Computing – Page 101 – Computing & Digital Blog

Awarding Body Forum

September 15, 2011 - Bobby - 0

I attended an Awarding Body Forum today. These are held quarterly, in locations across the UK. Today’s meeting was held in the Pearson offices in London (Pearson is the parent company of EdExcel). These meetings are convened by the Sector Skills Council (E-Skills) and their main purpose is to update awarding bodies on relevant developments. They also provide awarding bodies with an opportunity to raise issues with the SSC. While much of the agenda is mainly of operational interest to…

NC Computer Games Development

September 13, 2011 - Bobby - 0

Scotland has a strong reputation in computer games, and we’ve tried to reflect that with a world leading portfolio of national qualifications in this area. We began development of an HNC and HND Computer Games Development in 2008, and these were available to centres in August 2009. In that same year we began development of NPAs in Computer Games Development and these were available from August 2010. In 2010, a group of colleges began development of a National Certificate (NC), and…

Curriculum for Excellence

September 8, 2011 - Bobby - 0

I’ve tried to find a little time this week to look over the draft course arrangements that have recently been published by SQA. Of course, I was particularly interested in the details about the proposed Computing courses. I also read through the Framework for Assessment. These changes are very important for Scottish education. Many students who progress to HNCs and HNDs in the future will possess these new qualifications so it’s important that we build on them. The current HN…

CPD courses on SQA Academy

September 7, 2011 - Bobby - 1

For the last few years SQA Academy has run a set of CPD courses for lecturers in partnership with Scotland’s Colleges. Some of these have focused on NQ subjects that are taught in colleges while others have been more general eg innovative uses of assessment or preparing for a verification visit. They will be running joint courses again this year and I met with Fiona Saxby, one of SQA’s Learning Technologists and Aileen Duffy from Scotland’s Colleges to discuss new…

Proposed HNC/D Computing Frameworks

August 31, 2011 - Bobby - 1

Information posted on the HN Review Blog on the latest versions of frameworks.

Software Development in Scotland

August 29, 2011 - Bobby - 1

The Chairmain of Google, Eric Schmidt, delivered the MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh on Friday. He criticised British education in general but specifically the teaching of Computing: “Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.” Scotland has avoided that. Software development has always been a key part of the Scottish curriculum. At a time when computer science and programming was being reduced in the UK, the Higher Still programme protected “pure” computing,…

E-Assessment Scotland Conference 2011

August 26, 2011 - Bobby - 0

I attended the E-Assessment Scotland Conference 2011 today at the University of Dundee. It was my first time at this event. I really enjoyed it. Although most attendees came from the university sector, the college sector was well represented, with 13 Scottish colleges in attendance. I didn’t see any school representatives on the list of attendees. It followed the usual conference template of keynote speakers and seminars and workshops. The keynotes were uniformly good. The first keynote – from Steve…

Qualifications Development Forum

August 23, 2011 - Bobby - 0

The team work within the Qualifications Development directorate within SQA, and every year the whole directorate attend a forum event. There was an event yesterday afternoon, held in Glasgow. These events are a collection of workshops, from which each person chooses to attend three. I attended one about the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), another about research in assessment, and one on the design of qualifications. It was particularly interesting to catch up with what’s happening with CfE. This is an…

Follow us on Twitter

August 22, 2011 - Bobby - 0

I mentioned in a post last week that I would write something about our use of Twitter. The team has been using Twitter for a year, and around 250 people now follow us. That’s not bad, but we would like it to be much higher. Twitter is a “micro-blog”, which means that it’s used for small messages. We use it for updates and other bits of information that we think you want to know. Not everything in this blog is…

Using the right unit specification

August 19, 2011 - Bobby - 0

I spent most of this afternoon proof reading the annual reports from the Senior Verifiers for my subject areas. I’ll post something about these reports later, but one comment seems particularly appropriate at this time of the year. The Senior Verifier for Computing commented that “there were several instances of centres not using the latest versions of unit specifications”. It’s pretty fundamental that you are using the latest unit spec. You should download the current version of unit specifications from…