We have had some exciting new developments to start this New Year, the first of which has been investment in new interactive display boards for our teaching classrooms. These boards are a huge jump in hardware for our teachers, coming with lots of built-in tools to compliment their teaching, as well as the boards being brighter and easier to see for our visually impaired students.

This is a move away from our previous model of having a projector and whiteboard which eventually starts to lose brightness due to the bulbs degrading over time. I’m really excited to do some training with the staff who will be using these and to then see the new hardware being put to good use in the classrooms! I hope students will see the benefits of the new kit. We have plans to expand this over the coming academic year with a long term view of having every classroom with a new Clevertouch board within the next couple of years.

Due to the amount of staff absence due to COVID, we have had to merge classes and bring them into the hall and gym using chromebooks. The challenge for us was making sure we could have the amount of chromebooks needed all in use at the same time in the locations, in order to cater for this we managed to get three extra wifi points configured and wired up in the hall and gym in a couple of days. While it would obviously be better if students were in classes as normal, I am proud to see the technology we have put in place able to support as reliably as it has over this period. We have had 120 students in the hall at some points working on chromebooks which I think is a great achievement! Mr Fisentzides is the other technican in our team and I must thank him for all his hard work with me on getting this setup and the support he has given in the hall and gym to students since. Seeing the students safe at school and working so well in the hall and gym has made it worthwhile!

It’s now been three years since I created this website, when we decided to move to an in house solution to give us autonomy in our design choice, and we continue to look at how we can make the website the best it can be. What really makes a website connect with its community is regular and quality content; we appointed our digital content creator, Miss Scott, last January and she has done a wonderful job over the last year and I thank her for all the great work she has done on the website, greatly improving our social media presence and relaunching our newsletter. I hope parents, students and staff have enjoyed seeing more regular updates and all our student success stories and opportunities celebrated.

The latest development of our website is of course, this blog, which I am really excited to watch grow. We had some fun coming up with the title for the blog, some of which included ‘Redhill Goss’ and ‘Redhill Natters’ but I don’t think Miss Scott was too keen on these!

We have also seen our parent information app, Edulink One, develop hugely since we first implemented it, with it now being used for sending out pupil reports, reporting pupil absence as well as allowing parents to monitor their child’s attendance, achievements and homework. We have also recently connected Edulink up with our canteen so parents can see what’s been chosen over dinner time!! If you are a parent and have not yet signed up, please visit our Edulink Support page for more information.

All of this could not happen without the support of Miss Scott and Mr Fisentzides who pupils will be used to seeing running around school taking photos, running clubs and giving ICT support wherever needed! Thank you to both of them for all their hard work, I am proud to have them in my team.

I’m looking forward to sharing more ICT updates with you during this academic year, we have some exciting new features with Edulink and more new hardware coming to support teaching and learning in the coming months!

Please visit our ICT Support page if you have any questions or are having difficulty with anything ICT related in school, we are always on hand to help and offer advice.

ICT Developments, Mr Roach