Library & Tech
Library
From orientation onward, students learn real research skills from the Irene duPont Library staff, instruction that starts in their first weeks and continues throughout their academic classes, building skills they'll rely on at St. Andrew's, in college, and beyond.
Built in 1956 and renovated in 2008, the library is stocked with about 31,500 print volumes, 150,000 e-books, 5,000 streaming videos, and 100 print periodicals, with roughly 700 new books added every year. Group study rooms, individual study carrels, and a periodical and reference room round out the space. Faculty rely heavily on library course guides to point students toward exactly what they need for coursework and research.
Students also have access to more than 35 electronic reference sources and full-text databases—JSTOR, Project MUSE, Academic Search Complete, and the Oxford English Dictionary among them—spanning nearly every subject. The library website is the starting point for all of these, as well as the School Archive.
Students and faculty can also borrow equipment, including:
- digital and video cameras
- GPS systems
- projectors
- calculators
- headphones
... and more. Visit the Irene duPont Library site to see everything available.
Technology
Campus-wide WiFi and close to 100 networked computers in classrooms and labs give students the tools they need: internet, email, file storage, printing, and specialized academic software.
That technology shows up differently in every classroom. For example:
- Film Studies and Music Composition students produce and edit movies and music in our state-of-the-art digital media studio
- In science laboratories, students use Vernier LoggerPro to model and analyze experimental data
- In modern language classrooms, a fleet of school iPads helps students hone their listening and speaking skills with interactive audio and video
- Physics students record their work on blogs, connecting them with professors and science writers across the country
- Choral students learn from interactive theory and sight-reading resources online, while instrumentalists record practice sessions for instructor feedback
- In "flipped" math classrooms, students watch mini-lectures at home and spend class time applying what they've learned through collaborative problem-solving
- In computer science courses—and as extracurricular exploration elsewhere—students build software and apps that serve the school community directly.
Students and faculty also use Canvas, a learning-management system that gives students clear access to coursework and assignments, and lets faculty offer more immediate, ongoing feedback.
While these tools enhance learning across our curriculum, we expect students to be fully engaged in—and co-leaders of—our classes. Science suggests note-taking by hand is more effective than note-taking with a computer, so laptops and other devices remain classed in classrooms unless otherwise instructed by a teacher.
Technology is something students learn to use thoughtfully here—not just to consume content, but to create it, and to know when, where, and how it actually helps.
