Hi, {{ contact.FIRSTNAME }} 👋🏾
I hope you enjoyed the bank holiday weekend. The INTO Congress feels like a distant memory so this newsletter will remind you of the highlights, the outcomes and why it matters.
I’m also going deep into AI territory with a tool many of you might use. Google’s Notebook LM has become my latest obsession and I thought it might be interesting to get it to publish this month’s podcast.
In this newsletter:
📺 In the Media
🎙 The NCSE’s Relate Document
💭 Education Stories over the last few weeks
🧵 Some threads
🤖 Getting AI to produce Carousels
Please pass on this newsletter to your friends and please encourage them to subscribe so it comes to their inbox every 2 weeks.
Subscribe to this newsletter
(if you haven’t already!)
If you were the Minister for Education…
What would you do?
Latest Podcast Episode
Notebook LM is a tool from Google, which is becoming my new obsession. Its biggest draw, for me, is its ability to make a podcast from a number of documents. In this AI generated podcast, you’ll get a 15-minute summary of the NCSE’s latest document, called Relate. Let me know what you think.
Listen Now
One of the big stories from the INTO Congress was the underfunding of primary schools. I was on The Hard Shoulder discussing this topic.
The INTO Congress came and went with debates on underfunding, recruitment, and burnout. However, the story that seemed to have the media most interested was only 4% of teachers believe they should be responsible for teaching sacraments.
Yes, the results of INTO’s survey and the work of their taskforce was published. The first thing I did was look at the names of the people chosen for the taskforce to see if anyone on it was from a minoritised background. It was worse than I thought.
Thankfully, Minister McEntee, (who, to her credit, did a great job at enamouring herself to teachers), announced a National Convention. It seems the Citizens’ Assembly won’t be happening.
Since then, the topic of religion in schools has been kept in the media. I had some thoughts on the why the word secular is harmful for those of us that want equality. However, when Helen McEntee said she believes parents should have more choice, a highly non-confrontational thing to say in 2025, the backlash from politicians was surprising, and depressing. I wrote to Cathal Crowe to express my disappointment and rather than have a conversation, I was chastised for it.
Unfortunately, Ireland may end up being the pioneer for religious control of schools as the United States look like they’re going down that road now. The future is not looking good for minoritised people.
You can read all the stories I found interesting here!
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.
* Sometimes I think I’m the only person that doesn’t speak outside both sides of my mouth (X)
* Social Democrats being more conservative than I’d hoped (Instagram)
* Really good opinion from Barry Hennessy about radio shows reading texts dismissing an entire report on one of the teachers’ union conferences with the usual tropes about our perceived easy life (X).
* Map Geeks – you can thank me later! (x)
* It might be too graphic for classrooms but what is cows ate humans? (X)
I use Twitter/X, LinkedIn and some of the smaller text-based platforms a lot for producing opinions but I find Instagram is much harder for this because it’s mainly a visual platform. However, I have seen carousels being used by many people to show more long form text. I tried it and found it was taking quite a long time so I asked AI to make me a web app that will take my long form text and turn it into carousel posts. Here’s what it produced for me. If you want the code so you can personalise it for your own platform, just reply and happy to send it to you.
ChatGPT decided to call it Slidenest. (I think jobs are safe for the moment and I have no idea why they used an emoji of a goose the logo!) In any case, the bones of a good app is there for you to play around with if you have access to an AI platform. I’ll do up a tutorial as soon as I can!
Try Slidenest
Don’t forget you can access my Code without Coding courses by clicking on the button below!
Access Code without Coding
If you’ve enjoyed my newsletter, pass it on to your friends and ask them to subscribe by going to: https://www.anseo.net/subscribe
