Information Technology

Chris Perry, Head of ICT, Newhall Green High School
Tom Kenny, Business Sales Adviser, PC World

Chris Perry, Head of ICT, Newhall Green High School: Key thing about this PC World visit is it’s not going to be your traditional school trip somewhere. Today we’re doing our first visit to an employer. We’ve given them two different assignments for two different audiences, so they need to create a multimedia product to explain what they’ve done, to other students of their age who may do the Diploma in the future.

The second group are to make a promotional product that PC World might actually like to use themselves. An important part of that is we will actually take them back to PC World and get their management to have a look at the products that have been made and to give feedback on it.

Learner 1: The advertising group can go round and take pictures of posters.

Chris Perry: They’re going to be given a presentation about the products they sell, how they sell them. PC World have a nice facility up there which they call the 'living room of the future', with all the latest gadgets and technology in, so they’re going to be having a look at that. In addition to that they’re going to have a look round the store and this morning they’re preparing by deciding what questions they want to ask the PC World staff and the PC World customers.

Learner 2: With this you get to do it yourself with laptops, the computers, the cameras and everything.

Learner 3: It’s more interactive with the work that you’re doing, instead of just doing pen to paper.

Learner 1: We’re, like, trusted to find out our own information and if we don’t do that we realise what happens when you don’t do that. It’s not "Oh, I’ll let you off, we can try that again" - it’s real and it's more like I’m adapting to the real world.

Chris Perry: For today’s visit we’ve given the students quite a lot of structure over what we want them to come up with. In the future, we’re hoping that they will become more and more independent in how they plan, record and also how they deliver the information back to us at the end.

PC World member of staff: We set up what people are installing in their homes. This is a sort of a projector set up.

Tom Kenny, Business Sales Adviser, PC World: I knew what they expected from us, about new technology, the way it changes and influences. Some of it they know more than me about, like the games consoles, and some of it, obviously, I’m showing them, so, we learn from each other. You can put footage up on YouTube within a minute. You can record it straight on a laptop and it’s on YouTube.

Chris Perry: The day’s been absolutely brilliant. They’ve stuck with the Diploma brief as well, so, everything they’ve presented to us has related to the new technology and how people are buying this technology and how it’s changed over the last few years. The students are going to spend a day putting their presentations together. Both presentations will then be evaluated, so they’ll come back and show that to the staff here and hopefully get some useful feedback about it.

Learner 4: At first I thought we’re not going to get that much information out of PC World, but we got more information from here than we have from Wikipedia, because it’s from them and they’ve worked here.

Learner 5: I thought we’d just be taken out on little tour with just like a worker from here but it was a lot more interesting that I’d imagined. It’s just a great place to be to learn, I’d say.

END