There are many schools in Ireland without a reasonable level of broadband. This means that they rely on offline software, which puts them at a big disadvantage. I was asked to recommend software for schools where broadband is bad and, sadly, I was disappointed to note that there still isn’t really a lot of good … Read more
I am attending a PDST Tutor training 2-day course in Dublin today and tomorrow. I’m facilitating a PDST Tech in Ed course for teachers this July so I am bring brought up to speed with all the latest and most loved educational/tech resources that are being looked at by the PDST. Some of you may have … Read more
Thanks to Ciara Brennan for tweeting about this web site during the week. ClassroomDeskArrangement.com is the rather long-winded domain for a highly useful purpose – arranging your tables in your classroom. The web site appears to be run by a group in the UK and offers advice on classroom layouts for classrooms with 16 to … Read more
My favourite subjects to teach are SPHE and English and out of the whole English curriculum, the most enjoyable and challenging areas for me to teach is the writing genre. I write a lot in my spare time and am a member of a writing group so you would think that it would come naturally. … Read more
Scoilnet have come up with an amazing set of resources for schools. Scoilnet maps is a set of 6 mapping tools that could have revolutionary effects on the Irish primary classroom. While Google Maps is a fantastic resource, Scoilnet have acquired the rights to show official Ordinance Survey Maps for Ireland. You can zoom in on any … Read more
Social Bookmarking isn’t a new phenomenon and lots of teacher save links to services like Delicious or Google Bookmarks. However, while I find these bookmarking web sites great for my own personal use, it just never seemed to work at school level as a collaborative tool. For me, I think the main reason is that … Read more
As Halloween is coming, I thought I’d share a few ways to use technology to teach about the festival. In Ireland, Halloween is one of the most popular festivals in the year and houses are often decorated almost as much as at Christmas time. 1. Video Conference with a school Once a school has a … Read more
As we showed in the last article, the TES iBoard is probably one of the best resources any teacher could ever have if they were teaching an infant class. However, the TES iBoard covers the full curriculum for KS1 in the UK, the equivalent of the Junior cycle at primary level here. As the title … Read more
It’s great that there are so many UK and US created resources that Irish schools can “borrow” to use to support our curriculum. In the last number of articles, we’ve seen how our younger children can be exposed to brilliant literacy lessons from Literactive and iBoard. From a young age, if children are exposed to … Read more
In this article, I’m going to look at two great web sites, which help children learn literacy skills…and neither of them are Starfall.com. (However, for the very very few of you who haven’t heard of Starfall, check it out – it’s great!) Literactive.com is a web site that helps children learn almost every early literacy … Read more