The Minister for Education and Skills Joe McHugh this week announced a further €50million investment in ICT infrastructure for all primary and post-primary schools. Grant funding for the purchase of ICT infrastructure will issue shortly to all eligible primary and post primary schools in the country to enable them to embed the use of digital …
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After spending months in Beta version, Scratch 3.0 has been finally released as of January 2nd 2019. It brings major changes such as support for tablets and implementation of an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript-based extension system instead of the previously used Flash. In his blog post announcing Scratch 3.0 Mitch Resnik, leader of the MIT Media Lab wrote: …
I recently took some primary school pupils to Microsoft’s headquarters in Leopardstown Dublin to take part in its futuristic new Dreamspace learning initiative. DreamSpace is an educational activity space developed in Dublin at a cost of €5m and it opened earlier this year. Microsoft runs a three-hour programme in DreamSpace for primary and Transition Year …
Floor robots can be programmed to move and change direction across the floor or a flat surface and are an excellent way of introducing young children to the principles of coding and computational thinking. Although the physical appearance of floor robots may be different, they function in a very similar way and the principles of …
To date we have used Scratch in our school to develop children’s coding skills. However, while this is a fantastic application, it is more suited to the older primary school pupil. We recently looked at a range of free, web based applications that can help to develop coding and programming skills throughout the primary school …
A few years back I did a piece on Kahoot which is a brilliant free website for creating quizzes to use in class. Typically the teacher using Kahoot displays the questions on the interactive whiteboard and the students answer the questions on any internet-enabled device. It works really well as an assessment for learning technique to …
Those of you who are old enough might remember that in the 1980’s the BBC Micro Computer running Logo was considered cutting edge in terms of IT in schools. Many children who grew up with the micro went on to forge successful careers in the IT industry. More than 30 years on, the BBC has …
Google has recently launched an educational program designed to teach children about phishing, internet harassment, passwords, and other internet safety issues. The programme is called “Be Internet Awesome,” and it aims to teach children the fundamentals of digital citizenship and provides parents and educators with resources to help children and young people navigate the web …
Earlier this year Google announced two major updates to Earth and Maps. First to arrive was a brand new Google Earth experience that is web-based (not an install) and will even work on Chromebooks. With this web based version you can see and experience the world like never before. Just visit https://earth.google.com/web to get started. …
Check123 is a new, free service that offers 1, 2, and 3-minute videos across a variety of curricular subject areas. If you have tried to use YouTube (or a similar service) to find a classroom video then you know how difficult that can be, especially given the enormous number of videos you have to search …
