Leeming SHS is a new school, now in its 8th year, in the southern suburbs of Perth. In the short time it has been around, Leeming has established a considerable reputation in the area of Information Technology. Leeming has consciously avoided becoming a "specialist" school and has adopted instead the goal of becoming a comprehensive community school. In this article, I.T. Manager, Bryn Jones tells us a little bit about the history of I.T. in the school.

In 1988 Leeming had year 11 students for the first time. The administration ran on a dual floppy Microbee and 16 Microbees were available for student use. It was decided to perform an I.T. Audit (or "Needs Analysis" as it was then called). This revealed that only three members of staff made Regular Use of a Computer (and two of those were full time computer studies teachers!). We all felt that we were doing a Fine Job teaching Computer Studies and Business Studies and that we should carry on doing that for the time being . All the staff felt that computers were Wonderful Things as long as someone else was using them. There was obviously no foundation from which to launch "Computers Across the Curriculum".

We decided that we had to take a Long Term View, looking five years ahead, and that we needed a Plan. The plan was Broad and Deep, Comprehensive and Complex, but its Number One Priority was that the Personal Computing Skills of teachers had to be improved. Although the students at that time used only Microbees and DOS systems it was agreed that for teachers it had to be Macintosh. The other systems had proved to be too impenetrable for the average chalkie.

We bought 2 Mac Plus's with one external floppy drive, an Imagewriter and MSWorks with funds generously donated by the Canteen Committee (how Far Sighted they were) and off we went. The clerical staff and teaching staff were all invited to use these systems and the 3rd Computer User, who had his own Mac was given some extra DOTT time and made School Development Officer (Staff Personal Computing Skills - Improvement Thereof).

The following year we opened our new Business Studies Centre which was largely DOS but with one lonely Mac and our first Laserwriter forming part of the Model Office. This one system probably did more to transform the attitudes of teachers than all the other systems put together. Queues developed to use it and towards the end of the year fights broke out over whose turn it was.

1990 saw enough staff support for I.T. to spend $40,000 of our Own Money on a Mac network, involving 2km of cable and covering the whole school with plug in points in the clerical area, every staff office and teaching area and in the Library. At the end of the year, the write off of our Microbee network provided the funds for us to install 20 Macs in the Library computer room and a number of LC's in the Library to run CD's and Good Curriculum Software. By now we had 3 Laserwriters and staff and students had access to them from anywhere in the school. Most teachers were making use of computers for their personal work but not so much with students. Students however made extensive use of computers by themselves.

So our five years is nearly up and where are we now?

We have over 120 computers on one Novell and three Appletalk networks and a large range of software. The Library has been computerised. Yr 8 Computing has been abolished to free up resources for other curriculum areas. Maths has bought its own computer network. Every teaching department in the school makes some use of computers. There is extensive use of the free access computers. We've just bought some Powerbooks and plan to throw out the last of the typewriters. Information Technology pervades almost every aspect of school life from daily newspapers and magazines to careers guidance, sports carnivals and theatre productions.

A prime example of Cross Curricular Integration is the Performing Arts department where this year's production, an original called "Beijing Spring" has had computers involved in almost every stage of its scripting, music production, programme and poster design and box office. The box office program, a Hypercard stack called "Production Manager" has been under development by a group of students in the school for 18 months and is about to be put on the market for use by school and community theatres.

Looking back over this period of Intense and Rapid Development it is now possible to identify a few Underlying Principles that have helped us to move towards our goals.

• School policy (the Plan!) must take a Long Term View and accept that the problems we face are large and that Appropriate Solutions will not be Easy or Cheap.

• We must Acknowledge and Cope with the very Real Fear and Trepidation that many teachers have about Information Technology.

• Teachers have to be given Resources and Opportunities to develop their Personal Computing Skills and begin to appreciate the benefits that computers have to offer them personally before they can be expected to make any sort of judgement about the Usefulness, or otherwise, of Computers In Their Classrooms. This may take 3 to 5 years (from when you start).

• Support for I.T. users must be available, in person, immediately, in school and at the point of need.

• Students should have Free Access to computers even if their teachers are not interested in using them.

• Even if most computers can't be State Of The Art, (and most of them don't need to be!) there should be Centres of Excellence around the school where students and staff can go to use things such as scanners, CDs, powerful graphics workstations, publishing systems, on-line communications.

• The school should not be locked into one hardware platform but should empower the staff and students to choose the most appropriate hardware and software package for the task in hand. Users should also be confident that they can move between and in some cases translate between systems when necessary. It has to be said though, that with almost equal numbers of DOS and Mac systems available and similar software on both, the students and staff (but especially the staff) almost always show a preference for the Macintosh.

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