Immersive Education with ICTEdu

Set aside Saturday the 6th of May to join other educators on the Thurles campus of LIT to discuss what truly “immersive education” means. Distinctly different perspectives of immersive education will unfold in several workshops and keynote speeches, with a full range of deep discussion and hands-on in break-out sessions throughout the day. As is traditional during the ICT in Education Conference series, you can count on the timetable carving out segments to meet and learn from fellow educators and valued exhibitors.

On the run-up to the #ictedu conference, several participants have offered their perspectives about how they have made dry academic material more engaging by immersing students in clever ways. Those academically sound techniques are often more important than wholescale integration to virtual worlds or mixed reality environments. The ICT in Education Conference will underscore the essential nature of immersive education pedagogy in several discussion sessions.

During the conference and workshops, the organisers of the ICT in Education Conference will highlight best practices, technology platforms, training and education programmes and collaborative support for training systems and fully immersive environments such as caves, domes and 360 cameras.

By the time the ICT in Education Conference wraps up, learners will be able to return home with a range of immersive learning technologies. Coder Dojo organisers will discover ways to focus exclusively on the use of one form of immersive learning technology (i.e., VR or Minecraft or Scratch). Or they could start to integrate more than one technology into the current Coder Dojo groups. These same creative ideas will prove very helpful when planning activities for the new Junior Cycle syllabus.

You can be part of this exciting day-long leap into immersive education during the ICT in Education Conference by registering on Eventbrite now.

Continuing an important @ictedu tradition, a pre-conference Maker Meet takes place on Friday May 5th. This meet places an emphasis on problem based learning based on hands-on, collaborative learning.

To stay informed about the 2017 ICT in Education Conference, please follow @ictedu on Twitter​, like our Facebook page​ or check out the #ictedu hashtag on social networks.​​

Teachers attending the 2015 ICT in Education Conference will discover a "maker" theme running through the presentations and workshops. In fact, this year's conference hammers home the theme with the tagline "Make. Bake. Take." Keynote speakers include Dr. Steve Bunce and Mary Loftus.
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Register to attend

Make means the emphasis of the event centres around creativity. Presenters will share observations about things they have made, attributing their work to original work they reimagined, repurposed, and reused. We want to celebrate the essential roles played by creativity and originality in our primary and secondary school curricula by promoting the idea of "make" as a major theme. For our part, the ICT in Education Conference will upload maker objects onto Github where they can be downloaded and forked by schools anywhere in the world.​

Bake means a process. You start with raw ingredients (the things you made or reused) and produce something just like a pastry chef would bake apples into a tart or a clever parent might bake a cottage pie from things in the fridge. During the ICT in Education Conference, we want to see people sharing their edtech recipes and talking about the key ingredients of their classroom workflow.

To Take something away means you leave with valuable ideas. Perhaps you download the #ictedu ePub or follow the #ictedu Link List to slide decks, OneDrive collections or Github repositories. To be worth spending your time on a Saturday in a professional development session, you need to know you're taking away inside information. And if you attend in person, you want to come away with renewed friendship, with the voices of people you follow on social media, and with professional connections that you may want to develop into real friendships over time.

As in the past, a pre-conference opener takes place on Friday April 24th. It will be a Maker Meet run by Mags Amond and Bian a Ní Ghrógáin, the Ying and the Yang of marvelous creations. People who have survived workshops with Mags and Bianca enjoy enhanced appreciation of inanimate objects such record cards, fruit, pasta, wire and alligator clips.

For more details of the main event or the Maker Meet, please monitor the #ictedu hashtag on both Facebook and Twitter.​