Cool Chromes for Crazy Class by our 6th Class reporter, John O’Rourke
6th Class Get New Laptops!
During the summer a company ( that a parent of a puoil works for) donated laptops to St Francis National School. The head of I.T. for Saint Francis National School, Ms McKevitt, helped to make it happen. After their arrival during the summer, the laptops were checked and set up by Shane from Nortch IT and put in the principal Mrs Lawless’ office where they remained for the next two months! That was until she got tired of having them and gave them to the new heads of ICT (apparently it takes two teachers to replace Ms McKevitt), Sixth Class teacher, Mr McShane, and Senior Infants teacher, Mrs Twibill. Mr McShane then bought a trolley for them, but it only fits 36 laptops of the 40+ laptops.
Then when the trolley arrived, Mr McShane had to set it all up and needed the help of responsible students. Jack and John helped with installing the chargers and laptops, while Sophie, Rose and Phoenix helped with labelling each slot in the trolley. Beth and Chloe helped by labelling all of the laptops.
Since there are so many laptops each pupil gets one, but they each share that laptop with someone from the other Sixth-Class. They use the laptops to write things like a letter to a local MEP for a competition, and if one of them wins, the laptops are surely to be thanked. They work extremely well and the students love to use them. Pupils Marianne and Layla have been given the job of looking after them each day, making sure they’re all charging and working smoothly.
“I thought that they were very high-spec and reliable,” says Mr McShane. “ I think that these laptops will help the class with learning and getting more interested in their work and lessons,” answered the Sixth Class pupil Seth Connolly.
There is only one con about these laptops and that shows how brilliant they are. That con is that pupils can’t log into their google account on the laptops and have to keep all their work locally, not on the cloud or school network. Unfortunately, this means that only Sixth Class can use them because the younger classes mightn’t know what to do and how to use them.
As you can imagine the pupils of Sixth-Class are really grateful for these laptops and everyone that helped in the process of making it happen.
