I only got to experience some of the Digital MegaMeet in Dublin Castle, part of the 2016 Excited Digital Learning Festival. This day long TeachMeet style program of teacher led CPD was planned and …

Source: #DigitalMegaMeet

I only got to experience some of the Digital MegaMeet in Dublin Castle, part of the 2016 Excited Digital Learning Festival. This day long TeachMeet style program of teacher led CPD was planned and curated by Frank Walsh of Excited and Adrienne Webb of CESI, with Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin as Bean a’ Tí . But what I saw, I liked. Especially as the first thing I was offered was one of these with my coffee!
It was a really good experience for our CESI tribe to showcase to the teachers taking part that we are an organisation for everyone and anyone wishing to exploit tech in their classroom. I arrived as Fred Boss was deftly dealing with a room full of people looking down into their devices while they were also listening to him guide the room thru the Twitter #edchatie timeline and what it achieves. Adrienne Webb, our current Chair, then gave an overview of CESI activities. John Hegarty explained the workings and value of “the CESI list“, and used the list-generated graphic below to show the diversity of the tribe.  I outlined the history and geography of our involvement with TeachMeet to date. (AND, thanks to Aoibhinn remembering why I was the one wearing luminous orange when everyone else was in elegant white, I got my plug in for the teachers present to make sure they got signed up for Code Week EU in October!).

It was fun to see it get all mashed up in cyberspace when Tanya Morrison and Cara McDermott each tweeted us a hello, from Donegal and Cavan respectively, to tell us how they were enjoying the live stream.

The comfortable room, the wonderful ‘invisible’ technical support and infrastructure, the round tables encouraging camaraderie (Go, Table 10!!!), the wide mix of activities, all made for that good atmosphere of sharing that characterises a successful TeachMeet; and showed that upscaling needn’t necessarily mean downgrading.

Up with this sort of thing! Leanne Ní Loinsigh, Susan Nic Réamoinn, Dermot Walsh, Mags Amond, Neil Butler and Tony Sweeney say hello from Table 10!

Full list of Digital MegaMeet speakers and activities is here

The videos streamed on the day are available available here