On February 28th and March 1st of this year the Computers in Education Society of Ireland will hold its annual conference in Galway. The theme for this year’s conference is Spark the Imagination. The CESI conference is a calendar highlight for those who are interested in integrating technology into their teaching and learning.
Last year’s conference marked a very special milestone for CESI as it celebrated its 40th anniversary. It is fitting, therefore, that this was the largest conference CESI has ever held, attended by over three hundred teachers, educators and education technology enthusiasts who travelled from all across the country to attend the Saturday event and to choose from over forty presentations and workshops on offer. The keynote presentation was delivered by John Naughton and the capstone presentation was delivered by Dan Meyer. You can watch the videos for both presentations below:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzdHHj_ZDAw[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh-C0BaTXRw[/youtube]
This year the conference is going from strength to strength, with an even larger programme than last year following a record number of proposals to present. The keynote presentation will be delivered by Dr. Daithí Ó’Murchú. Daithí brings a wealth of experience and expertise to this year’s conference; he is a primary school principal teacher, has worked with a number of EU projects concerned with the use of ICT in education, has worked with several teacher education programmes and serves on numerous conference review boards worldwide. You can find out more about Daithí on his website at http://www.domurchu.com/
Other highlights of this year’s conference include a timely and important discussion on the forthcoming National Digital Strategy, a demonstration of the high-profile Google Glass, a demonstration of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (which has won the ‘Best of CES’ with several tech publications), a MaKey MaKey workshop and a demonstration of Project Spark (new tool for building virtual worlds). As you can see, it’s going to be a busy but very enjoyable day.
As has been the pattern for the last few years, the Saturday conference event will be preceded by a Friday night TeachMeetCESI (formerly known as CESImeet) in the Clayton Hotel. This event is now fully booked but you can still be placed on the waiting list by clicking here.
Tickets for the Saturday conference event (Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) campus) are still on sale and can be purchased via the CESI website at http://www.cesi.ie/conference-2014-registration. Stay tuned to the CESI website (www.cesi.ie), CESI Twitter account (@cesitweets ) and CESI Facebook page (www.facebook.com/cesi.ireland) for updates.