A leader in secondary school digital arts
Profiles in Success: Mount Lawley Senior High School
Perth, Western Australia: Founded in 1955 and one of Western Australia’s premier schools, Mount Lawley Senior High School provides students with a broad and rich learning experience, with a focus on academic excellence, personal growth and development, and an enriching social experience. Priding itself on being one of the country’s leading visual and performing arts schools, Mount Lawley has long been a leader in secondary school digital arts.
In mid-2005, though, faced with teacher/student goals that far outstripped the capabilities of its predominantly PC-based multimedia development facilities, the school embarked on a refresh program for its digital music, film and photography rooms. According to Associate Principal Michael Camilerri, the primary aim was to provide students with environments in which they could fully explore their own creativity.
A result of the program was media, photography and music rooms that would be the envy of many professional studios. In the media (film) room, 20 iMacs with 17-inch displays take centre stage in addition to a powerful production suite running Final Cut Pro. A further 20 iMacs and Apple Logic Express were brought in for the music room, and in the photography room, an additional 20 iMacs. All of the iMacs run Apple iLife ‘06, a suite of programs specifically designed to make light work of creating, editing and sharing digital music, videos and photography.
Rounding out the Apple solution is an Apple Xserve dual processor server and a high performance Xserve RAID configured with 14 400Gb drives.
In commenting on the decision to adopt an Apple-centric environment, Camilerri states quite firmly: “We wanted integrated solutions across a range of media applications, encouraging students to take creative risks rather than spending time learning complex applications and systems. The more we looked at what was on the market, the more we realised that Apple was the only viable alternative.
For students and teachers, the Apple environment affords the means of being able to focus on creating content right from the start, rather than devoting inordinate amounts of time just learning how to use the systems
— Michael Camilerri, Associate Principal, Mt Lawley Secondary School
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