AGIPodcast

06/16/2026

Most conversations about AI in school are still circling the same question:

Did the student use AI?

That question matters, but it does not get us very far by itself.

A student can use AI and do real thinking.
A student can use AI and skip most of the thinking.
Same tool. Very different learning.

In this week’s *School’s Out Field Notes*, Jason digs into a better frame for educators: **Agentivism**, a learning theory for the AI age.

The big idea is simple enough to use tomorrow:

Learning is not the polished paragraph, the clean slide deck, or the perfect answer.

Learning is what the student can still do after the support starts to fade.

Inside Issue 4:

▪️ Agentivism, explained without academic fog
▪️ The “AI receipt” students can attach to one assignment
▪️ A practical way to see what students delegated, checked, rebuilt, and can now do with less help
▪️ The debut of the *Beginner’s Mind* comic

Read Issue 4 here:
https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/field-notes-issue-4

And there are two more ways to keep going this week:

🚀 Tonight at 7 PM ET, Jason and Ronda Swartz are leading a live intro to NotebookLM inside the AI Launch Pad, based on the same walk-through they shared at the Fever Conference.

Join here:
https://www.skool.com/ai-launch-pad/about?ref=6da44c20543646dfbd48cd032aa36886

🎙️ Then this Saturday on the AGI Podcast, Jason is joined by Lena Darnay from the Central Indiana Educational Service Center for another conversation on what schools, teachers, and students need next.

Newsletter. Teacher Tuesday. Podcast.

Three chances this week to move past panic and get practical about preparing students for their future, not our past.

What is one assignment where the final product looks good, but you are not sure it proves the student actually learned the thing?

06/15/2026

What a Week! Julie and Jason Ask the Questions Nobody Seems Ready to Answer

⚠️ The government just shut down access to one of the most advanced AI models on the market
🏢 What happens when your entire business runs on AI and someone pulls the plug?
📠 In an AI world, what's the modern version of till do us part?

This week's episode starts with AI regulation and somehow ends with backup plans for an AI-powered workforce.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBeGVU933EaEH3AGEpGy2s3yi8zKDRkvT

06/13/2026

Meet Bryon Haverstick, CNP, Assistant Scout Executive and Chief Operating Officer of Scouting America, Sagamore Council, where he oversees scouting programs and operations across 14 counties in north-central Indiana. Under his leadership, initiatives like the University of Scouting are helping thousands of young people explore emerging fields—including artificial intelligence—while developing the character, leadership, and life skills that Scouting is known for.

• What happens when Scouting meets AI?

• In this episode of AGI School's Out Saturdays, I sat down with Bryon to discuss how Scouting America is preparing young people for a future shaped by artificial intelligence.

• We explored:

→Why AI became one of Scouting's newest merit badges

→ How scouts ages 11-18 are learning AI fundamentals, ethics, deepfakes, and real-world applications

→ The importance of teaching kids to create with technology, not just consume it

→ How AI can help young people develop critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving skills

→ Why community organizations, parents, and educators all have a role in preparing kids for an AI-powered future

"Our mission is to prepare young people for their futures. Their future is going to include AI."

🔗 Link in comments.

06/09/2026

The Fever Conference was Amazing

Teachers rock ... and everyone seems to be in a different space when it comes to providing access to AI tools to students.

- Some schools have purpose drive tools like MagicSchool or SchoolAI
- Some schools have tech teams like Richmond Community Schools
- Some schools are denying use altogether

Field Notes Newsletter: A weekly note for educators preparing students for an AI-shaped future, with practical signals, questions, and opportunities from the edge of school and work.

https://schoolsout.agipodcast.ai/field-notes

This week's newsletter argues that schools are imperative in helping kids navigate a powerful technology they all have access to. te back?

06/08/2026

The AGI Podcast Weekly Blitz - practical conversations about big topics like Data Centers!!!

Meta is building a huge data center in Lebanon, Indiana. SK hynix has a major chip-fab factory planned for West Lafayette.

Do they use water - yes but not nearly as much as you'd think (if done right)
Do they consume a ton of energy - yes, they do

But those are the wrong questions - the real conversation is what will the impact be on everyday Hoosiers ... and that is on small conversation.

Join Julie Koehrer and Jason Padgett as they unpack the pros and cons. Plus Jason explains the difference between using an LLM through the chat interface and true 'agentic AI'.

The AGI Podcast Weekly Blitz
What changed in AI this week, and why it matters.

Stream:
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/-AI
🎧 All streaming platforms: https://pod.link/1812450522
🌐 Website: www.agipodcast.ai"

Listen to AGI - Advance, Grow, Innovate with AI wherever you get your podcasts!

06/06/2026

"You can't shape what you won't use."

Anne Leftwich leads learning technologies for all of Indiana University, and that's her answer to every educator still refusing to touch AI.
New episode of School's Out Saturdays, and she came with specifics:

→ The GenAI 101 course that takes you from first prompt to building your own AI agent, now free to anyone worldwide
→ Her fifth graders trained a chatbot and found algorithmic bias on their own, no adult pointed it out
→ An NSF curriculum teaching third graders computer vision through snake heat sensing and bat echolocation
→ Why banning AI in K-12 fails the same way abstinence-only everything fails
→ The pace of change: what used to take a year now happens in 45 days

Because our job is to prepare students for their future, not our past.

Links in the comments.

06/01/2026

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical drops 43,000 words on AI, and Anthropic's co-founder is sitting next to him at the Vatican launch.

On this week's Blitz, Jason and Julie break down Magnifica Humanitas and the rest of the week's AI news:

→ What the Pope got right on power concentration and worker displacement, and where the document jumps ahead of the actual conversation

→ UnitedHealth Group is running AI bot calls into nursing facility rooms, refusing to admit it's a bot even when asked directly

→ The case for family safe words in the deepfake era, especially for households with elders or anyone with memory issues

→ Why Musk, Altman, and Amodei might be quietly building toward a god complex

Full episode and timestamps in the comments

05/30/2026

ChatGPT is barely three and a half years old, and we already have an equity gap in schools.

Some students are learning to use AI as a tutor, a thought partner, and a way to make difficult material finally click.

Other students are learning to use it as an answer machine.

Same tool. Two very different futures.

That is why this AGI Podcast episode with Jeremy Hill and the Richmond Community Schools Tech Team is worth your time.

The Richmond Tech Team is not some tiny group of “tech kids” hiding in a back room fixing Chromebooks. It is cheerleaders, basketball players, band kids, choir kids, dancers, future college students, future workforce leaders, and high schoolers who are already helping adults understand what AI can look like when students are trusted to lead.

And that might be the whole lesson.

Jason Grant Padgett first saw this team present at the AI Edu Symposium hosted by Central Indiana Educational Service Center (CIESC) and Keep Indiana Learning, and the room was blown away. Not because the students had memorized a bunch of AI buzzwords, but because they were speaking from actual experience.

They talked about using AI as a thought partner instead of an “answer vending machine.”

They talked about why college students who never received AI guidance often treat it differently than high schoolers who are being taught how to use it well.

They talked about MagicSchool.ai, ChatGPT, NotebookLM, learning disabilities, workforce readiness, soft skills, college pathways, technical education, and why AI literacy is already becoming an equity issue.

And Jeremy Hill said something that should probably be written on the wall of every school trying to figure this out:

Give the problems to the kids. Let the kids solve the problem. Then let them spread the solution.

That is a very different lens.

This is not a conversation about whether students are going to use AI.

They already are.

The question is whether schools are going to teach them how to use it with judgment, curiosity, and purpose, or whether we are going to keep pretending avoidance is a strategy.

Spoiler: it is not.

This episode is part of AGI Podcast’s School’s Out Saturdays, where we talk to the people forging the future of AI in education and, arguably, the future of America.

Links in the first comment.

05/28/2026

Saturday's episode of School's Out is one worth making time for.

The Tech Team joins Jason for a conversation about what AI in schools looks like when students are invited into the work of solving it instead of being treated like the problem.

Jeremy Hill, Sophia Hill, and Maren Bolser get into MagicSchool AI, student-led professional development, red-teaming AI tools before rollout, the difference between using AI as a thought partner and using it as an answer vending machine, and why AI literacy is already becoming an equity issue.

Some folks missed their crowd-stopping presentation at the Central Indiana Educational Service Center and Keep Indiana Learning's AI in Edu Symposium. That's exactly why Jason wanted to bring this one to the show.

Student-informed, focused on giving young people ownership and helping schools build practical, human, student-centered ways to use AI instead of reacting from fear.

Episode drops Saturday

Full episode → 🔗 linktr.ee/AGIPodcast)

05/25/2026

The Class of 2026 is booing AI at graduation ceremonies. Three speakers got drowned out this week alone.

The new Weekly Blitz covers that, plus Musk losing his OpenAI lawsuit in under two hours, Andrej Karpathy jumping to Anthropic, SpaceX filing for the largest IPO in history, and co-host Julie Koehrer's story about using Gemini to navigate her mom's sepsis diagnosis in real time.

Link in the comments.