Heron
News Week commencing 23rd. May 2005 Number
5Heron
News Week commencing 23rd. May 2005 Number
5
Continuing Professional Development (continued...) We finished this article in Heron News #4 with the following paragraph; "Attending updating events is only one version of CPD, but if you attend such an event you will return with lots of notes. The next question is: “Now that I have all this useful information, what do I do with it?” No rude suggestions, please! We promised to revisit this question in this issue of Heron News and I must begin by telling you what I do with these notes. I treat them like home-made wine; the longer they are left the better. I put them to one side, then after several weeks I read them again. Then I decide how much of them I have managed to forget, and how much I have managed to remember. I am usually surprised on both counts. I resent hoarding lots of paper, therefore anything I wish to retain more permanently on file is first scanned into WORD using OCR software and saved in my hard disk in a folder named "Ideas". Then, with a few clicks of my mouse I can trot it out in a future issue of Heron News and pretend it was all my idea in the first place! Of course, if you believe that, you'd believe anything! Something else I do is to keep an electronic diary in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. This is used for all my appointments, etc. and has additional columns on the right including one for CPD. If I spend a day taking advantage of CPD opportunities, or whatever, I make a note in that column, and then expand on these notes in my CPD log as soon as I get a chance. Learning Logs. I mentioned CPD logs just then. I knew a man once, whose name I've now forgotten, who earned many a free dinner by speaking at conferences on the topic of Learning Logs. he wrote up his log daily, stored the sheets in lever arch files, and by the time he'd been doing this for several years, he acquired shelf-fuls of his learning logs. I wonder if he srill dines out for free? Now that the internet has come along, the practice
has mutated to that of weblogging, or "blogging"
for short. This has given birth to a whole new genre of jargon. Impress
your friends and colleagues with your grip on blogging terminology. Barking moonbat: Someone on the extreme
edge of whatever their ism happens to be. Blogorrhea: Publishing an unusually
high number of blog entries For a full blogging glossary visit |
Meet Sam Or Samuel Patrick Watts, our new grandson, born on January 27.
New Resources facilities I have recently changed the way in which useful resources are published via this website. I had been trying to sell things such as the Assessor and Verifier workbooks for cash. Nobody was buying, so they can now be downloaded for free. these are not cut-down out-of-date versions with copyright notices on every page, but are word for word the versions we currently use. The Assessor workbook is downloadable from A1.pdf. The Internal verifier workbook is at V1.pdf. For a full and up to date list of downloadable resources, go to Resources.html. Learning and Development Level 3. A workbook for Learning and Development Level 3 (Direct Training and Support) is also available to download from LD3DTS.pdf. This popular programme is now supported by the Workbook, a Witness Statement pro forma and also a study booklet, soon to be available. Watch this Space. More spacewatching should pay off in time. We plan to design a multiple choice test for the answers to the underpinning knowledge question such as those on pages 24/25 of the current Assessor workbook. With a self marking scheme, this will help with candidates who never seem to know the correct answer to Question 3; "And what do you mean by sufficient evidence?" There is considerable scope for additional publishing via this website. All I have to do is to get round to it. I need to be careful, though, lest any of my readers start to accuse me of "blogging"!
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On-line Registration systems Most large Awarding Bodies now permit Centres to Regisiter candidates on-line, enter them for qualifications and claim results and certification on-line. There are huge advantages in using these systems as comnpared to paper forms and "snail mail", but how do they compare? The Walled Garden City & Guilds Walled Garden is a unique on-line administration service that saves you time, money and paperwork. It has been developed especially to enable City & Guilds centres to carry out a range of day-to-day functions quickly and efficiently on-line. This free, secure service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
LCCI, EDO, Goalonline, etc. This awarding body, variously called LCCI (London Chamber of Commerce International), EDI (Education and Development International) and now Goal, has been using online registration and certification for some time. The system is failrly easy to use, but information on how it works seems to be available on the Internet only to already-registered Centres. Visit Goalonline to learm more. SQA-RED is the Scottish Qualification Authority's on-line Registration and Entries Database. It is one of a number of linked on-line systems which are available to all SQA registered Centres. The newness of the system is epitomised by the fact that information is not yet available on the SQA website. You will need to ring the team who developed it on 0141 242 2439. We have only had the system up and running since the other day, but I am able to tell you something about how it works. SQA have known for a long time that Centres would not be satisfied until they were able to obtain full access to the registration and results data stored on the central SQA computer. First there was SCOTie, which only resulted in each centre registering and entering candidates on-line and e-mailing the entries to SQA. This inevitably resulted in two diverging databases of candidates; the Centre's database, and SQA's. Each got out of kilter with the other. In order to correct this problem, SQA.net arrived on the scene late last year, making direct transfer of records easier. This also gave Centres access to SQA.Navigator. Centres could now consult the official SQA database in regard to any Centre, candidate or qualification. What was ultimately needed, however, was a simple system of exploring and correcting anomalies, which is why SQA-RED has just been launched. The new system will show me all the candidates I've got, allow me to register and enter new candidates and claim their certificates in due course. Should a problem arise and if I find that what I think I know is not what SQA thinks it knows about a particular candidate's progress, I can then use SQA-RED to explore and rectify the anomaly Chris McAllister 22.05.05 |
