Anseo.net #24 Newsletter – Happy New Year

Hi, {{ contact.FIRSTNAME }} 👋🏾

I reviewed 2024 for my podcast and after putting down the mic, I felt quite down. What a thoroughly depressing year! With 2025 possibly starting with a snowstorm, let’s hope it gives us a fresh start with some hope. 

In this newsletter:

🎙 Latest episode of the podcast

💭 Education Stories over the last few weeks

🧵 Some threads 

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Latest Podcast Episode

Join me as I get increasingly depressed as I review 2024 in Irish Primary Education. And yes, you can expect several mentions of pouches rather than pedagogy as well as my thoughts on the world falling apart with war and moral panic. I also look to find sparks of hope, which unsurprisingly aren’t on Twitter.

The new year is only a few days old and the big question about education from everyone is…. will the schools open? Thankfully the Department of Education has come up with decisive action by saying it’s a matter for individual Boards to decide whether schools should open.

There’s nothing left to do other than channel deep into my most optimistic version of myself and try and think of anything that might give primary education some hope for 2025. I surprised myself by stretching it out to ten things.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, an Australian teacher has found himself a new role – Senior Pronunciation Officer for all the Irish teachers working in his school.

Given how “threadful” X has become, I’ve decided to focus on anything I can find on social media that might be of interest. Some of them I’ve found and some of them I’ve made. Let me know what you think.

• My review of this podcast episode on Teacher Diversity (X)
• My reasons to hope in 2025 (X)
• 10 films that feature primary education (Bluesky)
• 5 Art Websites worth checking out (Instagram)
• Let’s Get Factual: Asylum Seekers and Refugees (Instagram)

I’ve been developing a webapp that uses AI to help me programme thousands of ideas on a topic for the classroom. While I’m no coder anymore, I was able to use ChatGPT to write the code in order for my 1,000+ ideas to show up on the screen in a nice way and for the user to be able to swipe between them. I also added a filtering system, which I think works well enough.

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