Loraine Johnston of James Watt College would like to speak to Centres who are currently delivering the HNC & HND Information Technology courses. She is looking for supporting evidence to justify delivering these courses, therefore any examples of good practice and advice would be welcome.Please contact her at ljohnston@jameswatt.ac.uk or 01294 559000 ext 3036.Loraine JohnstonSenior Lecturer – Business & ComputingJames Watt College of Further & Higher Education

Operational plan for 2010/11

Like many of you, I have recently spent time on my operational plan for next year (April 2010 to March 2011). The main projects scheduled to begin next year are: commence the review of HNC/D Computing review HNC/D Computer Networking launch HNC/D Computer Games Development launch NPAs in Computer Games Development (at SCQF levels 4, 5 and 6) develop support materials for the refreshed PC Passport develop new PDAs to match Adobe and CIW certification. It would be good to…

Vocational Computing awards

I recently updated the list of awards in my area. It’s a handy simmary of vocational Computing qualifications (excluding SVQs) available (or about to be available) to centres. Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io Save File: Computing Vocational Awards.doc It can be downloaded here.

Aspect report for Computing

I took time out this morning to go through the HMIe’s report [PDF] into Computing in the college sector. It made interesting reading. It’s hard not to read a report like this from an individual perspective and, from an SQA angle, the report made pretty good reading. There were some kind words about the portfolio of Computing awards available to centres, and specifically the variety of awards and how up-to-date they are. It was nice to see this recognised since…

HMIe subject based report for Computing

As many of you will have noticed, HMIe has recently published a subject report for Computing. You can download it here [PDF]. This report will be the key topic in the forthcoming Heads of Computing event, on 4 December, so that you have an opportunity to discuss it with colleagues. In fact, the agenda for that day is shaping up very well, with lots of interesting topics, so I hope that you can make it along. If you can, you…

Reminder – Heads of Computing

There are still places available for the next Heads of Computing Event which is taking place on Friday 4th December 2009. Please register online at the URL below if you have not already done so: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=iEG1EK4FMeuy7ToPY5CbLA_3d_3d</a

10,000 hits

The blog is about to reach it’s first 10,000 hits since a counter was set-up last January. That’s an average of just over 1,000 hits per month and an annual total of around 14,000 hits. It’s not brilliant but it’s OK. It would be much better if it was 1,000 unique visitors per month, rather than the number of page views. But it still represents a lot of Computing teachers and lecturers. In my recent update letters, I stated that…

Online groups to support teachers

We’ve been using online groups for several years to support centres that deliver vocational Computing awards, using a range of (free) online services such as “E-Groups”, “Yahoogroups” and “Smartgroups”. As you probably know, we currently use Jiglu for most online groups. The use of these groups has declined over the last few years. They were once vibrant, with hundreds of members and thousands of posts, but are much less active now. As a result, we have cut back on the…

HNC/D Multimedia Awards

Now that the HNC/D Interactive Media awards are now available to centres, I thought I would remind you that the following HNC/D awards have a finish date of 31st July 2011 attached to them: G7DD 15 HNC Multimedia Computing: Web DevelopmentG7DE 16 HND Multimedia Computing: Web DevelopmentG7DF 16 HND Multimedia ComputingG7A5 15 HNC Interactive Multimedia CreationG7A6 16 HND Interactive Multimedia Creation This means that candidates must be certificated by this cut-off date.

Update letters to centres

I recently sent two letters to all centres, one about NC developments and one about HN developments. You will find digital copies of the letters on the SQA Drop. They contain important information for teachers and lecturers so they are definitely worth downloading. For those who have already read the letters, you might have noticed that I plan to phase out annual update letters since this blog contains all of that information — and a lot more. It’s very time…