How Organisations use ICT

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Danielle Sharpe

Unit 2 Task A

How Organisations use ICT

The Northampton Academy is a new comprehensive school situated on the Billing Brook Road in Lings. There are 1300 students attending this school with the age range of these varying from 11-18 years.

Northampton Academy


Many business organisations use ICT in different ways depending on the type of organisation and how ICT can improve and help the business. The Northampton Academy is good example of a business that uses ICT in administration, in a more advanced and wider range of ways.

 The Academy needs to be able to send out letters to parents providing information such as how well their child is doing in school, whether or not their child is displaying the right kinds of behaviour in school, or information on educational trips coming up which their child may be interested in or is a part of. Newsletters also need to be sent out providing the parent’s of each and every child in the Academy with information about forthcoming events, plans for the future and general information such as school term dates.
The variety of ways in which they use ICT in administration, are those such as at times like registration. The register will be taken by the teacher and each student marked present or absent, and then the register will be taken to reception where the staff will then feed it through an OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) machine. This saves time and effort of those that would otherwise have to type in the information of every student, saying whether or not they are present at school that day, so that each pupil’s attendance is recorded on their systems. With this information the computers will be able to work out each pupil’s percentage of attendance to put on individual records and also to enable them to keep on top of truancy and report attendance levels to parents.
The school has to keep a record of every pupil’s data on their databases which is all done through ICT and typed into the databases on their computers. These need to be able to be updated if a student has a change of address or a slight change of information. The contact details can be stored easily and found easily which means it is a lot quicker to search for information on each student. It is important for the information to be retrievable quickly because if a child is ill or is in urgent need of going home, then telephone numbers and emergency contact information on that student needs to be found as quickly as possible and the staff don’t have the time to be searching through paper files looking for that students information. Some of the information on each pupil is needed to be kept confidential, and because it is all recorded through computers, rather than having to be written out and stored in filing systems, which would take up much more room and time searching for information, it is easier to allow for that to happen. Each member of staff can be put at different levels of access on the administration system and password protection can be enabled to individual records so that only the people that need access to those files can retrieve the information.
Student and staff timetabling is arranged through ICT. They are produced through the software SIMs (Schools information management System). The computers store all the information about what year, ability level and lessons each pupil should be placed into and timetables for each and every student can be made. There has to be a teacher present at each lesson so teacher timetabling is also sorted through ICT. This way if there are errors made on an individual’s timetable or there is a mix-up somewhere, it doesn’t take long to correct it on the systems and re-print another one for the student or the member of staff.

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 Using the software on the computers, things such as sending out newsletters, sending letters home to parents and general word processing becomes a lot quicker and easier. They can be made professional by applying letterheads to each letter they send, and addresses can be mail merged to save time in having to find out names and addresses in manual filing systems.
Every so often, each child is issued with a report that informs their parents about how they are doing in school and monitors their academic learning. Instead of each teacher writing every pupils report out by hand, the report is ...

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