Unit 3 ICT and Society
Your Own Use of ICT
The school computer system
Describe the ICT technology that is being used.
I use the computer system at school. In school there are 3 main ICT rooms. Each room has about 30 computers, 2 scanners, a black and white printer HP laserjet and an interactive whiteboard. Recently the computer rooms have been updated with flatscreen RM1 computers. The computers are especially designed for use in secondary schools and have some special features that others don’t. Like a laser mouse instead of a normal mouse because pupils used to nick the balls in them. There are also some older computers in the library. Each pupil gets their own workstation. At the start of yr7 we all got a username and a password. This area that we each log onto is individual and we work on it and store our work. The teachers can control each computer by taking over all the computers via their one. This is useful for them because they can easily get our attention but bad for us because we can’t play on it while they are explaining! The computers are all linked to a network. Controlling that network is the server. It is in the ICT technicians office. Everytime we save a piece of work it goes into the hardrive of the server, not the computer we are working on. This is good because we aren’t always bound to the same computer that has all our work on. The ICT people also take a back up of all the work every week.
Describe how you use the ICT technology.
I use the computers for my work quite a lot. Obviously I use them for my ICT GCSE but also for tutor lessons, french and drama, so far. I use the Word program the most but also PowerPoint, Access, Excel and Publisher. By far the program that I use most is Word. Microsoft Word is the main program for writen documents. Word has many useful things, such as spelling and grammar check. You can fiddle around with the font, colour and size, to present your work better. The spelling usually checks your work very accurately, although occasionally does not work. The advantage of typing your work up rather than hand writing it is that you can go back and correct it easily. In the case of essays I can just go back through it, change all the mistakes, and re-save it! It’s great! If you have a handwritten piece of work, it tends to be messier where you have made spelling mistakes and is not so easy for others to read particularly if you have messy handwriting. A lot of handwriting makes your arm ache too, so generally I tend to do my homework on computer. I always do written pieces on Word, because it is easy to use. I can just print off as many copies as I like and save it, so I will never loose a piece. Other software includes Excel. This is very useful for doing spreadsheets, and you can use it as a calculator too. I have actually learnt how to use spreadsheets, then gone and used them at home. I use the software now to keep track of spending and to use as a calculator for my maths homework. I’ve used Powerpoint to do a presentation to the class in science. We didn’t have time to complete the presentation at school so went to a friends house, and completed it there. The school also has access to the internet. I use this lots too but find it very annoying when some sites are blocked. I use the internet in a french lesson to go on french language learning sites. However I don‘t just use the school computers in lessons. Quite often I do the work after school. I used to be able to do work at lunch and break too, which was so useful because if I forgot some research homework I could just go on the computer at break and run off some more research. Though since the new times of the school day we have not been allowed to do this anymore. This means that after school is the only time we can do it. I don’t really stay to play games on the computers mostly because all the good games sites are blocked but I know that some people do. I just come to do my homework. When I do get to do my work at home, like when I’m doing something on word I can use the Home-school link. The home-school link is a really useful thing that we have in our school. You can access your account at school on a computer at home. You can work on documents that you do at school at home then copy them over back onto your school account. However the link is often quite slow in copying documents back and forth. I can’t use this too much though because we don’t have all the right software at home to do some of my work on. We don’t have programs such as excel or powerpoint. This is unbelievably annoying for me as my dad refuses to buy them because he doesn’t like microsoft. So this means that I have to spend more time after school completing my homework. However apart from this, the programs are pretty universal almost every computer has the basic programs which makes it easy to coplete work on different machines.
