My first-hand experience of a first-class IT education

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

PC Pro’s had a fair bit to say about the standard of IT education over the years, not least the shambolic ICT GCSE examination papers that thousands of pupils will be sitting this summer. Good luck with those, kids – even our IT experts were baffled by some of the poorly-worded or just plain wrong questions.

Yesterday, however, I had the pleasure of visiting Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith – a refreshing example of what can happen when a school gets IT teaching absolutely right.

IT clearly isn’t just another subject that’s taught in the computer rooms at Sacred Heart. It’s intelligently woven into the entire school curriculum and is an everyday part of school life.

I saw how a class of 11-year-olds were practising their French by recording themselves on  pocket Flip Mino camcorders, and then editing the footage on Dell’s new Latitude 2100 netbooks. It didn’t matter if the netbooks didn’t have video-editing software installed, because the pupils could log into their virtual Windows desktops and access the required software over the network.

In fact, virtualisation is second nature to these children. Work completed in school is saved to each pupil’s virtual hard drive, which they can remotely access from home to complete their homework.

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