St Peter’s, Cambridge embraces digital technologies alongside our traditional values.
St Peter’s sees digital literacy as an essential skill. Digital devices are important tools for learning and communicating. E-learning at St Peter’s means purposeful, integrated use of internet-connected devices for learning. Students should bring a laptop or netbook as their primary device. Students can supplement this with tablets, ipads, smart phones or any other internet capable device that can assist their learning.
The school is fully set up to support the use of devices. We have expert in-house support for the use of devices. Investment in the latest infrastructure enables St Peter’s to offer wireless access to the internet anywhere in the school, while ensuring a safe online environment for our students through the use of filters. St Peter’s supports access via all the main platforms, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Linux devices. All students have a school email account with a unique password and single sign-on access to the Wi-Fi, the school intranet, google drive, Office 365, and e-learning platforms — Moodle and MyPortfolio.
Students use devices to enhance learning in many different ways. These include: using our school’s virtual learning environment to view resources, do activities and upload assessments; creating learning content in a variety of ways; conducting research to develop critical and analytical thinking; communicating online with different learning communities using cloud-based servers such as google drive and Office 365; accessing the library and its databases, catalogues and e-books. Teaching and learning occurs in a blended environment where technology is integrated into the process of learning.
St Peter’s has five computer labs with specialised software installed. These are used by students taking computer science, data and media, design, music technology and photography. Other subjects can book these rooms to use the specialist software when needed as part of their teaching programmes.
We offer a comprehensive Computer Science curriculum. Computing is a core subject in Years 7 and 8. It is part of the technology rotation where students learn CAD drawing, 3D printing and coding. Studying coding at this age is a real advantage as learning programming languages is very much like learning spoken languages - if you don’t learn when you’re young, you’ll never be a fluent native speaker. Our Prep students are gaining coding skills that will be valuable for life.
In Years 9 to 13 computing is an option. In Years 9 and 10 students learn about digital media, digital information and programming using a variety of software and web-based programs. NCEA courses in Years 11, 12 and 13 use Digital Technologies achievement standards, whilst IB offers a two-year Computer Science course option. NCEA students learn about digital media, digital information, infrastructure, computer programming and computer science. Year 13 students have the option of taking a first year university level programming course offered by Waikato University as a distance learning paper fully supported by an in-class teacher.
