Mr. Steven Daly:

That probably leads on quite well to Senator Moran's question on expanding on the teacher training. One of the seven recommendations mentioned earlier was to ensure that teachers have the capabilities to make meaningful use of information and communications technology, ICT, in a classroom. That recommendation was expanded upon to build a learning framework - essentially a training framework - for teachers to be able to do a certain amount of pretesting to figure out where they were on the framework and then to figure out what kind of training courses they needed to gain the confidence to be able to use the tools about which Mr. John Fitzsimons was talking. While this has not really happened yet in Ireland, Camara Ireland is in the process of trying actively to develop a teacher training framework whereby we do not have a set course one does, but we have a number of courses and partnerships with a number of organisations such as CoderDojo, which Deputy Cannon knows so well or Bridge21, of which some members might have heard, and a myriad of other third sector organisations that we can bring together to collaborate on delivering a selection of training courses to teachers, as they identify the need to have that level of confidence and skills to be able to use the tools about which Mr. John Fitzsimons was talking.

The key point to realise is it is not a matter of training someone as to how to use a particular tool. There is no particular piece of software in which one can train an educator, a youth worker or a teacher that is the piece of software. What that teacher or educator needs are the skills to be able to find one of the hundreds of pieces of available software that are free or paid for, to figure out whether they are any good and if they suit the needs of their students - be they special-needs students or in mainstream education - and to figure out whether that piece of software is applicable, then to figure out how to use it and then to feel sufficiently confident to actually use it in the classroom. That is the point at which we are aiming here. We are not talking about simply giving people a set of skills whereby one ticks the box and says that is grand as every teacher now knows how to use X, Y and Z. That is not the solution we need. What we need, just like we need for our young people, is for people to have skills to teach themselves, to learn for themselves, to be able to figure out what is good and bad and then to figure out how to use it and deliver it in the appropriate context. That is the key differential.