Wildern School
From Schoolforge-UK
Wildern School is a co-educational comprehensive for young people aged 11 to 16 based in Southampton. We are a designated specialist performing arts college, but also place a huge value in ICT in the classroom.
The school is home to a little over 200 Apple Mac based, and approximately 300 Windows based computer systems. The majority of classrooms throughout the site extend their use of digital teaching aids further, with interactive whiteboards and projectors, printers and scanners, and digital still and video cameras.
Our performing arts building, The D@rt Centre, leads the development of digital expertise within the school, combining state of the art sound and video recording studios into the teaching environment. Within the building our arts department has their own ICT suite of 30 Mac G4's, running Logic, Sibelius, Macromedia Studio and Photoshop. Our recording studio is also Mac based, running Pro-Tools. Along with our leisure centre the D@rt is available to the community in the evening, allowing a huge range of artists and musicians from the Hampshire area to access some of the most advanced technology currently available. There is also an open mic night on the last friday of every month (see center for details).
The school has recently gained a new "wireless technology centre" which has pioneered the use of mobile networking in education. Wireless access is now available across the whole site allowing students and teachers access to the school's Virtual Learning Environment, the Internet and other learning resources from anywhere. This combined with the fact that every member of staff is supplied with a laptop means that I.T is fully implemented across the curriculum.
The IT team at Wildern is made up of a group that support our network, and a small team of developers who are involved in new projects for the school. We are big supporters of Open Source, and use these products wherever possible.
In addition to the use of Linux servers, our biggest OSS project to date is the use of Moodle for a VLE. This large scale installation has been running for 18 months now, and staff are now very confident with the system. We consider the VLE to be a curriculum online, and our teachers have worked hard to make sure the resources our students need are online. Departments are also starting to work with forums and chatrooms, encouraging pupils to interact (and more importantly) and support each other. The next stage for us is the integration of MIS into Moodle. How we do that is still in discussion....
Another fairly important project for us is the use of SkoleLinux in a couple of our primary schools. This is in the very early stages, but the plan is to have the two schools ICT suites running thin clients and using a complete OSS solution. At a later stage we'll add a case study for these to update you on the progress...
There are many other open source software solutions running in the school including- IRM (asset management/fault reporting), IPCop, Debian, Red Hat, Live Support (OSS Radio Station), XLogo, Audacity, Firefox, Opera, WinSCP, Putty, etc...
We are always interested in hearing from other schools working in similar ways, so do get in contact.
