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Thursday 30th April, 2009St. Macartan's College: ICS Skills Centre (ECDL) of the Year 2009
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St.Macartan’s College ICS Skills Centre (ECDL) won the “ICS Skills Centre of the Year 2009” Award last Thursday, 30th April 2009, at the ICS Skills National Training Excellence Awards 2009 in Dublin. The Award was presented to Mr.Vincent Mc Carvill, Centre Manager, by Mr Sean Haughey, Minister for Life Long Learning and Mr James Friars, Chief Executive ICS Skills.

This award is given to the ICS Skills centre that has demonstrated the overall best practices throughout the past year. The centre was audited on Thursday 23rd April 09.

 

 

 

St.Macartan’s College recognised the value of independent international accreditation as a valuable tool in the promotion of computer literacy back in 1998. In that year two ECDL classes began, 20 transition year students and 21 teachers, including our Principal and Vice-Principal. This provided the enthusiasm to make ECDL part of our Transition year programme. In 2000 the decision was made to offer ECDL to all Transition year students. In 2001 we also offered classes to parents in the evenings. These provided an extra stimulus to our students to work at ECDL when their parents were also taking the tests. In 2005 the centre moved to automated testing, with ActivTraining, which greatly eased the administrative workload. In 2007 we have offered ECDL to the Leaving Certificate Applied students and they will complete the seven modules over two years. This has been successful and is again offered in 2008/2009. Now all our students are leaving school having completed the ECDL course. Since automated started we have maintained the  charge at €100 per student.

In the 10 years since we started 960 students have bought skills cards and 766 have received their Licences. This represents a completion rate of 80%. This has been achieved due to the enthusiasm and hard work of a very committed centre staff who thoroughly believe in the ECDL concept.

Research undertaken by the centre has shown that when our students go to third level they greatly appreciate having had the opportunity to become competent in the use of ICT.