A new AI recorder is being marketed with a ten-year-old recording his class. Most teachers have never heard of it. Here is what all teachers and school leaders need to know.
Meet Evan
Evan is ten years old, and he is a young man with a lot to say for himself. The advert in which he features has been online for three weeks and has passed a million views. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_8iMEviViY
Let that age sink in. In Ireland, a ten-year-old sits in fourth or fifth class. In two or three years, a child like Evan will be walking into first year in one of our schools.
Mid class his teacher asks whether he is paying attention. “More than everyone else writing, Mrs Smith,” he replies. “They write for an hour. I read for five minutes. Same information, zero hand cramps. And the rest of the time, I’m outside.”
His secret is Pocket, a small AI recorder with no screen. It snaps onto a phone, records at the press of one button, and turns what it hears into summaries and notes. It costs about €110, with an optional Pro plan of about €170 a year, and it ships to Ireland. Its microphones reach 15 metres, which is the whole classroom, and recordings sync to the cloud.
Interestingly, the advert arrived just as students returned to school. No accident of course: September is when school bags are packed and new gadgets are bought.
Making it look normal
Doctors and lawyers increasingly use AI transcription, but they do so with informed consent, approved software, a defined purpose and a human check. Evan’s classroom has none of these.
Instead, a child is handed the device and told it is clever, harmless and normal. The students writing in their copies are the “joke”. The boy who merely pressed a button is the winner. The message to a ten-year-old is plain: listening is optional and taking notes is a “mug’s game”.
The Harm
In recent years, more students ask to photograph the board or a handout. Sometimes it is written into their learning plans. Sometimes it is simply a student who broke their hand playing football. I have no problem with that. They asked, and it helped them. But I do wonder whether a photograph creates a sense that the learning is done, simply because a record exists. A picture of the board on a student’s phone is not knowledge in a student’s head.
Pocket takes that illusion much further. It captures a full lesson and every voice in the room, and hands back a summary that looks like learning.
The harm also falls on children who never agreed to anything. Every classmate is recorded: their voices, their names, their wrong answers, the question a shy student finally found the courage to ask. Once students suspect they are being recorded, they stop asking questions.
Then there is the learning itself. Taking notes is listening, deciding what matters and putting it in your own words. The effort is the point. Teach a ten-year-old that the effort is for other people, and do not be surprised when, at sixteen, he sees no reason to make it.
The phone ban has not solved this
Phones have always been able to record. Circular 0045/2025 requires post-primary schools to restrict students’ use of, and access to, personal mobile phones during the school day. It would be easy to assume the recording problem went into the pouch with the phone. It did not. Pocket is about the size of a credit card. It can sit in a pocket or a pencil case, and it could easily be mistaken for a calculator. This is a problem we need to get ahead of now.
What schools can do
Few teachers or principals know these devices exist, so the practical step sits with each school. Make staff aware of them. Teachers cannot notice what they have never heard of. Then look at your AUP. Does it name these devices, or only phones? I would strongly suggest adding one definition: “any personal device capable of recording audio or video, or of processing such recordings with AI, including smart glasses, AI voice recorders and smartwatches”. Carry it into the Code of Behaviour and the Bí Cineálta policy too.
However, keep a clear route for approved accessibility use for students with an identified need, agreed through the school’s support structures.
Then tell parents. A well-meaning parent or grandparent could easily buy one for a birthday or a back to school gift (To give him his due, Evan is a convincing salesman!). One review on Pocket’s own website comes from a mother who bought the device, with a year’s Pro subscription, for her son.
The temptation will reach us too, for staff meetings, board of management minutes and meetings with parents. The same rules apply. If we want students to respect the line, we must hold it ourselves.
Q’s Workshop
Not so long ago, a recorder hidden in a pen or a camera tucked into a pair of glasses belonged in Q’s workshop in a James Bond film. Today one costs about €110, ships to Ireland and fits in a pencil case. We live in a fast-moving world, and the surveillance gadgets of the old spy films have become an easily accessible reality. In the films, the hidden recorder was aimed at the villain. In Evan’s advert, it is aimed at his classmates, his teacher and those “stupid’ notes that can cause cramps!
Evan is ten, and he is the face of the advert. That should tell us something. In this kind of marketing, everyone is fair game to tech companies, children and classrooms included. Evan cannot be expected to weigh up whose words he is keeping or where they might end up. The adults around him can. That begins with awareness: knowing these devices exist, recognising the marketing that sells them to children, talking to colleagues and parents about them, and naming them clearly in our policies before the first (or next) one arrives in a school bag in your school.
Patrick Hickey (@aiteachingguru on all major social media) is an AI CPD Provider, AI in Education Consultant and Media Contributor on AI in Education. He is an ASTI nominee to the Assessment working group of the Department of Education and Youth’s AI in Schools External Advisory Taskforce.
If you have any queries you can email www.aiteachingguru@gmail.com