Porthcawl Primary School

Porthcawl Primary is a school with vision. It has 181 pupils (from Nursery to Year Six), seven teachers and a strong determination to improve its status in the next six months. To achieve this, Porthcawl works closely with its supportive LEA to introduce realistic new IT structures – it has already set a standard by being the first school in Bridgend to implement electronic registration.

“We believe in putting as many worthwhile IT systems in place as we can,” says Andrew Wood. “I was at an ‘Assessment for Learning’ training course in Cardiff, presented by one of the UK’s foremost authorities on assessment, Shirley Clark. She was talking about modern alternatives to acetate sheets and overhead projectors and mentioned a product that was easy to use, showed instant results and contributed to peer assessment. We had been looking into enhancing our assessment procedures at Porthcawl, though at the time I had no real idea how this next-generation technology worked or where to get it.”

Some months later it was Steljes, the technology pioneering organisation, that was able to shed a little more light on matters. Steljes is the exclusive distributor for AVerMedia in the UK and one of their products, the visualiser, was exactly what Andrew had been thinking about – a state-of-art document camera that promoted assessment and enhanced interactivity in the classroom.