The school uses ICT across all faculties and students will come across many specialist applications during their time at school. There is no compunction to have ownership of these applications on personal computers at home or to have a computer at home on which to prepare coursework or homework.
Arrangements are in place within school for students to make use of our ICT facilities before school starts, at break, lunchtime and after school. However, we understand that for those with PC's at home, parents may wish to ensure that their children have access to the most compatible software. We are listing below the most common applications that we use in school and which are readily available for installation at home.Word processing, Spreadsheet and Presentation
Microsoft Office Professional 2003 is deployed across all our PC’s and MS Office 2004 across Apple Mac’s. This provides Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Publisher and is the primary office suite used by staff and pupils. “Home” or “Student / Teacher” editions of Microsoft Office are available from retail or mail order outlets. The cost fluctuates, but is normally £90 to £110. Note that these versions do not include Access or Publisher. These two products are not essential.Our systems also have “OpenOffice” installed. This is a cost effective alternative to MS Office and provides the same functionality. Provided documents are saved as “Microsoft” equivalent formats, work is interchangeable between the systems. Open Office can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.openoffice.org.
When using any “office” package it is important to ensure that the files created are saved in a compatible format. As we use Microsoft Office 2003 by default, any Wordprocessor, Spreadsheet or Presentation files should be saved as “Microsoft Office 2003” versions. This is also true if you are using MS Office 2007.
If you are using Apple Mac and have MS Office 2008 installed make sure that the document is saved in MS Office for Mac 2004 format. Users of Linux based machines will more than likely be using OpenOffice covered earlier.
Desktop Publishing, Photo Editing, Basic Web Design, Drawing
All our PC’s have the following Serif products installed:
The following Adobe products are also used
Other software is used throughout the school, and there are many free alternatives to the commercial software we sometimes use. Opposite you will find links to “Open Source” software we have tried and found to be useful. Some examples are “Cute PDF” for creating Adobe Acrobat compatible files and “Audacity” for recording and editing sound files.
All students who undertake work at home MUST have an up to date Anti Virus and Firewall installed to limit the risks of damage to their work and infecting other machines. Those concerned about the cost of purchasing and maintaining such products (particularly if they have more than 1 PC to protect) should check our website for links to “free” alternatives which are perfectly adequate.
Some specialist software allows students to install a copy at home and where appropriate this will be made known.