UL Student Conor Walsh

14/05/2020

My name is Conor Walsh and I am a final year Electronic and Computer Engineering student. This is my fourth year to be involved with the Presidents Volunteer Award.

I have really enjoyed volunteering during my time in UL, I have volunteered with Clubs & Societies and various STEM educational programmes. Schools were one of the first places to be officially closed as a result of this pandemic and because of this, they had to rapidly move their teaching online to allow education to continue. My former primary school in Co. Offaly reached out to me to help with their efforts to teach their classes online. It was a challenge that I was delighted to accept. I had previously volunteered in the school helping with STEM education for example with their biannual “Discover Primary Science” project. The school is primarily using a website and emails to interact with their students. I taught the teachers how to do several things such as: how to use tools for photo and video editing to help them to create content for their web pages, how to easily put their students work onto their pages in a GDPR compliant manner which is very important especially with young kids and some tips and tricks to improve their pages such as making sure that they worked on mobile devices.

In addition to demonstrating these tools for online learning I also helped as problems arose and answered questions during the school closure and I intend to continue doing this for as long as they require. I found this volunteering opportunity very rewarding as I felt that I had an almost direct impact helping with the students’ education. I would encourage my fellow students to try and help within their communities as this pandemic continues.

By Conor Walsh