About MuggsOfLearning

Teachers are the most resourceful problem-solvers in any building. Every day, they design experiences, manage complex systems, and find ways to make things work with whatever they have. MuggsOfLearning starts from a simple premise: what happens when you put real tools in the hands of people who already know how to build?

MuggsOfLearning is a professional development program of Irish Network New Orleans (in-nola.org), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit serving the Greater New Orleans community. The program equips local educators with full-stack web development skills — not as a career pivot, but as a professional expansion. Teachers who can build their own classroom tools, design their own platforms, and understand the technology their students will inherit are teachers with more autonomy, more capability, and more to offer.

The curriculum is grounded in the same technologies that power the modern web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, serverless architecture, and database design. Participants don't learn to use someone else's product. They learn to create their own. The goal isn't to replace what educators already do well — it's to remove the ceiling on what's possible.

MuggsOfLearning is funded through MuggsOfDreams, a creative services initiative that builds enterprise-quality websites and applications for local creators and small businesses. Every MuggsOfDreams project is a donation to IN-NOLA, and every donation helps put another educator through the program. The community invests in its creators, and that investment circles back into its classrooms.

Great teaching has always been an act of design. MuggsOfLearning just adds a new medium.

The Claddagh ring carries a simple promise: hands extended in friendship, a heart offered in love, a crown worn in loyalty. For centuries, it has been given to mark relationships built on trust and mutual commitment. We take these three virtues as our foundation—not as sentiment, but as practice.

Love is for the craft.

Teaching is skilled work. It requires judgment, timing, deep knowledge of content, and the ability to read a room of young people whose attention is precious and fleeting. The tools we use should serve this craft, not obscure it. We believe that when teachers build their own instructional tools—exactly as they envision them, without compromise—they are engaged in an act of love for their practice. They are refusing to accept "close enough." They are insisting that their expertise matters down to the details.

The technologies now available make this possible in ways that were unimaginable even two years ago. A teacher who understands what their students need can now build it. Not someday. Now.

Loyalty is to the profession.

In a landscape crowded with vendors, consultants, and reformers eager to tell teachers what they need, we choose a different path. We are loyal to teachers as the domain experts in instruction. This means we do not build tools for teachers to consume—we build capacity for teachers to create.

Loyalty also means honesty. The world is changing. Technologies that augment human capability are no longer emerging; they have arrived. Teachers who do not claim their space in this new landscape risk having that space claimed for them, by people who have never managed a classroom, never graded at midnight, never watched a student finally understand something they'd struggled with for weeks. We believe teachers must be the ones shaping how these tools enter education—not as passive recipients, but as builders and decision-makers.

Friendship is our method.

No one learns to build alone. Muggs of Learning is a community—teachers working alongside teachers, sharing what works, troubleshooting what doesn't, and holding space for the frustration that comes with learning something new. We extend our hands to one another because this work is too important and too hard to do in isolation.

Friendship also means we build tools with exit plans. Our goal is not dependency but capability. Success is measured not by how much our members need us, but by how confidently they can work without us.

Sean Muggivan is a New Orleans educator who made the transition from clinical social work to teaching. He holds a Master's in Social Work from LSU (2011) and spent several years working in multisystemic therapy, intensive case management, and crisis intervention with adolescents and families—experiences that shaped how he approaches young people in the classroom.

Since 2016, Sean has taught across middle and high school settings, in both special education and general education roles. Over the last two years, he developed a senior-level Social Data Science course where students conduct original research—designing surveys, analyzing qualitative data, and building visualizations to communicate their findings. To support this work, he built a computer lab from the ground up, capable of running offline AI models so students can work with professional-grade tools without relying on cloud services or subscriptions. He completed Stanford's Youcubed Data Science teacher training and is an Operation Spark Level 1 IBC Certified Instructor.

Sean's approach is simple: build the tools you need. Everything he creates—assessment platforms, survey tools, data dashboards—comes from actual classroom problems he's tried to solve. He shares these tools freely with colleagues, believing that teachers shouldn't have to depend on vendors to get what they need.

He serves on the board of Irish Network New Orleans as Data Manager and AI Strategist, where MuggsOfLearning operates as a professional development program. His work has been featured on Fox 8 Live and WDSU 6 News for bringing AI tools into New Orleans charter schools.

For more, visit seanmuggivanlcsw.me.