Connected journal

The Summer 2005 edition of Learning & Teaching Scotland’s Connected journal has a feature on blogging – including an article on this blog. A paper copy of the journal should be arriving in (school) staffrooms now and a digital version is available on the LTS website.

Moderators’ meeting

The Computing Moderators’ responsible for HNs and SVQs met today to discuss developments in these areas. The meeting was led by Deryck Nutley. The focus of this full day meeting was SVQs. Jack Robertson and Jack Coleman provides training on the new IT User and IT Professional SVQs. Also in attendance was Caroline Douglas who is the SQA Officer responsible for these awards.

Computer games qualification

Stow College has been developing a new award entitled HNC Computer Games Development during the last 18 months — and today was the culmination of those efforts when the college hosted the validation event. After serving on the Qualification Design Team during the HND Computing validation event, it was a pleasure being on the other side of the table today! The photo below shows the QDT for this award, led by David Hughes. The validation event went very smoothly —…

Unit writers’ training

The HNC/D IT award is developing at pace and there was a training event for unit writers today at the Menzies Hotel in Glasgow. Me, June McCamlie and Angela Orr provides guidance to the prospective unit writers. I also encouraged them to subscribe to the (public) unit writers forum. I was keen to get this training done before the summer holiday since I am hoping that most of the writing will get done during the holiday so that we have…

New librarian qualifications

My team are responsible for Computing/IT, E-Qualifications and Library awards — but we don’t develop many qualifications for librarians. So it was a particular pleasure to go forward for validation this morning for two new library awards: the Certificate in Applications of ICT in Libraries and the Advanced Certificate in Applications of ICT in Libraries. These new Professional Development Awards are designed for practicing librarians – of which there are 4000 in Scotland alone – although we’re hoping that these…

HND Computing Arrangements

Today is a milestone. Caroline uploaded the definitive HND Computing Arrangements to the HN e-group! The Arrangements will also be uploaded to the SQA website later this week. I’m currently working on an update letter that will be sent to centres in the near future. This letter will contain information about a launch event (for HND Computing) that will take place in August or September.

Central moderation

Central moderation takes place today and tomorrow. This involves the HN moderation team reviewing exam papers and student scripts [ASF]. Each centre is required to submit a sample of scripts which the moderators go over to check that standards are consistent from centre to centre. This year’s event takes place in the Marriott Hotel (Glasgow). The moderators enjoy the opportunity to discuss standards; a face-to-face meeting means that they have the opportunity to debate problems that arise as they review…

Sometimes you just need to get away from the crowd.

New HNC/D IT forum

A new e-group was created today to support the review of the HNC/D IT award. The group is public and is designed to keep lecturers up-to-date with developments and also to provide feedback to the Qualification Design Team. You can subscribe to the group by visiting the home page or sending an e-mail.

HND Computing is validated!

The convenor of the Validation Panel today confirmed that the validation conditions had been met and that the new awards are now approved. This is great news. The HND development has taken a couple of years and this is the culmination of a greal deal of work by the Qualification Design Team, led by Mike Jannetta. I’ll arrange for the Arrangements documentation to be uploaded to the HN e-group and also the SQA website so look out for this. I’ll…