Verulam School St Albans, Hertfordshire, England

This is my own page for Verulam School, an 11-18 boys' state comprehensive school with 940 pupils, relating to my involvement with various projects as Head of Physics. There is an official Verulam School page which is being developed by some of the pupils.The school has been at the forefront of many development projects involving the use of computers in education. Some of these are described below.

Schools Online

Verulam School is one of 60 schools across the UK to be sponsored by industry to participate in the government's Schools Online Project. This is the pilot scheme for looking at how UK schools can benefit from being connected to the Internet. The main projects are in Languages and Science with other interesting areas being given some cover. The emphasis is on learning how to use the net as an interactive medium and not just as an information resource. More information about the project's background can be found on the Schools Online Project press release page. Our involvement has followed from participation in the Hypermedia Project which is sponsored by BNR Europe Ltd in conjunction with Ultralab at the Anglia Polytechnic University. This project enables pupils to go "online", searching the Web for information relevant to specific topics and communicating with BNR engineers to answer questions, particularly related to telecommunications

Telecommunications

Also in conjunction with BNR Europe Ltd we are developing a Telecommunications course to match the UCLES A Level Modular Physics Telecommunications Module. Currently four students are being taught this course by BNR engineers for one half day per week at BNR's Harlow site, where optical fibres were first used for telecommunications. It is hoped that we will be able to put some of the teaching material produced by the engineers onto web pages on the Schools Online server.

Datalogging

We have also participated in the Herts IT in Science Project, using datalogging equipment in the classroom. An account of this can be found in "Enhancing Science with it - In Action", published by NCET, who are a good source of information on the use of computers in schools. I also spoke at the ASE Annual Meeting about this project in a talk entitled "The use of computers in the Science Laboratory" on Thursday 4th January 1996 at Reading University.