Chalktalk: News and views in education

Going online for serious study

It’s good to see some of those who have come through the pressure pot that is the Leaving Cert reaching a helpful hand down rather than pulling the ladder up. In the spirit of collaboration and learning from others, a group of first year students at NUI Maynooth has created Studynotes.ie. An e-learning hub for Leaving Cert, it uses technology for study, where students can post their revision notes, edit others’ notes and study with their peers. Teachers can publish articles and notes on the site.

"Having experienced the Leaving Cert last year we know the pressure students go through," says Warren Farrell, a first year politics and history student at NUIM, and one of the founders of Studynotes.ie. "All the content is free to access and is dependable and reliable. Our generation of young learners are digital natives and prefer to seek answers to problems not in books, but online."

Meantime, there’s specific online help for Leaving Cert accounting students in Accounting Nuggets, a new series of online tutorials. The student-staff collaboration from NUIG’s Cairnes School of Business and Economics at NUIG has step-by-step tutorials of bite-sized syllabus chunks. See nuigalway.ie/cairnes/ leavingcert.

And Edco, the Educational Company of Ireland’s revision aid, boasts that it has close to 10,000 downloads for its Leaving Cert Answers app, which has sample exam answers for six LC subjects, with marking scheme breakdowns, exam tips and suggested timings. The app is free and the 10,000th download wins €300 worth of vouchers, see leavingcertanswers.ie.

Celluloid lessons

Some children are fascinated by the notion of film certification, probably because of the lure of the forbidden (why am I not allowed to see an over-18s film?). So a children's workshop on film classification, That's Classified, with the Irish Film and Classification Office (IFCO), sounds nifty. It's part of the primary schools education programme in this year's Cinemagic Film and Television Festival in early June. The festival has a nursery strand, with animation screenings in nurseries, while for older children, the Junior Talent lab (ages 8-11) is a chance to meet industry professionals, including special effects make-up artists. As well as the classification workshop, there's one on copyright and respecting creativity, and another on what it's like to work in the Irish film industry, the range of jobs and just what it takes to make a film.

The education programme of screenings, including ‘The Legend of Sarila 3D’, ‘Anina’, ‘A Cat in Paris’ and ‘The Boy and the World’, also has events to teach children about the film industry, critique and analyse film and TV, or go to hands-on workshops on filmmaking, how to make a robot, learn about storyboarding, or make Muppets.

Cinemagic Film and Television Festival in Dublin (for under 12s) is on June 7th-13th. cinemagic.ie. Teacher information from Chris Shaw at chris@cinemagic.ie

Betty Mc Laughlin

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CBS Mullingar was elected president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors defeating former ASTI president Patricia Wroe. Mai Kerins, Ashton School, Blackrock, Co Cork, is vice president.