Report from ICT in Education at Tipperary Institute

Last Saturday I attended the ICT in Education conference at Tipperary Institute for my first time and have to say it was one of the best events I've been to in a long time. We - Daynuv - were there primarily to provide virtual presence for Daithi O'Murchu's keynote address but I thoroughly enjoyed all the talks and workshops I attended, in particular those dealing with introductory programming options for children. Indeed the Scratch workshop with John Hartery was a highlight for me --

"It was clear after 5 minutes that John is a gifted teacher as he had every attendee happily programming the cutesy Scratch mascot to jump and dance across the screen in response to various keyboard and mouse inputs. I was genuinely blown away by the capabilities of this application and started day-dreaming about the difference it could have made to my path through 3rd level education. In CBS Tramore John uses Scratch as in introduction to programming and then progresses to Alice followed by BlueJ, the common denominator again being the emphasis on visual development environments. For anyone wishing to investigate further John has kindly published his course notes on Moodle."

Read the full report here.

Comments

[Chris]

Have to say John was a fantastic teacher, he was always able to enthuse everyone in the class, had him for 6 years as a teacher when I attended CBS, I can only commend him for all his hard work, without it students in Tramore would not have a CS course as a leaving cert option!

[James Corbett]

Hi Chris, thanks for stopping by. And very good of you to chime in in praise of John. I feel good teachers should get better appreciation in society in general and even while I'm only going on a 40 minute workshop I could tell that John Hartery is up there with the best.