St Andrews Takes Education into the New Millennium
Founded in 1885, St Andrews Cathedral School is one of Sydney's oldest educational establishments. However, despite its majestic halls and long academic history, when it comes to technology, the school's implementation of the latest technology suggests it has its sights set clearly on the future.
The school's first students would have struggled with chalk and a slate, carefully lugging their chalkboards home to tackle homework by candlelight, but today's computer-savvy students are increasingly mobile, and can quickly and easily transfer work between school and home with the help of the latest in removable storage solutions.
Pupils are able to work electronically both in school and at home, moving large files to and fro without having to lug around cumbersome laptops, keep track of piles of floppy disks or wait for a slow dial up into the school server. With a solution based on Iomega® Zip® drives and disks, St Andrews' students simply purchase Zip disks which can be used in all of the school's computers and on their home laptops or PCs.
According to Ian Scott, director of information technology, the Iomega® solution has enabled students to work from home or school with minimal of fuss.
"Our school has a policy of ensuring every computer we purchase has a Zip Built-In drive," he said. "To take advantage of the capabilities of these drives, all our computing students and Year 7 pupils are required to purchase an Iomega Zip drive - which has proven to be an inexpensive alternative to acquiring a notebook computer. This approach has proven to be a simple and cost-effective solution for our student's storage needs and has increased both their productivity and their level of interest in computing courses."
"This is a much more effective solution than notebooks which not only require a large initial investment but are simply not designed to be thrown about at a playground in a school bag. Zip disks are durable enough to withstand this treatment, and the cost of a drive and disk for students is significantly lower than would be required for a laptop. We have also eliminated the need for students who would otherwise have to travel to various parts of the city carrying an expensive notebook."
Currently using Zip® 100MB drives, Mr Scott believes that the new Zip 250MB capacity will enable the school to upgrade both internal and external varieties. Being backward compatible with Zip 100MB disks, he anticipates the transition will be quite smooth.
St. Andrew's Cathedral School is a day-school catered for boys from Year 3 to Year 12 and girls from Year 10 to Year 12. Students travel from all over the city and its surrounds to central Sydney to study in one of the school's three buildings. The school was keen to implement a fully portable computing solution which would offer students full access to school projects at home.
St Andrews has a dedicated Computer Resources Centre, established to educate all students a range of computing applications. All students in Years 7 to 8 would need to complete 50 hours of computing in their design and technology program and Years 9 - 12 have the option to take a computing studies course. Younger pupils in the primary school also use software to supplement traditional lessons.
The school provides a network of more than 150 IBM-compatible machines and a radio network for student laptops with unlimited Internet access, email and print capabilities.
"St Andrews' pupils are truly computer literate - and it's not just limited to the computing students," said Mr Scott. "Even in the course of their day-to-day lessons, some students choose to use laptops over traditional pen and paper. While this has great implications for the school in terms of the skills with which we are equipping our students, the down side is that we have an ever-increasing need for storage space on the server.
"We have many students working on multimedia projects and for them it is just not practical to be carrying around a bundle of 1.44 MB floppy disks. Depending on a collection of floppies is not reliable and does not allow for the transfer of various projects. In addition, it is of great benefit for our students to be using technology which is an industry standard because they can take this knowledge into the workforce with them when they leave school."
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