Nestled in the foothills below the range from Toowoomba, Australia, and surrounded by lucerne fields, lies Flagstone Creek State School. For more than 100 years this school has served as the hub for the community and it is far from being a an old fashioned little school.
With 82 students, principal David Prestridge and three full time teachers, this school boast one computer per six students and one of the first in the Toowoomba area to be fully integrated with the Internet.
Since the beginning of computers in school, Flagstone has been an Apple/Mac school and now are the proud owners of several iMacs. When asked why he chose to stay with Macs, principal David replied, “They work logically, are very reliable, are able to do everything we want and are easily networked. We only use one IBM in the admin area, and it was provided by the education department as a system requirement.”
No pressure has been placed on the school to change over to Windows machines, and there has never been a shortage of software for the Macs. The computers are used by students in all learning areas, for word processing, letters, email, photos, scanned images, sound files, typing practice, and drills. Research is carried out on CD-ROM encyclopaedias by the older classes while years one and two are taught numbers and sounds via their Macs.
When asked about the reliability of the new iMacs, David said he had no problems whatsoever. He thought a 3.5″ floppy disk drive would have been useful until the network was set up, but now there was no real need. He particularly liked the ease of setting up the iMacs for ethernet, taking less than five minutes.
I would like to thank David for taking time out of his busy days to provide the information for this article and wish him and the school all the best in the future.
On a related matter, the University of Southern Queensland just took delivery of 16 iMacs. Hopefully this is only the start of a very large order.
Yeah, well my school’s got one whole G3 in the accounting department. Oh dear, we have problems at St. Michaels. :)
