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 dive deeper:

👉 Why banning screen time isn’t the fix - here’s what parents should do instead

👉 Toronto kids are learning from lunch monitors - not teachers - and the numbers are shocking

👉 A German teacher’s gone on sick leave for 16 years - and refuses to prove she’s really ill

TECH TOOL

Plan Your Room Without Losing Your Mind

If you’ve ever stared at your classroom in the new school year and thought, “How do I even start rearranging this?”, you’re not alone. 

Between desks, shelves, tech stations, and that mysterious corner nobody goes near, getting a room to feel functional and inviting can be overwhelming.

The Solution: PlanYourRoom.com

PlanYourRoom is a free, web-based tool that lets you design any space with drag-and-drop ease. You can lay out desks, chairs, shelves (even rugs and plants) right on a digital floor plan. 

For teachers, it’s perfect for planning a classroom layout before moving a single piece of furniture… or for testing different seating arrangements mid-year.

Start by picking or estimating a room size. Drag and drop furniture and fixtures to create your ideal setup. The platform lets you move things around as much as you want, so you can experiment with desk clusters, teacher stations, and activity zones without lifting a finger.

Is This For YOUR Classroom?

PlanYourRoom wasn’t built specifically for classrooms, so you’ll need a bit of imagination. You may have to estimate measurements of desks, whiteboards, and shelves and input them manually. But once you do, it’s incredibly flexible. Bonus: it’s also great for planning your home office or a cozy study corner.

Strategies That Work:

• Start With a Rough Sketch: Even a quick estimate of room dimensions and furniture sizes is enough to get going.

• Experiment With Layouts: Try group tables, individual pods, or U-shaped setups—see what works best before moving furniture.

• Share With Colleagues: Export your plan to get feedback or collaborate on school-wide design improvements.

PlanYourRoom turns classroom chaos into a visual playground - perfect for teachers who like to plan ahead, experiment, and maybe even have a little fun while doing it. And by the way, it’s 100% free.

BRAINY BITS

This is How Teachers Have Been Using AI - According to Research

TLDR: Anthropic (creators of Claude) analyzed 74,000 faculty chats and found most professors and teachers use AI to plan courses, research, and sometimes assess work. They tend to keep a human in the loop for teaching tasks and automate routine admin. 

Here’s what that means for our K-12 classrooms:

The Study: Anthropic’s Official Education Report

Anthropic ran an analysis of ~74,000 anonymized Claude.ai conversations tied to education emails over 11 days (May 22 to June 2, 2025) across the planet. 

They filtered for educator-specific tasks and added interviews and surveys from 22 educators to explain motivations and concerns.

The Results:

Across the report, here’s what teachers used AI for:

• 57% to develop curricula

• 13% to conduct research

• 7% to assess students

Outside of this, educators have also been applying AI in the following ways:

• 77.4% defaulted to using AI to aid in their usual teaching tasks that needed judgment and context.

• 48.9% of conversations that involved student grading were automation-heavy, even though surveyed teachers rated grading as AI’s weakest fit.

In addition, some teachers were also building with AI, using Claude to create deployable materials like quizzes, simulations, custom graphics, and grading rubrics.

In Your Classroom:

Take this all with a grain of salt - while valuable, this data is coming from one of the major players in AI right now (Anthropic).

Here’s how to use this research in your classroom this week:

Strategies

• Default to “co-pilot,” not autopilot. Treat AI as a thought partner for planning lessons, examples, and practice items.

• Build simple interactive materials. Use AI to draft rubrics, quizzes, and quick simulations you can tweak and reuse. Start small, then iterate with your students’ feedback.

• Be cautious with grading. Use AI to structure rubrics or draft formative comments, but own final feedback and grades. Many educators are wary of fully automating assessment for good reason.

The pattern from the report is clear regardless of the grade taught - use AI to speed the tedious parts and to brainstorm better materials, while keeping teacher judgment at the center. 

That balance preserves trust and boosts the part students value most: you.

REFERENCES

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

Tech Talk:

planyourroom. (2025). Plan Your Room.  Retrieved from https://www.planyourroom.com/

Brainy Bits:

Bent, D., Handa, K., Durmus, E., Tamkin, A., McCain, M., Ritchie, S., … Jones], J. (2025). Anthropic Education Report: How Educators Use Claude. Retrieved from https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-how-educators-use-claude