Imagebank is an offshoot of the government agency, the N.C.T.E., National Centre for Technology in Education. The idea is that teachers and pupils can search for images that can be used for free for educational purposes. It’s been around for about a year. The reason I’m reviewing it now is because they’ve undergone a makeover.
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Thoughts on the Sunday Business Post
Today the Sunday Business Post published a 7 page special on technologies in education. It focussed on many aspects of ICT in all three levels of education. Amongst articles of interest to me as a primary school teacher were the NCTE’s plans to roll out laptops and projectors to us all, Interactive Whiteboards, Scoilnet’s services, Fís and a profile on constructionist learning in Gaelscoil Ó Doghair. I was not altogether happy with every article and below are my thoughts about each one.
Scoilnet Blogging Service
Scoilnet, an NCTE initiative are providing Irish schools with Blog hosting. I tested it out at the excellent CESI conference this year and I must admit, Scoilnet have got it right.
You're Going to Hate Me…
This evening, sometime between 7pm and 9pm, I gave a talk entitled: “You’re Going to Hate Me!” It’s a two minute talk about how I intend to spend the €5,000 per classroom my school received from Batt O’Keefe and how any school that wasn’t on the list could be entitled to the grant. In case I make a balls of the presentation or I run out of time, below is the text of what I intended to say. I have scheduled this post to go up on Anseo.net at 9pm.
ICT procurement frameworks from the NCTE
Thanks to Batt O’Keefe’s decision to award €2.2 million to some primary schools for ICT equipment, the NCTE have decided to introduce some frameworks in order to spend all that money. There are guidelines on projectors prices, laptop prices, printer prices and visualiser prices…but no mention of Interactive Whiteboards at all. So, the question on my lips is, naturally, why?
Calls to scrap teacher email system… did you even know it existed?
A couple of years ago when Ireland had money, the government, through the National Centre for Technology in Education, the NCTE, decided to pay a company to develop an email system for teachers. Every teacher was going to be given an email address @scoilnet.ie I was one of the teachers chosen to pilot it in my school so I went for the training. There was nothing particularly wrong with the system apart from the fact that it wasn’t very good.