Looking forward to #CESIcon

The annual CESI conference will be taking place in Galway this weekend. We’re looking forward to our 13th conference and all it has to offer. This will be the 42nd CESI conference and the theme for this year’s conference is Beyond the Horizon – Technology in Education. 

CESI always manage to get at least one huge name to keynote at their conference. This year is no different and I’ll be looking forward to seeing Tim Rylands (http://www.timrylands.com/tims-biog/) who I’ve been following on Twitter for a long time. I’m also looking forward to seeing John Davitt, who I first came across at BETT a few years ago. However, I’ve never seen John speak before but I imagine he will have a new innovative scheme to showcase. I am not familiar with the third keynote, Sarah Neild, but I have no doubt that she will provide some interesting insights to ICT in Education.

With the unpredictability that a new baby brings, I didn’t sign up to give a talk this year, (though I could tell you about a great app for logging feeding times – not sure how educational that is!), but there is a fantastic lineup as usual.  The only unfortunate thing is that one has to choose from a number of presentations on at the same time. For example, on the first slot, I’m torn between three presentations that I’d love to go to. I’m very interested in the presentation about Google Classroom. I’m also interested in the Flipped Classroom presentation. However, I’m going to have to go to the following presention: A 21st century’s digital School’s story on the BeeBot Application: Teaching programming, emotional social language development in a Primary school. I’ve been trying to get the BeeBot into my school for a number of years and want to see how this school did it. I’m hoping it will be related somewhat to Aistear as I think this is a good way to get it into the infant room.

The next session has another load of talks that I’d love to see with familiar names: Ciara Brennan, Mary Jo Bell, Cormac Cahill and Séamus O’Neill, amongst them. I might opt for Cormac’s presentation as he is doing some great things in this area. After lunch there’s some other workshops and presentations that I’d like to see but I’m going to see Tom Lonergan and hear about his thoughts on BYOD. Tom always gives a great insight to what’s happening in edTech in Ireland so it is sure to be interesting.

If you haven’t been to a CESI conference before, I highly recommend that you get yourself to Galway this weekend. Everything kicks off on Friday evening with an excellent Teachmeet and continues into a feature-packed Saturday. You’ll be tired but buzzing afterwards and your classroom will never be the same again!