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 introduce Irish educators to the “something different” that is BreakoutEDU. And so a flurry of emails ensued between Lynne, CESI, and champion supporter Avril Ronan of Trend Micro in Cork. And there we ended up on September 3rd – in a spacious room in the River Lee Hotel in Cork, with coffee and food on tap, for our day of immersive learning with Lynne, of fun and teamwork, of time flying while we solved the clues and literally ‘unlocked our learning”. As ever with events in the CESI tribe, we had the enriching mix of educators from Primary, Secondary, Third Level, voluntary, non-profit and ed-tech support worlds.
Lynn is a gifted teacher – the perfect mix of deep empathy and a light touch – and we were thrilled to have had a day with her in Ireland – lets hope she will return! BreakoutEDU is definitely a very clever and engaging methodology, based on a very simple idea – the answer is locked in a box, if you want to open it you have to learn your way to solving the code that opens the lock. This has huge potential as a straight content-teaching tool, and could be a very powerful cooperative learning method. The simplicity of the idea lends it extreme flexibility and has potential to be used in all levels and sectors of education.
Those curious for more details – or to see the huge bank of resources and ideas already developed and shared by BreakoutEDU community – can check out the BreakoutEDU website, BreakoutEDU Facebook page, the Twitter timelines @BreakoutEDU, #BreakoutEDU, and @lherr
(Those who are curious to experience a BreakoutEDU should get themselves along to MathsMeetIE in LIT, Moylish, Limerick on Friday October 15th – more details in next post!)
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