What better way to start a new year than with some new conferences. January began with MiTE 2018 in Galway where I presented on Virtual Fieldtrips and Coding. Both have become big interests of mine and I was honoured to have been asked to present at them. The great thing about conferences like MiTE is…
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For this, you will need the Sphero Edu app as well as a Sphero or SPRK+ This activity will demonstrate how you can use loops, functions, colours and sound to code a weather forecast. Each weather type is a separate function an example of which can be seen below. The full activity can be downloaded…
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The Learning Games project was an ERASMUS funded project which examined the use of gamification in education. The focus was to develop an App that would allow for gamification in all classrooms from secondary to university level. The project had partners from Spain, Germany, Ireland, Hungary and Turkey. I was lucky to be part of this…
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A few weeks back Apple launched the All About Me templates on the Apple Teacher Platform. The templates ask students to use the new shapes in Keynote to captures their favorite pastimes. These came at a perfect time just as my classes were starting but having students who were newbies to Keynote I waited a…
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It is a big deal to go with 1:1 devices. Whether you are considering iPads, chromebooks or other devices preparation is as important as the devices you choose. One big part of this move is planning the apps you use. There are thousands of apps out there and finding the right one might not always…
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The new academy structure. Call me a pole hugger but I was really unsure about how this was going to work. Having attended 5 institutes I did not want our geo to be split and was afraid that it just wouldn’t work and be too small. When we first heard that EMEIA was going to…
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I first learnt about Swift in 2014 and having had some initial exposure to it, it seemed like an easier version of other programming languages I had already used. Back then it was very early days and not really in the hands of the non-developer so I forgot about it for a while until it…
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Tuniversity recently released their iBook featuring Pharrel Williams song Happy. This iBook guides readers through the processes of composing Happy in Garageband. Having never used or even heard of Tuniversity before I wasn’t sure how good this resource would be but for €5.99 I figured it would be worth the try. The 79 pages of the…
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Released over Easter break Apple Clips was just a week too late to integrate into my full-time classes but just in time to integrate into my summer class and because the summer class was just 10 weeks long I figured I would integrate Clips as much as I could. So for anyone that had never…
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I have had Sphero since they were released 5 years ago back before they were readily available and back when they were seen as ‘toys’. I am lucky to have had a set of Sphero in my class for the last 4 years have had these on hand through the evolution of Sphero from a…
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