EdTechSR Ep 357: AI Tinkering Playbook

Welcome to episode 357 (“AI Tinkering Playbook”) of the EdTech Situation Room from August 27, 2025 , where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) lean into the tinkerer’s mindset —treating AI as a thinking partner you iterate with, not a magic box—while swapping classroom-ready examples and PD patterns. They open with hands-on strategies for NotebookLM as a quasi custom-bot for staff handbooks and new-teacher docs, showing how a short “read this first” instruction turns NotebookLM into a practical helpdesk for policy Q&A. Then it’s a tour of PD formats that work: an advanced, build-something-together session (“Build-a-Bot”) where teachers leave with a functioning helper tailored to their workflow, and a foundations session (“Prompting is Teaching”) that frames promptcraft through how teachers already model, iterate, and improve student work. On the creative side, the hosts compare Nano Banana image edits (Wes’s Tetons photo… now featuring Ronald & Grimace!) with Qwen’s new image modifier, plus Freepik’s growing AI toolkit—concrete examples of “try it, test it, share it” tinkering educators can adopt tomorrow. Headlines include Meta + Midjourney model news, an Apple iPhone event preview, and a trio of security stories: an AI-assisted worm in the wild, Anthropic disrupting automated disinfo/attacks, and research on tricking AI browsers—reminders to keep beating the drum for password managers and unique passphrases. Geeks of the Week: Play with international AI models (Mistral, ZAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, Reka, Kimi) to broaden your toolkit, and Home Assistant Green for a private, resilient smart-home lab teachers can learn from and automate around. 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!

You can listen to EdTechSR Ep 357: AI Tinkering Playbook online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

EdTechSR Ep 357: AI Tinkering Playbook is an episode from EdTech Situation Room by @techsavvyteach & @wfryer by @techsavvyteach & @wfryer.

This episode is 64:54 long.

This episode was published on Oct 26, 2025.

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