CESICON is back, baby.
Like the halcyon days of Anglo Irish Bank during the Celtic Tiger, CESICON – the conference of Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI) – saw a return to the old days, with a large attendance on Saturday 28th February at Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh in Limerick City. Like the old days, there was a TeachMeet the night before, hosted byLimerick Educate Together Secondary School and their funky chairs! Mags Amond wrote a blogpost about #Teachmeet in LETSS. The theme of this year’s conference was Navigating Digital Futures, which, as expected, featured many sessions involving or exploring AI.
CESI, for the uninitiated, is the teacher professional network for Computer Science and has been a driver in the promotion of information technology at all levels of education in Ireland for over 50 years. Traditionally, CESI has brought some of the leading thinkers and leaders as keynote speakers over the years, from John Naughton, Dan Meyer, Stephen Kinsella and Yong Zhao, to this year’s keynote speaker, Elaine Burke.
Elaine Burke is a journalist and broadcaster who provides clear, plain-speaking commentary on science and technology developments in print, online, on TV and radio, and in podcasts. She is the resident tech expert for Ireland AM and a weekly TV and streaming analyst on Today FM’s The Last Word. Her presentation on the current state of AI left plenty of food for thought for many of the attendees.
The great thing about CESICON is the opportunity to meet and chat with old friends. Thanks also need to go to the range of booth sponsors who attended the event. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to explore them in more depth, as I spent most of the mingling time gossiping with old colleagues.
There were nearly a dozen AI sessions, ranging from Stephen Howell’s Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Code: Bringing Algorithms to Life with BodyBlocks, which transforms the human body into a real-time input controller for Scratch 3 projects (https://bodyblocks.app), to a session on Google Gemini and NotebookLM with Sarah Porcenaluk from the University of Galway, and Laurence Cuffe’s presentation, Heutagogy: A Framework for Considering Education in the Age of AI, which explored a learner-centred approach to education where learners are highly autonomous and determine their own learning paths.
There were also a number of non-AI sessions, ranging from LCETB’s finest, Sheila McDonald and Lorraine Hickey, on accessibility and Moodle, to John Phayer’s session on using Microsoft PowerPoint to create e-learning resources for Special Educational Needs (SEN). A particularly interesting session looked at teaching AI literacy using the Irish-language version of Wikipedia.
As CESI is unique in covering all levels of Irish education, there were a number of primary-specific sessions. One hands-on interactive session (Sally McHugh) saw attendees explore how to connect the Primary STEM Curriculum to activities using both physical and online computing resources that were fun and easy to implement in the classroom with minimal preparation.
CESI is a community of fellow travellers using technology in education to improve student learning and teaching. Much of the interaction now takes place on the CESI mailing list, which has over 2000 members and is a great source of answers to tech-related questions, whether at the blackboard or in the server cabinet. They are a friendly bunch, so join up and say hi.