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Letter from Cambodia
I have been in Cambodia for three weeks, mostly working with SeeBeyondBorders, an NGO working to develop teaching capability in early grade primary schools. Cambodia is a country of contrasts. The people here are among the most friendly you will ever meet and yet they were subjected to a terrible genocide in the last decades of the 20th Century. The countryside is flat, characterised by jungle, rice fields and Asian cattle wandering the roadsides. And yet there is a vibrancy in the towns and cities like Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and Battambang. Everywhere you see the juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern. The banking system is good and you…
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Every Child Should Have a Good Teacher
The Value of Education It’s easy to overlook the obvious. We assume that childhood and schooling go hand in hand and you can’t have one without the other. Our experience during the pandemic reinforced our appreciation of the value of education. More than ever, we regard schools as fundamental to the proper functioning of society and teachers as essential workers. Why do we place such a high value on the quality of education especially for the young? Most would say that it’s obvious; our children deserve to be nurtured and developed so they can be successful and fulfil their potential as people. Children love to learn as much as they…
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5 Reasons to Study for a Degree in Early Childhood Education and Care
5 Reasons to study for a degree in Early Childhood Education and Care
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International Women’s Day: Maria Edgeworth’s Ideas on Education
As today is International Women's Day, I thought it appropriate to draw attention to the contribution of Irish woman and novelist, Maria Edgeworth to educational thinking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
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Blended not Scrambled – How Learning Happens by Design
We are living through a new iteration of the Digital World. The COVID-19 Pandemic has triggered unprecedented challenges for education. Students cannot get to class in the numbers, configurations and durations that were previously available. The role of the teacher has changed – changed utterly. To quote Yeats, “a terrible beauty is born”. Blended learning is here to stay. There are few positives to be gleaned from the awful circumstances in which we find ourselves. The trauma caused by the forced imposition of deep structural changes to education delivery should not be underestimated. Many students and teachers have struggled with the transition and many are left behind. However, we also…
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Education, Lifelong Learning and the Transformation of Society
There is much anger in the world today. People rage against injustice and inequality. Tempers flair as we struggle to protect the planet. Societies change and evolve and our values are transformed over time. Many practices such as slavery, colonialism and capital punishment were deemed acceptable in the past and considered abhorrent by today’s standards. Our current laws on discrimination and tolerance were hard fought and did not come about without argument and persuasion. Even with these, we know there is still much to do. The progressive process of transforming values in society is essentially an educative endeavour. Consider how our collective values have changed, even in the course of,…
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An Open Letter to Students Sitting Exams
Dear Writers, I know this can be a difficult and anxious time for students sitting examinations in college. The exam system is far from perfect and there are many valid criticisms of its ‘fitness-for-purpose’ and no doubt we will continue to improve how we assess learning in the future. However, like it or not you will soon be sitting in a controlled setting, for a limited time, to complete a previously unseen set of tasks related to your subject – in other words you will be taking an exam. So, here is some advice from the other side of the examination process – that of the college teacher tasked with…
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Reflection, Teaching Practice and Learning from Experience
Teaching practice or placement is one of the hallmarks of initial teacher education. As with many professions, the novice teacher is expected to learn through experience in an authentic setting. Student teachers are often required to write reflections on they have learned in placement. Many struggle with the task – wondering what actually constitutes reflective writing and why there is so much emphasis on the process of reflection. Many look to scholarship to provide answers and works by Dewey (1933, How We Think), Schön (1992, The Reflective Practitioner), Boud et al (1985, Reflection: Turning Experience Into Learning), Mezirow, (1990, Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood), Brookfield (2005, The Power of Critical…
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Reflections on 40 Years of Educational Technology
Completing the NCI National Forum for Teaching and Learning Index Survey caused me to reflect on my previous experiences with technology and education. On an October afternoon in 1981 in Theatre L in UCD, I placed a coin on the flat surface of an overhead projector and adjusted the lens to reveal a perfectly focused black disc on the giant screen. With that simple action I began my professional relationship with educational technology. Studying for the H-Dip in Education to qualify as a teacher, I was lucky enough to get part-time hours as an audiovisual demonstrator. The only downside was the cringe-worthy task of focusing the projector for the professor’s…
