During the Halloween midterm break this year, an IT camp was held at the Sensory Resource Centre in Dundalk. Presented by Róisín Mulligan, IT Trainer and Bernie Devlin, Community Resource Worker, the camp was offered to students between Junior Cert. and Leaving Cert. classes living in Louth. It was taken up by four young ladies from different parts of the county in mainstream education and provided an opportunity for the participants to meet, interact socially, provide peer support and forge friendships.

Stretched over two days, the objective of the IT camp was to provide the participants with a number of new IT skills. Several topics were offered to the girls who picked those most relevant to them given their current educational status. Each participant had a different level of computability and a varying level in terms of requirements, so a happy medium was sought and found. The participants were both JAWS and Zoomtext users so the notes provided catered for both mouse-users and non-mouse users who use the keyboard only.

Over the course of the camp, the topics covered were:

• Making a short presentation and the skills required to do so
• Using Skype for communication on-line
• Downloading audio books from www.audible.co.uk
• Saving files to and accessing files from a USB memory stick
• Using a search engine such as Google to search efficiently for information
• Accessing music on the Internet
• Using the accessibility (Ease of Access) options in Windows to customise the appearance of the Operating System

Towards the end of the camp the girls enjoyed a luxury session and received some general advice from Laura Flynn a local beautician based in Dundalk. A follow-on session in make-up application, colour analysis and personal styling was suggested and is planned for early 2011. This greatly enhanced the experience for the girls.

I wish to thank Roisin, Bernie and Laura for her hard work, and excellent delivery of tips, tricks and advice- Colette O’Sullivan Regional Manager for Dublin & North East