Britain's most high-tech classroom has opened in Bradford.

The switch was thrown by TV boffin Carol Vorderman who officially opened the £500,000 state-of-the-art centre at Dixon's City Technology College in West Bowling.

Information technology equipment in the new Minerva Centre includes huge digital electronic whiteboards, Internet access and integrated learning facilities which rub shoulders with 70 advanced workstations.

The full video conferencing facilities could even be considered as a "virtual classroom" delivering lessons all over the world, said college principal John Lewis.

Ms Vorderman said the innovation made her proud to be associated with the college.

"I have visited schools all over the country and this is top of the league in terms of IT,'' she said.

"It is a model school and when I travel around the world I always brag about my association with it."

Ms Vorderman was a governor at the school in its early days before she gave up the post when her blossoming TV career took her to London. The new centre means Dixon's 1,200 pupils will have at their fingertips the most up-to-date IT facilities in the district, if not the region and the country.

The Minerva Centre - named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and learning - will be open to other schools, the community at large and businesses which want to rent the high-tech space.

At the opening ceremony, guests from local colleges and the Lord Mayor of Bradford Councillor Tony Miller and Sir Stanley Kalms, the chairman of the Dixon's Group, the electronic retailer which sponsors the college, heard Mr Lewis hail the pioneering centre as a vision of the future.

"The Minerva Centre must be among the most advanced IT facilities anywhere in the country," he said.

"It alone contains 70 PCs, four digital whiteboards and a conference room which is a complete 'virtual classroom' able to deliver fully interactive lessons or meetings through video conferencing and wide-screen television anywhere in the world."

Dixon's was recently featured in a top state schools guide published by The Sunday Times which ranked it 205 out of the top 250.

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