Learn and Teach in the Ocean of Technology

I’ve been thinking a lot about how educators need to respond to some of our biggest issues in education: the rapid decline in student engagement, the steep decline in curricular relevancy, and the steady increase in teacher burnout.

I don’t have all the answers to these problems, but I do find myself circling around one particular response that I feel very passionate about: developing a new set of technology skills we should teach (and expect from) our current and future educators.

Of course, it’s difficult to articulate what these skills should be when they haven’t circulated enough in the broader discourse of one’s field to become the buzzwords teachers all love (or hate if they’re overused or poorly executed).

So what do you do when you’re trying to express or unpack an idea but you can’t find or just don’t know the right words for it? You usually do some more research with what you think will be good keywords to try out; and then those results might reveal better keywords for your second go-around in the search engine. Or you speak with colleagues who are willing to listen and maybe guide your thought process toward something fruitful.

You can also “ask AI.”

So, I hopped into a chat with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and shared my thoughts, ideas, and passions about this topic of 21st century teacher skills and this need for cross-tech-platform thinking, designing, and creating. I shared with Claude my contempt for prepackaged EdTech platforms and why I felt the latter atrophied the craft of teaching and the experience of learning (see the post on “Floating Fish”).

In response, Claude offered to generate a research report that captured the essence of our chat exchange. I happily agreed to the offer, and within five minutes, I had a six-page report with an impressive number of searched sources and references (over 500).

Here are some phrases and concepts Claude helped me realize in reading the report: Technological fluency, cross-platform skill sets, transformative integration practices, adaptive expertise, and AI-enhanced technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK).

I found my chat with Claude and the resulting generated report to be incredibly helpful for my next steps as a classroom teacher, a district teacher-leader, an education consultant, and a graduate student.

To engage with this report even more–and, therefore, to retain the concepts and language even better–I made it the topic for today’s episode of Talking the Read. In a way, I’m modeling the critical skills I believe in. Through my appropriate engagement with Claude, my editing work in transforming that written content into an AI-generated podcast in ElevenLabs, my basic production skills in recording software, my selection process for theme music, and my authentic written reflection (this blog post), I’d say I’m demonstrating a decent level of technological fluency.

This type of fluency has the potential to make teaching and learning so much more engaging, relevant, and meaningful; and, in my humble opinion, it is absolutely necessary for both teachers and students to acquire these skills if we wish to optimize our personal, professional, and global potential as thriving individuals and communities.

No doubt, swimming in this ocean of technology can be overwhelming and even scary at first; but, with the right support and willingness to learn and practice, it beats treading water in a stagnant pond with floating fish.

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Talking the Read

Episode 7: “Rethinking Teacher Empowerment in the Tech Age”

Show Notes

Today’s episode is based on the Claude-generated research report “Rebuilding Teacher Professional Craft Through Cross-Platform Technology Skills” (Anthropic, 12 June 2025)

Two Things I Learned in Producing This Episode

• Counter Arguments Lead Back to the Big Question. After working with the initial research report that Claude generated for me, I felt it was important to explore the counter arguments. Without hesitation (of course), Claude generated a counter response. It included some good points, but all of which I felt really spoke more to the outdated structures of and within our school systems. Which got me thinking: How is education supposed to respond to the Fifth Industrial Revolution when its structure still speaks to the First Industrial Revolution?
• ElevenLabs Tinkering with Its Voices. In ElevenLabs’ latest update and Beta something-or-other, I noticed that the chatbot voices for Chris and Liam sound different in the Text to Speech “playground” compared to how they sound within the Podcast studio. I liked that I can now add more than one voice in the playground, but my workflow was slightly inconvenienced because I could no longer use that area to quickly write up and produce the intro and outro script. They would’ve sounded too different from the voices in the actual discussion portion of the show. Curious to see if that gets resolved.