All eight teachers from four different schools attended.  There was a soft start to the day, with tea, coffee and snacks available to the teachers who travelled to DCU for this inaugural CoP session.  After a general introduction, the Irish AdAPPtive team, Dr. Eamonn McCauley and Dr. Monica Ward, provided an overview of the AdAPPtive project and the key role of the Community of Practice (CoP) in the project.  Eamonn noted that ‘we believe the COPs are the right method to bring the use of quality digital tools into the classroom, we want to collect evidence to this, every time we hold a COP”.

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School and Teacher Overview

There are two schools from socio-economically disadvantaged areas (called DESI schools in Ireland) in the AdAPPtive project, and two schools from other areas.  Via anonymous, online surveys, we were able to get a good picture of the teachers and their schools.  Some schools were single-sex schools (common in older schools in Dublin, some were catholic schools (also common in Ireland) and some were multi-denominational.  There was a mix of Microsoft and Google schools in the group and the teachers had a good level of experience as teachers.

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Future Plans

• The teachers will have some time to review the resources shared during the CoP session.
• They will be able to plan for increasing the use of digital apps with their students.
• The next CoP session will take place in March 2023
• There will be a special ApAPPtive course set up on Dublin City University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) (a local version of Moodle, called Loop) where teachers can access the resources and interact with the other teachers.

The Irish COP is setup and until the next one in March, will continue interacting on the Loop platform.It was a great first COP 😊