CESIMEET 2012

Here's the first of the CESI 2012 posts. I've so much to say that I've had to do two separate posts to cover everything! There was just that much going on and I don't want to leave anything out.
So my arrival to The Heritage Hotel was great, I'd arranged to meet up with Mary Jo Bell to do some knitting and chatting. There is nothing I love more then catching up with a good friend like Mary Jo. So after we got something to eat in the bar we went to the conference room and sat with friends like Nigel Lane of ITB Fame, Sabine McKenna, and Humphrey Jones of The Frog Blog, there's nothing like it.
So the CESIMEET, there were about twenty of us asked to present a mini topic for 7 mins or less. All our names were put into the fruit machine by Mags and we were randomly called up to talk. I was luck enough to be one of the first up to discuss a handful of apps that I've been using on the iPad lately. There were all sorts of talks. Brendan Buckley showed us Chessossity, a lesson plan site for learning/teaching chess, Humphrey told us about the idea of an EdHack day to help solve the problems in the education world, Jullian from sccEnglish showed us the ShowMe app that he uses in his English classes, Nigel filled us in on the whys and hows that he created the Irish Teachers Blog network to curate the blog posts written by teachers and keep them in one place so we don't miss any. David Mitchell told us about how Quad Blogging came about and how he's behind the feb29th.net project for blogging. It's coming close so don't forget to get writing. Sabine talked about survey monkey and it's uses in class while Mary Jo showed us her tweeting junior infants, who tweet as MrsBellsClass  and show us some of their work during the day. Pam  explained CoderDojo to us and how much she enjoys it.

I could talk all night about the presentations but I won't go on. After the presentations it was time to mingle. Mingling is such fun. We had finger food and yummy chocolate cake (kinda sorry I didn't go mad and have more of that if I'm honest!) I had to chat with Stephan Howell  about scratch and kinect, and my obsessive tweeting (no comment hehe). It was great to see people I haven't seen in a while like Simon and Rozz Lewis. It was a late night up chatting with Pam, Mary Jo, Enda, Evelyn and Mary.

The CESI execs did a great job getting the night the together, Ban, John, Anne, Enda and Mags all did fantastic work getting the night together for us and showing us all a great time. These people are amazing teachers, their students are very lucky to have them teaching them.

I can't stress enough how much I loved the CESIMEET this year, not that I didn't love it last year but this year topped last year, something I didn't think possible but then again a few years ago did we think that smartphones would be how we'd access the internet the most?

Wise words today? Anything is possible....