Irish Studies » Program

Irish Studies and the Irish Fireside Blog and Podcast

William Stites — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:25:15 +0000

The MKA Irish Studies program is happy to be working with the Irish Fireside Blog and Podcast to help promote Irish history, culture and travel.

Irish Studies will have student bloggers posting content to the Fireside prior to, during and shortly after the trip.

We look forward to working with them and helping to add to the knowledge base on all things Irish!

If imitation is the highest form of flattery.

William Stites — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:55:31 +0000

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then I want to thank the Winsor School. They are using the Irish Studies model of their student’s trip to India this March and have emailed to let us know that they were their example of how to do it!

I want to wish them the best of luck and much success on their trip and with the blog once it goes public (check back and I will post a link to the site here).

Note: A special debt of thank to Antonio Viva, Worcester Academy, WAMash and edSocialMedia for inspiring Irish Studies.

Irish Studies featured in Tech&Learning Magazine

William Stites — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:41:49 +0000

A short write-up entitled “Students use social media to promote stories of Irish travels” appears in the January 2010 issue of Tech&Learning magazine both in print and online (http://www.techlearning.com/article/26576).

The article talks about how the use of social media transformed the program from having just a local, school audience to that of a global one. It gives the program some very nice attention and given the short amount of time we have been using this new format, shows how you can take something which has been running smoothly for over a decade and bring new life to it with some new tools.

Irish Studies Explodes

William Stites — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:57:05 +0000

Since returning from the 2009 trip the conversations around the Irish Studies program have continued. Moving to the new format and including more social medai tools in the site has sparked a great deal of interest in what we are doing, how it has grown our audience and brought more attention to the program.

This past summer the Irish Studies program was featured at two conferences, one sponsored by edSocialMedia at Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia and the other at the Whipple Hill Users Conference in Boston. At these conference we shared how we had changed the program to include the use of WordPress, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, moving away from traditional static content and to a format that allows for greater interaction between the students and a much broader audience.

The attendees had many questions about process, privacy and the level of effort that went into the new format. They heard what was involved and the level of effort that was required prior to traveling and once we were in country and were extremely interested and impressed with the level and quality of the students work.

Most recently MKA’s Irish Studies program was featured in a video interview with Peter Baron on the edSocialMedia web site titled “MKA Irish Studies Goes Social” where we discussed the program, it’s history and our plans for the future.

It is nice to see that after 10 years of work and devotion to the program that the excitement and interest in what we are doing is still there and shared by others.