media teacher, yes, please get your phone out because it's much better than any camera we have at school today because it's a relatively new phone. Let's use that to be able to create films and document things and what we're doing for that particular class. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I would also say, too, is that, and then we've got to get off this stupid topic. I'm tired of talking about this, and it's so important. Also, a phone can be a bridge for studying and learning, right? I'm not even talking about being on the phone. I'm talking about what it puts in your pocket, right? Something that I was at a meeting last week in D.C. And they asked us to go screenless the whole day, which, fine. I think that's a good thing. They wanted us really active in the discussions, right? So great. So I have my notebook out, and I carry a notebook everywhere, right? That's been a part of my thing for a long time. But my brain doesn't quiet down just because the screen is gone. And so I kept hearing things from, there's a lot of really interesting and brilliant people in the room. I'd hear things. And so I had like literally seven or eight pages worth of notes, like on different topics. I was going back and forth, and I actually sketched out a LinkedIn post that I wanted to make. And I took a picture of it, right? And then gave it to Claude. Yeah. And then Claude turned that outline into a more formal outline of which then I wrote on the airplane home. And I loved it, actually. I was very happy. I had forgotten how much I like just taking notes in a notebook. Now, Claude didn't make fun of my handwriting, which... It didn't. It didn't. Yeah. It did? Oh, my gosh. Wow. I kept calling my handwriting squiggly. Okay. Wow. Made up a word to describe my handwriting. But, which, by the way, it's fair. But, you know, like it can also be a gateway, too. Oh, 100%. And I've been using this sketchnote to infographic. It's amazing what we can do now with photographs and AI. Wow. Jason, were you receiving an award in Washington, D.C. for AI? Was that the occasion? No. I was not. No, because you did win. Didn't you all win something from that, like, White House AI contest or something? Yeah. We were the... Montana Digital Academy was the state teacher winner of the Presidential AI Challenge. And I was really sad. I felt really good about our regionals presentation, which we did over Zoom. No love. So... But this is a different meeting. It's a different meeting. Yeah. But, yeah. But, yeah. I did win another award in May that I'd rather break about. I got the... I was named the 2026 University of Montana Innovator of the Year. Congratulations. That is well-deserved. Yeah. That was both a big surprise and a delight. And hopefully there was a nice stipend that came with that. No, but the trophy is beautiful. Okay. We're good. Hey, do you have... Do you still have any of your trophies of debate from college? I have them in a huge box in my basement. So, like, it's a big Rubbermaid tub. And Montana only gave trophies out for first place for debate tournaments. And so when I only won two tournaments in high school. But in college, hardware is prolific. And so I have this ginormous box of trophies and speaker awards and all the fun stuff. My wife made me get rid of most of them, but I did keep a couple special ones. I think, yeah, winning impromptu at San Diego State one year was like... That was exciting. All right. Yeah. Let's talk about it. I won extemp at the Great Salt Lake Tournament one year. And it totally... Yeah. That's... No, that's a big deal. And those are practical skills, by the way. We haven't riffed on speech and debate and extemporaneous and impromptu and all that stuff. But it's... Yep. Those are great skills. Okay. I think we need to talk about AI articles and security. So I've picked a few. Where do you want to start with the ones we've got? Yeah. So there's a couple, I think, really interesting ones here. The first one is... I don't want to talk too long about this, but let's go ahead and talk about the Anthropic Band. So I believe both Wes and I mentioned Fable. Excuse me. I'm just making up new names for it. Fables. Fable, which is the new Mythos class model. And for those that haven't been keeping up, Mythos is the model that Anthropic was so terrified of they wouldn't release it. It apparently is extremely effective at finding bugs in code and security holes. But Fable was a Mythos class model that had apparently a lot of safeguards in it. And late Friday afternoon, early evening, the government, U.S. federal government issued a letter banning the model for non-U.S. citizens, including anyone Anthropic that was not a United States citizen. And there's a variety of interesting pieces there, but Anthropic, and the statement is in the link from Anthropic, they just couldn't really enforce that in any sort of meaningful way and allow the model to continue out. I'd only played a little bit with the model. It seemed very impressive. And I was also starting to think about doing some one-shot coding projects that for me, I'm totally skeezed out by the security stuff with AI code because I know nothing about it. So I wouldn't code anything that talks to data directly, but I would absolutely code a game or code a little tool that lives on my desktop computer or something. But I was very disappointed when I heard that happen. Yeah. Yeah. I put several articles in here about this. The, oh, maybe I put that one in here twice, the zip tie one. I think probably I put it down under security. Where is it? It's the one that basically says these tools are out here and we just need to get used to it because we're going to have these. Yeah, there it is. It's the Ars Technica wired from June 17th. Dangerous AI models are coming no matter what. And so do you remember when the G4 tower by Apple was there and the government banned it from export? And so Apple ran these ads that showed a tank and then the G4 touting how powerful it was. I don't know if you remember that or not. We should go back on YouTube and find those. But what this article by Lily Hay Newman from Wired is saying on June 17th, it's today, is that this is the present and it is the future. And we're not going to be able to stop these frontier models in their various forms, including open source forms, including forms for Chinese models, French models. They're all over the place. We're not going to be able to, quote, stop these dangerous models. And what does a dangerous model mean? It means they can identify security vulnerabilities. It means that they can write code that hacks. And I've got another crazy security article about a breach to share. And this is another, I don't know if I'm just wanting to get on bandwagon mode here, but I have been wanting to do a security, like password manager, protect yourself and your family workshop, like at my church. Since we start, we moved here four years ago or whatever. I think I'm going to do it because, oh my gosh, we have got to take this seriously. And I'm not going to go off on a big prepper tangent, but cyber attack and the vulnerability. We have a lady in our church who was retired and some, something broke in AT&T's network in uptown Charlotte. And she's been without internet now for almost a week. And she was supposed to, she has to go somewhere else. You can be on our phone. But we are very vulnerable to failures of infrastructure and malicious attacks and things like that. And AI plays a role in this because bad actors who want to harm, let's say the United States of America or our infrastructure or whatever, they have access to these kinds of tools. So I resonate with what this article says. I think it's a lot like the G4 ad. How powerful was a G4 Mac back in the day compared to, you know, the iPhone 17 or whatever now, right? The processor and the capability is just huge. So I also, Jason, played with Fable just briefly. I've actually become disenchanted and real frustrated with Claude because I've been trying to fix some issues that I have on my server that I pay for. It's gotten very complicated with all of these sites. But for a brief bit, I went ahead and switched over to Fable and said, hey, analyze all this stuff. Use essentially your top capability. And it did come up with some, what I felt was some pretty robust feedback. But I also haven't done that one shot like here. I'm going to give you this long prompt. Go. I'm coming back in two days to see the app you've built or the website that you've created. But that's also that agentic thing that I probably need to start playing with a little bit. Yeah, totally. And it's funny, Wes. Inevitably, this is going to end up on AI agents. But my understanding is that you can get it to where it will straight up manage that for you. You've got to give it access to a terminal or something. But yeah, it's... And again, I think that is awesome and also terrifying, right? Because if these agents can manage the light stuff like that, that also means they can turn into pen testers. And they can. They can. They can today. And the capability... Because that article says within six months, 12 months, a year and a half, these are going to be even more pervasive. And these capabilities... See, and this is why we've got... We need to get our government to actually work. Because we've got to cooperate internationally. Because international... We're not a political show. Sorry, guys. Jason just dropped off the call. No, but seriously, we need to collaborate. We've got to collaborate, even with China. Because if we don't have international agreements and nothing is going to be perfect, we're going to have rogue groups that are doing stuff. But it's a lot like other kinds of really potentially destructive technologies like poison gas. We haven't just given up on international treaties on poison gas, I don't think. Nuclear weapons, we've heard these kinds of analogies before. So we really do need to figure out how to collaborate. But we also need to take proactive steps as individuals and within our families and our communities to try to protect ourselves as best we can. I'll do this AI agent one about the GPUs and zip ties. We've mentioned on the show before, hey, isn't it good that these AI models are not ambulatory? And what that means is they can't walk around. They don't have access to whole factories where they're able to just do whatever they want. This is an Ars Technic article from today titled, Our AI coding agents taught robots how to install GPUs and cut zip ties. And so NVIDIA has this self-improvement program for robots and it's enlisting teams of AI coding agents. This idea, I don't know if you remember what Anthropic CEO and others are calling it, but it's where you've given the AI the independent ability. I guess this is in an agentic sense to go forth and do things on my behalf. And don't check with me every time you make a decision. And this is not just in the realm of software. It can be through robotics in the physical analog world. And I'm sure we're going to see more and more articles like this because what are curious folks going to do with these AI agents and with the robots that are now cheaper and more readily accessible? We're going to have these robots doing things. So it's not the Terminator today and I'm not trying to say the sky is falling. But I am saying that international cooperation matters. We need to figure out how regulation can work with business, can work with international organizations in order to address these issues. And we also need to do things like invest in our infrastructure, invest in our power grids, our water systems. All of these kinds of things are very susceptible to hacking. And these things can be hardened, but we need IT professionals that are there on staff putting in updates. And we need to be looking at legacy systems and carefully deciding what needs to do. Things need to be air gapped. Do things need to be protected from the Internet? And when we get to that security article about this latest hack, longtime listeners of the show will recognize this rant, which is just basically all this stuff is hacked. Does it matter to you? Are you doing anything different because of it? Yep, absolutely. Okay, so let's see here. What's my screen? There it is. I was very interested in the Pew Research that was released today about kind of how AI is polling. And it suggests that more people are using chatbots. I thought it was entertaining. They compared a 2024 versus a 2026 article. That seems like a long time in the AI world. So it is not surprising to me that now half of all Americans ever have used ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot. But a lot of Americans are very skeptical about AI. And they say including younger adults. And I'm not surprised by that at all. I think the narrative about jobs makes it the jobs is what I'm trying to talk about. Yeah, we'll edit this part in the final podcast. Yeah, no kidding. The job situation. And I still believe that a lot of this isn't necessarily AI replacing workers. It's tech companies that are firing large to be easily fireable so they can stock up money inside AI play departments, right? And so that's certainly a part of it. But you're starting to hear more junior coders that are getting laid off and that internships are drying up. And I don't necessarily have all the data there to be able to confirm or deny any of that. But I do think it's a very challenging time for this. And this is one of the reasons why schools need to be part of this conversation, right? And it's not, I don't think AI literacy and AI fluency is about pushing AI. I think AI literacy and AI fluency is understanding AI and being functional with it. So if it is troubling or if you perceive that something is BS, then take it on, right? Have that conversation. I think that's an incredibly important part of this process. And this graph that I've got up from the article, Americans are more likely to say chatbots help rather than hurt their productivity, knowledge, and creativity. It's a sizable percent that believe productivity is helped, not hindered, or it's not neutral. It helps on how informed we are and how creative we are. And that's really important because, again, many of the articles that we'll read and the things we'll hear in the news are just negative. And I think for those of us using the tools, I feel extremely augmented in my ability to be a professional teacher and to engage in the civic advocacy and the other kinds of things that I'm involved in doing. And I think that perception is mirrored by what we're seeing in this Pew research. So that's good. Yeah. And I would also say, too, I did give the opening keynote address on Monday morning at the Office of Public Instruction Summer Institute. That's the state of Montana's Teacher Administrator Education Institute each summer in Bozeman. And one of the things that I have stumbled into in the last couple of weeks, in part because of good conversations with my colleagues, is that I personally am both a very good person to talk about AI, and in a lot of ways, I'm a very bad person to talk about AI. And the reason why is that it really does play into the way I approach the world, which is going back literally 40 years. I was a little kid that played with canceled checks and created businesses, and I had business cards at age nine, and you had these wild ideas about this and that. And that can sometimes annoy colleagues when you are helping run a state virtual school. But also, though, like you mentioned what you've learned from it. I am so much more functional. Like I literally have set up servers that I would have never been able to do before. I used to try and give up really easily. And I'm not just like vibe coding, slop code to make these happen. I'm asking it to explain why this or why that. Yeah, teach me that too. Exactly. And the Geek of the Week I'm going to share in a couple of moments is a wild thing that I tried. I can't believe works. I wouldn't recommend it to a general audience, right? From my vantage point, because I have just enough computer knowledge to be dangerous, it's a very important part, I think, of the bigger picture here. And I liked that survey. I thought that was actually more positive than I would have expected it to be. And I won't put it back on the screen. But the part about this is in February of this year. A majority of Americans say they read AI summaries at the top of their search. Remember, we talked about it last week. Google has changed the search box. They hadn't changed the size since 2001. And AI search is now primary. And so this is absolutely a critical thing for us to grapple with is how do we change the ways that we talk about search? We use search. We ask students to use search because AI is not an option. It's there. It's just built in. Let's do one more article. I think we probably better Geek of the Week it. Yeah, I want to do this massive security breach. So this is Ars Technica today. Massive breach spills credentials for thousands of sensitive networks. Okay, this is an article that we could have talked about on every episode of the show because this happens. There's a lot of breaches that happen. The scale of this, here's a quote from the article. The scale of this breach touches nearly every sector of the global economy, sparing no industry, researchers from Hudson Rock, a security firm, said. The threat actors have built a verified database of working credentials for some of the largest enterprises on the planet. And I could go on. I'll just summarize by saying that bad actors who are not just nation states, but in this case, they think this is a criminal enterprise, have the keys to so many of the critical systems that we rely on a daily basis to do life. To purchase things, to access our bank accounts, to get gasoline that we put in our automobiles, like all of these things. So, again, the two things I'm feeling really passionate about tonight is important for us to advocate for the positive uses of screen time and not to throw all the screens away in schools. And then also to really think about how we are protecting ourselves, our family, to the degree we can, others in our community against these security breaches. Because that ties directly to the AI articles we were talking about and Fable and these models that are just getting more and more powerful. So, yeah, rant and rant done for us. Yeah, and I'll tell you, the number of scam emails I'm getting is increasing dramatically. I get way more text messages that many of which seem like they cloak better than they did months and months ago. Yeah, I... Fishing for you. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right. What you got for our Geek of the Week tonight? I mentioned Hermes Agent last week. It still remains a fascination for me. But I wanted to note that one of the ways, especially if you want it really easy to set up, and again, don't install this on your production laptop, period, right? This is something you want to do with an old computer or spin up a Linux box. Or if you really want to go wild, then do what I've been doing and spinning up a little server. But one of the cool things that Hermes Agents will do is you can spend $20 a month and get access to dozens of models, including Claude, I might add. And they also have free models available that you can... That are good enough to kind of run the kind of chief of staff role for an agent. And it's really interesting that you can do that. And I've been in cancel account mode in the last couple of weeks because I had a lot of accounts I was underusing. But this is one I'm definitely going to keep is that it plugs right into the Hermes Agent. But I also want to mention that I successfully installed a Hermes Agent on a Chromebook the other day. And it is a beefy Chromebook. It's one of the ones that I found very undervalued on eBay that was an enterprise Chromebook. It has an i5 8th generation chip in it, and it had upgradable RAM, so I upgraded to 64 gigabytes of RAM. But what's cool about it is that you can start the agent, and then you have to have the Linux thing installed. This is not something you do on a school Chromebook. But if you've got even a relatively modest Chromebook, you can install the Hermes Agent and use it. But more importantly, it will install the desktop app for you. And so you'd have the desktop Hermes Agent app on a Chromebook. Don't do this on create a fake... Or not a fake, but an additional Google account to do it, right? But if you want to experiment in this space, an Intel-based Chromebook would do it. So Jason, if I would do like the Plus account for Hermes Agent at $20 a month, can I use it like I'm using Claude or like I use ChatGPT as well? Or is this not going to give me that same sort of just direct chatbot interface? It will through Hermes, the agent itself, right? And so, yeah, it works just like that. And in fact, that desktop app, which it installs, is pretty effective. And then I see D. Idaho in the chat. Yeah. And in fact, one of the things that I feel very challenged by Hermes is also that the memory itself, despite it being about a self-correcting memory piece, the allowable characters is so small. It doesn't always allow me to do everything that I need it to do. But I feel it's certainly a better platform than OpenClaw. Wow. And talk about a gap in knowledge and experience, right? Because some folks aren't using AI tools. And then we've got people like Jason that are writing these, that are already using OpenClaw to do things and other agents. So fantastic. All right. Mine real quick are related to school this week. So I have been teaching two half-day workshops. And I'm putting, of course, as I always do, my curriculum online. So you can go to amazing animal websites and check out the sites that we're doing. And so we've done Google Sites. And I'm Max is my little alias because I build these along with the kids. But in addition to Google Sites, we're also using Adobe Express. And this is our glide, my glide show example about amazing elephants. And it is just so cool to see what students can create. I think animals are a fantastic topic for students. I'm probably, I always use my summer classes and stuff to inform what I do during the school year. And it just, it really is fantastic. There's so many amazing animals, boys, girls. Everybody seems to be interested in animals. So it's great. The other one that I've got is to my Minecraft Coding in Space. And so this is, both of these are for third, fourth, and fifth graders rising. And we've only had a four-day because of Juneteenth, we're off. But basically, we've been navigating and building in a moon base. And then we have been coding landing pads and domes. And actually, we did some robotic farming today. And we also did, I will admit, spawn some mobs. And some of those might have been hostile mobs that were just fun to spawn inside the domes. We learned that the Ender Dragon can basically break out of glass and fly wherever he wants. So anyway, if you know what that means. All right. Jason, when you're not here illuminating us about the possibilities of agentic AI, where can people find you? Hey, best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Although I got locked out of my LinkedIn account, I'm trying to get back into it. Or you can go to aicentris.com. That's right. And rumor is you're working on a new website. So we'll look for that coming soon. I am. Yes. Yeah. Will Hermes be building that for you? Yeah. Hermes will be building it for me. And I got a WordPress MCP server running last weekend. It blows my mind. Okay. I'm going to have to learn what that means. My name is Wes Fryer. You can find me at westfryer.com. When my freaking virtual private server is not crawling because of hostile cyber attacks and things that are happening. But anyway, usually westfryer.com. You can find me. So this has been the EdTech Situation Room. We are an almost weekly podcast that has been going for 10 years. This is episode 376. And we want to thank you for tuning in. It was fantastic to have several live folks in the chat room. We want to encourage you to do that if you can on Wednesday nights. We post to Facebook as well as Mastodon, usually in advance. Peggy, I'm so sorry I didn't the other week. But usually we'll just let you know if we're not going to be able to be here. And sometimes things do happen in the summer. But we want to encourage you to stay savvy. Stay safe. I want to encourage you to advocate for positive screen time in your community and using a password manager and trying to be safe in this perilous digital world. Good night, everybody. Good night.