Media Literacy Roundup: 5 Jan 2026
Media, Links and Reflections from Wes Fryer
It’s 2026 and media literacy is more important than ever. Here a few links to some recent blog posts, podcasts and videos I’ve shared and found online worth your time and attention. I’m also including a few educational technology related tips!
MediaEd Club: Gamification, AI Superprompts and More
I’ve Switched: Gemini Pro Not ChatGPT+
Deep Fake Videos
A Fast Privacy Browser: Vivaldi
Smart Home Tips and DIY “Home Assistant”
1. MediaEd Club: Gamification, AI Superprompts and More
I’m continuing to facilitate free monthly webinars via Zoom for the Media Education Lab, in the “MediaEd Club” series. These are all recorded and archived on YouTube, and happen live (usually) the first Monday of each month. Here are some of our recent webinars and topics. Recordings are generally around 50 minutes each.
Gamifying the Feed (5 Jan 2026)
Holiday Tech Gadget Wish Lists (8 Dec 2025)
Fact Checking with AI Superprompts (3 Nov 2025)
Vibe Coding with AI (6 Oct 2025)
Use this link to register for the webinar series throughout 2026! You can also save / bookmark this YouTube playlist to help “train the YouTube algorithm” you want to see more high quality media literacy videos! Our next webinar topic will be “Substack 101” on Monday, February 2, 2026.
2. I’ve Switched: Gemini Pro Not ChatGPT+
ChatGPT was released in November 2022. The following spring in May 2023, I participated in an official podcast at my school focused on AI, with one of our graduates who worked for OpenAI for almost 5 years. I’ve been an enthusiastic ChatGPT user for most of the ensuing time, and paid a monthly subscription for ChatGPT+ access for over three years.
This past November, however, I cancelled my ChatGPT paid subscription and am now working primarily with Gemini Pro. Our family already subscribes to Google One, for additional Google Drive and GMail cloud storage, and our Google One subscription now includes Gemini Pro access for everyone.
The catalyst for my switch was research and conversations for The EdTech Situation Room podcast, which I co-host most Wednesday nights with Dr. Jason Neiffer. Specifically, check out our December 5, 2025 Episode 365 (“The Rise of Gemini AI”) for more details and links related to this switch. Also see our latest end-of-2025 episode 366, “Nano Banana Era.” All our shows include extensive show notes / links to news articles we discussed and also found for that week but didn’t have time to highlight.
As of this writing on January 5th, the “leaderboard” on the website LM Arena shows that for most tasks today, Gemini 3 is in the lead. I have also used Anthropic’s Claude AI in the past 3 years with good success, but Gemini is now my main AI platform.
You can check out my growing collection of blog posts and videos related to AI / artificial intelligence on ai.wesfryer.com.
3. Deep Fake Videos
Do you realize ANY of us can be tricked and “fall for” a deep fake video that has been generated by AI?! This past month I was taken in by a video about 3I/ATLAS, and I wrote a blog post about the experience. Today’s Wired article, “Deepfakes Are Impersonating Pastors to Try to Scam Their Congregations” is another reminder of how common these AI generated videos as well as images and other types of media are becoming.
4. A Fast Privacy Browser: Vivaldi
Why is it so hard to understand that PRIVACY is a fundamental human right, and we should all be taking more steps to protect our privacy rights both individually and collectively?!
Over the winter holidays I discovered the Vivaldi web browser, and I shared a blog post about how I found it and why I’ve switched on my iPhone, iPad, and laptop.
5. Smart Home Tips and DIY “Home Assistant”
If you know me and how much of a geek I am, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m into “smart home” or IoT (Internet of Things) technologies. Over winter break our fiber optic cable modem at home died, and as a result we experienced a sustained (almost two week) Internet service outage.
Fortunately this past August, I started building a parallel, resilient “smart home” using open source, Raspberry PI-based “Home Assistant” software. I created an 18 minute video in August about this experience and my lessons learned so far, and this past Sunday recorded a 10 minute video, “Building a Resilient Smart Home: Lessons from an Internet Outage.” These video links and my other past smarthome related blog posts are collected / shared on smarthome.wesfryer.com.
Thanks for checking out this edition of my Media Literacy Roundup! I’ll try to share these more frequently in 2026. Remember this is just one of four newsletters on Substack I actively maintain, and I’d love for you to subscribe to them all! More links to learn and connect with me are on wesfryer.com/after.
Happy New Year!