Getting your School ready - what happens next?

Now that you have received confirmation via e-mail of your application, spend some time looking at the Digital Schools criteria. There are forty-six criteria in all. Sixteen of these criteria are classed as essential and must be satisfied to achieve a Digital Schools Award. Essential criteria are identified by a star symbol ( ). To help your school on this path, use the online self-evaluation tool to identify your school's areas of strength and concern.

This online evaluation tool will automatically generate a graph that will illustrate to what extent your school meets the criteria. This graph is intended to help your school identify areas of strength and areas of concern before applying for a visit by a Digital Schools Validator.

By entering your e-mail address, the graph, a comment indicating how closely your school meets the criteria and a summary of how your school answered the self-evaluation will be sent to your inbox. You should then contact the Digital Schools Coordinator to arrange a visit to your school.

Your school will not be eligible to register for a validation until you have completed the self-evaluation and have confirmed with the Digital Schools Coordinator that your school have produced the required pre-requisites. The pre-requisites are:

1. School ICT Policy
2. AUP
3. Schools Online evaluation report
4. Appropriate Web presence (website)

The Resource centre contains weblinks to online resources organised under the five headings applied to the Digital Schools criteria. There are also links to the Resource Finder on Scoilnet, to software evaluations carried out by Irish teachers on Software Central and a range of NCTE's ICT Advice Sheets which provide information on ICT equipment, peripherals, networking and software.