After the recent meeting at Central College, I said that I would convene a meeting of interested people to take forward the links between SQA units and Cisco’s CCNA curriculum. That meeting took place this morning. Eight representatives of colleges attended, including Anniesland, Central, Adam Smith, Cardonald, Angus and Stow colleges. It was a productive meeting. We agreed to write four new units, with the same titles as the existing units, to reflect the changes to the Cisco course. We’re…
At the recent HN consultation meeting, I said that the next stage in the process would be to form a Qualification Design Team (QDT). We’ve already had several volunteers but please contact Caroline if you want to be considered for membership of this team. We’ll ask you to complete a short form and, on the basis of this, will make a decision about membership using defined criteria. I hope to convene the initial meeting of the QDT in the near…
We are about to commence exemplar writing for many of the HN Units within the new HNC/D Computer Games Development awards. We have a dedicated team (Support Materials Department) to project manage the production of these exemplars. They are hosting a training session tomorrow for all writers and vetters involved in the exemplar production. The writing process will commence once training has been completed. The following packs will be produced to support both the HNC & HND: Computer Games: Graded…
We try to keep this blog opinion-free (well, free of the opinions of the Computing team — your opinions are welcome) but I came across this article about the Internet in yesterday’s Observer, which I thought was interesting and relevant to educationalists. It puts the Internet into some sort of historical context — and concludes that we’re just at the start of the revolution. Speaking of the “revolution”, you can add the SQA Drop to your Twitter or RSS feeds…
The launch event for the new HNC/D Computer Games Development awards was held today in the Stirling Highland Hotel. Twenty five people attended, representing around 20 centres. Launch events are always a pleasure. They come at the end of a long development process and they tend to be something of a celebration — and today’s sunshine and lovely location added to the nice atmosphere. As well as introducing the awards to the audience, we also took the opportunity to ask some…
I attended a conference “for computing educators” at Heriot Watt University on Friday. The event was sponsored by Google and was designed for Computing teachers within Scottish schools. The agenda covered such things as the Curriculum for Excellence, computer games, the future of computing, and Scholar. The keynote speech was particularly interesting. Entitled Unlocking the Clubhouse, it was about the problem of attracting women to the subject. Allan Fisher (Carnegie Mellon University) and Jane Margolis (UCLA) gave the talk. The…
I attended the first meeting of the Qualification Development Team (QDT) for the proposed NC in Computer Games this morning. This is a centre-led development. The idea came from Forth Valley College and the development is being led by Fiona Jackson of the college. SQA takes a back-seat in this sort of development but provides funding and support when needed. Both Hilary and me attended this morning’s meeting to offer whatever help we could. The meeting went well and the…
There are QSTs for advanced (HN/PDA) and non-advanced (NC/NPA) awards, each of which meets twice per year. There was a QST meeting this afternoon for the non-advanced awards. The purpose of a QST is to support qualifications by suggesting how SQA (or other national agencies) can provide assistance to centres in the form of advice or support materials or other forms of assistance. We gets lots of suggestions about how we can improve qualifications or support materials and every idea…
The consultation event for HNC/D Computing and HNC/D Networking took place on Friday at Jury’s Inn in Glasgow. There was an excellent turn-out with over 50 people attending, representing 25 colleges. I thought that the event went very well. It was meant to be more than SQA “talking at” the audience since I wanted feedback on the best way forward. We provided various options for change and I was delighted that there was a clear preference for one of the…
I noticed that the blog counter reached 20,000 hits this afternoon. Given that the counter was only set up 17 months ago, that an average of 1,200 hits per month or 60 hits per (working) day. I sometimes get feedback that people are too busy to check the blog and, of course, it does take time to keep up with the blog — although the RSS feed can be sent to your PC newsreader or your tablet computer or mobile…
I received an enquiry this morning about the timescales for the updated PC Passport units and materials. My update letter of September 2009 stated that the revised units would be ready for January. Although the updated units were indeed complete by that time, we weren’t able to publish the new units because we also needed to update the associated support materials to avoid confusion in centres (i.e. new units and old materials). In fact, we realised that we had to…