August 24, 2010 - Bobby -
The Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council is providing funding a for a new student placement programme, focussing on three areas — one of which is IT. The e-skills placement programme, led by Edinburgh Napier University, will place 750 students in IT companies. The placements will last up to one year. I plan to meet with Michael Kowbel, of E-Skills UK, to discuss how SQA can link to this initiative. In the meantime, contact Michael if you want to…
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August 20, 2010 - Bobby -
The Sector Panel suggested that we look at qualifications relating to mobile phone technology so Hilary and me met with Jim Krieger, of Anniesland College, this morning to discuss a proposal from Jim for a new NPA in Mobile Technology. It seems a good idea to me. We discussed the possibility of developing a suite of awards at SCQF Levels 4, 5 and 6 (just as we did with the new NPAs in Computer Games Development). The awards would be…
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August 19, 2010 - Bobby -
Although the qualification team spends most of its time developing and maintaining qualifications and their associated support materials, we can also help centres in other ways. I’ve created a survey to try to find out what sort of help you would like. I’d appreciate if you would take a second to complete it. Me, and/or one of my team, can either visit your centre or arrange a public event if there was enough interest. Please note that we don’t do…
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August 16, 2010 - Bobby -
The annual update letter relating to non-advanced awards was sent to centres on Friday. You can download it here. This letter contains important information about NC/NPA awards, including PC Passport. I am currently working on a similar letter for HN awards, which I hope to send out later this month.
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August 16, 2010 - Bobby -
Welcome back to the many teachers and lecturers who re-started recently after the summer holiday. The blog is an excellent way of finding out what’s been happening during the summer so I hope you take a few minutes to look through the past posts. This year we plan to make more use of Twitter for regular, small updates so please follow us on that service. I am going to close the Yahoogroup mailing list, and replace it with our Twitter…
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August 12, 2010 - Bobby -
Once every year, the Computing team try to take some time out to review our use of online services. We met today to discuss our use of existing tools and consider the use of new tools. This time last year, we decided to give Twitter a try, which has proven to be successful. The first thing we discussed was SQA’s new, improved website. We all agreed that it is a huge improvement over the old version of the site. The…
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August 11, 2010 - Bobby -
E-Skills is the Sector Skills Council for IT. I came down to London yesterday morning to attend two meetings with E-Skills, relating to standardising the awarding bodies’ approach to delivering NVQ/SVQs. Yesterday’s meeting was about their IT Professional Standards (called ProCom) and today’s meeting is about IT User Standards (called ITQ). SQA’s relationship with E-Skills is not quite the same as other awarding bodies due to the different roles Sector Skills Councils serve in Scotland compared with other parts of…
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As you are aware, over the last few years we have developed in phases a number of interactive e-learning materials for various Units within our HNC, HND & PDA awards across the Computing portfolio. We have recently made some minor updates to the materials as well as create some additional packs. We have passed the files over to our Web Team for upload to the website – these should be available by Mid-August. Once live, the materials can be accessed…
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I’ve spent some of today writing my annual update letters to centres. I’m a little earlier than normal this year since they are usually sent to centres in September. As usual, there will be two letters: one for non-advanced courses and one for advanced courses. There will be nothing in the letters that readers of this blog don’t already know but some teachers and lecturers still don’t use online communications and prefer traditional means of communication — and for them,…
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I met with Alan Hamilton, a GLOW Development Officer for LTS, this afternoon to discuss Internet safety resources available to schools via GLOW. Alan told me that there is a the dedicated GLOW group called Internet Safety and Responsible Use that every teacher is automatically subscribed to, and also two blogs relating to Internet safety, one about resources and one for teachers. I agreed to use the resource blog to link to the various SQA resources that support our Internet…
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