A very successful CESI (Computers in Education Society of Ireland) Conference was recently held in Dublin. “Making Connections – Transformation Through Technology and Teamwork” was the theme of the conference. The Regency Hotel was the venue on Friday night for the CESI Teach-Meet where there was a great variety of two-minute, seven-minute and fifteen-minute presentations. This is a fantastic format as everything was quick-fire and it certainly held your attention.
The venue on Saturday was the St. Patrick’s College DCU campus where the keynote and capstone addresses bookended a day which was certainly inspirational, thought-provoking and challenging. Simultaneous workshops took place during morning and afternoon sessions so it was impossible to make it to all of them. Feedback was generally positive about all of the workshops and presentations. Congratulations to the Executive and the Conference Committee of CESI for organising a great conference.
To give a flavour of the conference, some of the following were recommended by various speakers at sessions that I attended on both Friday night and Saturday:
- Thinglink – annotate images and videos
- iEarn – learn about global education
- Global Oneness Project – bringing the world into your classroom
- Skitch App – annotate images
- Tag Crowd – create word clouds
- Tag Cloud App – create word clouds
- Pixomatic App – photo editor
- Photo Splash App – photo editor
- Typorama App – text on photo editor
- 8mm Vintage Camera App – create vintage type videos
- News Booth App – create Sky News-type images and videos
- Quik App – video editor
- 30 Hands App – create a video slideshow
- Comic Life App – photo comic creation
- Book Creator App – create digital books
- Seesaw App – create digital portfolios
- Adobe Spark – create great digital images and videos
- Apple Teacher Programme – online training programme
- BBC Micro Bit – device to get pupils learning coding
- Block Editor Lessons – for the BBC Micro Bit
- Arithmetic Game – game for practising tables
- Bridge 21 – Trinity College based learning programme
- Mentimeter – get participant response
- COGG – classroom resources as Gaeilge
- All About Explorers – use to teach pupils about fake news and alternative facts
- Piktochart – create infographics
- Canva – create digital images
- Easelly – create infographics
- Infogram – create charts and infographics
- Snopes – website to check if news is factually correct
- Photos For Class – Creative Commons images to use for classroom projects
- Pixabay – free images and videos
- Webwise – website with online safety lessons
- Chirp.QR App – create audio QR codes with your voice
- My Talking Avatar – create talking avatar movies
- Flipsnack Edu – educators’ version of Flipsnack for creating digital books
I gave a presentation on Saturday entitled “Digital Magpie – Stealing the Ideas of Others” where I presented a range of ideas for using educational technology in the classroom – ideas which had been “stolen” from other educators either at conferences or through Twitter. This presentation is available below:
