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Shun Lee Catholic Secondary School, one of 20 pilot schools in the Government's information technology education scheme, has completed its basic IT infrastructure at a cost of more than $6 million.

  It invested $200,000, with the rest funded by the Education Department. About $1.7 million was spent on physical amenities, including a complicated rearrangement of the electrical system, vice-principal Leung Kam-chiu said.

 About $1.3 million went on sourcing computer hardware and $1.2 million on networking equipment.

 The school uses a gigabit switch and fibre optics as its network backbone connecting the 100BaseT Fast Ethernet network of classrooms and function rooms on each floor.

 There are 350 ports, including one in each classroom to allow teachers to link their notebook PCs to the school intranet for teaching.

 The intranet will be accessible by students and teachers via 160 networked PCs to share materials such as notes and exercises. More than 100 PCs are for student use.

 The school plans to extend the intranet to an extranet, allowing students access to school resources from their homes.

 'But it will take longer to build the extranet as the security issue is our core concern,' Mr Leung said.

 There are five key IT facilities in the school. There are a staff room with 60 nodes, one on each teacher's desk, for notebook or desktop connection; one computer room each for the junior and senior sections; a multimedia geography room which also serves as an IT training centre for teachers; a multimedia language lab; and a multimedia room with iMacs for students to play games and use during free time.

 The school also has computerised its library system.

 Despite the massive network set-up, the school had not yet started the most important task - the application of IT to enhance teaching, Mr Leung said.

 Nine subjects including geography, science and English had been chosen as the first to use the technology in class.

 Mr Leung said IT could help make the learning process more interesting and interactive.

 'Teaching geography, for example, we can make use of information on the Web for more lively elaboration of natural phenomena, as it is not always possible to take field trips,' he said.

 Using IT as a self-learning tool for students was the school's final IT goal.'As teachers, we actually are helping our students learn to learn,' he said.

 Before all these goals became a reality, teachers and students had to master the technology, he said. Teachers had begun IT training.

 Because of inadequate Chinese software, the language barrier had been a key obstacle preventing extensive use of IT among students, Mr Leung said.

 Shun Lee, with Pui Ching Middle School, Sha Tin Government Secondary School and Ho Sau Nam Primary School were pioneers in the pilot scheme, said Paul Yeung, executive director of system integrator Senco-Masslink Technology.

 Senco-Masslink said it had contacted all 20 schools in the pilot programme.

 'The rest [of the pilot schools] tend to adopt a wait-and-see approach to learn from other's experience,' Mr Yeung said.

 It was unlikely schools would achieve significant progress in IT establishment this academic year because teaching was their primary focus, Mr Yeung said.

 Primary schools were relatively slow in IT adoption, because they had to build their infrastructure from the ground up.

 Secondary schools such as Pui Ching and Sha Tin Government had used IT before they joined the pilot scheme, said Agnes Mak of the Hong Kong Computer Society, a consultant for the pilot scheme.

 Mr Leung said Shun Lee's IT education plan had increased the workload of teachers greatly, which was the biggest problem so far encountered.

 Other challenges included inexperience in dealing with suppliers and government departments such as the Architectural Services Department to rearrange power connections and lay structured cabling.



Shun Lee school leads way in pilot IT education plan