The Sector Panel for Computing & IT is one of two surviving panels from the days (around 10 years ago) when every subject area had one. The purpose of these bodies is to advise SQA about what’s happening in the respective sectors and the membership reflects the external stakeholders who SQA deals with, such as colleges, universities, employers and Sector Skills Councils. The Computing Panel meets twice per year and met today for its first meeting of 2010. It’s a…
I met with Iain Shand of Cardonald College this afternoon to discuss his new role as the ITPCS Manager. Cardonald is the lead centre for the Microsoft IT Academy programme and Iain supports 15 centres across Scotland. Microsoft is one of several vendors whose curriculum we try to incorporate inside of SQA awards. There are presently three PDAs linked to Microsoft certification. We recently commissioned Deryck Nutley to develop a number of new HN units to map onto Microsoft’s new…
The validation event for the new HNC/D Computer Games Development was held on Friday. The purpose of a validation event is for a group of peers, who have not been involved in the development of the qualification, to comment on the proposed award. So it’s a nerve-racking day for the development team since the panel can ask for major changes if it doesn’t like what is being proposed. Nigel Kennington, of Edinburgh Telford College, led the development team and Ron…
Ideascale is a Web 2.0 service designed to get ideas about how organisations can improve. I’ve set up one for vocational Computing qualifications so let us know if you have any ideas about how we can improve.
I attended one of the quarterly meetings in London today when all of the qualification organisations involved in delivering qualifications linked to the Sector Skills Council (E-Skills) meet to discuss issues relating to those qualifications. E-Skills used to be only responsible for NVQs and SVQs but over the years has got involved in a large number of IT initiatives. So today’s meeting covered a wide range of issues. SQA’s main involvement with E-Skills is through SVQs but we also work…
I attended the Child Internet Safety conference today, organised by Holyrood Events. The theme of the conference was online child protection and representatives of various child protection and education agencies were present. The keynote speaker was the Minister for Children and Early Years, who opened the event with a talk about the Scottish Government’s views on child protection. His message was clear: the Internet is a vital part of contemporary culture and will not go away but we need to…
I met with Charlie Love, of LTS, this morning. Charlie has been seconded from Cults Academy until December 2010 to develop games-related support materials for the school curriculum. He will be exploring how various technologies (such as OpenSim, the iPhone SDK, and the Unreal engine) can be used within schools to deliver National Courses and contribute towards the goals of the Curriculum for Excellence (site is down or I would link). Charlie was particularly interested in the forthcoming NPAs in…
With the release of version 3, Silverlight has hit the maturity sweet spot with more clients realising the benefits of a runtime specifically designed for RIA and media based application. To help Universities, Media Academies and Colleges understanding the technology and teaching it to their students, and in collaboration with Skillset and the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, Microsoft developed a ready to teach module that covers all the main aspects of the technology and the associated tools. We are…
There was an interesting discussion at Friday’s QST meeting about how SQA communicates changes to unit specs or assessment exemplars to centres. The problem is that we can change units or assessments at any time. When people inform us about errors or improvements we try to action these changes as quickly as we can — resulting in revised units and assessment being published throughout the year. This means that staff in centres can accidentally use an out of date unit…
CompTIA in association with Scotland’s Colleges are holding a workshop based around the new CompTIA Strata Certificates on Monday 29th March 2010 at the Glasgow Metropolitan College from 10.00am until 1.00pm. If you would like to register for the event, please do by clicking here
The web log of the qualification team for Computing within SQA. Look out for news about Computing qualifications and related information.
