How People are REALLY Using AI in 2026 | Check-In 36

Prompt No More: What Claude Plug-ins Signal for AI in Education | Ep. 114

In this episode of ChatEDU, Prompt No More: What Claude Plug-ins Signal for AI in Education, Matt and Liz open with a major Meta security flaw: hackers simply asked Meta AI to grant access to high-profile Instagram accounts, including Barack Obama's. With support entirely AI-run, affected users couldn't reach a human. The Rundown ChatGPT's new memory system uses "dreaming" to auto-curate user preferences over years. Google's new AI feature for Enterprise and Education plans finds scattered files and suggests folders for them. In a Stanford blind study, law professors preferred AI answers to student legal questions over peer-written ones 75% of the time. In a poll of 545 K-12 educators, most said AI will outweigh the internet's educational impact; about half report no district guidance. A new six-item tool in the ECNU Review of Education measures how much students outsource thinking to generative AI. Bernie Sanders proposed a one-time 50% stock tax on major AI companies to fund dividends for Americans. Jack Clark and The Anthropic Institute warned frontier models are nearing recursive self-improvement, urging international verification. Penn GSE launched a course on how K-12 students can design, critique, and build their own machine learning systems. Maryland's new law requires public schools to appoint AI coordinators and add AI literacy standards by June 2027. IBM's global software competition gives university students hands-on access to professional tech tools via its AI partner. Beneath the Surface Matt and Liz analyze Anthropic's "Claude for Legal" expansion (12 plug-ins, 20 MCP connectors), then turn to education: how similar integrations could streamline IEP compliance, audit curriculum drift in LMSs, and run automated student risk signals. The Bright Byte Using a new Health and AI Policy Index on 240 healthcare AI policies, Mount Sinai investigators see an opening for health systems and academic medical centers to lead in standardizing clinical AI deployment. Announcements Purchase Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77 [https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77] Seeing through the Machine – Teaching Bias as an Equity Practice in AI - Dr. Elizabeth Radday - https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a [https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a] Check out our middle / high school Student AI Literacy course - ⁠⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠⁠ [http://www.skills21.org/ai/learnai]  Explore Skills21’s FREE social media literacy curriculum - ⁠⁠ [https://www.skills21.org/social-balance]⁠https://www.skills21.org/social-balance⁠⁠⁠ [https://www.skills21.org/social-balance%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0] Address Screen Time concerns - ⁠ [http://skills21.org/ai/screenshift]skills21.org/ai/screenshift⁠ [http://skills21.org/ai/screenshift%E2%81%A0] Sponsors The National Center for Next Generation Manufacturing: Your Gateway to Next Generation Advanced Manufacturing - https://www.nextgenmfg.org Links AI Policy Pressure Test https://tinyurl.com/5xam65xs [https://tinyurl.com/5xam65xs] AI Policy Scenarios Test https://tinyurl.com/463p8err [https://tinyurl.com/463p8err] Hackers Asked Meta AI for Instagram Access. It Worked. https://tinyurl.com/4456m8yt [https://tinyurl.com/4456m8yt] Better memory for ChatGPT https://tinyurl.com/uz7abp49 [https://tinyurl.com/uz7abp49] This New Google Drive Feature Organizes Your Files for You https://tinyurl.com/ewvdfzhv [https://tinyurl.com/ewvdfzhv] AI Outperforms Law Professors in Stanford Law Study https://tinyurl.com/58s8vt4z [https://tinyurl.com/58s8vt4z] Teachers Say AI's Educational Impact Will Eclipse the Internet https://tinyurl.com/4rh4vzye [https://tinyurl.com/4rh4vzye] A New Scale for Measuring AI-Driven Metacognitive Offloading https://tinyurl.com/5f9u2428 [https://tinyurl.com/5f9u2428] Bernie Sanders: A.I. Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It. https://tinyurl.com/nujnbh4v [https://tinyurl.com/nujnbh4v] Anthropic Urges Global AI Pause Over 'Self-Improvement' Risk https://tinyurl.com/mry54xvz [https://tinyurl.com/mry54xvz] AI education for kids https://tinyurl.com/3fzsddjt [https://tinyurl.com/3fzsddjt] Maryland's School A.I. Guidance Law Is Now in Effect https://tinyurl.com/yc4xzxk6 [https://tinyurl.com/yc4xzxk6] IBM Launches Global AI Builders Challenge for Students https://tinyurl.com/2ss23mna [https://tinyurl.com/2ss23mna] Anthropic Unveils 'Claude for Legal' https://tinyurl.com/rcf7tak4 [https://tinyurl.com/rcf7tak4] A First-of-Its-Kind Index for Health Care AI Policy https://tinyurl.com/49uzu77m [https://tinyurl.com/49uzu77m]

How People are REALLY Using AI in 2026 | Check-In 36

In this ChatEDU Check-In: How People Are Actually Using AI in 2026, Matt explores a rigorous study analyzing thousands of real-world examples to reveal a massive shift towards personal and professional support. The data tracks over 12,000 use cases across platforms like Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube to capture how people actually interact with AI in their daily lives. Key Takeaways: Individuals increasingly rely on AI for core human thinking, risking mental laziness and the erosion of independent thought when algorithms handle tasks from the very start. Therapeutic and companion interactions have become the single highest-ranked use case, with users forming deep emotional bonds and anthropomorphizing chatbots to navigate personal hardships. Significant "shadow usage" is occurring in the workplace, where employees secretly build AI workflows to bypass institutional hurdles and complete tasks faster without leadership's knowledge. Matt’s Two Cents: School leaders need to look closely at how automation impacts cognitive engagement, shifting the focus from simply offloading clerical tasks to using AI intentionally as a colleague or coach that grows skills. Furthermore, the rise of emotional reliance on chatbots and undetected "shadow usage" highlights a critical gap between institutional governance and real-world behavior, signaling that districts must address the human and hidden dimensions of tech adoption. Article: How People Are Really Using AI in 2026 https://bit.ly/4ftzkoN

ChatGPT for Every Student - Now What? | Check-In 35

In this ChatEDU Check-In: How to fight brain rot at school?, Matt explores Estonia's nationwide launch of a customized, Socratic version of ChatGPT for 20,000 high school students. Despite wide access, early data shows that only 35 percent of eligible students consistently use the system, which is designed to guide learning rather than provide direct answers. Key Takeaways: Estonia's school-sanctioned chatbot uses a restrictive Socratic framework, but only about a third of students use it regularly. Students are actively developing workarounds, using repetitive prompting or switching to unfiltered commercial AI tools to avoid the frustrating conversational guardrails of the school system. A vocal minority of students are staging a boycott of the technology due to environmental concerns over data centers and geopolitical skepticism regarding the dominance of American tech firms. Matt’s Two Cents: This story is less about the technology itself and more about enterprise organizational development and how to deploy tech at scale. For top-down, nationwide educational technology implementations to succeed, schools must move away from rigid, forced rollouts and instead allow administrators, teachers, and students to collaborate on how to best leverage the tool. Article: How to Fight AI Brain Rot at School? For One Country, It’s With Free ChatGPT https://bit.ly/4fsflqv

AI on the Sidelines, Near Real-Time Coaching for Every Educator | Ep. 113

In this episode of ChatEDU AI on the Sidelines, Near Real-Time Coaching for Every Educator, open with the "Sad Wives of AI," a Wired piece on the marital strain and household gender gaps emerging as Bay Area tech husbands pour themselves into the AI wave. The Rundown Google has introduced automatic Google Drive syncing for NotebookLM, eliminating the need to manually update uploaded Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Upgrading to Gemini 1.5 Pro transformed NotebookLM's image upload capabilities into full multimodal visual understanding, opening up new use cases for students and teachers using screenshots and real world photos. A roundup of recent AI failures: a $100 million Pizza Hut franchisee lawsuit against Dragon Tail AI, Starbucks scrapping a faulty AI inventory tool, a study finding 60%+ of AI search responses inaccurate, and fake journals publishing AI papers. A Wall Street Journal report highlights how persistent memory features in major chatbots can backfire by latching onto stale, outdated, or sensitive personal data and skewing future advice. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten introduced a 10 plan calling for a complete ban on screens for preschool through second grade and a prohibition on student facing AI in all elementary schools. The School Superintendents Association is pairing 50 superintendents with 100 students to collaborate with MIT experts and draft a student led national AI policy for public schools. Students from New Haven's Engineering and Science University Magnet School developed a functioning visual prosthesis utilizing advanced vision language models for real time hazard detection for the visually impaired. The Beneath the Surface Matt and Liz explore Urban Assembly's Project CAFE, which delivers near-real-time coaching to every educator. CEO David Adams joins to discuss using AI-driven frameworks to improve teacher development, student engagement, and AI integration in K-12 classrooms. https://www.urbanassembly.org/ [https://www.urbanassembly.org/] https://www.urbanassembly.org/what-we-do/project-cafe [https://www.urbanassembly.org/what-we-do/project-cafe] The Bright Byte The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Biohub is an open-source world model of protein biology that predicts complex protein shapes in seconds and designs disease-targeting proteins in days. Being fully open source, it lets researchers worldwide download the data and accelerate breakthroughs on their own. Announcements Purchase Learning They'll Love - Dr. Elizabeth Radday Amazon - https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77 [https://tinyurl.com/22t9hz77] Seeing through the Machine – Teaching Bias as an Equity Practice in AI - Dr. Elizabeth Radday - https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a [https://tinyurl.com/4ybwkn7a] Check out our middle / high school Student AI Literacy course - ⁠⁠⁠www.skills21.org/ai/learnai⁠⁠⁠ [http://www.skills21.org/ai/learnai]  Explore Skills21’s FREE social media literacy curriculum - ⁠⁠ [https://www.skills21.org/social-balance]⁠https://www.skills21.org/social-balance⁠⁠⁠ [https://www.skills21.org/social-balance%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0] Address Screen Time concerns - ⁠skills21.org/ai/screenshift⁠ [http://skills21.org/ai/screenshift]  Links Meet the Sad Wives of AI https://tinyurl.com/mr4xf8ze [https://tinyurl.com/mr4xf8ze] Automatic Drive syncing in NotebookLM https://tinyurl.com/38kfana4 [https://tinyurl.com/38kfana4] Unlocking NotebookLM's best feature https://tinyurl.com/3ppt3ccz [https://tinyurl.com/3ppt3ccz] Pizza Hut franchisee says AI caused $100M in damages https://tinyurl.com/5ypp52ua [https://tinyurl.com/5ypp52ua] Exclusive: Starbucks scraps AI inventory tool across North America https://tinyurl.com/5a68wphd [https://tinyurl.com/5a68wphd] AI Just Isn’t Right https://tinyurl.com/33ve2p6u [https://tinyurl.com/33ve2p6u] Fake journals publish AI papers under professors' names https://tinyurl.com/3tbf5rpb [https://tinyurl.com/3tbf5rpb] Your Chatbot's Long Memory Isn't Always a Good Thing https://tinyurl.com/4dzpb77n [https://tinyurl.com/4dzpb77n] AFT president urges screen and AI bans for young students https://tinyurl.com/tu56kxc9 [https://tinyurl.com/tu56kxc9] Let Digital-Native Students Lead the AI Revolution in Education https://tinyurl.com/y589exk8 [https://tinyurl.com/y589exk8] New Haven Magnet School Is Only High School Team at Yale Innovation Summit https://tinyurl.com/mr352pte [https://tinyurl.com/mr352pte] A World Model of Protein Biology https://tinyurl.com/5ca6upk2 [https://tinyurl.com/5ca6upk2]

Catch Up Crisis | Check-In 34

In this ChatEDU Check-In: Catch Up Crisis, Liz explores how artificial intelligence can help address the widespread failure of American schools to effectively help struggling students catch up. Grade inflation and the removal of standardized testing requirements are masking major learning gaps, leaving many students unprepared for higher education despite having high grade-point average. Key Takeaways: A significant disconnect exists between high student grades and actual academic proficiency, creating a deceptive reality for parents and students. Traditional school systems are largely failing to move struggling students toward academic recovery due to the overwhelming demands placed on teachers. AI tools can analyze student work in real time to identify specific learning misconceptions, serving as a scalable playbook for targeted teacher interventions. Liz’s Two Cents: School leaders must confront the uncomfortable reality that grade inflation is masking critical student deficiencies. To prevent students from falling permanently behind, districts should strategically leverage AI to surface real-time diagnostic insights, allowing teachers to maximize their limited intervention time by targeting exact learning gaps rather than relearning mastered content. Article: America’s Schools Are Terrible at Catching Kids Up. How AI Can Help https://bit.ly/4u8cuGQ