The State of Technology in Education 2019/20 – Promethean

Promethean recently released their fourth annual report on “The State of Technology in Education 2019/20” which gives insights and trends on important factors relating to edtech. Contributors to this survey included over 2,000 teachers, school principals/heads, deputy principals/heads, IT managers and support staff from primary schools, secondary schools and other educational institutions across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Technology is seen as essential in a digital world. Some concerns reported…

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#techweek2020 – tech & talent unite

TECH WEEK_2020 runs from March 28th to April 3rd. TECH WEEK is Ireland’s nationwide annual festival of technology aimed at students, parents and the general public and designed to offer experiential engagement to primary and secondary students which will allow them to develop their interest in technology, advance creativity and innovation while also letting them have a lot of fun in the process! Tech Week is made up of a…

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Our Evolving Learning Landscape #cesicon 2020

Online registration is now open for the 2020 annual conference of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI), which takes place on 29th February in Athlone’s Institute of Technology. The CESI conference has always been a calendar highlight for those interested in digital learning and this year’s programme doesn’t disappoint. The theme of this year’s conference is “2020: Our Evolving Learning Landscape” and will showcase (As always) the ever…

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STEPS Engineers Week 2020

This year’s Engineers Week runs from Saturday February 29th to March 6th and aims to surpass 2019’s event reach, when more than 800 activities were organised countrywide with over 99,000 participants. Now in its 14th year, Engineers’ Week 2020 already boasts an extensive (and evolving) programme for primary and secondary students and STEPS are currently calling on schools, businesses, third-level institutions, libraries, outreach organisations, local authorities and other organisers, to…

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Safer Internet Day 2020 – Together for a Better Internet

Safer Internet Day 2020 is just around the corner, Tuesday next, February 11th. Now in it’s 17th year Safer Internet Day (SID) started out as an EU wide initiative to promote a safer internet for all users, especially young people. From cyberbullying to social media, each year Safer Internet Day aims to raise awareness of emerging online issues and chooses a topic reflecting current concerns. This year’s event continues with…

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BETT 2020 – The Future of Work and its Implication for Education

The annual pilgrimage to the BETT Show took place last week for many Irish educators and it was great to meet so many people involved in digital learning at the event.  This year saw a new layout and design and it certainly seemed more manageable and we had more space to move around.  As always there was lots to see and hear at the event.  While there was no major…

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ESB Science Blast is Back

Fresh from the inaugural Science Blast in 2019 when over 12,000 primary children North and South participated, ESB Science Blast is back for 2020 and aims to significantly increase participation among 8-12 year olds by hosting new and improved shows and workshops, that will engage your entire class with STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) interactively… What is Science Blast? Science is everywhere and ESB Science Blast encourages children to…

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ACM SIGCSE Comes to Ireland…

The latest ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) chapter, SIGCSEire,  was officially launched this week  in the UCD School of Computer Science. The ACM was founded in 1947 and is the world’s largest scientific and education computing society with nearly 100,000 members.  was founded in 1970 and has nearly 3,000 members. SIGCSE is the third largest and second oldest of nearly 40 ACM…

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#HourOfCode 2019

The Hour of Code is back for 2019, December 9th – 15th… Now entering its 7th year, the Hour of Code movement continues to grow and so far has reached over 100 million students in more than 180 countries across 45 languages, and code.org, who organise the global event claim that over 800 million hours have been hosted online since 2012. What is the Hour of Code? The Hour of…

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New resources from Microsoft

Microsoft recently released a series of video tutorials aimed at beginner coders who are interested in learning Python. There are 44 videos in this series and all of them are available through YouTube. The videos are co-presented by Christopher Harrison and Susan Ibach; Christopher is a senior programming manager at Microsoft, and Susan is from Microsoft’s AI gaming division. Christopher acknowledges that they don’t cover everything there is to know…

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