Murray Reynolds, Paul Cowie, Andrew Bench, Jenny Hugo, Rob Willis, Sue Linnell, Lyn De Wet, Ann Clark (K-Net), Michael Clackworthy with Greg Royce, Headmaster of St. Peter's Preparatory School

St Peter's Preparatory School links up with K-Net

Following strategic planning sessions during 1995 and a fact finding mission to the World Conference on Computers in Education in the United Kingdom, on the role of Computers in Education, the executive of St. Peter's Preparatory School joined forces with K-Net to achieve their objective of radically expanding the use of technology in the School.

The move represents a departure from an individual running the computer centre to a corporate responsibility.

The decisions taken were to train all staff to be competent in the use of the packages available on the school computers to be used by the pupils, to further train those who so wished to an advanced level in both applications software and technical aspects of the network available in the computer centre, to allow the pupils to grow in the area of the use of computers in their academic work through educationally related software and activities, to expose the pupils and the staff to the exciting, educational world of the Internet and e-mail, to enable both the pupils and the staff to engage actively in the information technology revolution to the benefit of all, and to become the testing ground for new educational software coming on the market.

In what is widely believed to be a first amongst preparatory schools, all the staff of St. Peter's Preparatory School have undergone an intensive 48-hour, hands-on training programme run by K-Net.

The course was designed for St. Peter's by K-Net and included training on MS Office products. K-Net's innovative integrated training methodology has allowed the staff to become aware of the possibilities offered by the flexibility of the programs and how they can be applied to their daily teaching activities.

The process will continue with more advanced training for the staff, followed by courses on hardware and network maintenance.