News Story

KMi Trainee Scoops BECTa Award for Denbigh

Marc Eisenstadt, Wednesday 7 Jun 2000

Denbigh School has just been awarded first place in the BECTa/Guardian UK Schools and College Year 2000 Web Site Awards. Denbigh was short-listed for the ‘Student Learners’ award from over 640 entries. This award focused on student work, i.e. student web sites, class work involving multiple media, and Magnet (an online student magazine).

Significantly, Alex Singleton (chief architect of the Denbigh School site) received internship training in KMi from Stuart Watt and Anthony Seminara. This empowered him to produce and maintain the site that can be seen via the link listed below.

Anthony Seminara also worked with a group of 6 A-level students at Denbigh, intermittently over a period of 4 months, to teach them the design and authoring skills necessary to create a quality web magazine by-and-for students. The students went from being web novices to dedicated and enthusiastic web designers. The site is presently in its infancy but their confidence is growing, as is overall interest within the student body.

KMi’s involvement with Denbigh School is part of a long-standing programme of research activities involving the local community, including the Millennium Awards CLUTCH Clubs Project, Heronsgate Middle School, and Loughton Middle School (all linked below).

Denbigh benefits from a broadband wireless internet connection running from the top of KMi, which also feeds Heronsgate, Loughton, Lord Grey School, Leon School, and Milton Keynes College. The wireless facility, which was installed in December 1998, is now managed full-time by Neil Roche in ACS, and is growing rapidly to become a Milton Keynes Wide-Area Network under the label ‘MKSchools.net’ (see links below).

Denbigh will receive a multimedia PC or Apple notebook at the awards ceremony in July, as well as being listed in an online guide of good practice.