ICT Department

Access

Villiers School is the exception rather than the rule in terms of access to ICT resources. ICT facilities are open to students before the School day begins, during break and lunch times, and again after school. Priority of use is given to students engaging in academic work, or work for the School Community (e.g. working on Red Sokz, the Intranet, the School Website, assisting School staff etc.) catching up on email correspondence, browsing the Intranet, and finally games are tolerated so long as resources etc. are respected.

Perhaps the most constant visitors are our many International Students who keep in touch with their families and friends in places like: Germany, Italy, Russia, South America, South Africa, Spain, New Zealand, Ukraine etc. via e-mail.

Students who avail of the 'extra' access available in earlier years have gone onto become valuable resources in term of working on behalf of the School Community in later years. At break times the ICT Suite is a rather crowded place, with a good atmosphere where students learn from one another.

Academic Work

Students are busy working towards modules of the ECDL, thereby gaining a good start for later life, be it at further education/training &/or at work.

A number of teachers are very anxious to integrate ICT into their teaching and we see students from varying subject areas coming to the ICT Suite in order to do/learn course work, using the technology as an educational/learning resource.

Intranet

The Villiers Intranet is expanding rapidly; students access it on a regular basis. In their free time they browse the various sections on School extracurricular activities, looking at the myriad of photos on various events.

The academic section of the Intranet is growing rapidly with an ever expanding number of learning / educational resources. In terms of classes in ICT itself students can see screen grabs in colour side by side with notes in their traditional written form; surely much better than a black and white photocopy. Considering our environmental drive to become a Green School, this use of ICT serves to cut down on the amount of paper being used.

You might complain that we put few photos online, however our policy is to cut down on what we put on the World Wide Web thereby affording cost and time savings. Monies saved in this respect have allowed ICT develop at a faster rate within the School. Visitors to the School are more than welcome to call to the ICT Suite; given receipt of prior notice, it can be arranged to give visitors a tour of the Intranet. Students often email photos of themselves or their pals from the School Intranet to their computers at home, which in itself is a good exercise in skills acquisition.

 

ICT Suite

The School has a top of the range ICT - Information and Communication Technology - Laboratory. Rather than make this fantastic resource sound very clinical we decided to call it the ICT Suite - nicer term, isn't it!

The room has 24 PCs dedicated for student use; given the average class size in Villiers is  smaller than this, the number is more than adequate. Even though the ICT Suite has class groups therein for most periods teachers will allow other students, even staff come in and work quietly while they teach. This ensures maximum use of resources.

There is one PC with a slightly higher spec, which is used by teachers to demonstrate to their classes. Fortunately there is also a multi-media projector which ensures that students can view screen images projected onto a large screen. Added to this, the PC has a top quality sound system. Since the Demonstration PC has a DVD player we can view top quality DVDs as good as cinema standard, if not better.

 

Construction and the development of the ICT Suite happened over the summer of 2001. Prior to this building project, there were two classrooms; Ms. Quinn's Room 4, Mrs. Kearney's Room 5. Word has it that these two rooms were formerly One room, used by Ms. Quinn and earlier it was the School Library. And so the wall that went up, sometime in the 90's has come down!

 

LAN - Local Area Network

The above PCs along with others dispersed around the School e.g. a number of PCs in the Administration Offices, the Staffroom etc. (all PCs mentioned below) are all networked with Microsoft Windows XP Professional® thereby creating Villiers' very own LAN.

Within the ICT Suite there is a door leading to an office which Mr. Flanagan uses in his job as ICT Co-ordinator and ECDL Test Centre Co-ordinator, Just through this room we have the Comms or Media Room. This room is where the bulk of the Network Administrator work is done. As you can see from the photos there is quite a bit of technology involved in this epee-centre of the Network. All communication on the Network comes through here. There are wires here connecting every single Network resources to link everything together within the School, bringing us the Villiers LAN. With this, and connecting through a high tech Router allowing us to go beyond our own Network and connect onto a bigger one; the  World Wide Web.

Each student has her/his unique User Account, and has 20 MB of space on a server, dedicated to file storage.

File sharing, very necessary tools of any LAN, are used to great effect by Villiers students. Using these features have become second nature to the bulk of students who will find skills acquired in this respect of significant value later on in their studies and in the workplace.

 

Resources

Apart from PCs and Servers, the School has a scanner and digital camera allowing the photos you see on this website to be displayed. There is a top of the range printer in the ICT Suite, a Lexmark T520 which copes adequately with all printing demands. There are other smaller Laser printers in other locations through the campus. Using print servers these, too have become network resources.

Since PCs are connected to the Internet Villiers' pupils have a great opportunity to visit foreign websites in French, German, Spanish and other languages.

Apart from technology on the servers, there are a number of web cams, which also monitor the use of resources both in the main ICT Suite and in the Library ICT Suite.

ICT beyond the ICT Suite

The Library ICT Research Facility has two older PCs, which have been upgraded and boast of higher RAM specs than their counterparts in the ICT Suite. Therefore they are by no means the poorer relation. They are connected to the Comms Room via a Shielded Twisted Pair cable which runs over ceilings and under ground as it makes its way from the ICT Suite over to the Library. The cable terminates at and there we find a Switch, which allows several PCs and other network resources connect to the one cable running from the ICT Suite. From the above Switch a cable runs to the Study where Learning Support withdrawal students can benefit from ICT as a learning resource / educational tool.

 

An Unshielded Twisted Pair cable makes the long journey (long, in LAN terms anyway i.e. >100m) from the ICT Suite to the Lecture Theatre. A convenient stopover was taken in Room 10 (Physics and Chemistry Lab) where we find a small switch allowing a Top Spec PC access the LAN and  thereby the World Wide Web. This PC has excellent video, sound and graphics system; in fact ideal for DVD. Consequently students in Room 10 have excellent access to ICT educational material for the Science coursework. This opportunity is enhanced by the multi-media projector that has been put in place in the Lab.

 

From the Switch in Room 10 another UTP cable runs to the Lecture Theatre. Classes groups, even year groups can view presentations / demonstrations from another top-spec PC via yet another multi-media projector. This facility is being put to great use in terms of LCVP and Science and general presentations to various groups that use the Lecture Theatre.

The exciting thing about getting the LAN as far as the Lecture Theatre is that from there future expansion can take place. This could happen in much the same way as we have seen expansion from the termination in the Library. Consequently we could look forward to seeing a smaller Comms Cabinet placed somewhere in the Lecture Theatre and from a Switch therein we could see PCs making their way into classrooms in the 'New Block'.

The Music Department got its very own PC this year,  primarily to teach students how to use the Sibelius music program. There is an optional question on Music Technology in the Leaving Certificate Music Exam and a number of From VI students expressed an interest in same. Sibelius is a very expensive piece of software, in fact it is used by professional composers. Leaving Cert. music classes in Villiers are rather small and one PC with the software is sufficient for our needs at this stage. Given that students compose music with this software it would not be suitable to have number of PCs working in the same room and so it was decided to located the PC with Sibelius in Room 23, the main Music Room. Should you be interested in Music Technology, you can download NoteWorthy Composer, another such program. A number of our students have found this of rather good.

 

Some Specifications

The School has 2 Dell PowerEdge 2500 servers, each housing a Pentium III 1Ghz/133Mhz 256K cache processor, a 18GB 10,000rpm 1" Ultra160 SCSI hard drive, and 256MB PC133 SDRAM (2x128MB 133MHz DIMMs).Also in place is a Dell Powervault 100T Tape Backup which can backup up to 75 GB Of Data.

Each of the workstations is a Dell OptiPlex GX150 SD Chassis, housing 256MB Non-ECC 133MHz SDRAM (2 x 128MB), an Intel Pentium III processor 1GHz (133MHz FSB) with 256KB L2 cache, a 3.5 inch floppy drive and a CD drive. Each workstation has a Dell E771p 17" FST (16.0" VIS) Monitor in Midnight grey, with a vertical scan range (refresh rate) of 50 - 160 Hz.

In Sum

The ICT Facility is an invaluable asset to all in the School. They have helped increase ICT literacy for many students and staff. The School is very fortunate in that it has a very progressive Board of Governors, Headmaster and Staff.

By Derrik Hartmann IV N '02

Bryan King IV '03