This interview with Caroline Sherlock from Walk In My Shoes was focused on the sensitive subject of mental health. ‘Walk in My Shoes’ is St. Patrick’s Mental Health Foundation’s leading awareness and fund-raising campaign. It aims to provide vulnerable young adults in Ireland with mental health services, and also to challenge the stigma associated with mental health. It provides downloadable mental health packs, a cyberbullying guide, as well as promoting the message to teachers and students ‘to seek help early’ with regards to mental health problems.

Interview by Seán and Éadaoin de Búrca

Here David and Finn interview Young Social Innovators about their work. YSI seek to engage and prepare young people aged 15-18 to take part in civic action, whether through volunteerism, community service, service-learning, citizenship education, social entrepreneurship and innovation.

John McGabhann from the Teachers Union of Ireland was invited here today to #Feilte as a guest. Once upon a time, he was a teacher of English and Gaeilge, in Tallaght Community School. Today he took a great interest in Fintan O’Toole’s speech, particularly in how he talked about efficiency in education. John raised interesting points about how he thinks conferences like this should be held at a local level around the country, and involve parents in them so they can see how their children are progressing with knowledge, drama, art, etc. He believes parents and communities should be able to see the importance of the school in the community, and just how valuable it is. He thinks that technological advances in education are important but can never substitute for direct human interaction, and should instead supplement the needs of children.

Interview by Seán and Eadaoin de Búrca

Here Finn and David are talking to Ann White about her future hopes to start podcasting with her 1st class.  We think she will succeed because she knows lots about technology and about teaching.

Interview by:  Finn Briody and David Lombard.

Dissolving Boundaries uses Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to facilitate cross-cultural educational links between schools in the North and South of the boarder. It is jointly funded by the two Departments of Education.Once teachers have chosen the topic to work on, for e.g mapwork projects for geography,they present the idea to the pupils explaining that they collaborate with partner school who will do some of the work and that it will be project based using online interaction and video-conferencing.

Interview by Seán and Éadaoin de Búrca

Here Finn and David caught up with Bridge 21 and asked them about their new learning model that they use in their centre in Trinity College Dublin. They’re planning to spread this model of active learning into more Irish secondary schools.

Here are some pictures of their workshop:

Here’s our interview

Interviewing Bridge21

Youth Media Team members Brídín and Jack interview columnist and author Fintan O’Toole, Deputy Editor of the Irish Times.

Fintan understands the problems facing the education system as his wife is a teacher. He understands the challenges teachers encounter at the moment, particularly as they face cuts to funding and resources. Within fifteen minutes of Fintan’s lecture beginning, over 100 tweets flew out of the audience, establishing #féilte as one of the foremost trending hashtags today during this celebration of World Teacher’s day. Fintan was interrupted several times during his talk by enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Fintan believes technology can make learning easier and better. However, sometimes nothing compares to quiet time just reading about a topic. Technology can be hyper-active and can distract us from thinking deeply. His time in Primary School was not enjoyable as corporal punishment was still the norm. He didn’t feel safe in school but he did say he had some really wonderful teachers. In his opinion the best thing that has happened to Primary Education is the end to violence towards children. How we treat old people and children is the measure of how well our society is functioning.

Ultimately we want students to be confident, creative and critical and they inherit these characteristics from teachers, who need to model this behaviour. So we need to trust teachers. If Fintan was Minister for Education, he would trust teachers to use their Croke Park hours as they see fit. It is very insulting to say that you don’t trust them to use their time wisely. Teachers should be given freedom to innovate in their classrooms and not become box tickers.

Rozz Lewis loves writing and reading (and talking!). She has written articles for the Irish Times, Sunday Times, INTOuch magazine, writing.ie and co-edits and writes for Anseo.net. She left being a principal to become a teacher, as she wanted to be more involved with teaching and learning. She teaches English as a foreign language in Portlaoise, in the new Educate Together school, something which she finds very rewarding. She loves English, as well as SPHE and art.

Interview by Seán and Éadaoin de Burca.