ICT Skills

ICT Skills*

ICT at Greenhead
The college regards Information Technology as very important for all students and is therefore determined to make IT facilities widely available both for individual use and for teaching/learning.

There are 4 IT rooms close together on the ground floor of the main building containing a total of eighty-six computers. These act as both teaching rooms and open access areas for students' own work, with the use of laser and colour printers and scanners, as appropriate in each room. Supervisor and technicians, as well as teaching staff, are available at all reasonable times to provide help and support.

We run Windows XP and use Office 2007 as our main software package along with other packages that offer useful tools for students to use. We have also greatly increased students' access to the network by adding more computer rooms.

Many departments now have their own computer facilities enabling students to exploit new teaching and learning strategies, such as Interactive Whiteboards, the Internet/Intranet and CD ROMs, in lesson time and during private study.

The college has a link to the Internet which can handle a large number of simultaneous users. We also have an Intranet onto which departments publish their own material. All students have access to e-mail facilities on the college's mail server.

ICT courses offered
OCR/Text Production examinations in Word Processing, Mailmerge, Legal and Medical Word Processing, Audio Transcription and Document Presentation at Levels 1, 2 and 3 are held throughout the year.

Awards and Certificates
Students gain an 'Award' in Text Processing (Business Professional) and can then go on to obtain a 'Certificate' at each of the 3 levels.

We attempt to offer as large a number of choices as possible for students to undertake, as each student has different subject demands or career aspirations. Students are free to choose the direction their IT skills take.

Resources available

Greenhead College Computer Network
This links computers in Open Access areas (G8 & C10), the IT rooms (G9, G10 and G4), the ICT and Computer Studies rooms, the library and all the PC computers in departmental resource areas. All applications run on Windows XP operating system. Laser printers are available in all rooms, with access to colour printing when required. The software available on the network includes Microsoft Office 2007 and many subject based programes.

Access to the Network
The network necessitates the use of a user name and password by each student. All students will be issued with these during the compulsory IT Induction session at the beginning of term in September. During this session you will be shown the essentials of logging on and off, loading software, saving/deleting files and the important aspects of printing on a network. You will also receive information on the many IT courses you can undertake during your time at the college.

Room G8 usually operates on an open access basis from 8.00 - 6.00 each day. The other rooms are open from 8.00 - 5.00 and are available to individual students if they are not being used for teaching. The number of computers linked to the college network is increasing each year. Also more departmental resource areas are up and running with computers having network connections.

Greenhead College MOODLE
We have established an expanding Virtual Learning Environment within the college to be accessed from any computer. Departments use it to provide students with documents, media clips, interactive revision material etc as well as links to useful websites. A lot of the time on the Internet is spent searching through masses of irrelevant information to try and locate what you want: using our VLE we hope to save much of this valuable student time.

Students access the Internet/Moodle through a separate user name and password to log on to the web server. In doing so each student is allocated their own e-mail address.