Technology and education have a strange relationship in Ireland. If a teacher said to a parent or another teacher or anyone at all that they really didn’t like Maths so they don’t bother teaching it or using it, there would be uproar. And rightly so. However, even in 2023, you’ll still hear teachers saying they’re not that into technology so they don’t really use it in their classroom and no one bats an eyelid. To me it’s incomprehensible that a teacher would not utilise technology in their classroom and, to be fair, it isn’t even true. It is so embedded in our practice that most teachers don’t realise they are using it. I don’t think there is a single teacher in Ireland that doesn’t use an Interactive Whiteboard for example. If the internet went down in school when I started teaching, people mightn’t have noticed for a couple of days. Now you hear about it in a couple of seconds. In the last few months, the world of technology has been rocked by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s the next revolution, and will have as big an impact as the Internet did when it first came out. In this episode, I want to explore some of the things AI might do that will transform primary teaching and what I would do if I were the Minister for Education.

Links from the episode:

1. AI and Education (UNESCO)
2. Creating a unit of work in Canva
3. 30 uses for AI in the Classroom

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