[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Veronica,

Welcome to the course. It’s certainly an exciting time ahead for you and the children in your school. I can tell you from firsthand experience that both you and the pupils will get so much from using the Chromebooks. They are a powerful tool which will allow you to approach the curriculum in a more varied fashion. It is an excellent way of sending work home for learning, with videos, audio clips, etc. attached. I hope you will be able to get plenty of ideas for using them in the subsequent modules.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Peter,

Given that you will be working in SET next year, I would agree that the Immersive Reader is a tool you could get a lot of use out of. It can be of huge benefit to EAL learners and those with a specific learning difficulty like dyslexia. Even for fluent readers, the ability to pick out different parts of speech may assist those who are struggling with the writing process. As you have also said, it is a great collaborative tool. If you were taking a literacy or numeracy group from a senior class, you could certainly incorporate it into a collaborative venture.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Orla,

Certainly as it is your first year working in SET, there will be lots of things that are new to you. Digital technologies can be really useful in supporting children with additional needs, but you will need time to pick out the ones that will work for you. OneNote could be really useful in helping to organise work for those with DCD – the colour coded files could match coloured stickers on the books and copies for that subject, etc. In addition, Immersive Reader really would be a ‘go to’ tool for work with EAL students. The picture dictionary and translate feature would greatly assist their language acquisition and development.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Kathleen,

There is certainly a premium on real world problem-solving and innovation. It is probably one of the 21st century skills that is most relevant but most difficult to obtain. The context of the problem is the all important factor. Once it is rooted in something relevant to the lives of the children / the locality, it becomes much easier. The Christmas Market activity sounds like an activity that could really touch on this. There is so much cross-curricular learning and preparing speeches for securing sponsorship, etc. is a very important literacy skill. Within the activity, you are also hitting on the skills of collaboration and skilled communication.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Brendan,

Thank you for sharing your experiences of using digital technologies for the creation of short movies and digital storytelling. I have used tablets for digital storytelling (Adobe Spark) in the junior classes and found that it made teaching the narrative genre so much easier. Being able to orally voice over and act out their illustrations was such a game-changer. It’s possible to go even further in the senior classes and the Fís Film Project is a great initiative to get involved with if you had the time. The use of Croke Park hours in your school seems to be really pro-active and beneficial for staff development.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Liz,

Thank you for sharing your slideshow outlining a fact file of all of our presidents to date. I am glad that the course has provided you with more confidence in using the Google tools. I am a huge advocate for them and feel they have had a huge impact on our school over the past four years. Docs and Slides (and all the Google tools) are very easy to use and require little additional training. The children pick things up very quickly, and consistent use of Chromebooks / the Chrome browser will bring them on so much. I wish you the very best with the integration of the Google tools going forward.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Laura,

As you have pointed out, collaboration is a crucial life skill and one that the children in our classes will require throughout their working lives. As teachers, we can see the value of it on a daily basis. Collaboration can often be a buzz word that involves multiple people working independently at the same table. This is not true collaboration – the integration of digital technology can help transform this into a truly collaborative activity with shared decision making and responsibility. The rubrics provided in this module are an excellent resource to guide us in designing these learning experiences.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Orla,

Welcome to the course. I’m delighted that the content of the module has encouraged you to give both Sway and Forms a go with your class next year. They are both excellent tools from both an assessment and content creation point of view. The immediate feedback and data collection that Forms offers is it’s clear selling point. It can give you so much information in such a short space of time and can greatly increase productivity.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Claire,

You are right to refer to the use of digital technologies as a ‘scaffold’ for learning in some cases. For those with SEN, this is particularly true. In terms of SSE, you could certainly look at how digital technologies are being used to promote accessilbility and inclusion within the classroom. This would be a very beneficial focus, and quite specific. It would tie in neatly with the domains of ‘learner experiences’ and ‘teacher’s individual practice’.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Kathleen,

A number of years ago, I had the same reservations about One Note. While I was proficient with the other Microsoft apps, I was reluctant to try OneNote as it was different and outside my comfort zone. However, it is a really fantastic tool. While it is too advanced for junior infants to use and navigate, it could be used by teachers for the creation of resources, some of which could be distributed to parents for revision purposes.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Matthew,

Thank you for submitting your quiz. Within this, we can see both the simplicity and the beauty of using Forms as an assessment tool. This quiz would clearly highlight those who are able to complete linear equations and those who are not. The quiz itself could be created in c.5-10 minutes and can be shared/re-used over a number of years. It’s certainly a time saver when viewed in that context.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Owen,

Thank you for your contribution here and for outlining your use of many different educational apps and websites in the classroom. You have really painted the picture of technology being used to improve the learning experience of the pupils in your class. YouTube is a powerful educational resource that often gets a bad reputation – the advertisments that can pop up are often inappropriate and this can turn people off using it in the classroom. However, by simply putting a ‘-‘ (dash) between the ‘t’ and the ‘u’ in ‘youtube’, any video will play in full screen with no advertisements.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Alan,

One of the key benefits you have listed around the integration of digital technology is the fact that it can create ‘higher levels of engagement’ and ‘memorable learning experiences’. As educators, this is all we can hope to provide for our students. Your attitude of continuing to build on initial successes is commendable and will certainly steer you on the right path in the years ahead. The key is to try to make incremental improvements and additions to practice each year. The best thing about SSE is that it can be specifically tailored to your school’s needs and allows you to plan for your own interventions and CPD.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Ellen,

OneNote can certainly be used as a space for the creation of student portfolios – these can be multimodal and incorporate embedded documents, images of written work, audio files, etc. It also offers the potential for teacher feedback to be provided and acted upon in a meaningful manner and allows for collaboration and co-operation with other students in the class. Learning material can also be made more accessible through built-in features such as colour coding and Immersive Reader.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Karen,

The fact that your school has prioritised digital technologies and is seeking to put a plan in place to get the most of them is an important first step that really puts you on the road to success. Having a dedicated team is crucial, as it is too vast an area for just one person to be driving. This will also help keep the message consistent and ensure that it is multiple people pulling towards certain tools, rather than just one. In many ways we can be ‘sheep’ in schools – the more people we have travelling in a particular direction the more likely we are to increase the numbers following.

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