Tom Crean Slideshow Presentation

Hi, and if you are a presenter of this Tom Crean slideshow, I thought it best to give you some background to my own work of researching Tom Crean’s life.
Firstly, I’m confident that the children you present this slideshow to, will enjoy it and I personally present the show at schools whenever I’m able to. The feedback from both teachers and children has been wonderful and I’m fully aware of how difficult it is to hold a young child’s attention for the 45-50 minutes that the show lasts. I’ve included helpful information within the notes to assist teachers in presenting the slideshow.

My two daughters, both teachers, forewarned me that children become easily distracted and holding their attention for more than 5 minutes can be quite a task. Armed with this, I felt the key was to entertain as much as educate and I believe I achieved that in this presentation.

I’ve been a student of Tom Crean’s life for many years now and my interest was sparked when I was younger and visiting my relatives in the village where Crean was born. My father was born a few miles away from Crean so I developed an almost personal connection to his amazing story.

In 2017, I began researching for Crean’s biography and found that a host of events and periods in his timeline were absent from previous accounts that had been written about him. I was also shocked to find a number of inaccuracies had been written about Crean. As a result of my findings I presented all of my sources in evidence to the Royal Irish Academy. After they had examined the evidence they revised the official story in the article dedicated to Tom Crean in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
The biography, ‘Crean-The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero’, was released by Merrion Press in May 2023 and to accompany it, for children aged between 6-10 years-old, I released a fully illustrated, self-published children’s biography titled, ‘Tom The Mighty Explorer’

The slideshow here, is a project I’ve been working on for some time and it allows presenters of Crean’s story to utilise it in classrooms all over the world, whilst it gives me satisfaction that the factual story of Tom Crean is now being told to children when previous generations of children had been left bereft of the fuller picture and had digested inaccuracies written about Tom.

The images in the slideshow are those I had created for the children’s book and without wishing to blatantly promote sales of my book, it is beneficial to read it to get a more detailed understanding of Tom’s life. It will be available in number of libraries and for ordering purposes, the ISBN is, 9781527277083.

I’ve made the slideshow available in both Powerpoint and Keynote and I hope you and your classes enjoy this presentation. I would love to hear your feedback and I can be contacted at timfoley50@googlemail.com