We now have thirteen tutors available to work with CLiC Community partners offering a range of new courses. Our mobile unit has just been successfully deployed in the Aósog project www.aosog.ie and our school partners have got together to help us undertake a new role and relationship with them in light of funding sources and DIT expectations moving forward. Basically we’ve been busy the last three months.

CLiC Community

Train The Trainer

Congratulations to our first group of students who completed the FETAC Level 6 Train The Trainer course in December. Between them they got 3 distinctions and 2 merits. Well done to everyone. Our second group finished up last week and we look forward to hearing how they got on soon.

ECDL

The introduction of ECDL has proved a very positive addition to the range of courses we offer. Congratulations to the students from Ringsend who were the first to drop in to Dominick Street and successfully complete their initial set of exams. Our second cohort of students from Holy Family Parish Centre, Prussia Street did their exams on Thursday 4th April. Groups from Dolphin House, The Bungalow in Cherry Orchard and the Gateway project will be starting on their ECDL journey in the next few weeks.

Parents’ Classes

Our first parents’ class this year started in St. Audoen’s National School at the beginning of the month. The tutor there is Carol Ryan and the parents will be getting a solid introduction to computers by following the Fastrack to IT MyIT and Ecert syllabi.  If your school requires computer training for parents, please contact us.

Wave 2.0

As we are mentioning Fastrack to IT: the organisation was involved in an EU project designed to meet the needs of Senior Citizens through Web 2.0 technologies.

The project has developed:

• a Roadmap for Social Computing by Senior Citizens that will help education providers and trainers assess, plan and apply Web 2.0 tools into learning of senior citizens,
• a set of innovative learning tools and resources designed to help older learners acquire new skills necessary to use Web 2.0 tools and use their potential to fulfill their own social and personal needs,
• training materials and resources for trainers which can be used to help older adults learn how to use Web 2.0 technologies to meet their needs.

We will be working with a number of groups using the Wave 2.0 training materials soon. The material will also form the basis of an intermediate course that we are developing.

CLiC Schools

Meeting Teachers

Thanks to all those teachers and principals who responded to our invitation to attend our meeting on 6th February. We are in the process of evaluating all the great ideas that were expressed on the day and working on a strategy for the future. For those of you who couldn’t make it and feel there is an area that DIT could be working with you more closely on, then please do contact us.

eFuture

We are in the process of organising an information session for secondary teachers on another new Fastrack to IT initiative called eFuture http://www.fit.ie/index.php?page=efuture. This project aims at developing new methods for the use of ICTs, Web 2.0 and Mobile Learning which mainstream education and training providers can adopt to support large numbers of Youth at Risk to improve their capacity to enter the labour market and to progress to further education. If you haven’t been contacted about this and are interested in trying the programme in your school, please let us know.

CLiC News 

The CLiC News project is still going strong.

From a technical point of view we have added a print friendly button to all the stories. We have also taken on board a request to change the way the top comment contributors are presented therefore improving the competitive element of the information for pupils. More importantly, we are close to having our new plugin completed which will allow teachers to manage the pupils’ passwords in their classes.

We regularly run competition on the site. There have been poetry, digital picture and design competitions in the past. One comment from Emmy which we got this month in relation to a story written by journalism student, Jennifer McDonald, about her 86 year old grandmother will be forming the basis of our next competition. Thanks Emmy.

Her comment was:

Mary sounds like a lovely person. I love it when my granny tells me stories of when she was a little girl. I always wish I had lived when she was a little girl because it sounded like so much fun. My favorite story was of when it was near the end of the 2nd world war and there were rations in Ireland. My granny and her two brothers were at school when they heard that the war was over. When she got home her mother had made the kids a dish that was my great granny’s favorite before the war, but when my granny tasted it she didn’t like it at all and neither did her brothers!

Android Tablets

Deirdre Murphy from St. Paul’s CBS Primary School has been using our EasyPad 970 Android tablets for the last couple of months. She has kindly put together some feedback for us to share with you:

The main uses I have found valuable include:

1. We use them for Irish – videoing each other when they are asking each other questions and also for translating from English to Irish or vice versa online. The boys watch the weather forecast and TV programmes on TG4.

2. We use them for online maths games. All the kids have a password and username for the maths course Mangahigh and I can track their progress. They also invite and play against each other for tables practice (on-line gaming on academic arcade). Also for the topics of money we go into Smyths or Argos for budget shopping and practical problems. For time we have used Dublin bus and TV guide websites.

3. The tablets have been incredibly useful for English as this term was report writing which crossed over the curriculum into history, geography and science. The kids used the tablets daily for researching using Britannica primary on Scoilnet, watching video clips on national geographic, downloading ww2 app. We also used the 4 pics one word app, Google earth and the Brainpop app. We were using RTE news but have now started using CLiCnews and they are all set up on that now.

School Video

We’ll finish with a science video from St. Paul’s CBS Primary. We featured it on www.clicnews.ie as a competition where the children had to explain what was happening. Do you know the answer?

Click on picture or link The Magic Bucket from CLiC News on Vimeo.

Wednesday 27th February – 10:00 am to 12:00 pm in the Dominick Street Youth and Recreation Centre

We will be holding an open session & information morning on Wednesday 27th February – 10:00 am to 12:00 pm in the Dominick Street Youth and Recreation Centre as part of the Aontas Adult Learners Festival. Visitors will get the opportunity to see the facilities in the centre and chat to tutors and current course participants. If you are interested in courses on the internet,  photography, Facebook, Email, Skype,  shopping online  or  ECDL then why not drop in.

Dominick Street Youth and Recreation Centre is three minutes walk from the Ilac Centre.

View Dominick Street Youth and Recreation Centre in a larger map

Courses

Following our difficult start to the year, our courses are now well and truly up and running. Our first two tutors out of the blocks, Alan Lyons and Denise Connolly, have been doing a terrific job over the last three months. 121 people in total have directly benefited from the programme with 83 of these getting the assistance of Alan and Denise to start them on the road to ICT proficiency. We have four other tutors all ready to go in January and a number of others just waiting for final approval.

Funding

We are delighted to have secured funding from the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government for next year. This will allow us, in conjunction with the rest of our colleagues in the Dublin Institute of Technology, continue to provide ICT support and training for our community education partners throughout Dublin.

2013 therefore looks like it will be a very exciting time with the number of courses we’ll be able to offer and some new community education partners coming on board.

Android Tablets

Our Android Tablet project, which we ran in conjunction with Age Action, ended this month. We will compile the results from feedback forms in the New Year but in the meantime some of the comments from participants included:

“Easier to carry than a laptop, excellent for travel, weighs less too! Enjoyed the games.”

“Would like to purchase Tablet.”

“May use tablet in the future for shopping. Portability is a great asset.”

The tablets have now been located in St. Paul’s CBS primary school following Deirdre Murphy’s application to use the devices with her class. Some of the areas of use she hopes to explore include e-books and developing and creating Apps. We are looking forward to seeing the results in June.

CLiC Schools

CLiC News 

The website goes from strength to strength. We are rapidly heading towards 15,000 pupil comments on the site with 140 journalists having published 2500 stories. We have used the site as a platform to encourage video making and other ICT initiatives in primary schools. We held two digital painting competitions; one for Halloween and the other for Christmas. You can see the Christmas results here.

Winning picture by user bakeacake.  As voted by the children.

We only ask the children who use the site to leave comments on the latest news stories and competitions that we run, but every now and then they take it upon themselves to compliment the site. We are very grateful when we get these types of comments and we thought this one was representative of the feedback we get from time to time:

Ashna01 says:

I’d love to thank everyone there for making CLICnews an excellent site which kids and adults can read! There’s a section for everyone, whether it’s sport, music or world news! I love CLICnews because it improves your reading and it has interesting stories! I think CLICnews is a brilliant site!

School Videos

Thanks to Mark Candon, Principal St. Laurence O’Tooles CBS Primary, for showing us some of  the great videos being made by the boys in the school under the guidance of Andy Radley. You can see all their videos and their excellent website at http://www.larriers.blogspot.ie/ This video made for Halloween is particularly good.

Click on photo

Seasons Greetings

Finally we would like to wish you a peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to supporting all our partners in education as best we can in 2013.

If ‘Yes’ is the answer to any of these questions then a CLiC  Computer Course could be exactly what you need. There is a course to suit everyone from the beginner to the advanced; those who want to upskill and those who want to use computers creatively. You will never feel left behind as a beginner and you’ll always be challenged if you are a advanced user.

A course could open the door to a whole new world of information, communication and enjoyment and maybe even a new career.

* Please note that each course requires a minimum number of people registered before it can take place.

You can check out our Course Booklet online HERE

Download Course Booklet here

The exhibition celebrated the outstanding achievements of the pupils and teachers involved in CLiC. It showcased a high levels of creativity and skill, combined with a demonstration of how new media technologies can easily be used in education.

Bridges over the Liffey display by the girls from St. Mary’s Fairview

Check out animation made by boys from Francis Street CBS

Wd would like to thank all those teachers and pupils who produced material for iFestival 2012. We really appreciate the effort you made this year.

It has been a few months since our last news update so we thought we’d start with some important news. We’re moving! CLiC and the whole Community Links team will be located in the DIT Grangegorman campus from Monday May 21st. This is an exciting time for all of us, as ours will be one of the first departments in DIT to be taking up residence there. Grangegorman is a fantastic location and, once we get settled, we hope some of you will be in a position to drop in to us so we can show you around.

CLiC Community

First the good news.

The Multiseat in use. The server is the unit on the bottom right of picture which is the size of a normal desktop.

We have upgraded the Dublin 8 Community Education Centre (D8CEC) computer room with a 14 unit HP Multiseat system which was installed by Net Communications. D8CEC provides second chance education to over 300 adults from the Dublin 8 community each year. We are delighted to have been in a position to support them in their work.

We will be installing new computers  in St. Laurence O’Toole’s Recreation Centre, Sheriff Street within the next week. The system will consist of a server running Windows Multipoint sofware and 6 nComputing virtual desktops. A new computer room has been built by Dublin City Council. We hope the new system will prove to be a useful resource to support the staff who provide very valuable services for young and old in the area.

Just after Christmas we supplied EasyPad 970 tablets to Age Action. We have been working together with them on an eInclusion project which will attempt to compare the ease of use and interest in adoption between a tablet device and PC amongst elderly users who are introduced to the technology for the first time. The EasyPad 970 uses the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system and has a ten point multitouch capacitive screen. They were preloaded with a range of useful Apps ranging from RTE News to Gmail. Eight students attended classes in Age Action’s Abbey Street centre where volunteers provided one to one training; bringing the learners up to speed with this exciting technology. The ‘word cloud’ contains the participants feedback on the classes.

The last four months have seen many changes in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) Community Links Programme. The first one we must mention is that Professor Tommy Cooke has retired. We wish him well. Then, as well as planning for our move to Grangegorman, a number of new essential operational pocedures have been put in place which have affected the CLiC programme. These procedures are nearly completed and, once implemented, will provide a solid structure for our work that will see the CLiC programme more closely linked and embedded into the Access and Civic Engagement department within DIT.  So although it has been a quiet time in some of the centres , behind the scenes much has been done to strengthen the work of the CLiC programme moving forward and this will improve  its sustainability and ensure it ramains a valuable programme for the community it serves in the future.

CLiC Schools

Many schools have been getting material ready for iFestival 2012 which will take place this year in the Ilac library from the 8th to the 29th June. Because we are kind and considerate we are extending the closing date to Friday 11th May.  After then we won’t be in a position to take any more entries or issue certificates for the children. Please let us know what you intend to exhibit as soon as possible in order to help us with our preperations.

Gardiner Street NS have all their entries in already for iFestival 2012 and we thought we’d give you a preview of the talent in the shool by letting you hear the 4th class podcast entry. Click on picture to be brought to podcast page.

The Central Model Infants School, and especially theE-Learning Team of staff members who share the responsibility for managing the computer requirements, have been working hard over the last four months. As well as making good use of existing hardware and software the school is now in the process of purchasing a class set of iPads. The children should be able to explain how they work to the teachers in no time; having already mastered the Bee Bot robot as demonstrated in the following video. Click on picture to view.

CLiC News

www.clicnews.ie is a very practical resource for teachers and enjoyable experience for pupils and we never tire of telling people about the site. We got very positive feedback when we showed the site at the Computer Education Society of Ireland (CESI) conference in February. Not content with acclaiming the benefits of the site in Ireland, our partners in the DIT School of Media presented the site at a UNESCO confernce on childrens’ rights in Kryzegstan and also in Luton for Uk-African journalism educators.

Rather than going on any more about how brilliant the CLiC News site is (we’ll get back to doing that in our next newsletter) we thought it would be better to show you what  some of the children think of the site:

armstrong17 says:
April 26, 2012 at 6:57 pm  (Edit)

I love Jacueline Wilson big fan.I would love if she just stopped writting about children in care cause it makes me want to cry.I think Clic news is just as good as Jacline Wilson.I think who ever does Clic news should write a book about this website.

SarahOF says:
March 14, 2012 at 9:04 pm  (Edit)

I hate watching the news because it’s very boring for us children. Although, older people do like to watch it. I love this website because it makes the news fun to read about. There are kids topics about all genres. I love the celebrity gossip and the music stories and topics. I would really recommend this website to children who spend all day on chatting sites like Facebook and Hotmail and others because you are able to find put what is going on in the world and not just who is online and what’s going on in my neighbourhood. I really love your website! I’d like to thank my teacher for showing me Clicnews!

MT-5265 says:
March 14, 2012 at 7:11 pm

I normally don’t like watching the news , I find it very boring most of the times, but when my teacher showed my class and I this website it made news fun for me to read and I really love the way they allow you to comment to see what you think about the news articles. In my opinion I think this is a really good and safe news website for kids, I would recommend this website to other people who haven’t heard of it yet!

Finally

We are planning our CLiC Community awards ceremony for the end of June. We will be in contact with those who were involved with training as soon as we have finalised a date.

CLiCschools are getting a visit to see how they have fared over the Winter and to plan for exciting projects coming up to the Summer break.

CLiCcommunities are active with a new centre being fitted out at Sheriff Street, St. Theresa’s gardens getting a makeover and the PARC centre at Pearse Street having the recently fitted network connected to Broadband.

The office welcomes back Ian and Dáithí – just in time for the planned move to Grangegorman!

Check back soon for updates.

CLiC are supplying ten EasyPad 970 Satellite 10″ tablets. These use the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system and have a ten point multitouch capacitive screen. The will be preloaded with a range of useful Apps ranging from RTE News to Gmail.

A group of 10 elderly computer learners will attend classes in Abbey Street where Age Action will provide one to one training bringing the learners up to speed with this exciting technology.

Just a short update for you this month. We would like start by congratulating Riona Fitzgerald who had a baby girl on 7th December. We wish her, baby Aoife and the whole family well.

CLiC Community

We are sorry to have lost People with Disabilities in Ireland (PwDI) as CLiC partners due to the withdrawal of their funding. The centre successfully provided a number of valuable CLiC funded ICT courses over the years for people with disabilities. We wish all the staff and past students the very best for the future.

Pearse House has joined the CLiC community and will be providing after schools ICT activities for children and organising adult courses in the New Year. We look forward to working with the team there.

CLiC Schools

We have a short animation for you this month. It was made by Hailing Zhou from Stanhope Street Seconday school. She used Pivot Stickfigure Animator to make the video. The program only uses straight lines and circles so you can appreciate the amount of talent and time it took to complete the work.

CLiC News

We were delighted to have had our CLiC News www.clicnews.ie website shortlisted in the Education category in the ‘2011 eircom Spider Awards’. Three members of CLiC’s news team attended the formal ceremony on behalf of everyone involved with the website, Kate Shanahan DIT lecturer, Liam Keegan former editor and Yvonne O’Loughlin current editor.

Kate Shanahan and Liam Keegan

Finally

We did mention that it would be short. We would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

This CLiC News website has been created specially for primary school children. It taps into the popularity of the internet in a positive and productive manner. It features all the best that the internet has to offer in terms of technology and literacy.

The site is simple to use and interact with. Children not only get the opportunity to read all about the latest events that are occurring in Ireland and around the world but also to comment on them. The public have limited access to the site and are only able to view the front page. All the children’s comments are moderated.

Comments are awarded stars and prizes are awarded to those who get 5 star comments.

CLiC News offers a positive internet experience for children which encourages them to:

• Improve their literacy skills
• Take an active interest in Irish and World news
• Express their opinions in a thoughtful manner
• Communicate and argue effectively
• Be conscious about internet safety

Teachers can download all the comments, review them with the children to help them improve their spelling, grammar and punctuation.