Today’s introductory lesson involved watching the first two of three videos, and starting a sketchnote about the key ideas.

First we watched the 3 minute YouTube video, “Online Verification Skills — Video 1: Introductory Video” by Mike Caufield. (3 minutes)

Next we watched the 4 minute CBS Sunday Morning episode from 10 years ago, “Meet a puppeteer with a gift for pulling strings.” I preface this video with a slide and some discussion about Harry Potter 3 “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” the dementors, and what it means to be “pulling someone’s strings” like a puppet, trying to manipulate them.

At this point in the semester, my students have already learned how to create sketchnotes on their iPads, first sketchnoting Rachel Smith’s TEDx talk, “Drawing in Class,” and next sketchnoting John Green’s CrashCourse video on “Using WikiPedia.” Today I chose to sketchnote on our classroom whiteboard, and this is the VERY basic sketchnote I was able to draw “live” while watching these 2 videos with the students in class.

Here’s why I titled this post, “Sketchnote to AI Infographic.” I’ve been aware for several months about the amazing power of Google’s Gemini AI “Nano Banana” image generator, particularly when paired with an image prompt generated with Anthropic’s Claude AI and an actual “base photo” to use in the image. I’ve documented some of those discoveries on my “Learning AI with Wes Fryer” website.

This was my AI media creation workflow this afternoon:

1. I generated an AI image prompt using Claude AI, uploading a photo of my whiteboard-drawn Sketchnote and a PDF of my entire lesson from Canvas for background. (archived Claude conversation available)
2. I used Gemini AI and uploaded the whiteboard sketchnote photo (again) with the Claude-provided image prompt. After five different iterations / tweaks, I now have an infographic I’m quite pleased with. (archived Gemini conversation available)

Being able to create a high quality infographic based on my own sketchnote and lesson details is FANTASTIC! I’m quite excited to share this with my students during our next class.

I may challenge them to use one of the AI platforms they have access to (our school licenses Flint AI) and try a similar “sketchnote to AI Infographic” transformation.

I’m a HUGE fan not only of media literacy education, but also #create2learn pedagogy, which is embodied in the website I’ve maintained since 2013, “Show with Media: What Do You Want to CREATE Today?”

Give this “sketchnote to AI infographic” media creation workflow a try, and please let me know the results!

I opened Claude and described what I needed. This was my actual prompt, my full archived conversation is also available:

I need your help vibe coding the functionality of this double random spinner, which I use as a “mythological creator selector.” https://spinthewheel.io/wheels/QnF5l2mTXVBwoPy9FXUN I’m attaching a screenshot. Each spinner should spin and make a random selection, and display what that selection is… provide the chance to REMOVE 1 or both selections and re-spin… I want this to be all HTML and Javascript in a single HTML file, and it should have comments that are ‘friendly’ for others to use who want to change the selections in each wheel. Any questions to ask to clarify? I’ll want help creating a readme file too so I can share this on my GitHub

About five minutes later, I had a working html file I uploaded to my own server and used in my next class. This evening I shared the source code and an explanatory READ-ME file on my GitHub, and published a working version to GitHub pages:

–> Try it: wfryer.github.io/creature-spin/mythological-creature-selector.html

The replacement is genuinely BETTER than the original. SpinTheWheel.io just showed animal / creature names. This version displays a brief description of each creature the moment the wheel lands, and when both wheels stop, a combined banner shows both creatures side by side with their descriptions. That extra context matters for students who may not know what an Axolotl or a Pangolin actually is — and it scaffolds the Flint AI brainstorming step that comes next much more effectively.

The Activity

The left wheel is filled with unusual real animals (Axolotl, Narwhal, Platypus, Pangolin, Capybara, and more). The right wheel has mythological / legendary and other winged creatures (Phoenix, Thunderbird, Griffin, Pegasus, Dragonfly, and more). Students spin both and use whatever combination fate gives them as the foundation for designing an original mythological creature.

That’s where Flint AI enters the picture. Flint is a school-safe AI platform that lets teachers build structured conversational activities — a guided chatbot that asks students questions in sequence rather than just answering them. For this project, I built a Creature Creation activity in Flint that walks students through developing their creature step by step: name, origin story, habitat, diet, personality, special powers, etc.

I demoed it myself by spinning the wheels and getting Sloth + Falcon. Following the suggestions of my middle school students in class today, I named my creature “Jeremiah the Slothan,” gave him humble origins on a Mississippi farm, relocated him to Sydney, Australia, established that he heroically saves lost children, and decided he subsists on a rigid diet of corn dogs. Flint engaged warmly with every answer — even the silly ones — and kept building on what I gave it rather than steering me toward anything more “realistic.” When I asked mid-session if it could draw Jeremiah, it generated an image on the spot: a sloth body with falcon wings, sharp eyes, and a hooked beak.

Flint AI functions as a Socratic brainstorming partner. It never tells students what their creature should be — it asks questions and prompts them to go deeper. For middle schoolers who stare at a blank page and freeze, this kind of scaffolded conversation is valuable, and it also provides a structured as well as privacy-safe way to “use AI as a thinking partner, not a cheating partner.”

The Bigger Project

The spinner and Flint activity feed into something larger. Last spring (2025), my students used their creature ideas as the basis for Scratch sprites — designing, animating, and programming their characters. I combined about twenty of those creatures into a single Scratch project example, with original student “story code” included::

–> scratch.mit.edu/projects/1286497553

It’s worth “taking for a spin” to see the range of what students invented.

Using This in Your Classroom

The basic flow:

1. Spin: Students get their two-animal combination. Descriptions help them start thinking immediately about traits, abilities, and contrasts.
2. Brainstorm with Flint: Students type their two animals into the Creature Creation activity. The question sequence takes about 15–20 minutes and produces a rich character brief.
3. Create: Students use their brief to design a Scratch sprite, draw the creature, write a myth, build a trading card, or whatever output fits your class.

The spinner is free and requires no account. Flint AI requires a school subscription. Scratch is free and browser-based. My full lesson series / unit is also available, along with last year’s “creature code gallery.”

If you want to customize the spinner’s creature lists for a different subject or age group, you can. Instructions are included in the GitHub project README file. The items are configured right at the top of the script with comments. Just edit the name, description, and color for each entry.

AI Attribution: I vibe coded the spinner tool and drafted this blog post with Claude. More of my AI experiments and use cases are shared on ai.wesfryer.com.

* I also need to give a shout-out to Tony Vincent, whose “Spin a Spooky Story” project first inspired me to create and use the lesson “Spooky Scratch Stories” in October each year before Halloween in my middle school coding classes. That’s how I originally learned about SpinTheWheel.io.

Cross-posted to wfryer.substack.com.

The audio interview clip of this story is just under 6 minutes long, and it’s titled, “Stan Davis: From West Virginia’s First Black Air Traffic Controller to Healing and Friendship.” It’s an excerpt from a longer interview that is over an hour long, from November of 2024.

I shared this digital story during the featured presentation in the 2026 annual meeting of the Mint Hill Historical Society, where I’ve been a volunteer the past three years. More details and the full slideshow from my presentation are shared as an update on the MHHS website. I did video and audio record the entire presentation, and will be editing and sharing that full talk soon.

What I want to briefly share with and encourage you to do now is the following:

1. Give Stan Davis’ story a listen. You won’t be disappointed.
2. Consider the ways we need to listen deeply to the stories of other people, and not just those in our ‘normal circle’ of family and friends.
3. Think about the ways storytelling, listening, and “digital storytelling” can play a role in your own life and in your community through racial healing.

We live in challenging times, and I believe we are called to serve as “culture healers, not culture warriors.”

This evening, I am thankful I was able to lean into this aspirational, personal vocation.

Some of the digital tools which enabled and empowered me to share this evening’s stories and presentation were:

1. Descript.com
2. NotebookLM
3. Gemini Pro AI’s Nano Banana
4. Claude AI Pro
5. Auphonic
6. Canva.com
7. QuickTime Player

It is deeply fulfilling to have an opportunity to put some of my skills as a media literacy classroom teacher to good use.

Let the storychasing and cultural healing continue.

The star of the show is Auphonic, a web-based audio processing tool I’ve been relying on for years — for podcasting, digital storytelling, quick edit videography, and more. Auphonic’s adaptive leveler, voice EQ, and loudness normalization work together to even out your audio across an entire recording. You can actually see the difference visually: the input waveform is uneven and low, while the output is boosted and consistent all the way across. Auphonic offers up to two hours of processing for free per month, and if you need more or want to remove the audio watermark, you can purchase one-time credit bundles — I’ve found five hours for $12 to be a great value.

My workflow keeps things simple: after editing my video in InShot on my iPhone, I export just the audio using QuickTime Player on my Mac (File ? Export ? Audio Only). I then drop that audio file into Auphonic, select the “Voice Cleaner” preset, and let it process. Because I’m working with audio only rather than a full video file, the processing is fast. Once I download the normalized audio file, I return to QuickTime Player, remove the original audio track from my video (Edit ? Remove Audio), and drag in the fixed audio file. A quick export at the original resolution — 1080p in my case — and the video is ready to upload.

The specific video I used to demonstrate this workflow was a fun one: a multi-clip backyard project documenting my ongoing “war with the squirrels” and a new ZigBee smart plug setup for my Home Assistant smart home project. It had five different clips shot from different angles with noticeably different audio levels — exactly the kind of real-world scenario where Auphonic shines. If you’re a video creator, teacher, or student producing multi-clip videos, this workflow is absolutely worth adding to your toolkit. Better audio makes every story more compelling — and with tools like Auphonic and QuickTime Player, there’s no reason to settle for uneven sound.

AI Attribution: I drafted this blog post using Claude. Check out my archived conversation. More of my AI experiments and use cases are shared on ai.wesfryer.com.

The recent article, “The Wikipedia wars” by authors of EUvsDisinfo, highlights the literal cyberwar which continues to be waged by Russian-aligned threat actors against truth, history, the citizens of our planet, and specifically the editors of WikiPedia.

Vladimir Putin, the de-facto leader of Russia since 2000, wants to rewrite history on his own terms. The 47th elected President of the United States is following suit in many ways in our federal parks. But on WikiPedia, ongoing “edit wars” by Russian agents seek to change historical language specific to many of Russia’s geographic neighbors, including the Baltic States. According to EUvsDisinfo researchers:

One recurring tactic has been changing the birthplaces of hundreds of Estonian public figures from ‘Estonia’ to ‘Estonian SSR, Soviet Union’, despite the legal consensus that Estonia was occupied, not legitimately incorporated, by the USSR between 1940 and 1991. This is not a minor wording issue. Calling Estonia a ‘Soviet republic’ supports the Russian claim that the Baltic states voluntarily joined the USSR and directly contradicts the position of Estonia, the EU, NATO countries, and international law.

These repeated edits of WikiPedia articles by bad actors / threat actors are even more challenging today because of the rise of AI search and AI overviews. Back in August 2025 I facilitated a webinar for the Media Education Lab titled, “Searching with AI – Can We Trust the New Gatekeepers?”

Internet search skills of the 2000s and even 2010s are no longer sufficient today. Media literacy and AI literacy requirements should include “Defense Against the Dark Arts” strategies, like “Fact Checking with AI Superprompts.”

One of my favorite lessons in my my middle school media literacy class is, “LaunchPad WikiPedia.” In the lesson, my students practice their sketchnoting skills using their iPads and styluses, watching and looking for key takeaways in John Green’s 2019 video, “Using Wikipedia: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #5.”

Among other things, I hope my students in this lesson learn how the TALK PAGES of WikiPedia are digital spaces where online debates over facts, wording, citations, and other elements of WikiPedia articles are hashed out and resolved. WikiPedia celebrated its 25th anniversary last month in January 2026, and it stands out in many ways as an exemplar not only for web publishing, but also because of it’s community which polices, protects, nurtures and grows its article collection in so many languages.

Some conservative voices love to bash and disparage WikiPedia, making debates over bias yet another front in our ongoing culture war. Media literacy DOES mean fact checking, investigating sources, and uncovering bias. But media literacy should never be considered a partisan issue, any more than pursuing a college education or advanced degrees should be considered “suspect” and a reason to dismiss a source’s credibility. Those were opinions advocated by Mao Zedong in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They do not belong in twenty-first century discourses on ideas.

To gain a better understanding of how “digital defense against the dark arts” skills are needed by ALL Internet users today on our planet, I recommend the following podcasts:

1. Angry Planet (especially their January 16, 2026 episode, “Online Culture is the Whole Culture.”)
2. Long Shadow – Breaking the Internet
3. In Moscow’s Shadows by Mark Galeotti
4. DarkNet Diaries

They are a few years old now (from 2019-2020) but YouTuber Destin Sandlin (@SmarterEveryDay) created a fantastic series of videos he put into a YouTube playlist, “Deep Dive – Social Media Misinformation.”

My favorite from that series, shared in March 2019, is “Manipulating the YouTube Algorithm.” Even though this video is six years old now, I think the threat actor dynamics which Destin highlights are largely UNKNOWN to most Internet users and U.S. citizens today. Most folks just don’t realize we all need “defense against the dark arts” skills in digital spaces.

If you’ve read to the end of this post, congratulations. Now go back and add the videos I’ve referenced here to your own YouTube Watch List / media queue… and bookmark my “News with Wes Fryer” website!

If you’re interested in more links and resources on these topics, please check out my “Conspiracies and Culture Wars” Media Literacy inquiry project, which I started with my Chicagoland colleague, Brian Turnbaugh.

Hat tip to Brian for sharing the article, “The Wikipedia wars”, which was the original catalyst for this blog post.

Good luck developing your own “digital defense against the dark arts” skills. If I can help further, please let me know.

WikiPedia can be a helpful source of information for breaking news and controversial events like these. Unlike mainstream and social media “news” sources and influencers, who can present divergent perspectives and even contradictory “facts,” WikiPedia presents the SAME PAGE of information for each article to viewers, but maintains TALK PAGES for each article where controversies and disagreements are hashed out among article editors and site admins. In the case of these recent killings, I recommend checking out BOTH the articles and the TALK PAGES for:

• Killing of Renee Good (talk page)
• Killing of Alex Pretti (talk page)

Each semester in my middle school media literacy classes, I share a lesson I call, “LaunchPad WikiPedia,” in which students learn how to use a variety of features of WikiPedia to not only understand different topics and issues, but also how disagreements about them are “hashed out” among users and admins. We create a sketchnote of John Green‘s outstanding video from 2019, Using Wikipedia: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #5 (13:30).

One of the key media literacy skills I introduce to students through our “Brain Hacking InfoPics” lesson series as well as “Froot Loop Conspiracy Theories” unit is SIFT. Developed by Mike Caufield at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, SIFT is a media literacy strategy that encourages people to STOP when they encounter potentially emotional / polarizing information or an unfamiliar news source. SIFT nexts directs people to INVESTIGATE the source, FIND trusted coverage, and lastly TRACE claims to their original source.

Since SIFT was originally developed and John Green recorded his outstanding video on using WikiPedia as a launchpad for learning, artificial intelligence (AI) platforms have entered our information landscape and are increasingly providing direct “answers” to user questions, instead of a series of web links like a Google search. Given their near-universal tendency to confabulate / hallucinate, AI platforms present significant challenges.

AI tools also offer incredibly powerful opportunities for deep information analysis and fact checking, however, and Mike Caufield’s latest “Deep Research” AI superprompt strategy, which he calls, “SIFT for AI,” is a transformational tool for our personal media literacy toolkits. I facilitated a webinar for the Media Education Lab in November 2025 exploring this strategy, titled “Fact Checking with AI Superprompts.”

This past weekend, as we prepared for a significant winter ice storm in the southeastern United States, I shared a post on my “Resist and Heal” Substack that I cross-posted on my personal Facebook page titled, “Death Squads in the USA.” That post sparked a flurry of thoughtful comments (35 to date) from the politically diverse group of folks I’m connected to via that Facebook profile.

One of those commenters, a college classmate of mine, shared a long response that included more than ten different claims about the killings of both Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as past actions by other state and federal officials. A Facebook comment thread seemed like a VERY inadequate medium to thoughtfully respond, so I used Caufield’s “Deep Research” AI superprompt with Claude Pro AI to investigate the claims. The 7.5 pages of results are both helpful and eye opening, and provide a timely example of how AI superprompts like this can be extremely useful when we find ourselves confronted with an overwhelming volume of contradictory and controversial claims about current events.

In addition to offering a “deep dive” fact check into the presented claims, Caufield’s “Deep Research” superprompt also offers a variety of “commands” which can provide further insight into a given topic or claim set. I opted to choose, “explain like I’m in high school,” and the following are the unedited Claude Pro AI results. (You can also view an archive of my entire conversation with Claude – which includes everything except my friend’s original FB comment.)

The Basic Situation

You’ve probably seen posts online about ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents shooting people in Minneapolis. There’s a lot of conflicting information flying around, so let me break down what we actually know.

Two Separate Shootings, Two Different People

Shooting #1: Renee Good (January 7, 2026)

Renee Good was a 37-year-old mom of three who was part of a neighborhood group that watched ICE agents to alert immigrants when raids were happening (kind of like a neighborhood watch, but for immigration enforcement).

On the morning of January 7th, she was sitting in her parked SUV in the middle of a residential street, essentially blocking traffic to slow down ICE vehicles. An ICE agent named Jonathan Ross approached her car. What happened next is where the stories diverge:

• What the government says: She tried to run over the agent with her car, so he shot her in self-defense. They called it “domestic terrorism.”
• What the videos show: Multiple news organizations did frame-by-frame analysis of bystander videos. They found that her steering wheel was turned away from the agent right before he fired. The Minneapolis mayor watched the videos and said the government’s story was “bullshit.”

She was shot three times and died.

Shooting #2: Alex Pretti (January 24, 2026)

Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked at a VA hospital taking care of veterans. He was also legally allowed to carry a gun (he had a permit).

On January 24th, he was in an area where ICE was conducting arrests. He saw agents push a woman to the ground and stepped in to help her up. Then:

• What the government says: He approached agents with a gun, refused to be disarmed, and “violently resisted.” They said he came there to “inflict maximum damage” and called him a “domestic terrorist.”
• What the videos show: He was holding his cell phone, not a gun. Video shows an agent reaching into the scuffle and taking Pretti’s gun from his holster. Less than a second later, other agents shot Pretti 10 times. He never fired his weapon — he didn’t even have it in his hands.

The Original Post’s Claims — What Checks Out and What Doesn’t

The post you saw makes a lot of claims. Here’s the scorecard:

WRONG: “Body cam footage shows her make eye contact, smile, and gun the engine”

The footage released wasn’t even from a body camera — it was from the agent’s personal cell phone. And it actually shows her saying “I’m not mad at you” while sitting still. Video analysis shows her turning the wheel away from the agent before he shot.

WRONG: “She dragged one cop”

There’s no video evidence of this. The mayor said the agent walked away fine and that claiming he was “run over” was ridiculous.

WRONG: “The nurse pulled the weapon and fired it”

This is the opposite of what happened. Videos from multiple angles show an agent removed the gun from Pretti’s holster, and then other agents shot Pretti. He never fired anything.

WRONG: “Walz declared war on the federal government”

Governor Walz actually said the federal government was “waging war against Minnesota” — that’s the opposite direction. He was saying Minnesota was being attacked, not that Minnesota was attacking.

WRONG: “Biden hired 87,000 armed IRS agents”

This is a viral claim that’s been debunked many times. The real story: Congress approved funding to hire 87,000 IRS employees total (not agents) over 10 years. Most would be customer service reps and IT people. Only about 2% of IRS workers carry weapons, and those are criminal investigators who go after major tax crimes, not regular people.

PARTIALLY TRUE: Tim Kaine’s son was arrested at a protest

This actually happened in 2017. He was at a counter-protest against a pro-Trump rally and got arrested for resisting arrest. But calling it “false flag ops” is a huge exaggeration — he disrupted a rally and got in trouble with cops when they tried to arrest him. He got probation and a small fine.

PARTIALLY TRUE: Federal buildings were damaged in 2020

Yes, during the George Floyd protests, some federal buildings were damaged. But the claim of “170 burned” doesn’t match any official reports. Most damage was graffiti and broken windows. A few buildings had fires. Total damage to federal buildings in Portland was about $2.3 million.

Why Does This Matter?

Here’s the thing: when the government shoots someone, they get to tell the first story. They control the press conference, they control what information gets released.

But we live in an age where bystanders have phones. Multiple videos exist of both these shootings, and when news organizations analyze them frame-by-frame, the videos often tell a different story than the government’s official version.

That doesn’t automatically mean the government is lying or the agents are murderers. But it does mean you should be skeptical of any official story until you see the evidence yourself.

The Bigger Picture

The post you saw is doing something really common in political arguments: mixing real things with exaggerated things with made-up things, all presented with the same confidence.

• Real thing: Tim Kaine’s son was arrested at a protest
• Exaggerated thing: Federal buildings were damaged ? becomes “170 burned”
• Made-up thing: The nurse “fired his weapon” ? videos show the opposite

When you see a post that’s THIS confident and THIS detailed, that’s actually a red flag. Nobody knows everything for certain. When someone acts like they have all the answers and everyone else is a brainwashed idiot… that’s usually when you should start checking their claims.

How to Think About This Going Forward

1. Video evidence beats official statements. When multiple news organizations independently verify and analyze footage, that’s stronger than a press conference.
2. Check if claims can even be verified. “Chiefs from Chicago and Portland agree” — which chiefs? When did they say this? If there’s no source, be suspicious.
3. Watch for emotional manipulation. “Their kids!” — notice how the post switches from claims to emotions when the claims run out.
4. Both sides can be wrong about different things. Maybe some protesters ARE dangerous. Maybe some agents ARE using excessive force. Both can be true. The world isn’t a movie with clear heroes and villains.
5. Specific numbers need specific sources. “87,000 armed agents” and “170 federal buildings burned” are the kinds of claims that should have clear sources. If they don’t, someone probably made them up or passed along something they saw without checking.

Want to Know More?

If you want to actually see the video analysis for yourself:

• ABC News did a minute-by-minute breakdown of the Renee Good shooting
• The Washington Post analyzed the Alex Pretti shooting frame-by-frame
• Multiple videos are available showing both incidents from different angles

Looking at primary sources (the actual videos) rather than just reading what people say about them is always the best approach.

That concludes the Claude Pro AI superprompt results for my query.

I hope the strategies I’ve shared here are helpful to you personally, and to others with whom you have conversations about events like these recent, tragic killings of US citizens by US law enforcement agents in Minnesota.

If you found this helpful, consider subscribing to one or more of the four Substack newsletters I periodically update. Also consider bookmarking my new website, news.wesfryer.com, where I share links to newsletters and media I curate and create.

Media literacy. We all need more of it!

(I cross-posted this to my Substack, “Media Literacy with Wes.”)

This podcast episode from NPR’s Studio 1A features an interview with Marc Berman, the author of “Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being.” In the interview, Marc references and mentions another related book, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” by Chris Hayes.

Interestingly, Shelly told me this morning we already have Marc’s book in our Kindle library! I’m starting it today, so I added it as a “currently reading” book on my Storygraph profile.

As a current middle school classroom teacher, I found Marc’s discussion and observation about both “Directed attention” and a “directed attention fatigue state” fascinating and important. It’s thought-provoking to consider that in the “traditional school / classroom setting,” as teachers we attempt to control student attention and force students into a “direct attention” state. We want students to pay attention to the things we are talking about and teaching about in the classroom, and want to minimize distractions and not only “off-task behavior,” but also “off-task thinking.” These dynamics have always posed a lot of challenges for everyone involved in formal learning settings, but this is especially true today because of the prevalence of digital screens.

Marc also talks about “involuntary” or “bottom-up attention” in this podcast interview, which is the kind of attention that is directed by an outside hike or other experience with nature. This reminds me of my own “Wonder links” or “Curiosity Links” which I like to share and discuss with students in class.

Marc’s discussion of how the occurrence of fractals / fractal patterns in nature also seems to be connected to the healing properties of time spent outside. This reminds me of the iOS app “Frax,” which I learned about over Thanksgiving break in Northern Virginia, visiting with a local artist in her shop.

Marc’s research points to “Attention restoration theory,” which involves ways we can use nature to restore our attention and also improve our wellness and general health. These are topics I predict Shelly and I will discuss in the months ahead on our “Wes and Shelly Share” podcast!

Our byline for the podcast is, “Stay curious, Go Outside, and Keep Exploring!”

I have not visited Iceland yet, but my buddy and podcasting partner, Jason Neiffer, has, and he’s raved about how much he loves the country, the geography, the culture, etc.

The purpose of this video by the Vivaldi Iceland Team is straightforward: Let more people know about the availability and benefits (especially regarding online PRIVACY) of the Vivaldi web browser… and simultaneously educate viewers about Vivaldi, its historic relationship to the Opera browser… and the good work their Norwegian and Icelandic teams are doing to support open web standards, competition in the world of web browsing, and a more private / protected online experience for users overall.

For me, this web video strategy worked! While I’d downloaded and tried Vivaldi at some point in the past, I hadn’t been using it recently. As a result of the video, I downloaded Vivaldi on my iPad, MacOS laptop, and iPhone… and have been finding it both LIGHTNING FAST and also great (so far) for ad blocking, including ads on YouTube!

When you launch the Vivaldi browser on any device, you can choose if you want to “Block Ads and Trackers” and your “preferred level of blocking.” I’ve chosen to block them all, acknowledging that “some sites may break.”

I was curious about whether Vivaldi is based on the Chromium project from Google, and it turns out it is. Not only is that confirmed via the English WikiPedia, it also was confirmed by Gemini 3’s responses to this prompt:

Please tell me the background of the Vivaldi web browser, which has the development team based in Iceland. Is this chromium based or is it based on gecko or some other browser engine? User search skills and especially find some interesting trivia items about Vivaldi. Make the case for why privacy first browsers like Vivaldi are important.

My favorite part of this Gemini answer was shared under the heading, “Why Privacy-First Browsers Matter.”

In the modern web, your browser is often the “gatekeeper” of your digital identity. Privacy-first browsers like Vivaldi are important for several reasons:

1. Anti-Profiling: Mainstream browsers often track your history to build a “shadow profile” of your interests, which is then sold to advertisers. Vivaldi does not collect your browsing data.
2. Security by Default: By including built-in ad and tracker blockers, these browsers stop malicious scripts before they even load, reducing the “attack surface” of your computer.
3. Encrypted Sync: When you sync your tabs or passwords across devices in Vivaldi, the data is end-to-end encrypted using a password that only you know. Not even the Vivaldi team can see your data.
4. Breaking Monopolies: Using independent browsers prevents a single company (like Google) from dictating the “rules” of the internet, ensuring the web remains an open platform rather than a walled garden.

As a current middle school classroom teacher and media literacy advocate, I believe the importance of PRIVACY is poorly understood by many students as well as adults. Privacy is really the foundation of all other rights, and in our attention economy as well as maturing surveillance state, it’s important that we take actions to understand privacy better, protect our own privacy more, and help educate others about these issues and options.

I’m excited to rediscover the Vivaldi web browser and especially how FAST it is. I’ve been a big fan of Google for years (even before our Google Teacher Academy in Boulder, Colorado in 2009) but I’m also a supporter of the open web and privacy. So now that I’ve set Vivaldi to be my default web browser, we’ll see how that experience goes in upcoming weeks.

I encourage you to download Vivaldi and give it a try too! In our era of AI-embedded web browsers (like “AskGPT” from OpenAI) we need to critically interrogate the benefits and drawbacks of using digital tools which favor a panopticon approach to privacy.

Please let me know your thoughts and about your experiences about Vivaldi and Chrome-alternative web browsers, either here as a comment or via Mastodon, BlueSky, or other social media platforms.

I spent more time than I care to admit (more than an hour) playing with this code and tweaking it, and I did NOT come up with a satisfactory solution yet. Here are my two best attempts.

In “Circle Ray Animation v1” I’m trying to use the pen blocks, and I created two subroutines for the pin and pinhead. I’m pretty sure this is more complicated than what the student did originally. The student’s final graphic has 19 pinhead circles, but instead of fanning / drawing outward, they are at oblique angles which creates a “spirograph” like circle with a hollow center.

In my second attempt, I tried a different approach using the stamp block. Instead of creating a polygon with the “pen down” block and a loop, I tried “stamping” a sprite which I drew in the shape of a pin. I know this is not the technique the original student used, because they hadn’t changed the original Scratch Cat costume, but this result is actually closer to the design they created.

I tried “vibe coding” this challenge, initially using ChatGPT, then Claude, and finally Gemini. The LLMs offered the best help when I challenged them to “Please brainstorm 5 other ways to create this with totally different code approaches.” This is an AI prompting suggestion I picked up from Amanda Caswell in her October 2025 post on Tom’s Guide, “7 prompts I use for every AI chatbot — and they work for just about everything.” This is a version of her sixth prompt suggestion, “The ‘Three Versions’ Prompt.”

What ideas do you have? I’m thinking this could be a fun challenge to pose to my own middle school computer programming students down the road!

The YouTube thumbnail title, “NASA IS PANIC,” should probably be a giveaway. The narrated audio on many of these channel videos actually sounds realistic / real for the most part, but there are moments (like the 8:00 mark of the video, “3?/ATLAS Is a PROBE — New Data Leaves No Doubt | Avi Loeb”) when the narrator’s voice changes weirdly and reveals the deep fake.

In his takedown email to YouTube support today, Dr. Loeb notes:

It was obvious to my fans that the videos were fake because the clock in the background was frozen on a specific time and because two weeks ago — I injured my face on a trip to a Danny Jones podcast interview in Florida — whereas the fake videos did not show any sign of the injury. Nevertheless, a news outlet included one of these videos in a report about my research on 3I/ATLAS, blending reality with fake content when reporting about science.

Media Literacy is ESSENTIAL for everyone today, and the rapid development of AI technologies is only making the need to integrate media literacy skills into our classes at all levels more pressing. This isn’t something “just students” or young people need, adults need media literacy skills too! In fact, “media literacy IS literacy” today. The need to be able to critically analyze and “interrogate” media messages is essential for all of us to lead our lives well at the close of 2025.

I invite you to get involved with groups like the Media Education Lab and Teachers for an Informed Public. I facilitate monthly, free webinars for the “MediaEd Club” of the Media Education Lab, which provide good opportunities to connect with other advocates of media literacy and learn about new strategies, tools, lesson ideas, and more. I continue to maintain a collection of recommended media literacy resources on medialiteracy.wesfryer.com.

Beware of very convincing, deep-fake videos like these circulating on YouTube now, purporting to make extraordinary claims about interplanetary space debris. We may not be alone, but we definitely are not living in the media culture of the 1950s. It’s vital we help our students develop TODAY’S literacy skills NOW.

On 20 November 2025, 30,000 students in Charlotte, North Carolina, staged a walkout from school to protest Trump’s ICE immigration raids in the city.

FACT CHECK RESULT:

The past couple weeks here in Charlotte, North Carolina, have been both surreal and crazy. For insights into why, I recommend you watch the video from last Monday night’s (24 Nov 2025) “Charlotte Mass Moral Monday” by “Repairers of the Breach.” In this media literacy-focused post, however, I’m NOT going to reflect on the wider impacts and experiences of living here in Charlotte during “Operation Charlotte’s Web” by ICE and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents, as presenters did in that Mass Moral Monday gathering. For some of my deeper reflections on those events, please refer to my November 19th video on my “Resist and Heal” Substack (also on YouTube) as well as my “notes” on the same Substack channel.

In this post, I am going to address a claim posted to the “Really American” Substack on November 20th related to “Operation Charlotte’s Web”: An alleged “walkout by 30,000 students in Charlotte to protest Trump’s ICE immigration raids in the city.” I’m going to highlight this misinformation shared on Substack (and to date, NOT redacted) by a very popular channel funded by a liberal SuperPAC… and my process of using the “SIFT Superprompt” by Mike Caufield to fact check it. *

Here is my TL;DNR summary of my fact check results: The claim that 30,000 students in Charlotte, NC, staged a walkout to protest ICE raids in November 2025 is false. There is no evidence from local school officials, police, or reputable news organizations to support this figure or the occurrence of such an event.

Background

On November 20, 2025 at 11:56am ET, authors of the “Really American” Substack channel shared a 10 second video purporting to show student protesters walking around a track at a sports stadium, with the accompanying text:

Wow! 30,000 students in Charlotte just staged a walkout to protest Trump’s ICE immigration raids in the city.

Young generation standing up ?

As of this evening, 10 days later, that Substack note has 21,080 likes, 366 replies, and 3,282 Restacks. (For those not familiar with Substack, a “restack” is like a “retweet” on Twitter / X.)

Fact Checking with the SIFT Superprompt

To fact check this claim, I used the “SIFT Toolbox” / “Deep Background” or SIFT AI Superprompt developed by Mike Caufield at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. I facilitated a webinar on November 3rd and 15th for the Media Education Lab highlighting how to use it to fact check claims like this. The most recent version of the “SIFT Toolbox” is a 338 line prompt to use with generative AI platforms like Claude Pro, ChatGPT Pro, and Gemini Pro, which combines many of the best practices professional fact checkers use when evaluating and researching claims.

Mike Caufield recommends using a PRO AI model with his SIFT superprompt, and currently prefers Claude Pro. In this case, because I’m not currently paying for Claude Pro, I used ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking model and Google Gemini Pro. My archived AI chat conversations are available for both models:

• ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking chat log
• Google Gemini Thinking with 3 Pro chat log

In this case, Gemini Pro produced the most visually pleasing and helpful tabular summaries of the fact checking analysis. These included the following tables, which I will embed and link below as screenshots:

1. Verified Facts Table
2. Errors and Corrections Table
3. Corrections Summary
4. Potential Leads
5. Assessment of Source Usefulness
6. Revised Summary

Before sharing these tables of results, I’ll quote the Gemini provided “Notes on the Information Environment:”

This post exemplifies “Zombie Content” or “Engagement Bait” within the political information space. In this environment, old or unrelated footage is frequently reposted with sensational new captions to react to current events (in this case, the presidency/influence of Donald Trump in 2025). The specific number “30,000” is likely chosen to sound impressive but plausible enough to a casual scroller, despite being statistically improbable for a local school district event. The use of “Substack Notes” allows for rapid, unchecked dissemination within a like-minded community (echo chamber), bypassing traditional editorial verification.

Here are some of my key takeaways from this fact checking experience:

1. It’s very important to personally fact check viral political content.
2. Particularly when viewing content WITHOUT attribution links / links for more reading, we should be VERY WARY of liking / re-sharing / further amplifying media and claims.
3. Mike Caufield’s “SIFT Toolbox” can be a useful and powerful addition to our media literacy strategies when it comes to fact checking and verifying claims online.
4. Even though the results of the SIFT Toolbox can look VERY professional and convincing, we need to remember these are still the results / output of an imperfect and frequently error-prone artificial intelligence large language model.

To learn more about media literacy and fact checking, I recommend:

1. Following and subscribing to Mike Caufield’s Substack, “The End(s) of Argument.”
2. Checking out the November 2025 Media Education Lab webinar, “Fact Checking with AI Superprompts,” including the listed “recommended media” and “optional media” links.
3. Following and subscribing to my Substack, “Media Literacy with Wes.”

All the screenshots used in this post are also shared in this Flickr album. More media literacy resources are available on medialiteracy.wesfryer.com.

* Thanks to Carol Sawyer, one of the volunteer leaders of Indivisible CLT, for initially alerting me to the fact that this Substack post was / is false and constitutes misinformation.

Today I learned about the “Interactive Fiction Database” via the ArsTechnica article, “Microsoft Makes Zork I, II, and III Open Source Under MIT License.” In this context, “IF” stands for “Interactive Fiction.” According to the IFD’s tips page:

IFDB has three main functions.

First, it’s a comprehensive catalog of IF, past and present. IFDB is a collaborative, community project – it’s a little like a Wiki for IF bibliography. Members can edit the game listings in the catalog, and even add new listings, so you never have to wait for the site’s administrators to get around to adding the latest releases or fixing errors in existing listings. If something’s missing, you can add it; if something’s wrong, you can fix it.

Second, IFDB is a place to share recommendations. The site offers several tools for giving and getting personalized recommendations about games to play. The key word is personalized. IFDB isn’t just a “Top 10” scoreboard that boils everything down to an average of what everyone likes (although it can do that, too). IFDB’s recommendation tools are based on the idea that tastes vary, so the goal is to help you find games that match your individual style. One way we do this is by giving you lots of ways to sift through the database, and another is by helping you find other people with tastes in IF similar to your own.

Third, IFDB makes it easier to get started at playing these games. Modern IF games usually require “interpreter” programs, so it can be time consuming, and sometimes frustrating, for new players to track down everything they need. IFDB’s “Play Online” button is designed to fix this. Just click the button and you can start playing right away in your web browser. No downloads required!

This reminded me of the “Treasure or Trap? A Choose Your Own Adventure Video” project I facilitated back in the summer of 2017 at the Create, Make and Learn conference organized by Lucie deLaBruere. I wrote more background about this project and workshop on my post, “Choose Your Own Adventure YouTube Video: Lessons Learned,” from August 2017.

Now that I’m exploring different ways to use AI in vibe coding projects, I’m wondering how CYOA games can and will merge with AI platforms, perhaps using or building on open source software programs like Twine?

So many exciting possibilities!

Video Slideshow

The MHHS staff provided me with 1087 photos on a USB thumb drive for the video slideshow. With a 3 second display time, the duration of the final slideshow video is just over 1 hour and 12 minutes.

To create the slideshow I used the Photos app in MacOS. I imported all the photos and put them in an album, but I needed to randomize them. Amazingly, there does not appear to be a simple way to do this. I found an AppleScript for Automator (which I’ve used a few times in the past) which did a little shuffling, but I found it didn’t randomize them enough. So, as I often do today, I turned to ChatGPT (ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, specifically) and it provided an AppleScript which worked great:

on run {input, parameters}
    with timeout of 1200 seconds
        tell application "Photos"
            activate
            set imageSel to (get selection)
            if imageSel is {} then
                error "Please select one or more photos."
            end if
            
            set photoCount to count of imageSel
            
            -- Build a list of indices {1, 2, 3, ...}
            set indexList to {}
            repeat with i from 1 to photoCount
                set end of indexList to i
            end repeat
            
            set seqNum to 1
            
            repeat while (count of indexList) > 0
                set r to random number from 1 to (count of indexList)
                set idx to item r of indexList
                set im to item idx of imageSel
                
                set newTitle to my padNumber(seqNum, 4)
                set name of im to newTitle
                
                set seqNum to seqNum + 1
                set indexList to my removeItemAt(indexList, r)
            end repeat
        end tell
    end timeout
    return input
end run

on padNumber(n, width)
    set nStr to n as string
    repeat while (length of nStr) < width
        set nStr to "0" & nStr
    end repeat
    return nStr
end padNumber

on removeItemAt(aList, idx)
    set newList to {}
    set listCount to count of aList
    repeat with i from 1 to listCount
        if i is not idx then
            set end of newList to item i of aList
        end if
    end repeat
    return newList
end removeItemAt

With the photos in the album sufficiently randomized, I exported a slideshow video from the Photos app. That took awhile, and the final video file was almost 6 GB in size. I used Handbrake software (free) to compress the video to a little less than 1 GB in size, and provided the video to staff both via Google Drive and also uploaded it to the MHHS YouTube channel. That way if anyone needs / wants to play the slideshow directly from the web, they can do it via YouTube.

I also uploaded all the photos to the MHHS Flickr Channel, and put them all in an album. It’s possible to play a slideshow from that album’s webpage, but I don’t know of a way to randomize that playback directly.

Burning the DVD version of the slideshow video proved to be the most challenging, mainly because I needed to locate my blank DVD+R discs in our garage, and I also had to find the correct USB adapter for the old DVD player/burner I still have connected to a 2012 27″ iMac in my office. (I don’t use it anymore, but it’s a great dust collector… and does come in handy for moments like these!)

Again I asked ChatGPT for advice, and it recommended I use the open source software program Burn. The program converted my MP4 video into the requisite MPEG-2 video format, and speedily burned the video into DVD disc format. Yay!

I created the thumbnail for this YouTube video using Canva.com, which is now my favorite software platform to use with my students in both my web design and media literacy classes.

Combined Video Montage

I also burned a combined video to another DVD for them which features some YouTube videos from their channel, as well as a segment from a PBS video special that just aired about a month ago and includes a segment I’m in discussing Mint Hill history. These three videos are:

1. Welcome to Mint Hill – 1964
2. Step Into History at MHHS
3. Boom Towns: Small Towns On The Rise | Trail of History (Mint Hill segment starts at 20:56)

To make a single video file from these three videos, I first downloaded the first two from YouTube (directly from the MHHS channel’s admin console in YouTube Studio) and used Tubly Downloader to download the other one. I used QuickTime Player for MacOS to “trim” the third video (the segment we want to play is just 6 minutes long, and the end of the original) and then used QuickTime Player to combine the three clips into a single MP4 video file. The interface has changed a little over the years, but I made a video tutorial of these basic steps 12 years ago using QuickTime Pro 7. Apple no longer has a “QuickTime Pro” version, the software is now just “QuickTime Player,” but it still supports quick edit videos like this. It’s a workflow I use often and love!

One other cool thing I discovered in the course of creating these DVDs was the AI-powered music website Stocktune.com. Initially I created a version of the slideshow video with copyright-friendly music, and I wanted to find some North Carolina folk music / Appalachian style music. I found 4 tracks I liked, and linked them in description of the (now unlisted) musical version of the 40th anniversary slideshow. This is a website I’ll likely use again, and will (eventually) add to the “resources” page of Storychasers.org.

Over the years I’ve created a variety of DVDs for different projects and purposes, and shared blog posts about those techniques and experiences. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have access to blank DVDs, a DVD burner, and a DVD player, but I’m not planning on giving up any of these resources anytime soon!

Yay for DVD authoring capabilities!

Check this project out with these links:

• Direct project demo: https://wesfryer.com/testcode/canon/
• Embedded demo version: https://ai.wesfryer.com/canon
• GitHub repo: https://github.com/wfryer/ai-cultural-canon (with detailed README documentation)

This project builds on my earlier Google Sites Firebase Comment Widget experiment, detailed in my November 4th blog post, and feels like a significant next step in my journey back into database-powered web development, now with AI as an imperfect but extremely helpful coding partner.

In this post I want to do three things:

1. Push back on some misconceptions I keep hearing about “vibe coding.”
2. Share what this new project does and the prospects it suggests may be possible with students.
3. Connect the dots back to my early 2000s FileMaker Pro days and why this all matters for my teaching and for media literacy.

Vibe Coding Is Not a Magic Button

One misconception I see a lot is that “coding with AI” is basically pushing a button and getting a finished app. That has not been my experience.

For this project:

• I spent multiple hours going back and forth with both ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking and the latest Google Gemini model. (All of my ChatGPT conversations (but not those with Gemin) are detailed on my AI documentation Google Doc.)
• Our conversation ran to hundreds of lines of prompts, code revisions, bug reports, and “wait, that broke something else…” moments.
• I had to debug Firebase rules, tweak HTML/CSS layout, refactor how config is handled for security, and iterate the admin UI multiple times.

Yes, the AI wrote basically ALL of this actual code. However:

• I had to steer the architecture (What functionality did I want? How should the UI look? How should an admin page look and function? etc.)
• I had to notice when something was broken or “good enough but not actually what I asked for.”
• I had to keep track of security, data structure, and deployment details that were very easy to lose in the middle of a long chat.

So vibe coding, at least for me, is not “type one sentence, get a working app.” It’s much closer to:

A very intense, collaborative code jam with a robot partner who never gets tired, sometimes forgets what you just decided, and will happily write a hundred lines of code in the wrong direction if you’re not paying attention.

But Vibe Coding Is Absolutely Transformative

All that said: there is no way I could have built this project on my own without AI assistance.

The AI Cultural Canon app:

• Uses Firebase Firestore as a cloud database.
• Has a public explorer page where students can filter by category, click into individual people, and see:
  • A short bio (in Markdown),
  • Optional image,
  • Optional YouTube video,
  • DOB / DOD and a link to their Wikipedia article.
• Includes a password-protected admin dashboard where a teacher can:
  • Add / edit categories,
  • Add / edit people entries,
  • Manage tags, links, and bios.
• Includes a seeding script so I (or another teacher) can quickly pre-load the database with example entries.

Under the hood that’s a lot of moving parts: Firestore collections and rules, authentication, modular JavaScript imports, markdown parsing, and a simple UI that still works when embedded inside a Google Site.

I’ve long believed that database-enabled web apps are one of the most powerful things we can create on the web. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I was building web-enabled databases with FileMaker Pro, and those solutions were incredibly useful in a college administrative setting. But modern stacks: frameworks, security concerns, cloud hosting, have a much steeper learning curve than “click a FileMaker web-publish button.”

Vibe coding changes that equation. It doesn’t make the work simple, but it makes it possible for me, as a full-time teacher, to build and ship real, data-driven web apps again.

Building on the Google Sites Firebase Comment Widget

This AI Cultural Canon builds directly on my previous project:

Google Sites Firebase Comment Widget
https://github.com/wfryer/google-sites-firebase-comment-widget

That comment widget was my first project using Firebase as a backend. It taught me:

• How to set up a Firebase project and web app
• How to use Firestore for simple create/read/update operations
• How to embed a custom widget in a Google Site with <iframe>s
• How to keep Firebase config usable but reasonably safe in a public GitHub repo

The AI Cultural Canon takes those same ideas and expands them:

• Instead of a single comments collection, I now have two structured collections: categories and people.
• Instead of an invisible backend, there’s a teacher-friendly admin UI for managing records.
• Instead of “just get it running,” I now have documented Firestore security rules that keep the public site read-only and limit writes to authenticated users.

From a learning standpoint, this project feels like “Level 2” of my Firebase journey. And it’s giving me more confidence that I can keep going: more collections, richer relationships, perhaps even multi-user workflows down the road.

Why This Matters for Teaching and Media Literacy

By day I’m a middle school web design teacher and I’ve been building websites since 1996. I care a lot about:

• Helping students understand how the web actually works, not just how to click inside walled gardens.
• Showing them that they can build things that store and present information, not just static brochure pages.
• Connecting web design to media literacy: Who gets represented? How is information presented? Who curates the information? Who is the intended audience? What seems to be the purpose of the presented media?

A project like AI Cultural Canon hits all of those notes:

• It’s a curated, opinionated dataset: Which AI “voices” are we lifting up? What bios do we write? What sources do we link?
• It’s a concrete example of a database-backed website that students can see, click through, and potentially help expand.
• It’s a template I can re-use: students could build their own “canons” of scientists, artists, historical figures, or local community leaders.

I’m already thinking about how to turn this into a lesson or mini-unit:

• Introduce students to the public explorer and talk about representation and selection.
• Show them the admin view and the underlying data model.
• Have them sketch or co-design their own canon projects.
• Potentially, in an upper-level class, invite them into the vibe-coding process itself.

Looking Ahead

If you’d like to explore the code, everything is on GitHub:

• AI Cultural Canon: https://github.com/wfryer/ai-cultural-canon
• Google Sites Firebase Comment Widget: https://github.com/wfryer/google-sites-firebase-comment-widget
• My full project list: https://github.com/wfryer

This is my eighth successful vibe-coded project, and it definitely won’t be the last. The combination of:

• long-form, back-and-forth conversations with tools like ChatGPT and Gemini,
• my own mental model of web development and pedagogy, and
• the power of platforms like Firebase

is opening doors I honestly thought were closed to me as a classroom teacher with limited time.

If you end up forking the repo, adapting it for your own canon, or using it with students, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Tonight I spent some time “vibe coding” a maintenance release of the Federated Reader bot, tightening up how it chooses links and remembers what it has already shared. The bot script still lives on GitHub and the script results are “live” (and continually updating) on my secondary Mastodon account, @FederatedReader… but under the hood it’s now a bit smarter and (hopefully) less repetitive.

What changed?

The following explanation of my vibe coded changes was provided by ChatGPT… AFTER I ended up taking code which turned out to be broken, and asked Claude AI to fix it.

Tonight’s work on the Federated Reader bot was less about adding flashy features and more about tightening the plumbing under the hood:

• Smarter, more reliable link detection.
  The bot still uses my original “smart URL” pipeline: it looks at canonical/meta tags, scores all the links in the email body, and only falls back to “first URL in the text” when it has to. That’s what lets it handle Substack, Ghost, Mailchimp and friends without hard-coding each provider.
• Cleaner URL “canonicalization.”
  Many newsletters wrap their real article URLs in redirects or decorate them with analytics parameters. The updated script now decodes Substack’s special redirect links, follows common ?redirect= / ?url= style parameters when they contain a full URL, strips utm_* and similar tracking tags, lowercases hostnames, and removes extra slashes. Tiny variations of the same link now normalize to a single canonical URL.
• Junk / tracking links are filtered out.
  Some messages still include links that should never be posted—things like the XHTML namespace URL, Substack’s image-based “open pixel,” or broken Ghost click-tracking links. The bot now recognizes those patterns and treats them as junk, so they don’t appear in the Mastodon feed at all.
• Persistent de-duplication.
  The script remembers both which Gmail messages it has processed and which cleaned URLs it has already posted, and it prunes that memory after a configurable number of days. That gives me a stable “only post this link once” guarantee without running into Google Script Properties size limits.
• Optional Mastodon-history check.
  For now I’ve left the cross-checking of my recent Mastodon posts turned off (to avoid API scope issues), but the logic is still there behind a configuration flag if I ever want an extra layer of safety.
• Nicer posts and better error reporting.
  Each post now includes the newsletter subject, author name, and date, plus the URL and a couple of hashtags like #OwnYourFeed and #FederatedReader. If the script has trouble talking to my Mastodon instance, it logs a detailed error and can even email me a heads-up.

From a user’s perspective, the result is simple: the @federatedreader Mastodon account (and my Flipboard channel fed by it) should post fewer glitches, no “XHTML namespace” nonsense, and far fewer repeats of the same tracking URL.

Note my desire to be transparent here: The “vibe coding” scripting updates described above are well beyond my ability to independently create or replicate. After letting my updated Nov 4 code version run (Commit 7e4e617) I posted a Nov 5 version (Commit 3568988) via Claude AI’s help, and it appears to work. I’ll monitor this over the next 12 to 24 hours to verify.

Why this matters

In my Heal Our Culture post, I argued that “to heal our culture, we need to reclaim our news feeds and collaborate to reinvent social media.” Little tools like DIY Federated Reader are one small way I’m trying to live into that idea: Curating a slow, human-chosen feed of writing by sources I trust and value, using open tools and federated platforms.

If you’re experimenting with your own federated reader, you’re welcome to fork the project on GitHub, tweak the filters for your own newsletters, and share what you learn. The more of us who become neighbors and filters for each other online, the less power the default, engagement-hacked feeds have over our attention.

* AI Attribution: I used “ChatGPT 5 Thinking” to draft an initial version of this blog post, which I edited further. I created the included image with the same AI model, using this fun prompt:

Can you please create a square visualization of the key ideas here… but use the style of an oil painting, make this look mystical like a medieval and silk road setting… maybe in a caravanserai in ancient times… and a young blonde mystic (make it look like me, let me know if you need a selfie for help) is using magical spells and alchemy to create something amazing that is both welcome and exciting to an audience that looks on during an evening campfire story….

This free software solution lets anyone add password-protected comments to a Google Site (or any webpage) using a lightweight widget – just two HTML files. Student comments are stored in a secure Firestore database, and teachers (or moderators) can review and delete comments from a separate dashboard. There’s no need to pay for commercial web / server hosting to get this working. You just a free Firebase account and GitHub Pages for hosting, along with your Google Site (or other hosted website.) If you already have a paid web host, you can use it (instead of GitHub pages) for the HTML files.

I learned about Firebase last year from one of my 8th graders enrolled in my middle school Computer Programming class. He was using vibe coding (primarily with CoPilot by Microsoft) to build an interactive, cloud-based application which needed database-like storage.

As the developer setting this simple “widget embed commenting system” up, you can decide on a shared “student password” to use for posting comments, and a secret “admin password” to use for moderating / deleting comments. Comments go up live, there is not a “moderation queue,” and the commenting system DOES use a shared password… so it’s open to misuse. Use with discretion, and with a class of students you’ve prepared in advance with good digital citizenship expectations. Don’t share either password publicly online. (Just the commenting password directly with your students in class.)

I tested this live with our “ACE” adult Sunday School class, using 10 images of Kindle quotes from “How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith” by Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde. Each image had / has its own embedded comment widget, so participants—both in person and online—could reflect and respond to a different quote. It worked beautifully!

This was another “vibe coding” success story for me. Over a few evenings, I worked step-by-step with ChatGPT-5 (and Gemini a little) to create, test, and document the project so others can (hopefully) recreate and use this system. If you’ve ever wanted to make a class website more interactive, I hope you’ll check it out.

On a security note: One of the things critics of “vibe coding” are quick to point out is that people who don’t really know what they are doing with web or software development can easily create insecure or even dangerous applications. This can be true. An initial iteration of this project saved both the student commenting password and the moderator / admin password “in the clear” as part of the HTML files. I pointed this out to ChatGPT, and it re-coded portions of the project so the passwords are now stored securely in the “rules” for your Firebase instance. To me this doesn’t mean vibe coding is worthless: It’s an example of how it’s important to have a working knowledge of security best-practices for websites.

One last reflection: Have you ever heard of Filemaker and Filemaker Pro? It’s still available commercially, but I haven’t used it for years. Back in 2001 – 2006, when I was the first Director of Distance Learning for the College of Education at Texas Tech University, I used Filemaker Pro and some other software tools to create web-enabled databases which gave our college, our administrators, and myself SO much power! (Shout out to Pam Tipton, our student teacher coordinator at the time!) I wrote several blog posts referencing Filemaker during those years, like this March 2006 post, “Moving from Filemaker 6 to 7 with Lasso.” Dreamweaver, Claris Homepage, CDML, moving to XML… oh the memories!

Seriously: Being able to create dynamic database-connected webpages was HUGE. I also served as the webmaster for our college at that time, and I created a variety of custom web solutions during those years including:

• Web forms students could use to apply for student teaching
• A web solution which allowed our faculty to reserve time with a “pool” of summer research assistants
• A series of web forms and webpages we used with our school districts in ESC Region 17 to connect Texas Tech graduate students to our main campus in Lubbock as well as new “Hill Country satellite campuses” in Fredericksburg and Highland Lakes, for our “iTV” (interactive tele-video) courses. Those were the days before desktop videoconferencing solutions like Zoom and mobile video like Facetime. Back then, CU-SeeMe was cutting edge!

During those years I was also able to use a free php script called “yform” to create a series of webpage to email solutions, including the first online / digital “Graduate Bio Update Form” for the US Air Force Academy’s Association of Graduates. (Yep, those where the years before the HTTPS Everywhere campaign and Firesheep.

Why am I bringing up those memories? Because although I’ve been using WordPress extensively since 2005, I have never managed to reclaim those “web powers” I had working at Texas Tech in the early 2000s, creating custom, web-enabled databases and websites.

Now, thanks to vibe coding, I’m back in the saddle again.

* AI Attribution: I used ChatGPT 5 to create an initial draft of this blog post, which I edited further before publishing. I also used ChatGPT 5 to generate both images used in this blog post. (This was an iterative process – as usual – and required multiple prompting interactions.)

I love podcasts and podcasting. I started podcasting with “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” in 2005, and continue to both produce my own regular podcasts as well as help others get started in podcasting.

Jason Neiffer and I have been co-hosting The EdTech Situation Podcast on an almost-weekly basis since 2016, and I’m exceptionally proud of the “body of work” we’ve co-created now with over 360 hour long episodes. We initially started livestreaming with Google Hangouts, but eventually discovered and migrated to Streamyard, which we absolutely LOVE and just keeps getting better and better as a platform.

After Facebook changed it’s live streaming policies (now requiring at least 100 followers) we continued just live streaming on Wednesday nights to YouTube. In addition to the live stream, YouTube auto-archives our shows to our YouTube channel. For well over 250 shows, I followed a relatively complex workflow of post-production podcast steps which included:

1. Using the PodLove Publisher plugin for WordPress
2. Using HandBrake software (free) to create compressed video versions of each podcast episode
3. Using iTunes software to create compressed / 32 kbps audio versions of each podcast episode, with embedded show art and a description
4. Uploading both audio and video versions to Amazon S3
5. Writing (eventually with some help from AI / ChatGPT) a podcast description for each episode
6. Organizing and sharing our “show notes / links” from each episode in a podcast blog post
7. Eventually (maybe around episode 250?) cross-posting each episode video to our Substack, along with show notes / links we included in our weekly Google Doc but did NOT have time to discuss during the show

This was a lot of post-production work each week, and over time I fell behind. Until this weekend, I was 10+ episodes behind… Which meant our latest podcast episodes were on YouTube, but were NOT on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts, etc. This has been a dark cloud hanging over my head for many months.

After a little consultation with ChatGPT, I decided to use a much more streamlined and simplified workflow for publishing our EdTech Situation Room podcast:

1. Download the 1080P (and highly compressed) video from YouTube Studio following each show.
2. Use www.youtube-transcript.io to create an automated / unedited transcript of each episode, downloaded as a PDF.
3. Create a Google Doc of organized links (those we discussed and those we did NOT discuss) for each episode, saved as a RTF / rich text file
4. Use a custom GPT (“EdTechSR Podcast Post Production“) to brainstorm possible 3 word podcast titles, and draft a podcast description.
5. Post the episode video from YouTube along with its meta information (title, description, show notes / links) to Substack.

This is still a multi-step podcast post-production process, but it’s MUCH faster and streamlined than my previous one. I’m so excited! I think it’s now realistic for me to commit to publishing our full episodes (with show notes) within 48 hours, and those updated links and videos should be syndicated / publishing on all our podcast channels / platforms.

This year, in 2025, YouTube became the biggest and most popular platform for podcasts and podcast listeners / watchers. Fortunately, our EdTech Situation Room podcast has been a VIDEO podcast from the start… and we formally / technically made EdTechSR a YouTube podcast a few years ago. (The process is very easy and straightforward.)

I’ve been using Spotify for Creators (previously Anchor.fm) to publish several podcasts in the past decade, including our “Wes and Shelly Share” podcast and “Class with Dr. Fryer.” Substack, however, is IMHO an even faster-growing and more robust / flexible platform… particularly when it comes to user / listener interactivity: Providing comments as feedback, and sharing / re-sharing content.

I also LOVE that Substack allowed me to import ALL past episodes of EdTechSR by simply pasting my old RSS feed… So we now have a complete archive of all our shows on our Substack. 349 episodes of EdTechSR remain archived and available on our WordPress website, but at this point I’m not planning on posting new episodes there.

Only posting your media / content to a third party website involves real risks. I saved some of our family audio recordings when Audioboo went offline, but I think I lost some… And I also lost other audio files to different audio and video platforms over the years. (EduBlogs.tv, cinch.fm, etc.) At this point, however, I’m very confident YouTube will remain online for the foreseeable future… and I’m hoping Substack continues to thrive and grow as a platform.

If you’re a podcaster, has your post-production workflow changed in the past couple of years? I’d love to hear about it.

Hope you’ll join Jason and I on the EdTech Situation Room podcast soon! If you can, please follow our page on Facebook… Once we get 100 followers (we have 59 today) we’ll be able to livestream there again too!

TL;DNR list of Digital Tools

Here’s a TL;DNR list of the websites and software programs I used to create my YouTube shorts today

1. Descript — The primary editing platform used for trimming, reframing, and producing final rally clips. Descript handled transcript-based editing, AI-generated “Overlord” shorts, portrait layout adjustments, caption generation and styling, and final exports to vertical 9:16 format.
2. VLC Media Player — Used to preview downloaded and exported video files, confirm codecs, and verify that no black-screen or playback issues existed before further editing. (Can open virtually any video file / CODEC, can open formats QuickTime Player for MacOS cannot.)
3. yt-dlp — Command-line video downloader used to obtain an HD copy of the rally footage after browser-based tools failed. It supports advanced format selection and metadata retention for archival use.
4. Canva — Used to create a branded 4 second animated outro, with logo, tagline, and sound. The exported MP4 was appended in Descript for consistency across shorts.
5. Mixkit — Provided a free “whoosh” stinger or transition sound effect that was incorporated into the Descript outro for added polish.
6. Homebrew — macOS package manager used to install and manage command-line utilities like FFmpeg and Python.
7. FFmpeg — Command-line tool used for transcoding, trimming, and re-encoding video and audio files before import into Descript. Also used to verify export quality and check compatibility.
8. YouTube Mobile App for iOS — Used to upload and manage final shorts, customize video thumbnails, and publish to the correct channels.

These are software tools I tried or considered in this process, but either did not work or I didn’t use:

1. Tubly Download Extension — Browser extension I tried to use (unsuccessfully) to download a high-definition copy of the original rally footage for editing and archival purposes.
2. Shotcut — Initially used to experiment with a shorter rough cut before switching fully to Descript for the final workflow. (My export with Shotcut failed, it was black and didn’t have any video for some reason.)
3. LosslessCut — Can use to make the initial trims and exports from videos without re-encoding, preserving full video quality.
4. Pixabay Music & Sound Effects — Considered as a potential source for royalty-free background music and stingers but replaced by Mixkit.
5. Epidemic Sound — Evaluated as a premium licensed music source but not used for this project.

Creating YouTube Shorts from My “No Kings” Speech

This turned out to be a surprisingly technical and multi-step process — more command-line and Terminal use than I typically do for media production, but it worked beautifully in the end.

After downloading the original rally video in HD with yt-dlp, I used FFmpeg to trim out the specific section of my speech I wanted to use. I used VLC Media Player to preview the downloaded video, which initially wouldn’t open in QuickTime Player because I hadn’t yet installed FFmpeg prior to using yt-dlp.

Inside Descript, I imported the trimmed clip, and generated an automatic transcript. I used Descript’s AI “Overlord” short generation tools to create “drafts” of several vertical, captioned versions formatted for YouTube Shorts. Descript’s AI makes ‘best guesses’ about which clips might be most engaging — even potentially viral — for YouTube shorts or reels on social media.” I ended up modifying most of these selections, but it was a GREAT help to identify parts of the longer, complete speech in this process!

Once I had the clips framed and styled the way I wanted, I added a short animated outro (created in Canva, using a “whoosh” sound effect from Mixkit) to maintain consistent visual branding across all my video shorts.

After exporting each finished short from Descript, I uploaded them to YouTube from my laptop. After entering / customized the meta information for each video and publishing to YouTube, I customized each video’s thumbnail and title using the YouTube mobile app for iOS.

Finally, to streamline publishing, I used the Notes app on macOS to record the title, description, and link for each short. Here’s the format I used:

“A clip from Wes Fryer’s speech at the No Kings Rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 14, 2025.
Full video on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHRPOMNR_hE

Join me (Wes Fryer) in advocacy for human rights, representative democracy, and religious tolerance:
https://wesfryer.com/advocacy/”

All in all, this workflow blended powerful open-source tools with creative cloud apps — a mix that made it possible to edit, caption, brand, and share high-quality civic storytelling videos quickly and effectively. It’s a workflow I plan to keep refining — balancing the creative freedom of AI-powered editing tools with the control and transparency of open-source software.

I’m perhaps most amazed at how many views some of these video shorts have already racked up. My short “Civic Duty and Love of Country” has almost 1000 views just a few hours after posting.

I will note that after publishing that short, I figured out how to change the LAYOUT and ZOOM of the video so I could better center myself in the 9 x 16 portrait frame. Overall, this experience of creating these video shorts REALLY helped me learn to use more of the features of Descript, which I continue to LOVE. It’s one of numerous websites and web services I pay for on a monthly or annual basis.

I’ll close by noting that YouTube is a HUGELY important platform and cultural force today, in October 2025. I have started reading the Fast Company five-part series, “How YouTube Ate TV,” and so far it reinforces my contention that as teachers and parents, we need to be paying MUCH more attention to video as a communication platform, to social media influencers, etc.

I’m glad to learn some more advanced techniques for creating YouTube shorts / video reels, with the tools I’ve highlighted in this post.

What tools or techniques are you using to create video shorts and reels?

Check out the recorded session video and session slides.

The webinar description was:

As AI tools make it possible to create apps, games, and interactive experiences without ever writing a line of code, a new practice called “vibe coding” is raising big questions for educators, technologists, and learners alike. Popularized by New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, vibe coding invites anyone with an idea to build software by describing it in plain language, but it also stirs debate about what gets lost when we stop looking under the hood. Are we entering a new era of creativity and accessibility, or risking a generation of “coders” who never see the code? Join the MediaEd Club this October as we explore the promises and pitfalls of vibe coding with AI—through articles, podcasts, and critical perspectives that examine how this trend may reshape computer science programs, software, education, and our collective digital future.

Both recommended and optional resources (including articles, podcasts and a journal article) relating to vibe coding are available on the Media Education Lab website.

What experiences have you had with vibe coding?! I’d love to hear about them. Please reach out to me on Mastodon, BlueSky, or other social media channels. (Or just fill out my contact form!)

More of my presentations, blog posts / articles, videos, podcasts, and workshops about artificial intelligence are linked on ai.wesfryer.com.

The 1.0 version of the game worked, but it wasn’t very engaging or as educational as I hoped. Since then, I’ve worked on a variety of other vibe coding projects (all shared on my GitHub) and I’ve been VERY pleased with the ways I’ve been able to use AI as a coding partner and collaborator, VASTLY extending my own coding capabilities.

This evening (Sunday, September 29, 2025) I spent around an hour making a 2.0 version of Packet Defender. I used Google’s Gemini AI platform, however, instead of ChatGPT to make this new version. I uploaded my original ChatGPT chat log and final code to Gemini to get started, so we “build on the past.” Packet Defender is improved in several ways:

1. It asks for a username and shows that name above the packet information area, so students can take a screenshot of their final score and include their name
2. It has 3 levels, which change the ‘refresh’ rate of the game
3. It uses different solid colors for the packets to transmit or defend against
4. It uses an IP lookup table and requires students to lookup the IP of a given domain to make a successful packet transfer or network defense
5. It includes a RESET button to start over

This game can still be improved in a hundred different ways, but I’m pleased with the improvements tonight and I’m excited to give it a try with my own students.

Please take “Packet Defender” for a spin and let me know what you think!

Check out more of my AI projects, blog posts and videos on ai.wesfryer.com.

To learn more about OpenMCQ and other amazing AI innovations created by staff at the Montana Digital Academy, I encourage you to subscribe to the SubStack for the Frontier Learning Lab at MTDA.

You can also check out episode 337 of the EdTech Situation Room podcast, “Teaching and Parenting in the AI Era,” in which Dr. Jason Neiffer shared some background about OpenMCQ, it’s development and it’s practical usefulness for educators.

I am continuing to share resources about AI / artificial intelligence on ai.wesfryer.com.

An AI persona is a carefully crafted digital profile with a specific personality, expertise, tone, and style. The concept of “AI persona” is used in several contexts, including marketing, workflow automation, and digital companionship. Unlike a general-purpose AI, a persona can be trained on specific data to serve a specialized function. (reference articles 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5)

Dina Temple-Raston and Erika Gajda’s September 19, 2025 podcast episode, “The GoLaxy papers: Inside China’s AI persona army,” highlights a variety of important and alarming issues relating to artificial intelligence, but chief among these is the way Chinese government entities continue to “hoover up” terabytes of public data about individuals in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, as well as China, and build CUSTOMIZED “AI personas” which:

1. can be deployed in influence campaigns / psychological operations
2. can be “micro-targeted” at specific individuals
3. are being developed at breakneck speeds
4. are (at least at this point) virtually impossible to detect and identify as non-human / AI-based.

These are big problems we are ill-equipped to handle at this point.

Compare the challenges posed by micro-targeted and almost-impossible-to-identify “AI personas” with common “AI slop” reels / videos like this one below I saw on Facebook yesterday morning. In the video, a young girl who appears to be tending a small flock of goats takes a stick and strikes a wolf, who is apparently attacking a goat. Although I haven’t independently confirmed this, I’m 99% this is an AI generated video. It’s labeled on Facebook, “girl save a goat from wolfbite,” and the wolf appears to almost be “necking” the goat instead of biting it before the girl hits it on the head with a stick.

“AI slop” does have a current English WikiPedia page, and its authors explain:

“AI slop,” often simply “slop,” is a term for low-quality media made with generative artificial intelligence. It is characterized by an inherent lack of effort and is currently being generated at an overwhelming volume. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a pejorative connotation similar to “spam.”

AI slop has been variously defined as “digital clutter,” “filler content [prioritizing] speed and quantity over substance and quality,” and “shoddy or unwanted AI content in social media, art, books and search results.”

Both “AI slop” and “AI personas” are and promise to further pollute our information environment, but also make it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Based on the transcript of this article, I asked ChatGPT 5 to provide a definition of “AI persona,” and this is what it provided to me:

An AI persona is a highly realistic, AI-generated digital double: an online identity crafted from scraped personal and behavioral data, animated by generative AI to interact, adapt, and persuade like a real person. Unlike crude bots that recycle slogans, AI personas listen, respond in natural language, and tailor their tone and messaging to specific individuals or groups. This makes them powerful tools for influence operations, capable of slipping into social feeds, building trust, and subtly shaping narratives at scale.

If you are not having conversations with others in your family, circle of friends, and colleagues about AI chatbots, you need to be. In February 2025, I facilitated a webinar for the Media Education Lab on “AI Chatbot Ethics” which touched on some of these issues. The archived webinar post also includes links to a variety of articles, videos and podcasts related to AI chatbots which are both informative and useful to catalyze these conversations.

Media literacy IS literacy today. Check out my growing collection of media literacy links and resources on medialiteracy.wesfryer.com. Also consider subscribing to my periodic (almost monthly) free Substack newsletter, “Media Literacy with Wes.”

Give the “The GoLaxy papers” podcast episode a listen. The Age of AI is just getting started.

Shout out to Brian Turnbaugh for sharing this podcast episode link with me.

For years, in my “Discovering Useful Ideas” workshops and videos, I’ve shared strategies on how to create “curated lists” on platforms like Twitter / X, Mastodon and BlueSky. In January 2017 I wrote the post, “Digital Literacy Challenge: Create an Information Filter Bot,” which described a 1.0 version of the software solution I’ve been working on several evenings this week rather intensely. My new project I’m sharing in this post, the Federated Reader Bot, is the next step in this journey.

I’ve been a huge fan of Flipboard since its founding in 2010; it’s my favorite way to read news on my iPhone and iPad. My “iReading” magazine on Flipboard, which I’ve curated for 15 years, now contains over 12,500 articles, videos and links… which have been “re-flipped” over 50K times by others. So when I envisioned a new iteration of this “news filtering and sharing” project, integrating with Flipboard was a logical goal. Since Flipboard is now “federated” and supports subscription to specific Mastodon lists (as it did for Twitter lists “back in the day”) I felt confident if I could figure out a way to auto-post my Gmail newsletter public HTML links into a Mastodon account / feed, I could view, enjoy and share those in Flipboard. I’ve been listening to Flipboard founder Mike McCue’s “Dot Social” podcast for several years now, and his thinking has definitely influenced my own in big ways about the fediverse.

The result of all this is now a Google Apps Script that acts as a “bridge,” using email—still the most important “common denominator” in our digital lives—to create a clean, curated output on the fediverse via Mastodon, with Flipboard as the beautiful front-end. The script (combined with a custom Gmail rule, detailed in the GitHub ReadMe file) automatically finds my newsletters in GMail, pulls out the main article link, and posts it to a dedicated Mastodon account. After subscribing to that Mastodon account in 1 of my own Mastodon account lists in Flipboard, my inbox has been transformed into a powerful curation tool in the fediverse!

Over the past few days, I’ve been “vibe coding,” initially with ChatGPT 5 and then with Google’s Gemini to bring this idea to life, working through a series of interations to build a functional script and solution. This took me three evenings of vibe coding, spending about 2 hours each night on the project.

I hope this “Federated Reader Bot project” can help you more intentionally and effectively consume, filter and share information online. I consider it part of my wider work with the “Heal Our Culture” project, because “re-taking” our news and information feeds away from the algorithms of BigTech is an essential step in the process of “de-polarizing” our communities, states and nation. This project also embodies the spirit of #OwnYourFeed, using a simple tool to help us curate and share the best of the web with each other.

If you’re interested in setting up your own DIY Federated Reader, the complete script and a step-by-step guide are now available on my GitHub. Please give it a try and let me know what you think! (A comment below would be great!)

* AI attribution: I used Gemini 2.5 Pro to draft and edit this blog post. I further edited, refined and linked the post before publishing. Find more of my AI experiments on ai.wesfryer.com

…fundamentally, generative AI does not let companies build something new. Anyone that builds a generative AI product is ultimately just prompting the model, albeit in increasingly more-complex ways at the scale of something like Claude Code — though Anthropic has the advantage of being one of the main veins of infrastructure. This means that a generative AI company owns very few unique things beyond their talent, and will forever be at the mercy of any and all decisions that their model provider makes, such as increasing prices or creating competing products.

“AI Is A Money Trap.” Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At, 6 Aug. 2025, www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/.

Summarizing his opinion of the financial positions of both OpenAI and Anthropic, Ed writes”

…long story short, these companies are unprofitable with no end in sight, don’t even make that much money in most cases, are valued more than anybody would ever buy them for, do not have much in the way of valuable intellectual property, and the two biggest players burn billions of dollars more than they make.

I’m not a financial analyst or economic expert, but Ed’s forecast is very persuasively argued and is quite dismal for not just generative AI companies and investors, but also the near-term health of the United States and global economies.

If Ed’s thoroughly cited analysis is correct, an AI bubble bust is eminent:

What is missing is any real value generation. Again, I tell you, put aside any feelings you may have about generative AI itself, and focus on the actual economic results of this bubble. How much revenue is there? Why is there no profit? Why are there no exits? Why does big tech, which has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into generative AI, not talk about the revenues they’re making? Why, for three years straight, have we been asked to “just wait and see,” and for how long are we going to have to wait to see it?

AI Is A Money Trap (Edward Zitron, 6 Aug 2025)

via on Dan Gillmor Mastodon:

Post by @dangillmor@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

…aims to empower students and educators to critically inquire into the effects of technologies on their individual and collective lives. We conduct research, develop curriculum, and offer professional development. Our work seeks to advance democratic, ethical, and just uses of technology in schools and society.

“About Us.” Civics of Technology, https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/aboutus. Accessed 1 Aug. 2025.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Communal Resistance to Artificial Systems,” and there were some phenomenal presentations in both the keynotes and breakout sessions. Yesterday I wrote a post sharing some of my key takeaways and new links, and I also created a Google Doc of notes from all the sessions I attended. I’ve titled this post, “Is Any AI Use Ethical?” because, in the course of the conference, I realized many of the presenters and participants in the conference are in different “ethical and pedagogical places” than I am when it comes to using AI. I shared the comments below in the Zoom chat of one of our Friday conference sessions:

It seems many of the participants and presenters in this conference are “AI is evil absolutists.” For these folks, there is no middle ground of ‘use AI to do helpful things.’ AI is viewed as a fundamentally ‘a priori’ evil and any use is unethical / immoral. I’m not on that page today, although I certainly oppose techno-facism and want to actively resist it. But it’s helpful to have my thinking challenged in many ways by this group.

I definitely oppose techno-fascism, which is a current and strong political and economic movement in the United States today in mid-2025. I setup the page, “What Is TechnoFascism” on the ResistAndHeal.com website I started earlier this year and continue maintain, along with an accompanying Substack. I acknowledge that the “techbros of Silicon Valley” are colluding with our chief executive and administration to ramp up both government and corporate surveillance, and advance our pervasive culture of “surveillance capitalism.” I am not happy about these trends, and have been concerned about the rise of the surveillance state for quite awhile. In 2015 I shared the TEDx talk in Enid, Oklahoma, “Digital Citizenship in the Surveillance State.” In that talk I attempted to sound alarm bells for the rise of the surveillance culture in the USA and our need, as educators, to raise awareness and take action… But I was less sure of the specifics of actions we should take (in 2015) beyond changing personal app privacy settings, and supporting the advocacy work of groups like the EFF.

I have been and continue to be a vocal advocate for “playing with media” as a way to gain knowledge and skills around the uses, affordances and drawbacks of different media formats and platforms. Today, I’m an advocate of “playing with AI,” and have documented many of my own AI experiments and lessons learned on ai.wesfryer.com. I am convinced AI technologies present transformative capabilities as a “cognitive force multiplier,” and have willingly drank a healthy portion of the “AI Kool-Aid” and “AI hype cycle.” I’ve said and still believe that AI represents a transformative leap forward in our shared human history of communication as well as information economy / third wave work. At this point, I am not and do not want to be an “AI conscientious objector,” refusing to voluntarily use it in all contexts. I am an advocate for its ethical and beneficial uses, and plan to remain one.

AI is a super-powerful technology and technological capability. It’s emergent, continuing to improve and change in dramatic ways. I frequently share the refrain, “This is the worst AI we’ll ever use,” and struggle to imagine what our world of ideas, work and culture will look like in 10 or 20 years if AI continues to improve at its current rate.

As I shared in that 2015 TEDx talk, however, especially as a ‘recovering school director of technology,” I’m acutely aware that the overall advance of enterprise technology tools seems to be on the side of authoritarians and those who want to exert authoritarian and fascist control over others. This is true within nation-states as well as within schools and universities. This explosion of surveillance tools and capabilities is dramatic, Orwellian, and lamentable. Today’s Civics of Tech presentation by Ian Linkletter, “Centering Student Voices in Resisting Surveillance,” was the most dramatic articulation of these dynamics I’ve read, heard or watched to date. I encourage you to watch the 90 second video, “Face Detection, Remote Testing Software & Learning At Home While Black — Amaya’s Flashlight.”

I encourage you to also read resources on Ian Linkletter’s website, “Stand Against Proctorio’s SLAPP! (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.)” The use of surveillance technologies to coerce and oppress students, in consistently discriminatory ways, is both unethical and illegal. Yet it continues, and the economic incentives for edtech companies to energetically participate in this Orwellian Mardi Gras parade is sickening.

Follow Ian on BlueSky at @linkletter.org. His advocacy against the surveillance economy and culture is both instructive and inspiring.

Today’s Civics of Tech 2025 keynote speaker, Chris Guilliard (@Hypervisible) provided another wake-up call for me. I’m not sure if my notes from his keynote adequately capture the passion and seriousness of his ideas about surveillance technology and our moral imperative to resist these forces. We probably all know someone who is not a current user of AI technologies, for different reasons. Some are overwhelmed, some are disinterested, but some are morally opposed to their use. In ANY circumstance. Those are all important perceptions, beliefs, and choices to understand and respect. The Civics of Tech 2025 conference definitely expanded my own understanding of different perspectives on AI, and helped better prepare me for the imminent start of another school year (my 31st in education) which is sure to be full of conversations about AI, its use, abuse, and ethics.

What do you think of the idea that “all AI use is categorically immoral and unethical?” This is an important and powerful idea to explore. Perhaps it means as a current middle school teacher, I should give my students the option to “opt out” of lesson activities which include AI use? Like social media, AI technologies invite strong opinions and divergent perspectives.

Many important ideas to consider. Thanks so much, organizers, presenters, and participants in the 2025 Civics of Technology Conference! You’ve given me a lot to think about, as well as many new people to continue to connect to and learn with!

* – AI Attribution: I did not use any AI tools to compose, write or edit this blog post. I did create the included images with ChatGPT, and edited them with Canva.com.

Why This Matters

In an era dominated by generative AI, tech hype-cycles, political polarization driven around social media, and surveillance capitalism, building student awareness and civic agency around technology is more essential than ever. In our introductory / welcome Zoom chat messages, I shared my own favorite media literacy / STEM teaching units on “froot loop conspiracy theories”, family oral history projects, and “Minecraft Mars” coding. I hope these lessons (and others I’ve developed over the past 7 years) help students think both critically and creatively about technology’s role in our society.

Here are some highlights, takeaways, and people to follow from this powerful two-day experience. I’m sharing these both to reflect and to amplify some of the brilliant work happening in this space. One of the best ways to connect with others (including media literacy teachers) attending the conference is to follow the BlueSky “starter pack” for the Civics of Technology Community, maintained by Dan Krutka.

Keynote Highlights & Quotes

• “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Father John Culkin, SJ, often attributed to Marshall McLuhan
• “We need to unsay the LMS.” – Audrey Watters
• “Resist techno-fascism.” – Resist and Heal

As we discussed topics related to digital surveillance, privacy, and digital citizenship, I shared my 2015 TEDx talk, Digital Citizenship in the Surveillance State. This feels more urgent than ever in light of ongoing AI ethics debates.

Breakout Session Highlights

“GenAI Ethics Made Accessible”

Presenters:

• John Bartucz
• Galyna Arabadzhy
• Shreepriya Dogra

Key idea: Use ethical and philosophical frameworks to help students navigate and discuss values around polarizing technologies. John shared this thoughtful review of Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick.

AI Awareness and Belonging

• Dani Dilkes explored AI literacy with domains of awareness.
• Dr. Bonnie Stewart shared her research on “digital belonging” and the downsides of scaling without connection. Her message about dehumanization through scale in education deeply resonated with me.

Book Recommendations

• More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker (Review by Jacob Pleasants for Civics of Tech)
• Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures by Neil Selwyn
• In Praise of Slowless: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré (Author’s site – I shared this one in Zoom chat)

Podcast & Media

• “Hard Fork” podcast episode discussing pro-AI hype and critiques (NYTimes)
• Peter Thiel’s recent controversial interview, “A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat” (So many of the things Thiel says in this interview are CRAZY. Responding to this deserves its own post and video.)

AI Images & Media Literacy

Again via Zoom chat, I learned about the Better Images of AI project. I want to follow up and dive deeper into this resource for my own media literacy lessons next school year. Here’s an AI / ChatGPT summary of the project via the About page.

Most images representing AI today—especially in search engines and stock libraries—are misleading, dominated by sci-fi themes, humanoid robots, and white, Western stereotypes. This visual language distorts public understanding of how AI actually works, what it is used for, and who is behind it, contributing to mistrust, exclusion, and misconceptions. A growing body of research shows how these images reinforce harmful cultural tropes and limit the diversity of people entering the AI field. In response, a new initiative aims to build a more accurate, inclusive, and diverse repository of AI imagery that reflects the real-world technologies, people, and impacts behind artificial intelligence.

Connect and Share

I’ve posted more reflections and links from the event at:
wfryer.me/civicsoftech25

If you’re not already following them, I recommend checking out:

• Dr. Ben Williamson – researching datafication and education
• The conference’s main site: civicsoftechnology.org
• Their support page: buymeacoffee.com/civicsoftechnology

Final Thoughts

This conference affirmed for me that teaching civics and ethics alongside media literacy and STEM is vitally important, and there are many educators as well as others interested in supporting this work. We must help students develop the frameworks to engage with, critique, and shape the technologies that increasingly shape us.

I’d love to hear what frameworks, resources, or lessons others are using in classrooms to support these goals.

* AI Attribution: I used ChatGPT to create an initial draft of this blog post using my conference notes Google Doc, and edited / refined it before sharing. I created the accompanying post image with ChatGPT and edited it with Canva.com.

Here’s the archived recording (47 min) of our meeting, titled “Privacy, Power, and Platforms.” The session description was:

As surveillance technologies expand and authoritarian impulses rise both in the U.S. and globally, digital privacy is no longer a niche concern—it’s an urgent classroom conversation. Join us for this timely Media Education Lab webinar where we’ll unpack the forces shaping our digital lives and explore how educators can help students understand, critique, and protect their privacy. Together, we’ll examine the ways platforms, policies, and power dynamics intersect to track, monitor, and influence behavior—online and off. Through engaging media, hands-on tools, and critical conversations, we’ll equip educators with strategies to help learners become savvy, empowered participants in a networked society.

Here’s the Zoom AI meeting summary, with added hyperlinks. WOW!

Quick recap

The Media Education Lab held a meeting to discuss privacy, power, and platforms, focusing on the implications of AI and surveillance technology in education and society. Participants explored various aspects of digital privacy, including the use of facial recognition databases, data privacy laws, and internet censorship in different countries. The group also shared resources, discussed teaching strategies for media literacy and privacy awareness, and planned future events and collaborations.

Next steps

• Wes Fryer to update the date for Part 2 of the “United States of Secrets” documentary in the optional media links.
• Media Education Lab members to use hashtags #MediaEducationLab and #MediaEdClub when sharing on social media platforms.
• Attendees to register for upcoming events: “Exploring Media Quiteracy” on July 17th and “Our Time to Lead” on July 29th.
• Attendees to consider registering for the Media Literacy Institute at the University of Washington, August 4th-8th.
• Attendees to prepare for next month’s meeting on August 4th, focusing on “Searching with AI”.
• Wes Fryer to add the Wired article “How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance” to the session resources.
• Attendees to provide suggestions for future Media Ed Club topics to Wes Fryer.

Summary

Media Literacy and Privacy Updates

The Media Education Lab held its July meeting to discuss privacy, power, and platforms, with Wes Fryer facilitating and introducing upcoming events. Pamela shared updates about a new AI tool called “Both Silos” (?) being piloted in media literacy classes, which helps teach about media bias through interactive AI-assisted activities. The group discussed digital privacy concerns and agreed to use specific hashtags to connect on various platforms, including BlueSky and Mastodon. Wes announced several upcoming events, including a webinar on July 17th about ‘Media Quiteracy’ and another on July 29th, as well as a paid media literacy institute at the University of Washington in early August.

AI Surveillance and Privacy Concerns

Wes Fryer led a discussion on the implications of searching with AI and the growing surveillance state. He highlighted the increasing control that platform owners have over speech and the potential for misuse of facial recognition technology. The conversation referenced a 2018 TED Talk by Kashmir Hill, who discussed the dangers of surveillance capitalism and the ethical concerns surrounding facial recognition databases like Clearview AI. Wes emphasized the importance of teaching media literacy and privacy awareness to students, while also addressing the need for legal reforms to protect civil liberties in the face of expanding government surveillance powers.

Privacy and Surveillance in Education

Wes Fryer led a discussion on privacy and surveillance issues, particularly focusing on Clearview AI and its ethical implications. He posed four questions for exploration, including how to engage students in caring about privacy issues, what rules should govern the use of facial images, how educational leaders should respond to these issues, and how to balance the benefits of sharing with the risks of living in a surveillance society. The group discussed various approaches to teaching media literacy and privacy, with one participant sharing their experience using the AI4All curriculum with 9th graders.

Data Privacy and Surveillance Concerns

The group discussed concerns about data privacy and surveillance, with Wes sharing his experience managing campus security cameras and noting how AI has transformed data analysis capabilities. The conversation touched on the need for better privacy education, particularly for young people, and the accelerating pace of technological change. The conversation ended with participants being invited to share their thoughts in breakout rooms for 15 minutes, followed by a return to the main session for further discussion.

Data Privacy Laws and Challenges

The group discussed data privacy laws and regulations, with Wes sharing examples of how different states in the US have implemented varying laws regarding image usage and AI technology. They noted that a provision in the recent funding bill that would have restricted AI companies for 10 years was removed by the Senate. The conversation touched on the challenges of navigating different national and state laws, as well as the difficulty of enforcing data privacy regulations. One participant, who lives in China, briefly joined to share her perspectives on the topic, though technical issues prevented her from participating extensively.

Addressing Privacy and Censorship

The group discussed internet censorship and privacy issues, particularly in China, where a participant shared an example of a student facing consequences for starting a sexual harassment petition. Wes Fryer shared his experiences with privacy concerns during international travel and emphasized the importance of teaching media literacy and digital ethics to students of all ages. The discussion concluded with Barbara highlighting the lack of privacy in modern society and the need to address these issues with young people, while Pamela shared a Wired article about protesting safely in the age of surveillance.

Exploring Digital Learning Resources

Wes shared resources and recommended podcasts, including Ethan Zuckerman’s “Reimagining the Internet” and Mike McCue’s “Dot Social Podcast,” emphasizing the impact of books and podcasts on learning and idea sharing. He encouraged participants to explore the Media Education Lab website for additional resources and invited suggestions for future topics, with the next session focusing on AI searching. Participants expressed appreciation and interest in collaboration, with some offering to share student work and engage in future discussions.

If you’ve ever needed to generate properly formatted attribution for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, you probably know about tools like ImageCodr.org or Alan’s Flickr CC Attribution Helper. These have been staples in my digital toolkit for years, especially for teaching students how to model good digital citizenship and give credit where it’s due.

But with Flickr’s recent addition of support for CC 4.0 licenses, I found myself wanting a streamlined, simple option that works specifically for CC BY 4.0 International licensed images — the kind I use most frequently, and formatted like ImageCodr.org. So, with a little HTML and Javascript help from ChatGPT 4o, I built a “CC BY 4.0 Flickr Attribution Generator.”

It’s a lightweight, browser-based tool that lets you:

1. Paste in a Flickr photo page URL (licensed CC-BY 4.0)
2. Preview the image and see proper attribution formatting
3. Copy clean, accessible HTML code for your blog, website, or project

It only works for CC BY 4.0 images (by design) and includes a clear warning for images marked All Rights Reserved.

Want to peek under the hood? The code is all open source and available on my GitHub: github.com/wfryer/cc You do need your own Flickr API key to run this code / script on your own website. I have my personal version running on wesfryer.com/cc/.

This was also a fun excuse to extend my AI-assisted coding skills — you can see more of those learning experiments over on ai.wesfryer.com.

Big thanks again to Alan Levine for blazing the trail on this kind of tool — check out his recent blog post for the full scoop on the Flickr license changes and his updated CC Helper.

If you give my generator a try, I’d love feedback or suggestions. Happy attributing!

After researching different approaches — including Feedburner (which, sadly, isn’t as flexible as it used to be) — I decided to try building a solution myself using Python. Spoiler alert: It worked, and I learned a lot along the way. You can find my project on GitHub, where I’ve named it, “rss-to-rss2-converter.”

AI “Vibe Coding”

“Vibe Coding” is a term for using AI tools (like ChatGPT 4o in this case) to write and help with the writing of computer code. I’ve documented a few of my past experiments with vibe coding on my “Learning AI with Wes” website. In this case, I used ChatGPT 4o to generate a short Python script using two libraries:

• feedparser — to read the original RSS feed.
• rfeed — to generate the RSS 2.0 feed.

The script fetches my Pinboard (RSS 1.0) feed, processes each entry, and writes a new RSS 2.0 .xml file to my web server.

Lessons Learned

This project reminded me just how powerful — and sometimes complex — working with a VPS can be. It also highlighted (yet again) how powerful it is to “vibe code” with AI! There is NO WAY I would have been able to successfully create this project / accomplish these goals without the help of an AI platform for vibe coding. Here are a few of my key takeaways from these experiences.

• Terminal Access Matters: I needed SSH access to my VPS to install Python packages and run the script.
• File Permissions Count: At one point, my feed wasn’t accessible because the output folder was owned by root instead of my hosting user. Fixing ownership solved that.
• .htaccess Confusion: WordPress .htaccess rules appeared to be blocking access to my .xml file. I experimented with rewrite rules, but the real fix was proper file permissions.
• Learning by Doing: I’m no Python expert, but this project pushed me to stretch my skills with scripting, cron jobs, and server setup. It felt good to get it working!
• Beware of Security Issues: Initially the AI / ChatGPT created code which included direct links to my Pinboard RSS feed and my web server directories. When I realized that I asked for updated, “cleaned” versions… but this was NOT something ChatGPT did on its own. I had to prompt for these changes.

Sharing the Process

To help others facing similar challenges, I am documenting my process through this blog post and some “cleaned up” script files (so no private links or server details are exposed) on GitHub:

RSS 1.0 to RSS 2.0 Feed Converter on GitHub

Feel free to use it, adapt it, or suggest improvements!

Final Thoughts

The open web is built on tools like RSS, and it’s satisfying to stitch together older and newer technologies to make them work for your needs. If you’re exploring decentralized platforms like Mastodon and want to automate link sharing, I hope this project helps.

For those interested in AI tools that can support creative problem-solving like this, I’ve also been documenting my AI experiments and presentations at ai.wesfryer.com.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions! And MANY thanks to the ever creative and innovative Alan Levine!

I watched this for several reasons. First, I’m continuing my own health journey alongside my spouse, and we’ve reached a point where we’re ready to not just alter our diet and lose weight, but also focus on building healthier, long-term habits. Three years ago—before moving to North Carolina—we both lost 50 pounds using the Optavia diet. Shelly was a coach for Optavia, and we learned a lot from that journey.

However, as George emphasizes in his video, it’s essential to develop habits we can sustain over the long term. I’m inspired by the fact that he has maintained his 120-pound weight loss for over four years—that’s a huge achievement. I’d like to lose about 50 pounds myself, but more importantly, I want to sustain that level of health and well-being.

Like George, my kids are “my why.” Shelly was my Optavia coach, and in that community, they often ask, What is your why? It’s all about motivation. If we’re not motivated, we won’t make meaningful changes—and we definitely won’t sustain them.

I’m also excited to reconnect with George’s work, especially because both of his books are favorites of our new department chair at school, Jennifer Pieratt. Jen has encouraged me and others in our department to read George’s books as we consider how we can continue fostering innovation—not just within our classrooms and department, but across our broader school community and online networks as well.

I’ve also decided to start sharing more media from my iPad. Since iPads are the primary devices our students use at school, I want to become more fluent with iPad-based media production. Over the past few years, I’ve mostly relied on laptops and desktops during class. So, here’s another blog post shared directly from my iPad—with a little proofreading help from ChatGPT!

Have a great day—and keep working on developing healthy habits for life.

Thank you, George Couros!

georgecouros.com

Listen to the original podcast episode on Pocket Casts.

Sam articulates his strong distaste for the harmful and unethical behavior of our president in 2025 and his administration, but he also shares his view that DEI and “wokeness” in U.S. culture were out of control and are appropriately being purged in many ways. He shares a view that our society today is largely colorblind, and while there are still disparities economically across the nation, especially in positions of power and authority, race is basically something that doesn’t matter anymore and we should stop talking about it. I do not agree with those views.

But I do think the focus on disinformation, misinformation, and the ways that information is shared and consumed is absolutely on point. I remember in the early days of EdCamps how, as organizers, we would typically make sure there was at least one session to help people who were not familiar with Twitter get on the platform and set up an account.

I have a sense that we need to find ways to do the same thing today with the Fediverse, with platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky. Although BlueSky was spun out of Twitter, it does not (currently) have advertising, and it offers “Federation” as an option for users.

I facilitated a webinar at the start of the month for the Media Education Lab, titled “Beyond the Algorithmic Feed”, discussing the Fediverse, and I was actually surprised how many of the participants were NOT familiar with it.

I think most users of social media today would agree that the shape of the “TechBro”-dominated social media landscape (think Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) has and continues to have a massive influence on how we as people see and consume ideas—and how we perceive the world.

In addition to having a “slow hunch” that we need to help others in our particular “spheres of influence” connect with more deliberate intention to others who share our values, I also think we need to “invest in influencers” and “empower influencers” who share our values.

A recent example that comes to mind is the “No Kings” rally in Charlotte, and the thousands of other “No Kings” rallies like it around our country. I was not only able to participate in the rally and subsequent march through the streets of uptown Charlotte, but also share a few thoughts with the crowd, which was both an honor and a challenge I welcomed.

There is so much about our world and culture that I do not understand, but there are some things I am quite positive about. One of these is the importance of building community, both personally and locally within our neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

Another thing I am sure about is the importance of finding and sharing “trusted voices.”

As Sam Harris mentions at the start of this podcast conversation, we are struggling as a society in part because we have discounted the importance and value of expert voices and expertise. So many people have opinions… and in some circles / on some platforms, those voices can have an “outsized volume” and an unwarranted level of amplification, especially if we think about expertise or the need to have constructive dialogue.

Another part of this podcast conversation I appreciated was Sam’s description of the radicalization and bad actor transformation of Elon Musk. In some of my middle school classes, I asked students to identify role models, and in some cases create media representations of those role models. These can be slideshows or webpages. They are so insightful. In years past, I have actually had students identify Andrew Tate as a role model, which led to an opportunity to have a conversation with that child’s parent. I had numerous boys this past year identify Elon Musk as one of their role models and heroes.

I want to continue asking students about role models and heroes they have for their lives, but I’ve also had a thought about inviting parents to share people they consider heroes and role models, including those they would like their own children to learn more about. I’ve been thinking of an assignment in which students identify two of their own heroes or role models—who could actually be social media influencers—and then select two of the heroes or role models identified by their parents. This would provide an opportunity for dialogue, potentially in families, and also invite parents to both inform and shape, even in a small way, the educational work of their child at school.

I recommend this podcast conversation with Scott Galloway and Sam Harris not because I agree with everything they said and shared, but because it served as a good catalyst for me, reflecting on the changes we are experiencing within our society and culture, and thinking about the actions that I could take personally and professionally in the weeks and months to come.

Who are your trusted voices? How do you obtain and read news about our world? How can we work together to co-create better social media and networking platforms that are less toxic and more constructive for our personal mental health as well as our constructive evolution as local, regional, national, and global communities?

To this latter goal, I recommend the following two podcasts:

• “Reimagining the Internet” by Ethan Zuckerman and the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
• “Dot Social” by Mike McCue and the team at Flipboard

I still like the slogan, “Let’s invent the future.” Sharing good ideas via social media as well as face-to-face conversations is an important part of this aspirational work.

I captured about 36 photos and several videos of today’s ceremony, you can access the photos in this Flickr album.

I also captured and shared several videos.

US Air Force Academy Cadet Honor Guard: 4 Man Performance at the 2025 Graduation Parade (5 min)

Wings of Blue US flag fly-in to start the graduation parade (first ever in USAFA history) and flyby

The proud father of the Wings of Blue jumper, Cadet Garrett, was sitting right next to me at the parade! He is a 1985 USAFA grad from Mach 1 who flew F-111s and Predator drones.

Tomorrow is the actual graduation ceremony, and I will add more photos to this Flickr album.

This episode is available as both a mp3 audio file and audio-only video file on YouTube. (Due to issues with my WordPress podcasting plugin, this episode is not showing up in my podcast feed YET.)

Show Notes:

1. Wes Fryer’s Main Site (wesfryer.com)
2. Wes Fryer’s Shared Lessons Website (lessons.wesfryer.com)
3. Media Literacy Hub for Wes Fryer (medialiteracy.wesfryer.com)
4. Conspiracies and Culture Wars Project (medialiteracy.wesfryer.com/concw)
5. Heal Our Culture (healourculture.org)
6. Resist and Heal (resistandheal.com)
7. EdTech Situation Room (edtechsr.com)
8. Media Literacy with Wes (Substack) (wfryer.substack.com)
9. EdTechSR Substack (edtechsr.substack.com)
10. Heal Our Culture Substack (healourculture.substack.com)
11. Resist and Heal Substack (resistandheal.substack.com)
12. Refugee Support Services of Charlotte (refugeesupportservices.org)
13. InfoPics for Refugee Support Services – RSS (lessons.wesfryer.com/courses/capstone/rss)
14. Photos for Class (storyboardthat.com/photos)
15. Canva (canva.com)
16. Auphonic (auphonic.com)
17. Descript (descript.com)
18. Flint AI (flintk12.com)
19. ChatGPT (OpenAI) (chatgpt.com)
20. Claude (Anthropic) (claude.ai)
21. Code.org App Lab (code.org/tools/applab)
22. Scratch (scratch.mit.edu)
23. Minecraft Education (education.minecraft.net)
24. MakeCode (microsoft.com/en-us/makecode)
25. Google Vids (via Google Workspace)
26. StreamYard (streamyard.com)
27. Teachers for an Informed Public (tipteachers.org)
28. Kevin Roose NYT Article on Vibe Coding
29. Wes’ GitHub for shared AI / vibecode (github.com/wfryer)
30. AI Project Hub for Wes Fryer (ai.wesfryer.com)
31. Room 208 Podcast (Bob Sprankle – bobtaughtme.com)

All podcast bumpers created by Wes Fryer in Garageband years ago… The last musical bumper is:

Summertime by LiQWYD | https://soundcloud.com/liqwyd/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Preserving the Past Through Technology”

My middle school family oral history unit is available on my curriculum sharing website. Learn more about Bob Sprankle and his legacy of classroom podcasting with students on BobTaughtMe.com, which I talked about in this March 2025 interview.

Since I didn’t wear a lapel microphone and I turned from facing the camera from time to time during the recording of this video, I wanted to improve the quality of the audio in my video a bit. I used the web-based audio enhancer auphonic.com along with QuickTime Player for MacOS, in a fairly simple and quick workflow. I chose the default option “Voice Cleaner (keep music), Partial Reverb” as my audio normalization option.

You can visually see the improvement in audio levels in the waveform comparison which Auphonic displayed after processing my audio. The initial audio from my video is shown in the lower waveform, the final / output audio improved by Auphonic is shown above.

Here are the specific steps I followed to create this “audio-enhanced” video:

1. I recorded the different clips of my video on my iPhone 13 using a tripod and plastic iPhone mount.
2. I downloaded some free, copyright-friendly music I liked from filmmusic.io. (Saved to my iCloud FILES on my iPhone.)
3. I saved a screenshot of the “Carbona 2-in-1 Oven Rack and Grill Cleaner” product on Amazon which I mentioned and wanted to include as a “picture-in-picture” image in my video. I saved this to my iPhone camera roll.
4. I used iMovie for iOS to edit my video, using the downloaded song as background music during the time-lapse sequences. I also inserted the Carbona screenshot a couple places in the video when I mentioned it. (I call this a “Quick Edit Video.”)
5. I made a screenshot of the copyright-friendly music which I then used at the end of the video to provide required Creative Commons attribution.
6. I exported / shared the final video to my iPhone camera roll.
7. I airdropped the final video to my MacOS laptop.
8. I opened the video with QuickTime Player and EXPORTED the file in an audio-only version.
9. I uploaded that .m4a audio file to Auphonic.com and chose the “Voice Cleaner (keep music)” preset.
10. I downloaded that enhanced / processed file, and “dropped it” on my movie in QuickTime Player, and clicked DONE. (Whoa-la, like magic, now I had MUCH better audio in my video!)
11. I exported the edited video from QuickTime Player as a 4K video.
12. I uploaded the video to YouTube.
13. I uploaded the audio file to a new project in descript.com (to which I have a monthly subscription, it’s AWESOME) and then used the “Overlord” feature to create a YouTube description with time-stamped chapter marks.
14. I cook a couple screenshots of different scenes from the final video, saved those to my computer, then put them into Canva.com to create my YouTube video thumbnail.
15. I uploaded the final / audio-enhanced video to YouTube, using the Descript provided description, my own title, and the thumbnail I created with Canva.

Do you have a different workflow with different tools which you prefer for enhancing the quality of the audio your videos? If so please let me know what you use and do!

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to share an updated presentation about this project at the NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. This Saturday morning, I’m listening to an audio podcast version of “The quest to figure out farming on Mars,” an article originally published in the MIT Technology Review in October 2024 as, “The quest to figure out farming on Mars” by David W. Brown. (paywall free version) This podcast and article is encouraging me to consider new possibilities for additional lessons in our Coding Mars unit, including the ways my students could simulate some of the chemistry involved with Martian regolith and perchlorates, using the specialized chemistry, periodic table blocks available in Minecraft Education. I’ll share a bit more of my thinking in this post.

I’ve been using MinecraftEDU and Minecraft Education with upper elementary and middle school age students since 2013-2015, when I taught STEM at Independence Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, before serving as the Director of Technology at Casady School in OKC for 4 years. For the past six years, I’ve been teaching middle school STEM classes, and finding ways to creatively use Minecraft Education has become a major “passion project” for me as a STEM and computer science teacher.

One of the special features of Minecraft Education which I have not previously explored in-depth is the periodic table / chemistry blocks and block functions, represented (in part) in the 2018 Minecraft Education lesson, the “World of Chemistry.”

Use chemistry to create new Minecraft items like helium balloons and sparklers, view elements in the periodic table and build a custom laboratory.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. I can use AI (ChatGPT and/or Flint AI, which our school licenses) to create some basic lessons which will familiarize students with Martian regolith and perchlorates.
2. Students could potentially use a “custom Mars laboratory” in Minecraft to create these organic and inorganic materials, similar to the way Space Resource Technologies creates different variants or “simulants” of Martian regolith.
3. Again, using AI to help me better understand the science and “translate it” for my middle school students, they could potentially explore some of the chemical reactions involved in transforming perchlorates into non-toxic / plant friendly soil components which could support rather than destroy organic plant growth and farming processes.

The last few months (and even the past couple weeks) I’ve been amazed by the power of AI to serve as my personal lesson planning assistant, to not only format and draft my lessons for students in Canvas (our learning management system) but also discover / recommend new videos, web tools, and other resources we can use. My new assignment on creating a 15 to 30 second audio advertisement, part of a unit on podcasting for my middle school web design class, is an example of an AI-augmented lesson.

My own knowledge of chemistry is fairly limited. I had a bad experience with chemistry in high school, with a nice teacher who was unfortunately very ineffective, and this set me up for a bad experience when I went on to the US Air Force Academy. I was able to “test into” a higher level of chemistry, so we covered a year’s worth of material in an accelerated semester, but I struggled to understand the content and barely emerged from the class with C. I never took any more chemistry in college and became a “fuzzy” PoliSci / Geography major.

I contrast my own bad experiences in high school and college with those of two of our kids, in (respectively) a public magnet school and private school in OKC. One graduated from the Colorado School of Mines as a mechanical engineeer and now works as a contractor for NASA supporting the International Space station, and the other is majoring in Astronautical Engineering at the US Air Force Academy. Both LOVED chemistry in high school and used those experiences to fuel and propel their academic and professional journeys in STEM, which are ongoing.

I share this reflection and background because I am acutely aware of how important POSITIVE experiences are for students in STEM fields. I don’t entirely blame my high school chemistry teacher for arresting my own STEM studies in college (we still had to take a course in about 8 different engineering disciplines as part of the Academy’s ‘core curriculum) but I definitely remember the bad experiences of NOT learning helpful “concept development” in high school, and how that hurt me in my subsequent college studies.

I’m energized by the way AI can help give me some “lesson designing superpowers” with both topics I’m very familiar with (like podcasting and family oral history interviews) as well as topics I have a strong interest in, but not a deep background, like cutting-edge agricultural methods and farming off-world. Some of the articles and resources I might plug into AI tools like GoogleLM, ChatGPT or Flint AI include the November 2022 article from Arizona State, “What will it take to grow food on Mars? Anca Delgado says microorganisms and bioremediation could make the red planet’s soil usable” and Google Scholar referenced publications by Anca G. Delgado.

These possibilities for learning, and potentially TRANSFORMATIVE learning for my own middle school students this semester, are extremely exciting and motiving for me as a classroom teacher! Coding + Space Education + Minecraft + “Design – Create – Share” lesson planning Creativity = “My Pedagogical Happy Place!” I can’t wait to continue developing and co-creating these lessons with and for my students!

1. About the medieval origins of lapis lazuli, ultramarine and the color blue.
2. How AI may be creating a “semantic apocalypse.”
3. What the ““Ghiblification” trend” is “where people use OpenAI’s new art model to make photos look like Studio Ghibli anime.”

For deeper reading see “Welcome to the semantic apocalypse: Studio Ghibli style and the draining of meaning” by Erik Hoel.

Via Ethan Mollick’s March 30th Substack article, “No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – When Language Models Learn to See and Create” shared by Jason Neiffer on LinkedIn.

My ChatGPT prompt for the attached image: “Please create a “Studio Ghibli anime” version of the attached image.”

Image links:

1. Original image
2. AI Studio Ghibli style image (generated by ChatGPT)
3. Combined image collage, “Our Family Studio Ghibli Style”

Is this “the end of culture?” No, I don’t think so. But it’s certainly a challenging time for copyright lawyers and creative professionals.

For more on this, check out Jason Neiffer and my upcoming “EdTech Situation Room” podcast and webshow on Wednesday, April 9th at 9pm ET. I’m sure we’ll talk about this!

This article is also shared on my SubStack newsletter, “Media Literacy with Wes:”

One of my goals as a STEM teacher and specifically as a web design teacher in middle school is helping my students become adept at using different kinds of multimedia to communicate effectively and tell stories online. In this unit I challenge my students to explore resources in one or more of the following online media archives, and learn to share them with proper attribution using my favorite free, ad-free citation tool, Zbib:

1. Smithsonian Open Access
2. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog
3. NASA Image Library

I encourage you to check out and review the full unit plan, which spans (theoretically) seven days of class meetings. Because of schedule interruptions and my own absences for different reasons, we ended up taking a little more time for this unit this year than in the past.

Today students shared their presentations about these projects with our class, and I was very pleased with the way this worked out. Yesterday I asked students (with their partner) to create a SINGLE slide in Google Slides, which included

1. The title of your media kit
2. Links to each of your WEBPAGES you created with your media kit
3. Your Media Kit on Google Drive

Then today in class, I shared a new Google Slideshow with them, giving all students EDIT rights to the slideshow. I asked them to copy / paste their SLIDE into the slideshow, and was then able to re-arrange the slides in the presentation order. This was efficient and relatively painless.

Partner teams shared a two to three minute summary of their projects, highlighting what they included in their media kit (in Google Drive) as well as their respective media kit webpages. Most created their webpages with Google Sites, but some used Adobe Express and one used Canva. I asked students to open the SHARED SPREADSHEET we used in this project, which includes links to each student webpage as well as their partner Media Kit.

I love this project and plan to use it again next year when I teach web design. I love how it gives students agency, voice and choice in selecting a topic of interest, but also introduces them to some new (and rich) media sources. It also gives them a chance to practice some excellent media literacy skills!

Feel free to use or modify this lesson with your own students, and let me know if you do! Also please reach out if you have any questions, either with a comment on this post or via social media!

The session description was:

Build a Mars Colony In Minecraft with Robots and Code? YES! In our middle school computer programming class, students are using Microsoft MakeCode in Minecraft Education to simulate the robotic 3D printing of buildings and greenhouses on Mars. Students are building 2D animations of Artemis space missions using Scratch coding.

Access referenced links from the presentation in the slideshow, and also on the unit / lesson website homepage, part of my lesson sharing website: lessons.wesfryer.com/lessons/minecraft-mars

If you have questions about this project I’d be glad to answer and try to help you use these lesson ideas with your own students. Reach out to me on social media or via my online contact form.

MY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Presentation slides

Microaggressions in Middle Level Education

Laurie A Ramirez, Appalachian State University

Very important topic to me, I have experienced this

Taught in Utah prior to moving to App State

Utah doesn’t generally do a great job with middle level education / middle school: Many schools in the east do better with this pedagogy

Basic definition of microaggressions: Subtle, often unintentional, comments or actions that imply negative associations or insults toward an individual or a group – often toward those who have been historically marginalized

These are like the beginnings of bullying, sometimes couched as a joke

Activity: Think – Write – Share

1- Think of any example of microaggressions you have witnessed or experienced

2- Write on 1 or more cards

3- Share with a colleague and the group

Often in middle school microaggressions are couched / rationalized as “a joke”

I SHARED ABOUT HOW MEMES ARE SOMETIMES SHARED BY MIDDLE SCHOOLERS WHO ARE IGNORANT OF THE BACKGROUND AND MEANING / IMPACT OF THEM

If you have looked at RESTORATIVE justice, it’s not just harm done to the victim, harm is also done to the perpetrator and to others in the room / classmates

3 different categories of microaggressions

Microassaults

• More deliberate
• Intending to make harm
• Assault
• Conscious
• Explicit
• Discriminatory
• Slurs
• ‘Good old fashioned racism’ (or sexism or homophobia, etc – ‘boys will by boys’ excuse)

Microinsults

• Comments or behaviros that subtly convey rudeness or insensistitvity, often unintentionally
• Preferential treatment t owhites or other ‘majorities’ in a given context (or poor treatment to ‘others’)
• Still do a lot of harm

Micro-invalidations

• Comments or actions that are DISMISSING, IGNORING, or NEGATING the experiences or feelings of marginalized individuals
• Assailing a person’s identity or self-esteem
• This can be systemic

Most harm you can do to someone else: Take away someone else’s sense of self

Six key characteristics of microaggressions:

1. Subtlety: often difficult to identify, can be disguised as compliments or jokes, making them harder to address
2. Unintentional: can stem from unconscious biases
3. Cumulative impact: can break people down, cause deep seated harm
4. Contextual: can vary depending on context and individuals involved. What might be considered a microaggression in one setting might not be perceived the same way in another
5. Perpetuation of stereotypes: often reinforce stereotypes and societal normas that marginalize certain groups
6. Impact on mental health: experiencing microaggressions can negatively affect mental health, leading to feelings of frustrations, sadness, and decreased self-esteem

MY MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS REALLY STRUGGLE WITH CONTEXT: SAYING THAT THEY SAY THAT ALL THE TIME TO FRIENDS, IT’S OK BECAUSE ITS NORMALIZED FOR THEM IN PEER INTERACTIONS… FAILING TO UNDERSTAND THE CLASSROOM CONTEXT IS DIFFERENT AND REQUIRES A DIFFERENT STANDARD OF BEHAVIOR

Impact of Microagressions on Victims

1. Mental health
2. Physical health
3. Self esteem
4. Academic and professional performance

Article: “Bullshit and Bullying” – Bullying is a bunch of BS about status, about getting attention, laughs, etc.

Impact of Microaggressions on Perpetrators

1. Reinforcement of biases (their own)
2. Damaged relationships
3. Missed opportunities for growth
4. Reputational Damage

I COMMENTED THAT SOMETIMES THESE MICROAGGRESSIONS HAPPEN SO FAST THAT IT CAN BE REALLY CHALLENGING TO ADDRESS. I HAVE FOUND CHANGING STUDENT SEATS IN THE CLASSROOM 

Sometimes a good response to a witnessed microaggression: “Tell me what you meant by that.”

• Or: “Can you please elaborate on that”
• Or: “Sounds like you have a strong opinion on that. Can you please elaborate?”
• Kids and adults can sometimes then struggle to define why something was funny, what they meant, etc. (THIS BRINGS THE COMMENT AND MICROAGGRESSION INTO THE LIGHT OF REFLECTION AND SCRUTINY)

Recommended article: “If you notice a microaggression, acknowledge it”

What to do if you notice a microaggression (insert photo)

1. Discern: Is this important enough to deal with immediately or it can wait? But to NOT avoid it completely because of discomfort or fear
2. Disarm: Explain that you noticed and would like to have a conversation that might be uncomfortable
3. Defy: Challenge the individual to clarify their statement or action with probing questions
4. Decide: How do you want to address it? How you will take control of the incident?

From Harvard Business Review (2020): “When and How to Respond to Microaggressions” by Ella F. Washington, Alison Hall Birch and Laura Morgan Roberts, July 3, 2020”

Another Approach to Addressing Microaggressions

Take a deep breath: collect your thoughts before responding.

1. Take a deep breath: collect your thoughts before responding.
2. Acknowledge: know and recognize that the other person’s perspective is their reality and truth.
3. Inquire: Give students the benefit of the doubt. First, ask the student to clarify, elaborate or further explain. This will give you more information about where s/he is coming from, and may also help the speaker to become aware of what s/he is saying.
4. Reframe: Create a different way or perspective from which to view at a situation.
5. Identify: Directly respond to student comment as problematic. Calmly and politely explain which specific words or phrases you experienced as disrespectful (or that someone else might have). Use an “I” statement to express feelings, as appropriate, rather than commenting on or labeling the speaker.
6. Diffuse to allow productive re-engagement: Sometimes, a hot moment can get out of control.
7. Revisit: Sometimes one is caught by surprise, misses an opportunity, or wishes s/he could have a do-over in response to a microaggression or “hot moment”. Even if the moment has passed, it’s ok to go back and address it later in class. Research indicates that an unaddressed microaggression can leave just as much of a negative impact as the microaggression itself.
8. Check in: in person, talk with the targeted student(s) after class. Let them know that you value their experiences and perspective, and see if they have any suggestions about how to better support them in class.

via Carnegie Mellon University 2025

From a participant who is an administrator: Often when parents get upset about a microaggression situation, it can be because they perceive the teacher NOT addressing it in a timely or appropriate way in the classroom

When bullies are emboldened, they get worse….

Future Directions / Further Study: Beyond the scope of this work I would like to research further:

• Macroaggressions
• Stereotype threat
• Triggering
• Upstanders / bystanders
• Prevention strategies

Book: “Upstanders: How to Engage Middle School Hearts and Minds with Inquiry”

Middle school students are unique

From a participant: When teachers and admins are not feeling and acting like a team, kids can sense it

THIS WAS A GREAT PRESENTATION / SESSION AND OFFERED GOOD OPPORTUNITIES FOR PARTICIPANTS TO SHARE AND REFLECT AS WELL. SO IMPORTANT TO ADDRESS THESE TOPICS ALWAYS, BUT ESPECIALLY IN OUR CURRENT POLITICAL AND CULTURAL MOMENT.

MY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

In this session we will highlight ways to insure we take the normal curriculum I am supposed to teach and invite students to see themselves it it… plus have fun!

“Teachers are the ultimate influencers”

#positivelyinform

“We are teachers because of a teacher or in spite of a teacher”

The teachers who were my influencers

• Mrs Wolfe in 1st grade: We need to think of others, to care for others

Our parents are dropping off their greatest gift every day at school

Coach Hilton Middle School PE: There is a big world outside our middle school

Our learning HAS to transcend the classroom walls!

Mr McDowell, high school leadership teacher

• Lean into your leadership

See math in your everyday life, it’s key!

Maria Shriver: We all have contributions to make

“When will I ever use this in my life?”

Today is about project based learning and STEM learning

• Taking standards and making them fun and connected to standards (if we want it to impact our students)

I start each year with this activity, working in groups, finding numbers

Model for students what good group work looks like

100 Numbers to Get Students Talking

The classroom, where it should all start:

• Curiosity takes root
• Problem solvers are created
• Real world connections are made
• Innovation is celebrated
• Relevance is established
• Perseverance is expected
• More….

Mrs Smith’s 8th Grade Math Classroom

• Small groups
• Hand on activities: Pythagorean theorem, volume, transformations, angle relationships, story graphs (distance vs time)
• Real World Connections: systems of linear equations, comparing linear functions, scatterplots / surveying individuals

Sara’s favorite meme on the Pythagorean theorem:

Story of Sarah Lefebrve – Union County Curriculum Facilitator created Math Trails

Slideshow presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IT0isRLW5asVNWiM-uQdSIJugo4iJKsE1wLhSeLZEXo/edit?usp=sharing

Via: https://2022ncctmannualfallconference.sched.com/event/1Amlz

And via: https://x.com/Lefebvres_class/status/1590567903463866368

The Myanmar Boat Project (high school example)

Good example of Google Maps project using Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany

Your Role in the Puzzle

• Greatest professional development is in our buildings
• continue to spark curiosity and rive that propels students from the classroom into the world
• Your work is part of a larger mission!

hsmithnctoy24 [at] gmail.com

X: @Teach_Hsmith

Instagram: @h_smithteaches

HEATHER’S CLOSING COMMENTS REMINDED ME OF THE “DESIGN CREATE AND SHARE” LESSON AND CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK WHICH SHELLY AND I HAVE NOT FULLY CREATED / BUILT OUT BUT NEED TO!

HER COMMENTS ABOUT HOW MUCH EXPERTISE IS IN THE ROOM ALSO MADE ME THINK OF EDCAMPS AND HOW I REALLY WANT TO HELP FACILITATE SOME EDCAMP PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT EVENTS HERE IN NORTH CAROLINA:

I TALKED WITH A LIBRARIAN FRIEND AND CHURCH YESTERDAY AND I’M HOPING TO GET SOME EDCAMP CONNECTIONS GOING!

#MSMATTERS2025 

MY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Liz teaches at Pollard Middle School in Chatham County Schools

Liz grew up in Wilmington and knew very little about its history until college when she got a history degree 

• It doesn’t make you a bad person to learn
• We need to seek truth in our social studies classroom
• History seems to be up for debate these days

Proud grad of New Hanover High School Class of 2015, “New Hanover High School” in Wilmington, NC

Decided to major in US history after they did away with US history major at UNC

History 367: North Carolina History

Wilmington 1898

Wilmington 10 (1970)

Why did I have to move away from home to learn about Wilmington?

Wilmington Massacre: The only successful coup d’état in US history where white supremacists overthrew a democratically elected government

• I didn’t know the historical significance of any of the buildings

I shouldn’t have had to wait till I was 27 to figure out where I came from!

Why teach local history?

What should we keep in mind teaching local history?

How do we embark on this endeavor?

Naysayers might say….

• What if students move?
• Shouldn’t we focus on ‘the big picture?’
• “Why waste time on North Carolina when we could be talking about significant things that happen across the country?”

Local history provides students with pieces of connection, to find purpose in the material and what they are learning

• It is so hard to get students to connect with the material
• Students are desperate for purpose, for connection (to anything) and teaching locally can make everything more real!

Students can learn about how local people were RESILIENT and might have even fought back in difficult times

Our standard are SPIRALED, so students will receive in-depth US history as part of their high school requirements

• No end of course exam!
• Chance to hook and engage students!
• Design curriculum in a way that feels special for those students in the room
• This is a unique time for students

2nd highest number of lynchings in our town of _____

Example of standard:

8.H.1.4: “Explain how recovery, resistance, and resilience to inquiries, injustices, discrimination, prejudice, and bias have shaped the history of North Carolina and the nation.”

• Focusing on the US as whole can be a good place to start, but what if we make it more PERSONAL for our students?!

Example: African Americans in Wilmington 

• Copes of the Daily Record can be found in the Cape Fear Museum archives and at the new Hanover County Public Library!

Learning about people like Alexander Lightfoot Manly:

“Alexander Lightfoot Manly (May 13, 1866 – October 5, 1944) was an American newspaper owner and editor who lived in Wilmington, North Carolina.[1] With his brother, Frank G. Manly, as co-owner, he published the Daily Record, the state’s only daily African-American newspaper and possibly the nation’s only black-owned daily newspaper. At the time, the port of Wilmington had 10,000 residents and was the state’s largest city; its population was majority black, with a rising middle class.”

Example from 2017: “Students help bring new light to the Wilmington riots of 1898”

REAL can be exciting, help students connect

• Bring in guest speakers who have a connection to an event
• Physically visit the site of significant moments
• Touch documents and artifacts from the time period

Students in Liz’ high school had relatives on both sides of the Wilmington insurrection

• Real can be challenging

Knowing who is in your classroom is very important: This doesn’t mean we avoid talking about these issues!

• This means we give students TOOLS and SPACE to have a productive and meaningful conversation
• Giving students primary sources is key

Great websites to use:

digitalnc.org

Newspapers.com

Another good resource from a session participant: NC History Case Studies from the Levine Museum of the New South.

Liz shares a variety of social studies curriculum on Teachers Pay Teachers:

Not sure of there good spaces in North Carolina for history and lesson plan sharing in social studies

I WONDER IF THERE IS A HASHTAG THAT NORTH CAROLINA HISTORY TEACHERS ARE USING ON BLUESKY OR OTHER PLATFORMS TO SHARE?

My dream is for students to be interested in history

High school world history classes can become “Honors Coloring” (coloring so many maps for a coach teacher)

When teaching local and controversial history, use as many primary sources as you can

• Lean into primary sources
• Don’t tell students how to think, but ask critical questions

Full Circle Moment: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 2024 UNCW institute focused on Wilmington Coup and Massacre of 1898

“The Book of Wilmington” from 1954 (example of primary source written from the perspective of the Wilmington successful insurrectionists)

• Reference to the reading of the “White Declaration of Independence”

PBS October 2024: “When White Supremacists Overthrew a Government”

Mentioned by a participant: Gaston County African American Museum

ldavis [at] chatham.k12.nc.us

Took a class called “My Hometowns” in college, was a big moment

• Learning about the cover up of the Wilmington coup 

I MENTIONED THE CHARLOTTE REMEMBRANCE PROJECT AND WEBSITE:

#MSMATTERS2025 

MY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Darrin’s books include:

“The Road to Awesome: The Journey of a Leader”: roadtoawesome.net and roadtoawesome.net/books

Darrin’s most recent book with Katie Kinder is “Culture First Classrooms: Leadership, Relationships, and Practices that Transform Schools”

Darren’s Podcast: “Leaning Into Leadership”

http://leaning-into-leadership.captivate.fm/ (PocketCasts link)

His home state is Wyoming!

Culture First Truth Bombs:

1- Culture is everyone’s responsibility

2- To be a better we, I have to be a better me

3- Every single one of us has the opportunity to leave a lasting impact

Great culture requires clarity and intentionality

“Punishment  to gain compliance” was a primary motivation in my initial years as a high school teacher and administrator (in charge of discipline and attendance)

• Culture was “I’m going to ‘ding’ that student”

Question from a teacher: “Why does it always have to be about what they [the students] do wrong?”

If you don’t like the culture in your classroom, consider changing the way you LEAD it

It is SO important we are crystal clear about what matters to us

John Hattie “Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta analyses relating to achievement” (389 pages, PDF)

Teacher Clarity as a HUGE effect size

4 key areas where teacher clarity matters:

1- organization

2- explanations

3- examples

4- assessments

I think this should also include ‘expectations” of our kids and ourselves

Talking about the LESSON vs the LEARNING by the students

“People will rise or fall to the level of expectation to which you are willing to hold them”

We often fall into this trap about accountability (Punishment  to gain compliance) but we don’t have to…

“The standard is the standard” by Pittsburg Steelers head coach

“What you don’t address becomes a mess” by Katie Kinder

“Clear is kind” by Brenee Brown

It’s so important that we see our students for who they are

“Accountability is love” by Charles Williams

When we are really intentional about teaching and reinforcing those expectations we have, amazing things happen

Powerful object lesson using “toothpaste” to highlight how we can’t put words back into our mouth

Why shouldn’t you be at the door to greet your students before class? At the front of the school as students come in…

We have options every single day about how we show up:

1- show up as a thermometer (thermometers “name the problem”)

2- show up as a thermostat (adjust the temperature, see the problem, name the problem, and help fix the problem)

Think about this: “What are you looking for?”

Focus on the great things happening in our schools

• It’s amazing what happens when we do

What are you looking for? You will see more of those things!

Levels of Engagement

• Disengaged
• Compliant
• Engaged

We shouldn’t allow computer screens to become ‘the new worksheet”

“Compliance is the enemy of innovation”

• We have to be willing to let students take risks

Story of working with Bradlee W Skinner, speech teacher

• Learning from community members about the importance public speaking and communication

“What are your time bandits?”

Where would rather spend that time? (Hint: It’s not answering email)

“Stop sacrificing the important on the altar of the urgent”

We have to focus on telling the GOOD stories of what is going on in our schools

Story about “The Defining Moment” and Thomas playing in the senior basketball game

Every day we have a choice! And we can leave a lasting impact

On behalf of parents: Thank you for what you do, for making a difference in the lives of kids

When two roads diverge: take the road to awesome and don’t look back!

#MSMATTERS2025 

“Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, and the Future of America” by Gene Nichol was my top selection yesterday because its themes are so important to current events and the issues I’m wrestling with personally, just over a month since our 47th chief executive assumed power in Washington D.C. The book description is:

North Carolina had a big, unfortunate headstart on now-common attacks on democratic institutions—the lessons learned as NC makes its way out of the chaos can benefit other states.  Attacks from the radical right will plague the entire nation for the foreseeable future, and now is the time to seek out the causes and find the path to remedy them. In his most personal book yet, Indecent Assembly author Gene Nichol, takes on, unsurprisingly, race, religion, poverty, higher education, constitutionalism, movement politics, the meaning of North Carolina proper. He forecasts the future of democratic promise in the state, the South, and the United States. This book is not reportage, but rather a cri de coeur, with inspiration and aspiration for the next generation.

I had not heard of Gene Nichol previously, and have searched unsuccessfully for a Substack newsletter or other blog / website he may be updating with is views on current events. If you’re aware of one, please let me know, I couldn’t find anything tonight. According to his bio from the Charlotte Area Fund in December 2023:

Gene Nichol is a distinguished professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He was director of the UNC Poverty Center (2008-2015) until it was closed by the Board of Governors for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly. Nichol was president of the College of William & Mary (2005-2008), law dean at the University of Colorado (1988-1995) and dean at UNC from 1999-2005. 

I’m just getting started in the book but am hopeful Dr. Nichol will have some insights I can share with our ThriveEDU group as well as via my own Patreon community (Dangerous Ideas with Wes Fryer: human rights, democratic norms, tolerance, and media literacy) as well as my aspirational and long-term project, “Heal Our Culture.”

The first of seven books to be added to my aspirational reading list was “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future” by Jason Stanley. As an educator and storychaser, I believe deeply in the importance of studying history from multiple vantage points so we can not only better understand past actions and decisions, but also strive to DO BETTER with our own choices in the future.

This book reminds me of “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” by Rachel Maddow, which I listened to on Audible last summer and highly recommend also. So many of us are wondering, “What can we do?” in the face of regime change in the United States and ascendant fascism. Maddow offers hope by studying the actions and resilience of those who opposed fascism leading up to and during World War II here in the United States, and I suspect Jason Stanley’s book offers similar prescriptions and “playbook suggestions.” When I encounter those, I’m planning to add them to “The Menu of Resistance” collection which our ThriveEDU group is starting to curate and build using Notion AI.

My second book to make my reading list but not personal book collection (yet) is Slaveroad by by John Edgar Wideman.

The GoodReads description of Slaveroad is:

John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists. In a section of “Slaveroad,” called “Sheppard”, William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white colleague. Wideman imagines drinking afternoon tea with Lucy Gant Sheppard, William’s wife, who was on her own slaveroad, as she experienced her husband’s adultery with the African women he was trying to convert. In “Penn Station,” Wideman’s brother, after being confined forty-four years in prison, travels from Pittsburgh to New York. As Wideman awaits his brother, he asks, “How will I distinguish my brother from the dead. Dead passengers on the slaveroad.” An impassioned, searching work,Slaveroad is one man’s reckoning with a uniquely American lineage and the ways that the past haunts the “It’s here. Now. Where we are. What we are. A story compounded of stories told, retold, untold, not told.”

In order to “Heal our Culture” I’m convinced we need to individually as well as collectively engage in the difficult and challenging work of racial healing. I described some of my reasoning supporting this contention in my February 11, 2025 post, “Anti-Racism.” Some of the organizations I’ve included in my resource website for HealOurCulture.org are focused on racial healing, like “Coming to the Table.” Some of my own work with Storychasers focuses on racial healing through digital storytelling. One of the important elements of a “new civics curriculum” which we need to teach in our communities through our churches and other organizations (even if we cannot presently through our public schools) involves “hard history” including the factual history of slavery in the United States and the Americas. Some of the stories I’ve started learning about and sharing specific to Salisbury, North Carolina, fit into this genre of “hard history.” This also includes stories I’ve shared in the past 3 years from the Latta Plantation, from Philadelphia Church in Mint Hill, and from Brattonsville, South Carolina. I still need to edit and share a video a recorded 2 years ago at the cemetery of formerly enslaved Charlotteans right across the street from our school and from Sardis Presbyterian Church. Living now in North Carolina instead of the midwest of the USA, this antebellum history of slavery is all around me, and I want to continue both learning more about it and encouraging others to do the same. This is one tangible way we can seek together to dismantle racism. It involves confronting whiteness, in part by making formerly “invisible” chapters of history and our own family histories visible to discuss, process, and heal through.

Next book on my list: “Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan” by David Cunningham. It’s alarming and unfortunate that the KKK was very active and influential in Union County, North Carolina, where we live just outside Charlotte. Members of our Charlotte church actually witnessed a Klan march a few years ago in nearby Waxhaw. The legacy and influence of hate groups like the KKK is sadly not “ancient history” in our nation, and new generations of white supremacists have been and continue to be emboldened not only through social media but also through the words and actions of elected government officials. My work since 2019 on the “Conspiracies and Culture Wars” media literacy inquiry project continues, and part of those studies involve examining how extremist groups seek to foment political change as well as political terror in our society. Books like this one by David Cunningham are therefore (unfortunately) of interest to me.

The next book to be added to my reading wish list is “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times” by Athena Aktipis.

As a Boy Scout and Eagle Scout, I’ve been an advocate for emergency preparedness since I was in middle school. As an adult, influenced in part by my periodic immersion in right wing media (including YouTube) my interest in and awareness for the importance of family emergency preparedness has led me to start my “Communitarian Prepper” website and video series / YouTube channel. I’m not a “tin foil hat wearing Zombie apocalypse prepper,” but I am an Eagle Scout and former USAF SERE survival instructor who has lived long enough through Oklahoma ice storms and other power outage events to know it’s wise to prepare for natural as well as human-caused disasters.

Next book on my wish list: “Capitalism and Slavery” by Eric Williams. As explained previously, I’m very interested in the history and legacy of slavery in the United States and our world. I’m a very outspoken advocate for human rights. We need to understand our economic and political history so we can make informed and constructive choices as voters and leaders in our communities, nation and world. This is “hard history,” but also important history. The past often does serve as a prologue for the present and the future. Topics like this may be distasteful to the Project 2025 fans in our current administration and nation, but they remain important none-the-less.

The next book on my list is also historical in focus: “Colonial North Carolina” by Joe A. Mobley. I like local history, and I want to know more about the history of our state and home.

The last book I added to my reading list Saturday is, “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War” by Tony Horwitz.

The subtitle, “Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War” reminds me of Heather Cox Richardson‘s outstanding book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.” I also listened to her book last summer on Audible. Before reading it, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to how the social and political elites of southern plantations and the “aristocracy of the south” continue to exert dramatic political influence in the United States today.

I think this book by Tony Horowitz will shed further light on these historical and contemporary dynamics.

Make no mistake my friends, we find ourselves in early 2025 in the United States of America in a protracted struggle for the soul of our very nation and culture. Together, we need to heal our culture. But our path forward is not abundantly clear, however. We do not currently have national leaders who can articulate both a vision and “shared story” for humane, respectful, collaborative, and peaceful future which I and many, many others desire and dream of.

So, to this aspirational end, ideas and reading matter. I hope some of these book titles are of interest to you. If they are, or if you have feedback on the ideas I’ve shared here, please let me know via a comment or another social media channel.

BlueSky is currently my favorite.

1. Embrace Daily Quiet Time or Meditation
Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, carving out a daily quiet time is essential. This isn’t just about being still—it’s about centering ourselves on thoughts of goodness, gratitude, and reflection. Even amidst life’s challenges, there are always things to be thankful for. For me, as a follower of Jesus Christ, this time includes reading the Bible and inviting God’s Holy Spirit to guide me in service to others. However, this practice is beneficial for everyone, regardless of faith. Self-care must come first; without it, we can’t effectively care for others.

2. Build Community Locally and Online
Community is a lifeline, both in person and virtually. At school, I’ve found comfort in conversations with colleagues over lunch, and we now gather monthly to share meals and fellowship. Our church, Caldwell Presbyterian in uptown Charlotte, has been another cornerstone of my community. Online groups, like the Media Education Lab and the “First Hundred Days” community, have also provided invaluable support. These connections remind us that we’re not alone, helping us process life’s complexities with people who care about us.

3. Seek and Become a Trustworthy Media Filter
The information age bombards us with a firehose of data. To navigate this, we need trustworthy media filters—both people we can rely on and becoming those reliable sources for others. Influencers have always shaped public opinion, but today, anyone can step into that role. For instance, I value the insights of historian Heather Cox Richardson for her thoughtful takes on current events. Sharing such trusted sources with our networks can be transformative, guiding others through the noise.

4. Establish Personal Media Firewalls
Just as physical firewalls protect us from literal fires, media firewalls shield us from the emotional and mental toll of constant information. Setting boundaries on our news consumption—limiting time spent doomscrolling or engaging with polarizing content—is crucial. Social media and news can be addictive, so it’s important to create limits that protect our mental health and well-being.

5. Volunteer in Your Local Community
Volunteering is a powerful antidote to feeling overwhelmed. Through my church, I’ve had the privilege of serving at the Levine Men’s Shelter in uptown Charlotte. We go the first Friday of every month, providing meals and companionship to men in need. This experience has been uplifting and grounding, offering perspective on my own life and the opportunity to build deeper relationships within my community. There are countless opportunities in every community to serve—find one that resonates with you.

6. Maintain Hope and Faith
Perhaps the most important action we can take is to maintain hope. Faith, whether in a higher power, a greater purpose, or simply the goodness of humanity, sustains us through difficult times. As a follower of Jesus, I find comfort in the belief that I am not alone and that forces of good are at work in the world. J.R.R. Tolkien captured this beautifully in The Lord of the Rings, reminding us that even in the darkest times, there is light and hope. We must hold onto that belief and work together to support the values we cherish.

In conclusion, these six actions—quiet time, building community, filtering media, setting boundaries, volunteering, and maintaining hope—are steps I am actively taking to navigate these turbulent times. I hope they offer you some guidance and support as well. I invite you to explore two projects I’ve initiated: Heal Our Culture, aimed at addressing societal divisions, and Dangerous Ideas with Wes Fryer, a Patreon project supporting representative democracy, human rights, religious tolerance, and media literacy.

Together, we can make a difference. Stay well, and let’s continue this journey side by side.

* AI Attribution: I initially recorded these ideas as a 15 minute video using Streamyard.

** AI image generated by Wes Fryer using Ideogram:
ideogram.ai/g/5TmuDVKtSd26ElmUKnS3Mg/0

This was my workflow to create this blog post based on my video transcript:

1. I used Descript.com to create an accurate transcript of my video.
2. I downloaded my 4 most recent blog posts and saved them as PDF files.
3. I provided the following prompt to ChatGPT: “I would like you to take a video transcript that I recorded today and edit it into a blog post, keeping the content and tone… but making it into a well formed, paragraph based blog post. To do this, please prompt me to upload 4 recent blog posts I have written that you can use to pattern and match my writing style. Secondly, ask me to upload the video transcript.”
4. I reviewed and edited the resulting script, which I’ve shared here.

These are additional referenced links from the video:

1. Learn more about MEDIA FIREWALLS in Episode 45 of “Wisdom with Wes”
2. Learn more about MEDIA FILTERS in Episode 46 of “Wisdom with Wes”

I shared the final results of my coding project tonight on GitHub, and you can run it from GitHub pages. Two example exports are available, one of just my NEWS list and another of ALL my current Mastodon lists. I added my documentation and archived Claude conversation links to my AI Tips and Tricks Google Doc. The catalyst for this AI-assisted coding project was one of our adult children, who recently joined Mastodon and asked me for help in finding news / journalism sources to follow. (She’s tired of algorithmic news feeds, and wants something different.)

Before you start getting too impressed at my coding acumen, please realize this coding project would have been ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for me to successfully complete this evening without help from artificial intelligence / AI tools. I initially tried to create this with ChatGPT, but it was making things too complicated and I almost gave up. Instead I turned to Claude.ai with a simple prompt:

I want a fast way to share my mastodon lists with my daughter.

It took some iteration (as I’ve found is ALWAYS the case, coding with AI) but in a short amount of time I had a working prototype HTML file. I continued to work on tweaking it, and didn’t successfully make all the changes I wanted, but I’m VERY happy with the initial release and am absolutely BLOWN AWAY that this even happened / was possible.

When you first open this single HTML file, you are prompted to enter your Mastodon server name. In my case, this is “mastodon.cloud” – without the quotation marks, of course.

Next, the page links to an OAuth authorization page. If you’re already logged into your Mastodon account in your current browser instance, you’ll be able to authorize READ ONLY access to your Mastodon account, including your LISTS.

Next, wait a few seconds while the HTML file loads all your current Mastodon lists! You can choose to deselect or select all, or individually select lists. If you make a selection change, click UPDATE DISPLAY. Once you have the lists displayed that you want to share, click DOWNLOAD SELECTED LISTS.

Then you can directly email those HTML files to others or post them online on a web host you use.

Ideally I’d like an option for users who receive the saved HTML files to be able to specify their own Mastodon server instance one time, and then have all the profile links to different Mastodon accounts be relative to THEIR OWN server to support faster following.

Mastodon does not support “Starter Packs” like BlueSky does, and I hope at some point developers add this feature. I still have a LOT of lists on Twitter / X, and miss them dearly since I rarely use the platform anymore. It’s exceptionally important for us to “serve as media filters for each other,” and one way we can do this is through social media lists like these.

If you do not already have a Mastodon account, I strongly encourage you to set one up (you can for free) and start using Mastodon. Federated social media is both similar and different from the “big tech platform” websites like Facebook, Twitter / X, Instagram, TikTok, etc. We’re still in early days of the “Fediverse” but I am SO encouraged by those who are developing it and working towards not only a more humane and less polarizing social media ecosystem, but also working in big ways to help support the causes of better governance and stronger communities.

Along those lines, I highly recommend you check out The “Dot Social” podcast hosted by Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. So much great work and so many great ideas about the Fediverse and other topics amplified there!

Happy Mastodon list sharing! If you use this code script, create your own or find something better, please let me know! Via Mastodon if you can, via other social media channels otherwise!

We have an old Bluetooth stereo in our car that does not support CarPlay, and it irritatingly connects automatically to my iPhone in the mornings before school when I start the vehicle to warm it up. This evening I successfully configured a NFC sticker (37 cents each in a 30 pack) to turn my Bluetooth back ON when I tap it with the phone… AFTER an iOS automation script turns Bluetooth OFF earlier on weekday mornings. It’s not a super-complicated workflow, but it did take me awhile to figure out.

I have created a range of different IoT automations via Google Home for our lights and WiFi enabled electrical plugs, but have only dabbled a little bit previously with Apple Shortcuts for iOS and MacOS. Now that I can use ChatGPT as a coding assistant and mentor, however, I’ve been trying out a variety of different scripting ideas.

I brainstormed with ChatGPT to figure out an easy way to get my BlueTooth setting on my phone to auto-magically switch to OFF just before I start my car. Initially I tried to create a shortcut script which checked to see if the Bluetooth had been turned off previously, like in the past 3 hours, and only turn off if that condition was false. I don’t want my BlueTooth auto-shutting off whenever I’m in the car driving.

That script turned out to be too complicated for my meager skills, however, and a more straightforward solution was just creating an automation which turns off BlueTooth every weekday at 7:15am (before I start the car) and then an automation which works with the NFC sticker when I actually get in the car to leave.

I wouldn’t have thought of or considered using a NFC sticker if ChatGPT hadn’t suggested it. NFC stickers don’t just automatically work when your iPhone is close by, you have to actually TAP the sticker to trigger it. By placing the sticker on the front dash panel on the driver’s side, I am able to readily tap it with my phone before putting my phone in the dash holder.

Now, truth be told, it’s really not that big of a deal to turn BlueTooth on or off on my iPhone using the Command Center shortcuts. However, I like the idea of having this automation to save me some steps and just make life a little easier, every school day.

Someday we’ll purchase a newer car stereo with support for wireless AirPlay. But for now, we’ll make do with what we have… and use a NFC sticker to automate our morning routine.

Now that I know how to use a NFC sticker and trigger automations, I’m sure I’ll think of other uses for these… Including automations that my spouse sometimes has trouble activating… Although if I need to trigger a Google Home automation, I may need some hardware to serve as a “bridge” between my iOS and Google worlds.

Last week on our EdTech Situation Room show, Jason Neiffer shared the open source home automation project home-assistant.io as his closing “Geek of the Week.” I may play with that in the months ahead, as a way to both bridge devices (between the Google and Apple IoT worlds) as well as create a home automation capability which (might?) could be resilient to Internet outages.

Have you created helpful iOS or MacOS shortcuts you like to use? If so, please share them!

Today I explored a few tools, with help from ChatGPT recommendations, to create my own “dynamic audio waveform video.” Here is the 12 minute video I created, which is a combined video created using several different tools: “AI ChatBot Ethics: A Webinar Prep Podcast via NotebookLM.” The waveform animation segment starts at 1:57.

I recorded the first introductory segment using Streamyard.com, which is a paid / subscription platform we use each week for the “EdTech Situation Room” podcast, to stream live on YouTube. Streamyard also supports video recording, including decent green screen effects for virtual backgrounds. I created a background image using a Google Drawing and logos for the MediaEd Club of the Media Education Lab, and used my iPhone as a “continuity camera” to record an almost 2 minute introduction.

For the second and longer portion of the video, I used Google’s NotebookLM AI platform to create an “audio deep dive” podcast conversation between two AI hosts. I uploaded 11 different “required” and “optional” media file transcripts and articles, all as PDFs, to a new project in NotebookLM. I provided a specific prompt for the “deep dive” podcast to prepare an audience for our upcoming webinar on “AI ChatBot Ethics.”

To create a video version of that NotebookLM audio file with a the “dynamic audio waveform animation,” I used a free account with headliner.app. This two minute video provides a good overview of Headliner, what it can do and how it works.

ChatGPT recommended some other tools as well to create synchronized audio waveform animations, but some of them had time limits unless you upgraded to a paid / pro account. I didn’t run into any time limit issues with the free account options Headliner provides, which was great. I learned one of my favorite AI audio and video editing platforms, Descript.com, also supports the creation of synchronized audio waveform animations, but I didn’t try that out yet.

Headliner let me upload a custom logo for the audio waveform video, and also customize the on-screen text using a template I selected. After downloading it, I appended it to my Streamyard-created introductory video using QuickTime Player software (provided by default by MacOS) and then exported as a 1080p combined video before uploading to YouTube.

Do you use or prefer other tools for creating synced audio waveform video animations for podcasts, podcast clips or other audio recordings? I think this is something I’ll continue to do with other audio files and podcast highlights.

Here is the full description I added to the video on YouTube. Please consider joining me for this upcoming FREE webinar on “AI ChatBot Ethics” on February 3, 2025!

On February 3, 2025, the MediaEd Club of the Media Education Lab will host a free webinar on “AI ChatBot Ethics.”

To help prepare for the webinar, we’ve created an approximately 10 minute “deep dive” audio podcast using the generative AI platform NotebookLM. We uploaded the eleven (11) required and optional podcasts, articles and videos listed on the registration page for this webinar into a new project library in Google’s NotebookLM, and provided a specific prompt to use these materials to prepare for our webinar.

Please check out additional upcoming MediaEd Club webinars and meetings.

Please also sign up for the newsletter of the Media Education Lab, so you can stay up to date on all upcoming events.

Many past webinars of our MediaEd Club are available in this YouTube playlist.

Here is a screenshot of the specific prompt I used with NotebookLM. This is actually the second version I created, I added my bio to the “library” of source documents, and also added some “career track clarification” which the AI seemed to need in the first draft / interation.

I created a transcript of this podcast “deep dive” conversation from NotebookLM using Descript.com. I especially love the way NotebookLM connected my passions for learning, sharing, teaching, and cooking barbecue!

There are so many implications to this “deep dive audio podcast conversation creation power” of NotebookLM. We highlighted some of these in an October 2024 webinar for the Media Education Lab, but I’m thinking of even more possibilities now. For the next hiring committee I serve on, we could upload each candidate’s application documents into separate NotebookLM projects, and then generate insightful audio “deep dives” about them.

Of course as with all AI tools, results should be fact checked and verified, since AI platforms can hallucinate and get things wrong. This experiment also highlights, however, the value of conducting AI experiments on topics we know well. Since I do know my own career path, personality and skill set pretty well, I’m in a good position to have an informed opinion about the quality of NotebookLM’s audio conversation.

No doubt, IT IS AMAZING. Wow. Just wow.

Transcript: NotebookLM Introduction of Wesley Fryer

Male Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to this deep dive. Um, today we’re gonna be unraveling the world of Wesley Fryer. He’s had a truly fascinating career in education and technology, but there’s way more to his story. 

Female Host: What I find most interesting about Wesley is how his journey goes through so many different fields. It’s not every day you see a U S air force Academy graduate and a Fulbright scholar decided to go into elementary education.

Male Host: Yeah, you’re right. Not exactly the typical career path. Yeah, but that kind of seems to be a recurring theme with Wesley Fryer. I mean, this is a man with a PhD in curriculum and instruction, which, you know, sounds pretty standard for an academic, 

Female Host: right? Until you dig a little deeper and you realize that his dissertation was on impact analysis of phone casted lecture summaries, not your typical research topic.

Male Host: It’s like he was podcasting before podcasting was even a thing, a true digital pioneer back in those early days of the internet. 

Female Host: And speaking of being ahead of the curve, you mentioned he was a Fulbright scholar. 

Male Host: Yeah. His Fulbright research was focused on Latin American security issues in Mexico [00:01:00] City.

Really shows you how diverse his interests are. He’s not just sticking to one field. You know, and when you look at his actual career path, it’s clear that he’s never been one to stay in a single lane. He’s been an elementary teacher, a STEM teacher, an instructional coach, a university instructor, and even director of technology at K City School in Oklahoma City.

Female Host: That’s really something. Experiencing education from so many different angles, I bet it gives him a really unique perspective. 

Male Host: One of the things that really struck me was his work on media literacy. Especially his project, Conspiracies and Culture Wars. It’s all about helping students navigate the crazy world of information these days.

Female Host: Super important skill, especially now. I mean, we’re bombarded with information constantly. 

Male Host: Totally. And Wes doesn’t just talk about these skills, he lives them. The man has been blogging since 2003, has a YouTube channel with over a million views, and has even written several books, including one called Mapping Media to the Common Core, which highlights 14 [00:02:00] different media projects.

Female Host: Wow. What I find really interesting is his concept of new civics. Giving students the tools to really engage in our world today. 

Male Host: That’s a good point. Schools need to be teaching this stuff. 

Female Host: Totally. But his interests go even beyond that. He’s a big advocate for STEM education too. Putting coding and computational thinking right into his lessons.

Male Host: Essential skills for the 21st century. For sure. And he believes coding projects can really help students become self directed learners. 

Female Host: For sure. But there’s another side to Wesley Fryer that might surprise you. Something completely different. 

Male Host: This is where things get interesting. Remember how we were talking about him being a big content creator?

Well, that creative energy goes beyond education. 

Female Host: Oh, what do you mean? 

Male Host: Wesley has another passion. Something you wouldn’t expect from someone so involved in education technology. He’s really into barbecue. 

Female Host: Barbecue? Wow, that’s not what I was expecting. 

Male Host: I know, right? It seems like a total 180 from his professional life.

But the more you learn about Wes, you realize he’s all about living a multi faceted [00:03:00] life. 

Female Host: So tell me more. What’s this barbecue enthusiast side of him like? Is he just grilling in his backyard or something? 

Male Host: Oh no, it’s way more than just casual grilling. He’s got this whole online persona built around his love of barbecue.

TikTok videos of brisket, Instagram photos of perfectly smoked ribs, even Facebook groups dedicated to discussing grilling techniques. 

Female Host: Wow, it sounds like he’s created a whole community around barbecue. 

Male Host: Exactly. He even has a blog, Cook with Wes, dedicated to everything barbecue. Recipes, instructions, even tips for troubleshooting common grilling problems.

Female Host: There’s that teacher instinct again, even in his barbecue. 

Male Host: It’s amazing to see how these totally different interests of his actually connect. Whether he’s teaching students about media literacy or sharing his love for barbecue, there’s that thread of creativity, community, and empowerment running through it all.

Female Host: It really makes you think about how your own interests connect to each other. 

Male Host: Wesley’s a great example of not being confined to a single box. You can be an educator, [00:04:00] a technologist, a barbecue enthusiast, all at the same time. 

Female Host: It’s inspiring. Makes you wonder how he finds the time for everything, though.

Male Host: That’s what we’ll be looking at next. How he balances it all and keeps that passion going. 

Female Host: It’s really amazing to see how Wesley’s passion for using technology and education really took off in the late 90s and early 2000s. 

Male Host: Yeah, it was like a whole new world was opening up and he was right there embracing it.

Female Host: Think about it. building websites in the mid 90s, one of the first bloggers. He even produced educational videos way before YouTube even existed. 

Male Host: He was ahead of the curve for sure, saw the potential of these tools right from the start. 

Female Host: And you can see that forward thinking approach in his work with organizations like the Texas Education Network and his role as director of distance learning at Texas Tech University.

Male Host: He wasn’t afraid to push for change, to get technology into the classroom. Even when it wasn’t popular. 

Female Host: And it wasn’t just about using the latest gadget. It was always about how technology could make learning better. 

Male Host: Exactly. It’s easy to [00:05:00] get caught up in the hype sometimes, but you have to ask, how does this actually help students learn?

Female Host: Right. It’s all about choosing the right tool for the job. 

Male Host: And talking about helping students learn, I have to bring up his work on cyberbullying and digital citizenship. Such a crucial topic these days. 

Female Host: Absolutely. We need to make sure kids know how to navigate the online world safely and responsibly.

Male Host: It’s not just about using tech. It’s about using it in a way that’s ethical and safe. 

Female Host: Like giving them the tools to explore this new digital landscape safely. 

Male Host: And that ties right back into his work with media literacy that we discussed earlier. 

Female Host: Being able to think critically about information is more important than ever.

Male Host: Especially now with social media and how quickly misinformation can spread. 

Female Host: His Conspiracies and Culture Wars project is such a great example of how to help students develop those skills. It’s 

Male Host: about teaching them how to think for themselves, not what to think. 

Female Host: And to be able to have respectful conversations even when they disagree with someone.

Male Host: And to realize that just because something’s on the internet doesn’t make it [00:06:00] true. 

Female Host: We have to be skeptical and question our sources. 

Male Host: It’s a skill that goes way beyond the classroom. 

Female Host: Definitely, and Wes has been a champion for that throughout his career. 

Male Host: But it’s not just about absorbing information, it’s about creating it too.

Female Host: You’re right. We talked about his content creation earlier, but it’s worth taking a closer look. 

Male Host: What’s fascinating is how he uses so many different ways to share his ideas. 

Female Host: It’s not just blogs and YouTube videos. He’s podcasting, presenting at conferences, writing books, even doing multimedia projects with his students.

Male Host: He’s a true multimedia storyteller. 

Female Host: Always looking for new ways to engage his audience and make learning more interactive. 

Male Host: And he’s not afraid to experiment with new tech either. 

Female Host: Always pushing the boundaries, trying new things. 

Male Host: And he encourages his students to become creators too, not just consumers of information.

Female Host: Giving them a voice and a platform to share their own perspectives. 

Male Host: It’s all about the power of storytelling. 

Female Host: Yeah, Wesley believes in the power of stories to connect with people, to teach, to inspire. 

Male Host: His work with the Story Chasers Project really shows that. 

Female Host: Using [00:07:00] technology to capture and preserve stories that might be lost otherwise.

sharing them with the world. 

Male Host: Such a great example of how tech can be used to bring people together and celebrate different experiences. 

Female Host: A reminder that everyone has a story worth sharing. 

Male Host: So we’ve talked about Wesley’s work in education, his passion for tech, his ideas about digital citizenship, and his belief in storytelling.

Female Host: But there’s another part of his life that we haven’t touched on yet, his faith. 

Male Host: Yeah, it’s a big part of who he is, and it definitely comes through in his work in writing. 

Female Host: His podcast, Stories of Faith, is a great example of that. It shows how much he believes in sharing spiritual journeys and finding those deeper connections.

Male Host: It reminds us that education is more than just academics. 

Female Host: It’s about helping someone grow as a whole person. Hmm. Intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. 

Male Host: Helping them find their place in the world. 

Female Host: And Wesley has really done that throughout his career. 

Male Host: He’s definitely an inspiration. But before we move on, I want to go back to something you mentioned before.

His varied [00:08:00] career path. 

Female Host: Yeah, it’s remarkable how he’s been able to move so seamlessly between being an elementary teacher, a STEM teacher, A university instructor, a director of technology, and a digital learning consultant. 

Male Host: It’s like he’s taken all these different experiences and woven them together.

Yeah, 

Female Host: it’s given him such a wide range of knowledge and expertise. 

Male Host: His ability to adapt and take on new challenges is something else. 

Female Host: He’s a true lifelong learner. Always seeking out new things. 

Male Host: That’s a great lesson for all of us in today’s world. 

Female Host: We need to be adaptable, curious, and ready to learn new things all the time.

Male Host: And to be open to the journey, even when it takes you in unexpected directions. 

Female Host: So what does all this mean for our listeners? 

Male Host: It means you don’t have to limit yourself to just one path or one passion. 

Female Host: You can be multifaceted, just like Wesley. Explore your interests and find those connections. 

Male Host: And that brings us back to his love for barbecue.

It might seem like a completely separate thing, but it actually reflects a lot of who he is. 

Female Host: In our next segment, we’re going to dive into that [00:09:00] culinary side of Wesley. We’ll explore how his love of barbecue connects to his values, his way of learning, and his desire to build community. 

Male Host: It’s a great reminder that our passions can really influence each other in surprising ways.

So 

Female Host: stay tuned as we fire up the grill and discover the delicious connection between barbecue and the world of Wesley Fryer. 

Male Host: Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We’ve been exploring the many sides of Wesley Fryer. We’ve talked about his work in education, his passion for technology, and his thoughts on digital citizenship.

But now, let’s switch gears a little and talk about something a bit different. His love of barbecue. 

Female Host: I have to admit, when we first started talking about this part of Wesley, I was a bit confused. It seemed so different from everything else we’ve discussed. But as we’ve gone deeper, I’m starting to see how it all fits together.

Male Host: It might seem unexpected, but Wesley is all about living a multifaceted life. He doesn’t limit himself to just one thing. And his barbecue journey is a great example of that. 

Female Host: So tell me, what’s [00:10:00] this barbecue side of Wesley like? 

Male Host: Well, it’s more than just grilling in the backyard. He’s really documented his barbecue experiments all over social media.

Tik Tok videos of sizzling brisket, Instagram photos of those perfectly smoked ribs, Facebook groups where he talks about all things barbecue. 

Female Host: It’s clearly more than just a hobby for him. He’s put a lot of time and energy into it and he’s sharing that knowledge with others. 

Male Host: And remember that blog we mentioned earlier, Cook with Wes is like a barbecue Bible.

You’ll find detailed recipes, step by step instructions, even tips for when things go wrong on the grill. He doesn’t just tell you how to cook, he explains the why behind it. 

Female Host: That teacher instinct coming through again, even with barbecue. 

Male Host: And here’s where it gets really interesting. Think about the similarities between barbecuing and everything else we’ve discussed about Wesley’s professional life.

They both need patience, attention to detail, a willingness to experiment, and that drive to keep improving. 

Female Host: You’re right. It doesn’t matter if he’s developing a coding lesson, working on a [00:11:00] media literacy unit, or perfecting a brisket recipe. There’s that same approach. Focus on the process, try new things, and share what you’ve learned.

Male Host: And that sense of community that he builds around everything he does, just like he encourages collaboration in his classrooms and online, he’s created a space for people who love barbecue to connect and learn from each other. 

Female Host: It’s a great reminder that learning can happen anywhere. 

Male Host: So what can we take away from Wesley’s passion for barbecue?

Female Host: I think it shows us how he approaches life. It tells us that we don’t have to keep our interests separate. Our passions can influence each other in ways we might not expect. 

Male Host: It’s a challenge for all of us to explore those hidden passions. What interests do we have that we can connect in new and interesting ways?

Female Host: Wesley’s story reminds us that it’s okay to be multifaceted, to keep learning throughout our lives, and to find those connections in unexpected places. This deep dive 

Male Host: into Wesley’s world has been fascinating. He’s challenged us to think differently about career paths, education, and even the role of barbecue in a well rounded life.

Female Host: He’s [00:12:00] shown us what it means to embrace our different interests, keep learning, and build communities around things we’re passionate about. 

Male Host: And as we wrap up, we want to leave you with this thought. What will your story be? What unique mix of passions and experiences will you bring to the world? 

Female Host: Think about it, explore it, and most importantly, share it.

Your story matters. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive into the world of Wesley Fryer.