THE explorer Tim Severin must have chuckled as he read the correspondence sent by a group of primary schoolchildren from an Offaly village. The queries flickered daily on to his laptop computer as he sailed around the Spice Islands. "What is a firefly?", asked his young inquisitors. "Do you have toilets?" and "Are there any teddy bears on board?"

Some 8,000 miles away in Coolderry Central National School in Brosna, 96 pupils waited by their computer screens. They clicked a button. "A firefly is an insect that lights up bushes like a Christmas tree," Severin replied. "No toilets. We use the sea around us holding tightly to the boat." Later, he reluctantly informed the virtual voyagers that there were "no teddy bears on board".

Coolderry Central School is one of 700 in the State with Internet access. The global communications tool enabled pupils to follow Tim Severin on his voyage last year. The school is also one of three Irish Centres of Excellence taking part in a pilot project being run by computer giants Microsoft and Siemens Nixdorf.

Viewed from outside, Coolderry Central is a typical country school, surrounded by playing fields. Inside, the buzz of technology and signs of enthusiastic learning are infectious. This, the experts stress, is a unique learning environment and Ireland's first fully fledged cyberschool.

It is not just explorers who have beaten a path here since the school went on line two years ago. Sponsors have been quick to recognise the initiative shown by staff. The school boasts 12 state of the art multimedia PCs and a laptop donated by Siemens Nixdorf.

Microsoft has donated boxes of educational software with titles like Creative Writer, Exploradia and Fine Art. Even the packaging of these products is used by the children to make craftwork or colourful posters covering every inch of the walls.

Sixth class student Tomas O Toole (12) is obviously comfortable with this advanced technology but, he smiles, "my parents cant understand it at all". He calls up the Spice Islands project on a screen. "We asked Tim Severin all kinds of things," he says.

Click. "We did a geography project using Encarta 97 Microsoft's interactive encyclopaedia and we put up a page about the school on the World Wide Web." (Both Microsoft and Internet service provider Ireland on Line have offered free Internet access to the State's schools.) Click, click. "This is the part of our home page dedicated to Leap Castle," says Tomas.

This section of the site, he says, has recently been expanded. The school received almost 100 e mails from across the globe looking for more information about, in one Canadian student's words, "this fascinating piece of Irish history". So they added more pictures and more information. The site has since received an Internet award.

Tom as talks animatedly, surveying the action in the fifth and sixth classroom. In one corner two boys with earphones listen to James Brown while reading a minibiography of the controversial soul star. Alma Maher (12) is working on a programme called Maths Circus. "It's about balance," she says, manipulating brightly coloured shapes around the screen.

Next door there is no letup in the feverish activity. Senior and junior infants grab the mouse firmly between pudgy fingers and click around the computer screen. They have just completed a project entitled simply "Myself".

"That's me," says Billy Bulfin (6), pointing at a picture of himself on the screen. He points and clicks the mouse, causing his voice to ring around the classroom. "My name is Billy Bulfin," blares his own voice from the speakers. His friends, all similarly immortalised on computer, giggle delightedly.

"They absolutely love it," says Ann Kennedy, a teacher at the school. "There is no problem motivating them and it is easy to integrate all the subjects in the curriculum in a computercentred project".

It is nearing the end of term and Paddy Bates, headmaster of Coolderry, is a happy man. Over 10 years ago he began this odyssey not really knowing where it would take him or his school. He has done it with no financial support from the Department of Education, relying instead on the co-operation of sponsors and the involvement of parents and staff. A student with cerebral palsy was the impetus for Coolderry's technological revolution.

"I was convinced that he was capable of communicating. It was just that we didn't have the tools," he says. "We managed to get a special keyboard. The day he printed out his first few words was," says Mr Bates, "the best day of my life".

But the teacher does not believe that technology can take the place of conventional teaching. "Humanities Lead, Technology Follows" is the message printed prominently in one of the class rooms. One bookshelf bears the reminder that "books are important, too". And the children appear to understand this, saying that the Encyclopaedio Britannica is as much a part of the classroom as Encarta 97.

Robbie O'Leary says that as a confidence builder the computers are "working wonders". He is headmaster at the Killinarden Senior National School in Tallaght, another Centre of Excellence. With 78 per cent unemployment and a drugs problem in the area, it has in the past been difficult to motivate students.

"With computers it's different," says Robbie. "The fact that they know their work will end up on the Internet being read by their peers and others around the world is crucial and is much more attractive than handing up work in a copy book."

A poetry week at the school bore "fantastic" results, he says. "We posted a selection of the poems on the Internet and asked people to select their favourite," he explains. The most popular was judged to be an anti drugs poem entitled Doo" Do It. "It's a subject that is universally understood," says Robbie.

Pupils in Coolderry have become penpals with the Killinarden students. They write of life in a rural village, talking about new born lambs and milking cows. In turn, the Tallaght students illuminate city life with copious lines on the Spice Girls and Manchester United.

At Coolderry, e mails have been blown up and pasted on the walls. There are messages from France and Austria, the United States and Australia. The man from Microsoft who picks out the music and sound for Encarta 97 writes that he is an ethnomusicologist. He tells them that when they go to the programme's music section it is him they can hear playing the didgereedoo. He wants to know how the children use Encarta.

A past pupil of the school, now studying in Austria, came across the Internet site and wrote to them saying he was amazed at how much his alma mater had developed. That week the children sent him e mail, supplying all the news of the locality and such vital information as "You hurled with my da".

Ms Lisa Temple Ashmore of Microsoft Ireland says: "If enough training and support is provided, schools like Coolderry Central could become an example for the rest of the world."