CESI Meet 2009

The second ever CESI Meet was held in the Digital Hub in Dublin last night. I always love CESI events because I always leave inspired and full of new ideas after them and last night’s was no exception. The idea of CESI Meet is to have an informal evening of short talks and group discussions about issues surrounding ICT in education. Within a two hour space, there were over a dozen talks ranging from primary, secondary and third-level.

Highlights for me included two talks on virtual worlds in education. Two separate projects are beginning shortly, one from Trinity College and another from Daynuv, both spreading the same message. Tim Savage from Trinity College demonstrated how a virtual world created in OpenSim (similar to Second Life) could be used to help children’s exploration skills in order to solve problems – one of the key aims of the curriculum – and something that is very difficult to do without IT. He showed us the virtual world of an African Village where children could interact with different characters and items in order to learn about life in another country. James Corbett from Daynuv gave an interesting glimpse into the future of this type of project where creating our own virtual worlds is relatively easy.

Ann McMorrough presented a 15 minute discussion on her Masters thesis about how eTwinning and linking up schools can have great consequences for learning. Sadly, I couldn’t hear the discussion as I was on the other side of the room discussing Interactive Whiteboards. I had planned my angle to be how we can use Interactive Whiteboards more effectively in the classroom but quickly realised people wanted to hear what board should they buy, where they should get it from and what the best software was to use it. There was an interesting part of the discussion about whether tablets or slates are just as effective as actual IWBs and we agreed this was probably true at second level.

Enda Donlan also introduced us to Xtranormal, a cool way to make 3D movies.  All you do is type in a dialogue, drag and drop a few bits and pieces and you’ve made a 3D movie.  It really is that easy!  Shame one has to be 13 to use it though.

For me, the highlight of the talks was a two minute presentation by Ban Ryan, a retired principal from Tipperary, who goes by the Twitter name of @lismiss. Ban said that when she looked into her grandchildren’s bedroom, she saw technology everywhere – it was basically invisible to the child. Children are using iPods, DS Lites, TVs, DVDs, Laptops, etc. without thinking about them. She then looked at teaching in schools in Ireland and realised we are not teaching our children the way they are now learning. Ban decided to learn how children learn and bought a DS Lite and a Nintendo Wii. She then created a constructivist classroom with all this equipment and now teaches, reading, writing, maths, geography, history, problem solving and everything else using technology. Children love coming to her classroom. She quoted a child: “I used to hate Maths but since coming to Mrs. Ryan’s classroom, I love it now.” She also gave the example of a child who was petrified of going to the shops because she didn’t know what change she was going to get. A few sessions of Brain Training with virtual change, the child proudly told her, she had gone into a shop to buy a lolly and knew what change she was going to get!

The evening ended all too quickly and it was time to head back to Carlow. Sadly I’ll be missing the Scratch Saturday session today, which I know will be excellent. A random bit of technology news came out of the evening. My wife left her bag at the Meet and we didn’t realise until we were halfway home. We didn’t have anybody’s phone number but today we’ll be picking it up. Read my next post about how technology saved my wife.