MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER

NOTEWORTHY NEWS

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to learn more:

• Check out why this teacher treats their class like an office - and even pays her students every two weeks!

• Can’t stop watching The Traitors? Neither could this school - so they made their own version.

• Should phone bans stretch into recess time? This Canadian school thinks so.

TECH TALK

Survive your staff meetings AND enhance those lessons

No one wants to listen to anyone for an hour straight. Sometimes though, it’s not possible to get around—keeping students engaged during longer lessons or enduring lengthy, often unstructured staff meetings for example. 

Students struggle to absorb fast-paced lecture content, and even teachers often find themselves scrambling to recall key points from PD sessions, administrative updates, or department meetings.

How can educators make both learning and professional obligations more efficient?

The Solution: Ossy

Ossy is designed to enhance comprehension and engagement—whether for students in the classroom or teachers in the conference room.

By providing live transcription and AI-powered assistance, it makes both lectures and meetings more effective and accessible.

• Live Transcription: Teachers and students can follow along in real-time as Ossy transcribes spoken words into text, ensuring nothing is missed.

• AI-Powered Q&A: Whether reviewing a lecture or catching up on a meeting, users can interact with Ossy to ask questions about key points, generate summaries, or clarify important details.

• Searchable Meeting Notes: Forget skimming through pages of handwritten notes—Ossy AI lets teachers search and retrieve key moments from past meetings instantly.

How About YOUR Classroom?

Integrating Ossy into your workflow can transform both student engagement and how you manage professional responsibilities.

Strategies

1. Enhance Student Note-Taking: Encourage students to use Ossy’s live transcription feature to capture lecture content accurately. This is especially helpful for students who struggle with auditory processing or taking notes quickly.

2. Make Staff Meetings (More) Useful: Instead of zoning out, teachers can use Ossy to transcribe long-winded meetings and instantly generate key takeaways.

3. Empower Asynchronous Learning & Collaboration: Whether reviewing a past lesson or following up on professional development, Ossy helps users revisit important moments, ensuring better retention and informed decision-making.

Ossy offers a free version with core features suitable for most classrooms and staff meetings.

We’ve covered similar apps before, but what makes Ossy seriously compelling is the price for its premium plan. For about $10 USD/month, you get unlimited everything - we haven’t seen anything even close to this price for similar features.

If you’re interested, click the affiliate link above to get started with a free trial today.

By using Ossy, teachers (and students) can save time, reduce frustration, and get the most out of both lessons and meetings.

Because let’s be honest—if staff meetings must be endured, at least let them be searchable.

BRAINY BITS

The false promise of phone bans

Many schools have cracked down on phone use by issuing outright student bans, hoping to boost their academics and wellbeing. 

But this week’s study, coming hot off the presses just a few weeks ago, suggests those bans may not be working as intended.

The Study: School Phone Policies and Mental Wellbeing

Researchers from the University of Birmingham examined the effects of school phone policies on student wellbeing through a cross-sectional observational study. 

They surveyed 1,227 students aged 12-15 across 30 secondary schools in England—20 with strict phone bans and 10 with more permissive policies.

To assess mental wellbeing, students completed the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS), while teachers provided reports on student behavior and academic performance. 

Additionally, students self-reported their smartphone and social media use, and some wore accelerometers to track physical activity.

By comparing data across both policy groups, researchers evaluated whether restricting phone use at school had any meaningful impact on mental health, classroom behavior, and overall phone habits.

The Results:

Schools with bans successfully reduced in-class phone use, but overall student wellbeing didn’t improve. 

Anxiety, depression, and behavior outcomes were the same in both restrictive and permissive schools. 

However, across all schools, higher phone and social media use correlated with lower grades, poor sleep, and decreased physical activity.

In Your Classroom:

If phone bans don’t improve wellbeing, what can? Instead of just restricting phones, try:

Strategies

• Teaching Digital Literacy: Help students manage screen time wisely.

• Encouraging Balance: Promote offline activities to counteract excessive phone use.

• Engaging Parents: Address phone habits both in and out of school.

Studies like this (and us here at The PEN) are not saying that bans can’t work - they very much can, but they can’t be the only tool we use.

The real issue isn’t just phones in school—it’s phone habits everywhere. And so the more we can help students address this, the better chance we have at enacting real change.

REFERENCES

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

Ossy. (2025).Transcribe. Explain. Elevate.. Retrieved from https://ossy.ai/
Note: The PEN Weekly may receive compensation as an affiliate should you choose to sign up using this link. Thank you for the support!

Brainy Bits:

Goodyear, V. A., Randhawa, A., Adab, P., Al-Janabi, H., Fenton, S., Jones, K., Michail, M., Morrison, B., Patterson, P., Quinlan, J., Sitch, A., Twardochleb, R., Wade, M., & Pallan, M. (2025). School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (Smart Schools): A cross-sectional observational study. The Lancet Regional Health - Europe, 101211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2025.101211