Computing & Digital Blog

September 24, 2015

Scottish Learning Festival

I’ve spent the last day-and-a-half at this year’s Scottish Learning Festival at the Scottish Conference and Exhibition Centre in Glasgow. The event was, as always, well organised with lots of interesting talks and workshops. I attended the Minister for Education’s keynote yesterday morning. A recurring theme in her talk was the importance of raising attainment for all pupils, and closing the attainment gap between the well-off and the poor. She pointed out that she has raised the targets for universities to recruit students…

Categories: Computing

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September 19, 2015

Assessments for Digital Literacy and Cyber Security

As you may know, the NPAs in Cyber Security and Digital Literacy have recently been developed. The next stage is the production of Assessment Support Packs (ASPs). We have moved away from paper ASPs to a combined online and offline version. We still produce ASPs for new Units but we take out the knowledge part and offer that through SOLAR, which is SQA’s e-testing system, leaving a stripped down version of the ASP, normally containing only the practical assessment(s). The training…

Categories: Assessment, NPA, Support materials

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September 17, 2015

Validation event for NPA Digital Literacy

The validation event for the revised NPA in Digital Literacy was held this morning. The Validation Panel was chaired by Loraine Johnston of Ayrshire College. I’m pleased to report that the qualification was validated with a few conditions and recommendations. There is nothing major to change. The qualification structure was approved without change and the rationale and aims of the award were accepted (with minor changes). The Panel made helpful comments about assessment, core skills and employment opportunities. It won’t take…

Categories: Digital literacy, NPA, Validation

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September 16, 2015

Vocational qualifications in schools

I received an e-mail this week from a school teacher who wanted my help to convince his Head Teacher to offer more vocational qualifications in his school. He currently offered the NPA in Computer Games Development (which he described as “very, very good”) but wanted to offer more vocational awards. He posed several questions: what is available? do they contribute towards a school’s achievement? do they generate UCAS points? do they articulate with college courses? I tried to address each question. There is a…

Categories: Computing

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September 15, 2015

Ofcom Scotland Stakeholder Event

I attended the Ofcom Scotland Stakeholder Event on Tuesday 15th September 2015. It was an interesting seminar with a wide and varied audience, but the focus was primarily on digital participation amongst the general population in Scotland compared with the UK. James Thickett and Vicki Nash from Ofcom presented some interesting data from the annual Communications Marketing Report (CMR); highlights included: 64% of adults (over the age of 16) have a smart phone; smartphones have overtaken laptops as the most…

Categories: Digital Skills

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