Author: admin

The Standing Committee on Teacher Education North and South (that is one very long name!) conference was in Armagh City this year. I was delighted to be invited to take part. There was a pre-conference audience for researchers with Etienne Wenger-Trayner, “Communities of Practice” expert. This went on for quite a long time longer than planned, because of…

The Next Generation: Digital Learning Symposium at DC last Tuesday had a rather complicated and unwieldy title, but it unfolded into something simple and useful – a day for ‘scholarly professionals’ to show and share what they care about. The day had a good mix of round table and panel-led discussions, breakouts for shorter presentations,…

On the origins – and future – of guerilla CPD in Ireland.

Thanks to Sandra Maguire and her team for a year of prep work leading to this year’s Dojocon in Dun Laoghaire. It was a pretty fantastic way to close out EU Code Week in Ireland. The venue  – the Marine Hotel – was lovely, as were both the weather, and the people who attended. Some…

It was a treat to be invited to Cloghans Hill NSW in Mayo during Code Week 2016, by Iseult Mangan and her students, to be part of their Skycademy launch (first in Ireland), and to be inducted into their team, alongside Hassan Dabbagh. Iseult explained the way things would go – all this winter the…

  https://vine.co/v/5Hwt3KeYzpQ   Good morning to all schools taking part in Code Week EU across Europe. We’re kicking off the school week in the STEAM room here in @LackenNS, County Cavan, Ireland with Grace Hopper nanoseconds, binary code bracelets and semiconductor circuits. Other schools and libraries all over the country will be joining in – already…

Pam O’Brien has done it again. Taken the Teachmeet format and morphed it to fill a need. She found a team (Neil Butler and me), a theme (Maths), a time (Friday night before Code Week EU kicked off; yes, Friday night – yes, we’re all a little cracked!), a place (LIT), sponsor (Microsoft, Twinkle, LIT),…

Ireland’s Code Week EU activities are off to a truly “Mega” start today.  In Limerick (Moylish Campus IT) almost 1000 ninjas and mentors get together for the 2nd annual Megadojo hosted by CoderDojo Limerick. In Dublin, DogPatch Labs hosts CoderGirlHackDay. And events are running in many places in between. Code Week will run thru the…

The idea of a TeachMeet*/MakerMeet just for Maths teachers was a hot topic of conversation at last April in Thurles – there was so much fun had trying out the Fold and Cut Theorem (inspired by the Katie Steckles YouTube version) at the #ictedu Maker Meet that it was bound to happen. And so now,…

A chance tweet from Joe Dale in the UK (thanks Joe!) alerted us to the fact that Nebraska teacher, Dr Lynne Herr, proponent of the increasingly popular BreakoutEDU activity, was visiting Ireland at the end of the summer. Lynne  was offering to give up a day of her vacation along our Wild Atlantic Way to…