Editing photos and text with Appleworks
Colgrain Primary School has a wireless network. As the pupils in Alistair Turnbull’s composite P4/P5 class go into the classroom, they each take an iBook from the cabinet where the computers have been charging overnight.
Today Mr Turnbull is showing them how to import photographs and vary the style of text using AppleWorks so they can each produce an attractive page about their school. They plan to send the pages to a school in Russia that they are linking up with.
Teacher profile
Alastair Turnbull has been teaching for 25 years – partly in England, where he was deputy head of a school in Solihull, and partly in Scotland. He is currently teaching a composite P4/P5 class.
Alastair is the unofficial ICT coordinator at Colgrain Primary, having been the area ICT coordinator for a while. He is a member of Masterclass and has attended some formal courses on AppleWorks and Microsoft Word. However, he has acquired most of his ICT skills through ‘trial and error and curiosity’.
Alastair says that he now ‘swears by’ the wireless network. It’s extremely flexible - he can take out six computers to work with a small group in his class, for example, and can print from anywhere in the school.
School profile
Colgrain Primary School is in Helensburgh, on the north bank of the River Clyde. Children from the nearby naval base of Faslane attend the school: therefore there is a comparatively high turnover of pupils each year. The roll has reduced from around 500 at the height of the cold war to the current figure of 217, with the result that a quarter of the original school building has now been taken over by the local education authority office.
20 pupils take free school lunches, 40 have special educational needs and four speak English as a second language. The average length of teacher service is 20 years.
Thanks to Alastair Turnbull’s interest in computers, Colgrain Primary was involved in the wireless network pilot in Argyll and Bute. The AirPort coverage at the school is now nearly 100 per cent so the 18 iBooks can be used virtually anywhere in the school building.