Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Following on from Professor Mac Craith's contribution, which was fascinating, I saw a teacher presenting at a conference recently on that very subject matter, extending digital learning beyond what one would normally consider the traditional areas of digital - maths, science, physics and so on. He is the principal of a national school in the south east where all the children from day 1, junior infants, use iPads. About a week before they began to study the Irish Famine, he told them they were about to study an area they had never studied before. He asked them to make a three minute video on the Irish Famine for the next week and put it up on Youtube. These third class pupils had the skills to do this and he saw all the videos and the various interpretations the following week. They had all gone and researched this - they had pulled content from Youtube, Wikipedia and other locations, and created their own three minute film on the Irish Famine. The engagement, discussion and debate those third class children had about the Famine was so much enhanced and enriched by their own research preceding that intervention. At the end of that class, the teacher said, it dawned upon him that he was no longer teaching history, he was developing historians. That is the subtlety and power of what is possible when one uses technology properly in a classroom. Following on from the resources Professor Mac Craith and others are making available, that is what is possible if we get this right in the future.