Edtech Situation Room By @techsavvyteach & @wfryer

Welcome to episode 356 (“Beyond AI Hype”) of the EdTech Situation Room from August 20, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) kick off with a few live-stream hiccups and then dive straight into back-to-school realities: district and state momentum around student cell-phone restrictions, why policies alone aren’t enough, and how schools can pair limits with media-literacy and tech-ethics instruction that actually sticks. From there, the conversation turns to Montana Digital Academy’s new Frontier Learning Lab—what it is, why it exists, and how “AI playdates” are helping educators move beyond four unhelpful AI narratives (cheating machine, rots your brain, superpowers, saves time) toward balanced classroom use. Jason shares hands-on experiments with the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—including an Obsidian-based assistant (“Astro”) that reads and writes to notes, drafts emails, and even manipulates Google Docs—illust