AI skepticism grows louder. A Novel I highly Recommend. Plus my latest podcast.

May 17, 2026October 25, 2026 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

As you would expect, resistance has been building up. Take this:

I was not surprised when a high school faced backlash from parents, and teachers because of the school’s focus on AI. There is a growing negative perception, and suspicion of AI’s cognitive effects on young people.

Me? I only use it to see what it’s capable of. Often doing field tests like this, where I interviewed Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic. If you are interested the article was published in DailyFT in April.

“AI GETS WEIRD”

A good friend, Isura Silva, posted something I agree with wholeheartedly. His article titled “AI gets weird” was on LinkedIn. “The real challenge now isn’t generating content, it’s curating and identifying authenticity.” Some of the key points he raises:

“The best creatives use AI as a tool, not as a crutch. They infuse their work with originality, emotion, and lived experience.
“Look for depth, not just polish.”
“Find those who have been in the trenches.” In other words, everyone is NOT an expert, though they pretend to be.
“Filter out the noise.”

Just a snide note: I could have copied Isura’s post and fed it into Claude and asked for a summary. I could never do that!

25 Student Podcasts, 80 eBooks

By the end of each semester I get my students in my computer class to stretch themselves with projects they never expected to see in a computer class.

This Spring 2026 semester, my young podcasters broke previous records with 30 podcasts. Topics ranged from Tech Effects, Books vs eBooks, The Vietnam War, Deceptive Beauty Standards Aliens, health, Basketball, 3D printing, Music Instruments, eSports, and Animation. Of course there were a few on Friendships, and just one on AI!

Finally, My Latest Podcast

For my latest episode of Wide Angle, I interviewed a graduating senior who began in my class six years ago. A soccer player, long distance athlete, and music performer—Reina was a finalist on The Voice a few years ago.

Finally, My Latest Podcast

Why are vinyl albums so cool again?

August 9, 2022August 30, 2022 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Old tech fulfils three needs we are denied of in a digital world.

A few weeks back, I stopped by at a thrift store. An inexplicable gravitational force pulled towards the vinyl album section. Vinyl! The technology that was birthed soon after the invention of the light bulb. It’s fans seem to be on the rise. (I am fully aware that my vinyl album taste puts a date-stamp on my age: Engelbert Humperdinck for instance, and Olivia Newton John.)

This imperfect, scratchy sound of music has found its way back into our lives — like the Polaroid cameras. Or the music of Queen. When I was a teenager we sang along to the anthem-like lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody. Today my 12- and 13- year old’s know every word of it. So my question is: why are old media formats so indestructible? Why, for example, hasn’t vinyl gone the way of, say, fax machines? Why do Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish release albums on records even while everything else is drawn to streaming platforms? I’m really, really perplexed about this.

I am looking for answers because in my writing and publishing class, a discussion of platforms and formats comes up a lot — something writers must keep their eye on because their audience preferences will always change, sometimes faster than they can keep up with. How might the content be consumed? Songwriters and poets, authors and podcasters, videographers, script writers, and web designers have to be one step ahead of the game. Remember how Prince wrestled with not just copyright, but distribution of his music?

My appetite for vinyl was whetted after I picked up a old record player at Bookman’s. It’s one of those suitcase-type players with a built-in speaker that can fill a room quite well no matter how squirrelly the track is. The Humperdinck double album was a steal!

Humperdinck has an interesting backstory that I refer to in my podcast below, if you’re interested. (You can also listen to a few tracks from Grease and Queen!)

This pull toward older technologies is larger than the music industry. I wanted to dig a bit deeper into this so I asked some of my colleagues about the ‘ancient’ technologies they use in that classroom and elsewhere. Don Meyer, my colleague who teaches British lit, said that he recently found cassette tapes of Macbeth were indispensable. Cassettes, for goodness sakes! Mrs. Walters, reminded me of one of the technologies that will probably never become extinct: The textbook. Duh!

So, here are three reasons old tech doesn’t have an expiry date? It is reliable. It is often fixable. And it’s available despite it being relegated to the old school. To the last point, fortunately it’s possible to find almost anything out of circulation on eBay. Including typewriter ribbons, film rolls, and those cassette tapes of Macbeth, starring Sir Alec Guinness. But I’d first go to the thrift store, because you never know what might show up in the vinyl section.

Here’s a fun fact: I’ve got a Corona typewriter in my class — a computer lab with 39 PCs. You should see students line up to use it!

All this jargon gets me woke

July 20, 2021July 20, 2021 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

There was a time when words like ‘grok‘ made me cringe. This was at the height of the social media frenzy, when everyone and their brother was jostling to get onto Facebook, asking “What’s Facebook anyway?” Grok? If you have no idea what this means, never mind. It still makes me cringe.

So a few weeks back I recorded a podcast about tech jargon, a topic close to my heart. Two reasons.

1, Technology is turning us into bots, and before we begin speaking like Siri, it’s time to raise the red flag. We teachers demand clarity; we whip out the red marker no sooner we spot clichés. Or redundancies. Or words that we don’t grok.

2. I wanted to keep up the podcast momentum during summer, as I was testing a new app and using my recorder with a new mic. I plan to use it in class when we get back to school – tomorrow.

HERE’S THE THING. All of us – yes we the grown-ups – let slivers of jargon fall into everyday word salads we call lectures. When I catch myself in jargonizing mode, I pause, apologize to my students and move on.

Which is what this episode is all about. Hope you like it. It’s just 12 minutes. Tell me what you think, please.

Surprising things happen when Digital Natives get their hands on old-school cameras

March 9, 2017August 30, 2017 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Here’s a batch of pictures taken by my students yesterday. Cameras may seem ‘old school’ but there’s always an interest in the basics of aperture, lighting, and perspective. In my Ed-Tech class, 5th and 6th graders can’t seem to have enough of this, as the results show.

An accidental homage to Silicon Valley?

Digital City?

Two very different perspectives of a robotic arm

There are much more! Who knows what ideas they will come back with after Spring Break?

Technology lessons – No books required!

April 7, 2016April 7, 2016 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Sometimes you don’t need text books to learn a skill.I don’t usually advise young people to skip university, but I know of many folks who have learned incredible skills, never having stepped into a classroom for the past 20 years. One friend fixes BMWs as a hobby (sometimes has about 10 in his driveway). Another runs a mid-sized marketing communications agency, but has built and operates an eco-resort. The former never went to engineering school. The latter never took a class in architectural design or management.

And my point is, we often hone our skills in our garages, and our basements.These are our ‘labs.’ No one gives us a certificate for these long hours of professional development.

Here’s a related example: Children learning about science and tech on a farm. Think of it as a STEM lab in Nebraska.

Cows. BMWs. Conservation. Plenty of knowledge out there, not found in books and lectures.

It’s a kite. It’s a tethered bird. Could it be a drone?

January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I love how this guy is disrupting the idea of what we think of a drone, to re-frame it as a kite.

A kite that takes pictures, that is.

Funny how we box ourselves in by classifying things the way they originally emerged as. Is a cell phone today really a phone? Ore more recently, with the idea of a supersized ‘commuter drone’, is a drone a light aircraft that may or may not need to be autonomous? But apart from the boxing ourselves in, the need to be creative is often stymied by those who are reluctant to make mistakes.

Sergei Lupashin, in the video below spoke at an Education technology conference last year about this. His point being we need to get young people to feel comfortable with making a lot of mistakes! That is how we could make breakthroughs

If you haven’t seen the Chinese-made single passenger drone, here’s how they position it – learning from their mistakes. Um crashes!

So kids aren’t playing with rubber bands and string anymore?

January 21, 2016January 21, 2016 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

True story: Recently I took a small group of students to visit a lab, and while breaking for lunch on some garden benches, they began climbing the trees nearby. They were getting a bit noisy when a lady walking by stopped and looked up into the branches. I thought I would get asked to get them to ‘behave’. But the lady smiled and said loudly to others passing by, “Look! look! children are playing on trees again!”

It took me a few seconds to figure out what she was really saying – that having seen so many kids today plugged into screens, it’s thrilling to see them having fun scampering up trees. (Side note: this was outside a Mars Space lab in Tempe, Arizona, and we were on a field trip to see a whole lot of technology!)

Drawing from : 7th period: Feed a Fish Wikispaces page Click on image to visit this class project page

I keep this in mind when I introduce students to new technologies. Last week, I began a lesson on animation, and as subject matter, I returned to the ‘Rube Goldberg Machine.’ We don’t always need screens for this. (Unless we need to check out the many Rube Goldberg contests like this.). How could we turn students into makers, and innovators, problem-solvers and scientific thinkers?

A Rube Goldberg Machine (or ‘contraption‘) teaches us a lot about levers, gravity, kinetic energy, and chain reactions among other things – such as precision, iterative design, and learning from failure. All it takes is some lengths of wood, string, paper cups, shoe boxes, old clothes hangers, marbles and/or ping-pong balls, rubber bands and cardboard tubes.

I like to get them to ‘design’ their machine first, and see what they come up with – then set them on a building mission! We could use a drawing app, but paper and pencil work just fine!

Image on right – One of the manyprojects from a 7th grade class – found here

Pros and Cons for Technology in the Classroom

August 10, 2015 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Your child probably goes to school with a device in her backpack with more processing power than the rocket that took men to the moon, and this child wants to be… an astronaut?

You’ve forgotten how to log into your son’s school website to download his missed homework, but… he’s found a way to ‘jailbreak’ your cell phone?

Yes, teaching and learning is changing!

My July technology column was about tech in the classroom, which somewhat coincided with my talking to teachers in Sri Lanka about technology and STEM. Indeed, there are still those who want limited screens – parents of hi-tech execs, of all people. And those who think otherwise. Which side are you on?