Spotted Rays, Hammerhead Sharks and Glogster

During our holidays in Portugal this year we went to Zoomarine - an aquatic theme park which my son and daughter loved.  We went to shows with dolphins, seals, tropical birds and birds of prey, wandered through exhibition areas, watched a movie about conservation in the 4D cinema and visited the aquarium.

 This turned out to be the highlight of the trip, as we saw many species of fish in various sizes of tanks from the very small, to those which had a shark swimming about, seeming to happily coexist with many other species.  We spent a lot of time watching the shark in his tank and then moved on to the final tank which contained a small separate section with sea urchins, starfish and a few other species and a larger section which had rays happily swimming about.  This last tank was the only one in which you could touch the fish.  We spent ages at this tank during our first visit of the day to the aquarium and even longer on our second trip before we left  My 9 year old daughter was very taken by the rays and made a beeline for the stuffed spotted ray in the shop before we left.

Over the following couple of days I got many questions about rays so I suggested that she could do a little project on rays when we got home.  I thought no more of it but on the evening we got home my son and herself Googled pictures of Spotted rays and he showed her how to save the images.  A folder was created for storing the pictures, a notebook was found and so began the research project.  Over the last few days she’s been Googling more pictures and some information about the rays.  She decided that she would find out what they eat, who their predators are (I didn’t even know that she knew what a predator was!) and where they live.  These pieces of information were written in the notebook before being put into a Glog using Glogster.  I set up a Glogster account for her and other than doing this and showing her how to add images and text to her glog I have had no other input to the project.

Seeing her work on this project has been a joy to watch.  She’s been doing bits of research and writing down what she’s learned, playing with her toys and her friends and then coming back to add some of her information and images into the Glog.  She asked me at 9 in the morning on Wednesday if she could go downstairs to Google the predators of the spotted ray  When she started the Glog first she was very unsure of how to add the images and text but as she came back to it over the few days her confidence grew and the calls of “Mam, how do I?” dwindled until she finished the Glog on Friday.  The glog has been printed and is now in pride of place in her room.  You can check out the fruits of her labours here.  By yesterday my 12 year old son decided he wanted to have a go at creating a Glog using Glogster so we set up an account for him and with a little help from his sister he was up and running.  His chosen topic was hammerhead sharks.  Have a look at his glog here.

The Drool Room

I returned from holidays to find a copy of Ira Socol’s book ‘The Drool Room’ in the post, a gift from Pam Moran.  I found myself unable to put it down, similar to ‘The Housekeeper + the Professor‘ but that’s where the similarity ends.  I’m finding it hard to describe my thoughts on the book – it is such a personal, moving and brutal book in some ways as Ira described his experiences through school and through his life.  To say that his journey through school was difficult doesn’t even come close as he was a kid with Dyslexia and Attention Disorder Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) back in the days when very little was known or recognised about these disorders.  I’ll be upfront here and declare my lack of knowledge of these disorders, particularly ADHD, but this book has given me a real insight into the problems that so many children have, as they attempt to make their way through an education system that may not work for them.  I find books written from a child’s perspective, which deal with difficult topics, an uncomfortable read so the first half of Ira’s book was difficult – I was like the child behind the sofa looking out though her fingers at a scary movie!  But it drew me in and I couldn’t put it down.  I’ve been very lucky, both in my own education and that of my children so far, that we have all had an easy run in school.  I know it’s not like that for everyone though, and reading this book brought me back to my own schooldays, as I recalled some of my classmates being ridiculed, made to feel stupid, physically pushed around and worse by some teachers.

As Ira moved on to give an insight into his life after school, and his time as a cop in New York City, you got the sense of a man on the edge managing to hang on by his fingertips and stay in control.  The brutal honesty which which Ira tells his story is what makes this book so powerful for me.   Telling your story warts and all, laying your soul bare for all to see, is not an easy thing to do, and yet this is what Ira has done.  What also really worked for me was the novel in stories format – it isn’t a book with a very distinct start, middle and end – instead it crosses over with snippets of stories which give insights and creates lots of questions, some answered some not.   For me it was a book of two halves, his early school years and his time as a cop with very little connecting the two or extending beyond that and yet that’s all that’s needed.  At the end we get a tiny peak at the motivation behind the book; reaching out to other kids who are struggling, with an authenticity that you can’t argue with.  And this is the Ira that I have begun to know through my various interactions, both virtual and in person.

My final thought on the book is I suppose the motivation that drives many of us – our children.  There are many characters and relationships dealt with in the book but the most intangible of the characters in some ways is the author’s son and yet there he is at all the crucial points in the latter half of the book.  So much is left unsaid and yet what little is said says it all.

School Celebrations

I was lucky enough to be at celebrations in three different schools over the past few weeksand I was really struck with how important these celebrations are to a school and the amount of work that goes into having them run smoothly.

The celebrations started in the Convent Primary School Nenagh where the cause of the celebrations was 25 years of the school band.  Sr. Stephanie, founder of the school band was the guest of honour.  The highlight of the celebration took place outside, where the band performed Sr. Stephanie’s suite, music which was composed by the girls specially for the occasion.

Later that same day I went along to the official opening of Silvermines National School.  After more than 10 years of planning and preparation the new school was finally started this time last year and was completed in March.  Then came time for the celebrations when the community came together for the official opening.  We were blessed with a beautiful evening in the middle of a typical wet summer in Ireland!  What really came through from the people who spoke on the night was how important the support of the local community for the school has been.  That support was very visible again on the night as people came together to celebrate the beautiful new school.

The final celebration was my son’s graduation mass to mark the end of his time in primary school.  My previous post on this momentous occasion can be found here.

The common denominators for all of these school celebrations were the input of the children and the links between a local school and the community in which it finds itself.

Social Media Day 2012

I found out about Social Media Day from Mike Cox.  There was a tenuous plan to have some kind of event in LIT which would link to the event planned in CIT.  Mike asked me to have a think about Twitter with a view to answering the following questions:

1. What is it?
2. How do I use it?
3. How does it work with other social media I use?
4. What next?

As it turned out the plan for the event in LIT did not come to fruition but you can find my Prezi with my thoughts on Twitter here.

On Social Media Day I followed the event in CIT through Twitter initially and then got sucked in to watch the live stream.  Hearing the panel in the after lunch session, discussing how social media has helped them deal with either their own health issues, or those of their children, gave me a very different perspective on social media.  Hearing Alex talking about how her blog helped her as she fought cancer, hearing Eoin speak about how his family used Twitter, Facebook and blogs in different ways as they dealt with the reality of their daughter having a serious heart condition and hearing Lisa talk about creating the Grace app that would give her autistic daughter a way to communicate, really stopped me in my tracks.

Later in the day I saw a link to a live Google Hangout that had been organised as part of the Cork Social Media Day event.  Jane Boyd and April Ennis in Canada , Greg McQueen in Denmark, Marti Konstant in the US and Paul O’Mahony, Bernie Goldbach and Mike Cox in Ireland were involved at various times during the hangout.  The first hour of the hangout involved a multiway chat between all of the above which demonstrated the power of Google+ hangouts to connect people around the world.  For me the chat really got interesting when it was reduced to just Jane and Greg after an hour.  As they discussed social media and what it means to them it was like they were discussing my own experiences of social media.  How getting involved in social media is like learning a foreign language, how it can be a lonely experience at the start and yet how it is worth persevering because of the generosity of people on social media.

As Greg and Jane discussed beginning to engage with people and having people engage with you, building relationships through Twitter backed up with hangouts and before you know it you’re in it, it really resonated with me as this has been my exact experience.  Signing up for Twitter and not doing much for a while, then retweeting other people’s tweets which started the engagement, obsessing over how to respond when someone actually tweeted me directly, being in awe of people with thousands of followers and who have sent thousands of tweets and yet now, here I am completely embedded in Twitter, wondering how I will survive without it for my 2 weeks of holidays.  It’s no secret that I love Twitter but I find that generally the people I interact with most are those whom I have met in person or whom I have hung out with via Skype or Google+ hangouts as I find that this gives an added dimension to our interactions.  When the chat turned to the idea that we as humans don’t like the feeling of being alone it echoed the sentiments of the panel earlier in the day and for many this is what social media gives them – a way to connect with people regardless of geographical location.

The discussion point between Jane and Greg that I’ll leave you with is the real power of social media which has people discussing what ‘we’ did rather than what ‘I’ did.  Social media in it’s many forms makes collaboration so much easier and to quote Jane it is ‘incredibly inspiring to collaborate with people around the world’.  This has certainly been my experience whether it was my involvement with Liam Dunphy and many others on the #ccGlobal Project or interacting with Ira Socol, Pam Moran, Conor Galvin and Bernie Goldbach in the preparations for the ICT in Education conference.  To echo Greg, putting your ideas out there and having them picked up by others and added to should be viewed as a positive rather than a losing of something in the sharing.

For some ideas of other social media applications to try out check out the infographic below

image from  http://www.integralseo.com/images/socialmedia.png