I’ve been in London for a couple of days attending various events relating to Internet safety in general, and child protection in particular. Our Internet Safety qualification has established a reputation for SQA as something of an innovator in this area but it’s always nice to be involved in national initiatives. On Wednesday I attended a FOSI event about mobile safety. The audience was from all over the world, including representatives of the major mobile phone companies and the UN,…
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You are invited to Scotland’s College’s Second Annual ComputingConference being held on the 25th of June from 9:30am to 3pm atCentral College in Glasgow. The event is free and is the perfect way to end your academic year andsend the whole department away buzzing with new ideas for next year. Speaking at the conference will be Iain Lowson of HMIe on UngoodPractice: 10 Things We Shouldn’t Be Doing!, Bobby Elliot of the SQA onthe latest awards, James Stanger on the…
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On Wednesday 24th June Adam Smith College will be hosting a one day training event for staff wishing to develop their skills in using Adobe Flash. This instructor-led course is intended to equip F.E. Lecturers with the practical skills required to deliver the following units within the NQ Digital Media Computing framework. F180 11: Interactive Multimedia for Website Development F1KB 11: Animation Fundamentals The course uses a hands-on approach and is geared towards beginner and intermediate users and will focus…
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We held the Computer Games consultation event in Glasgow today. We had planned to run a similar event in Dundee on Monday but we cancelled it due to lack of interest. And the turn-out today wasn’t great (eight people attended but three of these were members of the QDT). I’m not sure why there has been so little interest in these events. Perhaps it’s the time of year; perhaps it’s just that there is not a great deal of interest…
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Hilary Weir joined the team on Monday. She replaces Shirley who has moved to the textiles subject area. Hilary also replaces Jacquie Campbell and effectively picks up both Shirley’s and Jacquie’s portfolios. Crudely put, Hilary will deal with National Certificate/NPA/SVQ awards (including PC Passport) and Caroline will deal with HN/PDA awards. It’s not quite as simple as that and the attached organisation chart defines who is responsible for what. Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io Save File: HN SVQ team…
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Some time ago, SQA published guidance on the assessment of project-based Graded Units. The main change was that each stage in the project (design, implementation and evaluation) should be separately marked, and each student must pass each stage (rather than a single overall pass mark for the entire unit). The existing computing GUs take this holisitic approach and, therefore, require to be changed. These are the project-based Graded Units for the following awards: HND Comuting: Software Development HND Computing: Technical…
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PC Passport was first introduced in 2004 and rapidly became SQA’s most pupular vocational qualification. It was revised in 2007 to make it compatible with the National Occupational Standards for IT. We also took the opportunity to update its structure and contents. Whenever major changes are made to any award, there are errors and ommisions and we’ve had a lot of feedback from centres about inconsistencies in the units and errors in the assessments. So, a few months ago, I…
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We held two validation events today – each consisting of three NPAs. All six were validated with conditions. The awards are: NPA Software Development (SCQF 4) NPA Social Software (SCQF 4) NPA Website Development (SCQF 5) NPA Computer Hardware & Software (SCQF 5) NPA Digital Photography (SCQF 5) NPA Digital Media Production (SCQF Level 6). There were several conditions and recommendations but none that should take too long to address. We’re hoping to have the conditions lifted by end-July (due…
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Unfortunately we have had to cancel the above event in Dundee on the 8th June 2009 due to insufficient numbers. This is the first time we have had to cancel an event but we strongly felt that there was limited representation from the field to consult with at this point in time. An e-mail to those who had registered for the Dundee Event was sent this morning giving alternative options. The good news is that the Glasgow event on Thursday…
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I’ve mentioned previously what SQA planned to do to help with the performance indicator problem in this subject area. A sub-group of the QST for HN Computing, along with some other volunteers, met this morning to identify specific assessment exemplars that are currently causing delivery issues and that we could improve. We identified four examplars that we plan to rewrite: Computer Operating Systems 1 Computer Architecture 1 Computing: Planning Software Development: Array Data Structures Each pack was assigned a couple…
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