BERTIE BRINGS BRIGHTNESS

St. Aidan’s old boy, Bertie Ahern will bring a little brightness and light to the school’s students today. The Taoiseach, will be launching a product that could actually make study easy and attractive for the bright boys in St. Aidans. He will be launching Setanta, a project that could revolutionise learning in our schools.The Setanta Project is a collaborative ICT Project between the School of Computer Applications, Dublin City University (D.C.U) and St. Aidan’s. The project aims to develop courseware which will support the secondary school curriculum and be stored on a school intranet. Teachers will be able to access the courseware from their classroom computer and present subject material in new and interesting ways. The project draws on the skills, teaching interests and needs of the students and staff of St Aidan’s school, and merges these with the expertise, research interests and needs of the staff and students of the School of Computer Applications.

Setanta Saviours

The driving force behind the Setanta project is St. Aidan’s teacher, Ray O Neill. Ray came up with the bright idea in the first place and put all the very time consuming proposals together. He then used his renowned persuasiveness to convince the school management of the project’s potential and usefulness. The school principal, Bro. Cashel enthusiastically supported the venture. Ray then sought the expert cooperation of Dr. Alan Smeaton of DCU’s School of Computer Applications. Margaret Farren and Ray Walshe joined the team. Vital technical support and finance was offered by Seamus Knox from NCTE and as they say the rest is history...

Art and Science do mix!

A collaborative link has been established between the art teacher, Sonya Kinch, at St. Aidan's and two third year students, Marie Mooney and Deirdre Pentony on the BSc in Computer Applications course in DCU. 
The most common visualisation model suggested by the Sonya Kinch for Art History, was a museum environment where the learners could navigate themselves at their own through the Virtual Art Museum (VAM).

Setanta for students….
Almost 20 pupils received special training during the project. We asked a few of the participants for their opinions…...

Last October, we started working on the school's art database for Setanta, with each student being assigned a particular artist to work on.  I was covering Jan Van Eyck, which was interesting because I had heard about him before as part of the Junior Certificate  History course. At the time I didn't realise that it would take the best part of a year to finish, but I soon found out that there was a lot more information on Van Eyck than I thought possible. Eventually I managed to sort through it all and learned a lot at the same time.
Ronan Fahy.

 I was working on an artist called George Seurat for Setanta.  I had never heard of him before, but I suppose this was a good thing as I learned more about the artist then I did about computers.

A few weeks ago we took part in a Front Page 2000 user course, where Ken Maher taught us how to design web pages and how to make them look interesting.  The whole experience was great, and as well as enjoying ourselves we learned a lot, and got a lot of work done too.
Neil Hosey.

Animated about Maths

A further project, under development by science teacher, Pat Hastings, includes the use of an animation package, to explain maths and science concepts. These animations can be stored on the server and accessed for presentation purposes during class.

It is intended that emerging technologies will be explored and further collaborative ICT projects will be developed between the School of Computer Applications and St. Aidans.

Teachers go back to school
Almost 100% of the teachers in St. Aidans who formerly could not use computers or whose skills were a little rusty have taken part in a special training course associated with the Setanta project.
The training which took place after school will allow all teachers to be familiar with how the new intranet system will operate. It will also permit some of the teachers to design and prepare on line classes. Chalk and talk will soon be a thing of the past. Pictured above are teachers Aisling Brennan and Monica Mahon

No more cramming?
If the project is successful, the aim will be to extend the range of subject areas covered, make it available to classroom size groups and of course to other schools. The skills and expertise we have gained in St. Aidan’s in developing the model can be passed on to other schools to create a similar system specially tailored for the specific school.  Teachers can use the intranet as a teaching aid without having to look through endless databases and web pages to find what they’re looking for. At the same time students on the traditional last minute cram before an exam would be able to find the information they want quickly.