At Frank F. Harrison, Information Communication Technology is taught as a discrete subject throughout Key Stage 3. All students receive two lessons per week in ICT. This gives them a sound grounding in all aspects of ICT as laid out in the National Curriculum and enables them to be prepared to take online National Curriculum testing at the end of Year 9 as well as DiDA, Btec, iMEDIA and Entry Level Certificate qualifications in ICT in Years 10 and 11. At Key Stage 4 ICT is taught either five times a week or twice a week depending on the Pathway each student chooses and enables our students to have enough time to work towards their chosen qualification.
In Summer 2007 52% of all students in Year 11 achieved 4 GCSE grade C or higher equivalent passes at Intermediate GNVQ level.
In Years 12 and 13 students can study for the Advanced Vocational Certificate of Education in ICT ( this involves 5 lessons of ICT per week).
The Department believes in encouraging our students to work on their own initiative through some interesting problems and scenarios which they see as relevant to them. Homework is actively set and marked throughout all years. Students studying for their exams are expected to dedicate as much time on private study as the time they put in in the classroom.
There are 5 dedicated ICT rooms. Each room has 21 student workstations of industry standard networked across the college. There are also 5 networked open access ICT rooms across the college, available for use by departmental areas and for students at lunchtime and after college. In total there are in excess of 550 networked workstations across the college and there are plans to develop this still further as part of the college's development of extended hours and College @ Home.
In summer 2005 we developed our own new, fast and reliable ICT Network: running Windows XP with Microsoft Office 2003/2007. There are also more specialised programs such as Logicator and Lego Dactor for control, Photoshop for Art, Cad cam software for technology applications etc.
Each student has access to their own private user area and all students have their own e-mail account and access to the Internet. The development of College @ Home, which also enables students to access their personal online user area, where they are able to see work set by staff and have access to downloads of software in order to complete some of the required tasks. All of this is completed via the college's new Learning Platform hosted by Digital Brain.
Digital Brain also gives parents/Gaurdians access to letters which have been sent out by the college along with contact details and other useful information.
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To the right is one of Frank F Harrison's Computer Rooms. There are 5 computer rooms dedicated to ICT Teaching all with Pentium machines, laser colour printer access, scanners and digital cameras.
All rooms have Data Projectors and staff have access to interactive whiteboards to aid students learning.
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Frank F Harrison has a thriving sixth form with many students taking ICT. This involves the use of professional software for web design programming (both Visual Basic and Java). Students also study professional database construction looking at normalisation and Spreadsheet construction both using VBA environments within the software.
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The Internet is currently accessed and filtered through Walsall Grid For Learning to ensure students safety. All students and parents enter into an agreement with the college that their son/daughter will use both e-mail and the internet in a responsible manner.
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