Anseo.net #33 Newsletter 📌 Hopes are pinned on a 15-year-old

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A very big welcome to the 200+ new people who joined my mailing list this week. Last week I launched an app that creates a school calendar along with job shares. I’d love your feedback so I can make it even better.

If you’re new to this newsletter, it is divided into a number of sections, some of which will be of interest to you and some which won’t. You can skip the bits you don’t like but, in general, it’s divided up like so:

📺 Appearances in the Media

🎙 A Podcast

💭 My Thoughts on Education News Stories 

🧵 Social Media I liked

🤖 Technology

Please forward on this newsletter to your friends and please encourage them to subscribe by clicking on the button below so it comes to their inbox every 2 weeks.

A Brand New Podcast

I had a quiet couple of weeks in terms of the media though I was due to go on to talk about uniforms on Newstalk last week but was dropped for a story on bunking off work due to the weather. 

However, I was thrilled that my first ever publication in an American journal was accepted, an article about the complexities of being Irish and Jewish. While it isn’t an educational piece, it very loosely and subtly touches on it.

It’s been an extremely quiet fortnight in the primary education sector with only smatterings of news about the education system.

Children with additional needs continue to be failed by the system with our hopes pinned on a 15-year-old girl, Cara Dermody, who tells Mary Regan, since she started campaigning 4 years ago,  “nothing has changed. In fact, it is getting even worse”. Of course, who do the Department of Education’s inspectors blame? You got it…. schools.

The rise of religion in schools in the United States reads as shocking to most people but is completely normalised in Ireland as a debate in the Dáil decended into the usual tropes. 

The Social Democrats offered that the government re-establish its commitment to opening up 400 multidenominational schools (a mere 12%.) I can only hope it was a ploy to highlight the madness of it. But don’t take my word for it, even judges are joining in. 

Thankfully the INTO are on the case setting up a taskforce on the subject, of which all members are white, Irish, and work in Catholic schools.

Social Media has become a place of toxicity in recent years. Here I pull up some posts, threads and other interesting tidbits from X, Instagram and other platforms.

• The Educate Together AGM came to my neck of the woods (X)
• John Boyle responds to criticism of the union on religion in schools (Irish Times)
• I always like decent debate on X and sometimes it happens (X)
• Is the ICT Grant coming this year? (Nobody replied) (X)
• Jen Cummins playing a blinder on Instagram lately (Instagram)

One job I used to hate doing was creating a school calendar every year. You’d think such a regular job would be easy to find but, alas, short of copying and pasting a PDF, converting it to Excel, and manually trying to make sure the 182 days were covered, never mind sorting out Job Shares – nothing existed. So I made one myself through Vibe Coding!

Essentially, I used ChatGPT to create HTML, CSS and Javascript code to design a webapp that takes in dates in a school year and then creates a printable calendar to send to families.

It’s inspired me to try and make other tools that might be useful to teachers and principals and I’m going to share them here when I’ve made them.

If you have any ideas for a simple tool that would save you time, let me know by replying and I’ll try and create it.

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