NEW ADMINISTRATION EDUCATION ACTIONS – INITIAL ANALYSIS

Since Jan. 20, the new administration has taken a series of unprecedented actions that threatens student safety and rolls back decades of protections for students and historically marginalized communities, including undocumented immigrants and LGBTQIA+ students.

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BLUESKY / X LANDSCAPE ANALYSES 

Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 and his controversial decisions in the subsequent years, educators have begun leaving X, and we have observed tremendous energy and celebration among educators during their mass movement to BlueSky, where, tellingly, many educator communities are using hashtags for professional learning and connection that began on Twitter.

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AI IN EDUCATION – REPORT

In the little more than a year since the emergence of increasingly user-friendly AI tools (including ChatGPT), educators have used digital spaces like Twitter (now “X”) and Facebook groups to discuss problems of practice, ask questions, and share innovative lesson planning, professional development, and student engagement resources – all focused on the topic of potential applications of AI. These conversations signal an enormous hunger in educator communities across content areas and grade levels for immediately implementable tools, best practices, and professional development resources around the intersection of AI and education.

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TWITTER/X UPDATE – REPORT

Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October of 2022, the site’s subsequent rebrand to X, and a number of high-profile and controversial business decisions, many organizations are rethinking their approach to community-building and content dissemination on X. As X leadership has made changes to the site’s functionality and format, and public perceptions of X become increasingly fraught, many educators who have historically turned to Twitter to connect with communities of practice have indicated that they will no longer use the site.

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HOW TEACHERS USE THEIR TIME – REPORT

Across digital communities of practice, teachers consistently discuss the common challenge of not having enough time – of bringing work home with them, of running out of space to build connections with students and their families, of approaching burnout. This landscape examines trends in those discussions, paying particular attention to themes in the tasks and requirements of the profession that teachers report as “eating up” significant time blocks: what they identify as the most time-consuming tasks, where they would like time back, how they’d use it, and how they’ve identified AI as having the potential to significantly support with common time-intensive tasks.