[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Derek,

Thank you for your post and for sharing your Google Form on Synonyms with us. It’s clear tat you have been well able to navigate the permission settings, creating multiple choice questions, and assigning point values to each question. These are all staple skills to develop within Forms, and it’s clear that you have mastered them. As you have said, it’s important to start small with the children in our class. As they get more comfortable using the tool, they may be able to different question types like text answers, drop-down menus, etc.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Pól,

Welcome to the course and thank you for your contribution here. I really like how you have highlighted the importance of teaching development education to children, by placing a key focus on how the themes relate to their own lives. All too often, we can see poverty and inequalities as problems that are rooted in other parts of the world. However, many of these issues exist in Ireland, potentially within the community that their own school is located in. This makes it all the more important that these themes are explored with the children in our classes.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Mairead,

Thank you for your post and for the One Note notebook attached to the post. Within your submission, it is clear that you have been able to navigate a large variety of the features within One Note. Including text, images and learning intentions around the province of Leinster, as well as attaching a link to a PowerPoint presentation shows very good skills with this tool. Your Notebook has the potential to be used as a perfect aid for a ‘flipped classroom’ approach, something that the 365 apps really lend themselves to.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Helen,

Thanks for your post. As you have said, the SETT model really complements the school support plans that would already be in place for children with SEN. The beauty of both the SETT and School Support plans are that they allow you to take each individual child on their own merits, and apply various interventions that are specifically targeted to address an area of need. Being able to create such bespoke plans and solutions can be hugely beneficial for individual children.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Jennifer,

Thank you for your post and welcome to the course. It is great to have participants bring experience from many different settings and perspectives to this course. It’s clear that you can already see a huge benefit in incorporating digital technologies into your classroom learning environment. The fact that your students are comfortable using the available devices should make the use of tasks through Google Classroom reasonably seamless. The subsequent modules will outline how some of the individual Google apps can be used to create tasks similar to those you have mentioned in your overview.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Mairead,

Welcome to the course and thank you for your overview of both Forms and Sway, as well as your submitted links. Both 365 offerings have huge potential for both classroom and administrative use in schools. From your Forms quiz, it’s clear you have been able to edit permissions, create multiple choice questions and assign point values to each. This is such a time-saving exercise when it comes to corrections, and the digital element can produce data graphs that are easy for us to read and interpret. You have also highlighted the anonymous nature of Forms (when required), and this is a huge bonus when gathering feedback from students or parents.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Roisin,

Thank you for your post and for sharing this experience with us. I think it was an excellent idea to facilitate a group discussion on the war so that the children had some idea of what their new classmate was fleeing, and different ways in which they could make them feel welcome. It’s always so heart-warming to see children go out of their way to help  new child fit in, and it certainly seems like that was the case within your class.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Roisin,

Thanks for your post. It’s very interesting that many others on tis course have also chosen Aistear as a way in which they saw gender stereotyping to be quite prevalent within schools. Given these children are in infant classes, it just goes to show how ingrained this is, almost from birth. You have suggested many great ideas for getting children thinking around these issues. I love using big books to explore various themes within SPHE, and this is another area that would lend itself to be covered in this way.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Stephanie,

Think you for your post and for sharing your experiences with us. It is great to see the variety of the work being done up and down the country by various outreach centres and organisations. This is really complementing the excellent work going on in schools. Like so many others, you have outlined various specific steps you take to ensure these children feel included. The inclusion of significant songs to these children and their culture is a lovely idea within Christmas Concerts and other shows.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Aoife,

Welcome to the course and thanks for your contribution to the forum here. I think you have raised an excellent point in terms of using development education themes to build empathy and tolerance in children. It’s so important to acknowledge contrasting opinions and ways of doing things, with the key being mutual respect between all parties. This is a key skill for modern life, and one which can easily be interwoven into some of the main themes that you will focus on in subsequent modules.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Emma,

Thank you for your post and for sharing your own experiences on the forum. I am particularly taken by the ‘inclusion day’ you have described. It’s amazing to think that as many as 37 different nationalities can be present in the same school. It really does signify the open and inclusive society that Ireland has become in the main. I love the idea of all children being able to share a piece of their identity and for all people in the school to be exposed to small snippets of information about the places they have come from. All of this, I’m sure, will contribute to an excellent and inclusive atmosphere throughout the school.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Leona,

Thank you for your post. It is very interesting that your Aistear experiences mirror a lot of what other people on this course have also experienced. It is not an isolated issue, and seems to be very prevalent in society. I like how you have highlighted the ‘non-conformity’ of groups of females to gender norms. In recent years, the movement behind female involvement in sport has thankfully brought about huge changes. Young girls now can see many role models in a sporting context, and there is far more coverage of female sport on mainstream television. Last night, the country watched the women’s relay team run so heroically, and this will provide huge motivation for young girls seeking to follow in these footsteps.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your post and your engagement throughout the course. Farmers really seem to be bearing much of the brunt of the extreme weather conditions in recent years. Waterlogged lands and ruined crops are just some issues that they face. Children experiencing this at home will know the devastation that weather can cause to livelihoods. This gives them a real purpose to bring about actionable change that will help prevent these and make them less common as they grow up. I like your idea around debating, and getting the children to really dig deeper into the causes and solutions of this, arguing their thoughts and rationale in the process.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Ciara,

Welcome to the course and thank you for your post here. When new to something, there are always questions and teething problems, so feel free to come back with any further questions. I will attempt to outline how you may set up the accounts for individual children. They will all get an account within the school domain, e.g. (@school.ie). I always work with their first name initial and full surname (e.g. jbloggs@scool.ie). To set up an account, you will need access to the ‘admin’ suite, or get the school administrator to do this. The ‘admin’ can be found in the menu on the nine dots at the top right of your Chrome browser if you have access. When you are logged in as admin, you just press ‘Add New User’ and fill in the details. It is very straightforward once you have done it a couple of times, but the initial few may not seem that way. If you were setting up an entire school, there is an Excel that you can download and import all names from Aladdin, etc. but that might be overkill and more work if you are only setting up a few accounts / a single class.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Bill,

Thank you for your post. You have followed on from other members of this course in analysing the impact that the choice of toys and modes of play can have on the attainment of males and females in the shape and space strand in maths. The research backs this up, and points out that boys significantly outperform girls in this area, and it very much reads as an outlier within the data. I posted a video clip from Professor Douglas Clements earlier in this forum which highlights the rationale behind these differences, as well as getting us to think about potential solutions to this.

[Author]

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