What happens when the tools teachers build start making decisions teachers have not reviewed? And what happens when the knowledge shaping future educators does not come from research or curriculum, but from a social media feed? On This Week with EdSurge, two educators are wrestling with technology that is moving faster than their institutions are prepared to handle.

When TikTok Becomes the Teacher

Evi Wusk, Ed.D., teaches the people who will become teachers, and she noticed something during final exams that she could not ignore: her students kept referencing TikTok videos and social media reels, then apologizing for it. Wusk wrote about the experience for EdSurge, and her conclusion is not what you might expect. She is not calling for a ban or a warning label. Rather, she is asking whether teacher prep programs need to reckon with where professional knowledge is actually forming right now, and what it means if those teaching are the last ones to find out.

The Grader Who Was Not in the Room

Steven Swanson teaches high school engineering, and after two consecutive days of field trips he came back to 450 ungraded assignments. So he built a solution: an AI grading assistant that drafted grades, generated comments against his rubrics, and returned everything to students automatically. Then a student thanked him for feedback he had never read. Swanson wrote about what happened next for EdSurge, and the story is less about the technology malfunctioning than about what it revealed: even when the AI is accurate, the grade still needs to belong to someone.

Join us on This Week with EdSurge where we dig into what both of these educators decided to do next, and what their answers might mean for every teacher feeling pressure to let technology take over.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

What TikTok Is Teaching Future Teachers That We Aren't by Evi Wusk

I Built an AI Grading Tool. Then a Student Thanked Me for Words I Didn't Write. by Steven Swanson

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