Teachers and pupils at St Patrick’s Grammar school in Armagh have embraced new technology enthusiastically to make the most of the exciting new learning opportunities presented by the digital age.

Every one of the school’s 54 classrooms has an interactive whiteboard and data projector. French teacher Mrs Geraldine Cleary who is a firm advocate of technology in the classroom says it makes language classes much more enjoyable for everyone and encourages greater participation by pupils.

All teachers at St Patrick’s have had some ICT training to help them make the most of new technology such as interactive whiteboards and, based on the principle that ‘two heads are better than one’, teachers in each department work closely together to develop online resources for a variety of topics in their specific subjects. For example, a series of activities on ‘animals’ was devised to help Year 8s learn the names of animals in French.

“We also worked closely with staff from LearningNI (LNI) to develop resources for LNI - C2K’s online learning environment – which other schools can also access. There is a wealth of excellent material on LNI already and it is being added to all the time,” says Mrs Cleary.

 She adds that as well as improving the pupils’ language skills, there are many other benefits to using technology in the classroom. “It helps make classes much more interesting which is great for motivating the pupils and encourages them to be more creative. It also helps to improve their ICT, communication and research skills.”

She admits the pupils are not the only ones who are learning in the classroom. “Sometimes teachers are having to play catch-up with the pupils who could teach us a thing or two about MP3s, podcasts, videoclips, soundfiles and webcams.

“Technology is changing all the time and we have to keep up with it or be left behind. In the past for example pupils would have written to penfriends and posted their letters; then they progressed to email and now email is being replaced by webcams and online discussion.

“There are so many different applications - the year 9 group completed a photostory assignment and year 10s designed their own websites – all of which encourages greater creativity and innovation. It also means that there is always something new for both teachers and pupils to learn.”

The enthusiasm for new technology at St Patrick’s Grammar supports the findings of recent research by the Centre for Excellence in Multimedia Language Learning at the University of Ulster, Coleraine. Their research entitled ‘Multimedia Language Learning in Higher Education in the UK’ found that primary and secondary schools are generally making greater use of technology in language classes than many universities. Although universities have state of the art multimedia language labs, many lecturers are sticking with ‘traditional’ audiovisual technologies like television, video and audio cassettes, there is not the same appetite for newer technologies like the MP3 player, or web cams in universities as in schools. The research also found that interactive whiteboards have made a huge impact on teaching in both the primary and secondary sectors but over two thirds of university lecturers questioned said they never used interactive whiteboards.