St Paul's School

Back in 2000, two GCSE pupils at St Paul’s School became frustrated by the lack of easily accessible learning resources on the fast growing web. Their school had the beginnings of an intranet but it lacked content as in order to upload resources, teachers had to struggle with a complicated manual process of building everything from scratch. As a result, the site’s content was out of date and seldom used by teachers and pupils.

The boys vision was of an intranet that could be edited easily with the use a web browser by anyone capable of using a word processor. They also wanted to allow staff and students alike to regularly upload content and collaboratively transform the intranet into a useful tool for teaching and learning. It was out of this vision, and several school holidays, that Simon and Joe founded Firefly. Years later, the Firefly team has grown but is still managed on a day-to-day basis by the two Founding Partners.

After Firefly was deployed at St Paul’s, all the staff were able to get involved in the building and use of the intranet, which grew rapidly and now contains over 35,000 pages. Each academic department now use their section to set homework, provide pupils with relevant and up to date learning material and share teaching resources. For example, the Modern Languages Department use Firefly to allow students to test their translation and grammar skills outside of the classroom. The staff handbook and school calendar are now online and St Paul’s students and staff were heavily involved in the development of the Student Planner iPad app.