19/11/2010
Archived item. This item is published here for historical reasons. The information below may be out of date.
Press Release: Connect Education 2.0 Seminar
19th November 2010
As part of the Innovation Dublin Festival, South Dublin County Council and the Connect School Project held an Education Seminar in the Dublin West Education Centre on Wednesday 17th November entitled “Connect Education 2.0”
The Connect School Project in St Aidan’s Community School, Brookfield, Tallaght where all students and teachers were provided with laptops by the Council over the past 5 years – St Aidan’s is now Ireland’s only one-to-one computing second level school. Over the coming year the learning from the project in St Aidan’s is being developed into a wider Connect Education Project which will see teachers coming together in a Community of Practice to create and share resources for use in the classroom.
The Connect Education 2.0 Seminar’s first session looked at the implementation and evaluation of the Connect School Project and featured Dr Conor Galvin of UCD, Frank Moran Principal of St Aidan’s and Avril Bailey of An Cosan. The Second Session looked at the role of industry players in education and featured presentations from Microsoft’s Dr. Kevin Marshall, Google’s Samantha Peter and Steven Daly of Camara Ireland.
The afternoon session provided a number of half hour parallel sessions “by teachers for teachers” on various uses of ICT in Teaching and Learning.
Dr Conor Galvin, who was the academic lead on Farrell Grants Sparks Evaluation of the Connect School Project, outlined the successes and challenges of the project.
Google’s presentation focused on the use of Google Apps for education and was given remotely over Skype; Samantha Peter spoke about how the use of shared documents for students’ homework helps teachers avoid “email attachments hell”.
Dr Kevin Marshall spoke extensively about Microsoft’s partnership with UNESCO in conducting research on Innovative Teaching and Learning - http://www.itlresearch.com/
The Seminar was very well attended and the practical workshops in the afternoon were especially appreciated by teachers.
As a result of the seminar more teachers joined the Connect Education Community of Practice. The idea of the Community of Practice is to bring teachers together to train in the development of teaching resources and then share those resources for all to use. There are now over 150 teachers registered in the Community of Practice and training has begun on the use of Learning Management System – Moodle in the NCTE’s Dublin West Education Centre. More teachers are constantly joining the Community by emailing teachers@sdcc.ie
For more information on the Connect School Project, The Connect Education 2.0 Seminar and the Community of Practice see http://connectschool.blogspot.com/
-ENDS-