A textbook can tell your class that TDs vote in the Dáil. It cannot tell them what happened on Tuesday. Politics Leaving Cert students and CSPE classes are learning about a system that is sitting, voting and being questioned this week, and almost all of the evidence is public.

The problem was never that the record was secret. It was that it was hard to find and slow to read. A division page is a table of names. A debate is hours of transcript. A parliamentary question is written in a form that takes practice to follow. Teachers have had the choice between spending a free period digging for one good example, or teaching from the example already in the book.

Dex closes most of that gap. It can look up members, Dáil votes, debates, parliamentary questions and Bills from the official Oireachtas record and show them as a card in the chat. Ask how a TD voted and you get Tá, Níl or Staon and, for recent votes, how the rest of their party voted and who broke ranks. Each result points back to the official page, so the next move is always “open it and read it”.

The best ten minutes we have seen with this goes like this. Before you show anything, ask the class to predict: will every TD in this party vote the same way? Will the Government side hold together? Write the guesses on mini-whiteboards or on the board.

Then ask Dex, on the projector, how a TD from your own constituency voted on the Bill you are studying and whether anyone in their party voted differently. The answer arrives as a record card with links. The class sees the guess meet the evidence while the lesson is still happening.

Notice what the pause does. A class that has committed to a prediction cares about the answer, and the answer arrives with a source attached, so “how do we know?” is already on the table.

A one-week project turns the same record into assessable work. The shape is always the same: students collect evidence, verify each item at its source, show it, then defend a position with it.

Choose a question the record can answer in a window of recent months, for example: “On housing motions this term, did Government and opposition TDs vote as blocks?” Dex’s record look-ups cover a window of up to 120 days at a time, which is a good scope for a school project anyway. Pupils note the date range they searched in the first line of their notes.

The checking step is where the learning happens. For every vote, debate or question a pupil uses, they open the official link and copy down the date, the motion and the result into their own table. Only then do they ask Dex to show the numbers they collected as a bar chart, or the sequence of events as a timeline. Dex draws charts and timelines from numbers it has been given or has looked up, and a class that has verified its own table can tell straight away if a chart does not match.

Finally, defend it. In Dex Study, Argument Court has a student defend a position against an opposing TD and scores how well they use evidence, not how loudly they argue.

For “how does this work?” questions, Dex builds a purpose-made interactive explainer instead of a wall of text: steps you click through, side-by-side comparisons, timelines, charts, role cards, a PR-STV quota calculator, what-if scenarios, glossaries and quizzes. On a projector it turns a ten-minute explanation into a thing students can poke at.

A good routine is to let the class steer. Put a scenario on screen, ask what they think happens next, click, and see. A class that has argued over the wrong answer remembers the right one.

One rule worth saying out loud: Dex only puts numbers, dates and office holders in an explainer when they come from the Constitution, a record look-up or a verified source. That is also the rule you want pupils to hold themselves to.

In Dex Study you can build a practice paper with multiple choice, true or false, short and long answers, ordering and fill-in-the-gap questions, and give it a class code. Pupils go to the join page, type the six-character code and sit the paper. They do not need an account, and each pupil chooses whether to send their score back to you.

What you see first is the class, not the individual. The summary shows the average, the median, how many pupils fell into each band and the five questions most often missed, with the topic for each. That is a re-teaching plan: you know which idea to go back to before Friday. You can then open individual results and download everything as a spreadsheet.

Pupils type a name of their choice, so a first name or a nickname is enough. Class results are deleted 120 days after they were collected.

The marking is practice marking. Short and long answers are marked against a rubric and any mark can be adjusted, but it is not an official grade and should not be used as one.

None of this replaces the teacher, the syllabus or the textbook. It changes what happens in the gaps: the hook, the evidence, the picture on the board, and the check at the end.

Yes. Teachers can use Dex with a free DáilDex account, and creating classes and running practice papers in Dex Study costs nothing. Free Dex gives 50 messages a day, which is plenty for a lesson and its follow-up.

Dex Pro is €10 a month and adds the study coach, fact-checks, Irish legal research, downloadable documents and 500 messages a day. Neither classes nor Study need it.

Treat it as a fast, well-sourced lead, not as the final word. Dex grounds its answers in the official record and trusted Irish sources, links what it can and says when the record does not settle something. It can still be wrong, which is exactly why every record card links to the official page and why the checking step is part of the lesson.

When Dex generates study material from a source, Study checks that each quoted passage exists in the cited text and leaves out items it cannot verify. That proves the passage exists. It does not prove Dex’s reading of it is right, so read the surrounding text.