Anseo.net - If I were the Minister for Education

While I don't think anyone was expecting much from this year's budget, at least none of us were surprised. Here's my reaction.

Any time an important circular or guidance document is released by the Department of Education, I do a live reading of it to try and make sense of it for myself, but also, hopefully to explain it to …

Homework is still one of the most divisive things you can talk about. If you surveyed everyone in the country about whether they think you should scrap homework or not, you’d get a 50-50 response. In…

On Sunday evening, NPHET announced they were recommending that Ireland moved to Level 5 restrictions. My Monday, the government had rejected the recommendation and imposed Level 3 on the country. But…

Have you ever wondered what happens at these consultations when the Department of Education meets with all the education stakeholders? I always did and wondered what it would look like. And one day, …

The most popular post I've ever published was this week and I didn’t even write it. It was from a principal who had a positive COVID19 case in his school and his experience of how it was dealt with. …

To me Flat Out Busy refers to the agencies and organisations that spent their summers scurrying around scurrying, attending Zoom meetings about meetings, and making statements about statements that t…

Last week, I focused on the people that made lockdown and the reopening of schools a more tolerable experience. This week I'm focusing on the bad, and despite a very long list of candidates, only 1 o…

In this episode, I’m going to try and celebrate the first week back to school and the almost unanimous sigh of relief that all the weeks of line painting, partition-building, hot water pumping, traff…

The last part of my live Q&A session about blended learning where I tell you what blended learning is not, how self-isolating teachers might teach, and the must-have settings on Zoom. All in less tha…

Do you know at the end of a talk when the presenter asks does anyone have any questions, and the room goes silent? Well, I asked Facebook and Twitter that very question about blended learning and her…

Do you know at the end of a talk when the presenter asks does anyone have any questions, and the room goes silent? Well, I asked Facebook and Twitter that very question about blended learning and her…

Do you know at the end of a talk when the presenter asks does anyone have any questions, and the room goes silent? Well, I asked Facebook and Twitter that very question about blended learning and her…

It's Day 1 of the school year. It's all a bit weird and scary as the squeeze 30 children into your unventilated classroom, all of them breathing in your direction with only the mask you grabbed in De…

Cases are rising, counties are in almost lockdown, there’s more cases growing daily than there was when schools originally closed in March, it seems like the virus is one that’s airborne, all the exp…

I remember my classroom when I was in primary school - rows of seats, talking wasn’t really allowed, a lot of sitting down in the same place doing bookwork, everyone facing the blackboard. What will …

Last Friday evening there was so much thrown at us that you might have missed a very important circular sent to schools, possibly because it was Friday evening. I was one such person so I decided I'd…

One thing we can guarantee is that schools will be very different places when we go back to them in a couple of weeks. In this week's episode, I'm going to examine what a pandemic-style classroom is …

The government released their plan for returning to school, which could have been summed up with one emoji - the fingers crossed one. Looking at all the variables, while we're all going to go back to…

And all it took was a global pandemic for teaching principals to get a day a week of Admin leave; what will need to happen before the posts of responsibility are restored? 

In this special episode, I …