Help Parent-Teacher Communication Bloom

The desire to enhance parental engagement seems to be permeating schools more and more. Immediately after taking over as Home School Community Liaison teacher last year, I naturally enough started looking for a suitable application that our school could use to further drive parental involvement in our establishment. Some teachers have previously experimented with edmodo and many are currently using ClassDojo as a behavioural management tool. The school also posts…

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CJ Fallon teams up with The Maths Tutor

Over the last number of years, education publishers have become more diverse in their offerings to students and teachers alike. The initial digital version of the text book, whilst addressing the problem of weighty schoolbags, did not really add a new dimension to learning overall. However, now publishers are looking at ways they can extend their digital content making it more interactive and engaging. Our school use Text and Tests…

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Microsoft Educator Community – Have you explored it yet?

Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a new website for their Educator Community with many new additions and features for educators around the world to enjoy and exploit. It is accessible at www.education.microsoft.com and offers teachers a wealth of resources and features including courses, classroom resources, lesson plans, options to connect with other educators and to connect your students with students around the world. The Educator Community seems to be developing continuously and provides…

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Appolearning

As an IT coordinator and Learning Support teacher in my school for the past 20 years, one of the questions that I am asked ALL of the time is…. “Do you have any software that you recommend for x….” Be it place value, reading, spelling or maths concepts… teachers and parents want to give their children practice on the skills in the classroom or at home without a lot of…

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Using ICT to create resources for history in the primary classroom

We have had the pleasure of updating our primary school history policy recently and we used ICT in a number of ways to create resources that may be used within the classroom. We found ICT particularly useful in creating a bank of resources on the local history of Harolds Cross, Dublin where the school is located. Visualiser, Digital Camera & Interactive Whiteboard     We have a number of history…

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New Resources for Asperger Students

At Giftedkids.ie we get enquiries from teachers wanting information on how best they can support their students with Aspergers. Often these students have the potential to excel academically but find everyday classroom encounters and playground scenarios incredibly challenging. Time and again the two issues that come up on our twice exceptional board is that of sensory processing and social skills development. For instance the sensory overload that children with Aspergers…

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Triptico Tools For Teachers

Triptico (www.triptico.co.uk ) is an excellent resource for teachers to use in conjunction with their interactive whiteboards that currently contains around 20 different interactive resources – all of which can be easily edited, adapted and saved for later use. Because Triptico is an application that runs on your computer (it runs on Adobe Air, so it’s compatible with both Macs and PCs), it can be used with any make and…

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Some Web Resources for Secondary Schools

As part of my professional development courses for teachers in secondary schools I put together a list of useful web resources. I thought it would be good to share this list with you. I hope you find some gems here and if you have others of note perhaps you would be kind enough to add to the list! 1. Resources www.scoilnet.ie www.french.ie www.german.ie www.physics.ie www.censusatschool.ie www.teachnet.ie www.pppst.com www.nli.ie www.irishtimes.com/archive www.jcsp.ssls.ie…

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Studyclix.ie

In April 2012 a new website was launched called Studyclix.ie. The site was built by a Luke Saunders, a Secondary School teacher in Sligo. The website is aimed at second level students and teachers and is free of charge. Studyclix.ie breaks up the main Junior and Leaving Cert. subjects into curricular topics which links to all past exam question​s with marking schemes attached. Another useful feature of the site is…

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BETT 2012 & Free Programming Tools

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the BETT show in London. This has now become an annual pilgrimage to view what is new in the world of technology and education. At first glance this year’s show didn’t appear very different from other years but when you went under the surface there were some notable gems. In particular there was an increase in “free” quality resources for schools, particularly…

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