At the Scottish Learning Festival event taking place at the SECC both today and tomorrow, Leckie and Leckie will be officially launching their new PC Passport publication for Beginner Level (ISBN: 9781843725916). PC Passport – Intermediate Level (ISBN: 9781843725923) is due to be published mid October. To place an order, please click on the URL below: http://www.leckieandleckie.co.uk/products/buy_online.asp
I’ve alluded to imminent changes to the Computing team in a number of recent posts and today I met with my team to discuss the changes that are going to take place. SQA has been planning an internal restructure for a long time and the plans for these changes have now been finalised and will be implemented from 1 October. The changes do not greatly effect the Computing team, in the sense that the team will continue with its current…
I attended a meeting at SFEU this afternoon to discuss problems with HNC/D Computing at college. There were representatives of HMIE, the Funding Council and SQA (myself) there. For some time now, the uptake of HNC/D Computing has been declining. The decline has been less than the fall in university applications for Computing subjects but it still has been marked. And the performance indicators (such as student retention and student achievement figures) are not good. There has been an on-going…
My paper about modernising assessment has got me invitations to speak at lots of events. This morning’s event was one of the smaller but more enjoyable talks – to a small group of Head Teachers from Inverclyde. They were a lively group… and surprisingly supportive of modernising assessment. This has been a recurring theme whenever I’ve presented my paper – that nearly every teacher (whether from school, college or university) agrees with the need to update assessment. My presentation usually…
Please note that the Computing e-Learning materials are now fully hosted at the following URL: http://www.sqa.org.uk/e-learning/computing The temporary hosting site at http://www.e-learning-computing.com has now been cancelled as all materials are through the main SQA website.
When I got back from London last night, I had a meeting with the person (Ted Hastings) who is developing the suits of new units relating to Digital Culture. Ted lives in Spain but, thanks to Skype, it’s no problem to meet with him. Ted has now produced a draft specification for each of the proposed units at SCQF Levels 6, 7 and 8. They make interesting reading. Not only from a content perspective, although they cover lots of interesting…
I spent today in London, attending an Awarding Body Forum, which is hosted by E-Skills UK. The purpose of these meetings is to provide a communication channel between the Sector Skills Council for IT (E-Skills) and the awarding bodies that provide IT qualifications across the UK. Although much of the agenda inevitably relates to England, they are always interesting meetings and it’s a good way for me to keep up to date with UK-wide developments. Today’s agenda included developments at…
Over the past few months, we have developed additional interactive teaching and learning packs that cover a selection of HN Units that are included in HN Computing, Information Technology, Interactive Media and Computer Networking awards. These have now been uploaded to the SQA website and can be accessed by clicking on http://www.sqa.org.uk/e-learning/computing.
This morning I put out a request for volunteers for the Qualification Development Team (QDT) for the new HND Computer Games Development qualification. As previously noted, we had an open meeting of all interested parties last month and, as a result, decided to progress with this work. The first stage in any new development is to form a QDT, and appoint a person to lead the work (a “lead developer”). So, I posted an appeal on the online group (there…
The Computing team has been using online groups (Smartgroups (RIP), Yahoogroups and, more recently, Jiglu) for a long time. In the days of Smartgroups they were very active indeed. They are less active now. At the Computing team meeting on Tuesday, we discussed the use of these groups. There are a lot of groups still in existence, although many of these are hardly used. So, we decided to review the groups and rationalise them by combining the low usage ones.…
For the last few years SQA has been organising PDWs to help teachers to understand standards in NQ Courses. You may already have heard that this year a PDW is being organised for Higher Information Systems. The workshop will use examples of candidates’ work from the 2008 examination diet to develop delegates’ understanding of national standards. More details can be found here.
We’ve been trying to get PC Passport recognised for UCAS credit for some time. This is important for schools that want to help students progress to university. I spent some of this morning checking a proposal to allocate “40 to 50” UCAS points to PC Passport at Higher level. While this is not official yet, it is very promising and I’m hoping that a definitive value will be assigned soon. Watch this space…
The web log of the qualification team for Computing within SQA. Look out for news about Computing qualifications and related information.
