Good response to request for pilot centres

So far, 24 centres have come forward to volunteer to pilot the new Internet Safety qualification. There's a good mix of centres including schools, colleges and training centres. The qualification looks particularly popular with S1/S2 pupils since several of the pilot centres indicated their intention to offer it to this group.

The pilot centres will be provided with digital teaching and learning material, and access to an online assessment bank. This qualification is part of SQA's E-only initiative so paper materials will not be provided. However, the unit itself will be available to any centre from August.

We haven't yet made a final decision about pilot centres and there's still time to volunteer. Contact Derek McFarlane if you're interested.

Over 50 million Americans visit MySpace

Net companies pledge child porn crackdown

Pilot centres wanted

I am in the process of writing to centres to ask for volunteers to pilot the Internet Safety unit. But you don't need to wait for the letter to arrive since you can contact Derek McFarlane if you want to be involved in delivering this unit.

A key aspect of this project relates to innovative ways to teach and assess the unit and I'm looking for a number of pilot centres to test the learning and assessment material, which will be supplied in digital format (consisting of HTML teaching materials and an item bank of questions for formative and summative use).

At this stage, I'm only looking for expressions of interest - not commitments (on either side). So please contact Derek by e-mail if you're interested in becoming involved in the pilot.

New type of malware

The BBC reports on a new type of malware called ransomware.

Cyberbullying

Sunday's Times newspaper carried a story on cyber-bullying (which features in the Internet Safety unit!).

Working weekend

I'm just back from a working weekend in Stirling where a team of writers produced the assessments for the Internet Safety unit.

The work was pretty intensive. From Friday evening to Monday afternoon, the team produced over 200 questions for Outcomes 1-3 and developed an assessment for Outcome 4. I was particularly pleased at the multiple choice questions. Not only were a very large number produced - but they were high quality questions too.

These questions will be added to an item bank which will be used as the basis of an online assessment system for this Unit.

Final version of unit specification

Thanks to everyone who responded to my invitation to comment on the draft unit spec.

I've now made some changes to the unit and I think that it's much improved. Here is the final version. Note that it is not yet numbered and still has the "draft" watermark. You can locate the changes by comparing this version to the previous version.

I'll now arrange for the unit to be published and added to SQA's list of qualifications. It will be available to (all) centres from August. But I'll be looking for centres to pilot the "e-only" approach to the unit shortly.