Poster for #ictedu at LIT
LIKE MANY OF the clever teachers I've met in Ireland, I know I will enjoy the Maker Meet scheduled for Friday, April 24, 2015, on the campus of LIT-Thurles. [1] It's run by Mags Amond and Bianca Ní Ghrógaín and an essential part of a weekend involving the ICT in Education Conference and Workshops. [2]
When people see the poster (above) they often ask what we mean by the tagline "Make. Bake. Take." Ultimately, those words will be defined in context by presenters for the audience and hands-on skills shared during workshops during the all-day main conference on Saturday, April 25, 2015. But I thought I could offer my perspective in this blog post.
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 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.
If these kinds of things appeal to you, please consider registering for #ictedu today and marking your calendar for the main event on Saturday, April 25,2015.
1. You can find the campus of LIT-Thurles at the Racecourse Roundabout, Nenagh Road, Thurles, County Tipperary, Ireland.
2. Please visit http://www.lit.ie/ictedu for more information and follow the cross-talk by listening to #ictedu on Twitter.
[Bernie Goldbach joins Pamela O'Brien as an organiser of the 2015 version of the ICT in Education Conference on the Thurles campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.]
