Teachers’ plan to beat the cheats

Today's Herald has a story on cheating and reports that the SSTA wants all coursework to be done under teacher supervision. This follows a recent report from QCA entitled Digital Technologies & Dishonesty in Examinations.

Assessment 2.0 revisited

My previous post about Assessment 2.0 generated some feedback, which encouraged me to develop the idea a little further. So I've worked-up a short paper on how Web 2.0 can be used for assessment.

It highlights some of the challenges facing education with the advent of this open, democratic and interactive web. There is a particular debate to be had about how VLEs measure up to Web 2.0 - and which one we should use within education. There is a similar debate to be had about assessment. It's been argued that the choice of online assessment system is moot since students were increasingly using the assessment system that came as part of the school/college/university VLE. But does Web 2.0 make the VLE obsolete?

SQA's December E-zine

Comparing UK and Irish qualifications

Survey on e-learning

The Internet Safety blog has a post about a new survey relating to e-learning and e-assessment. We're looking for as many people as possible to complete the survey so if you have 10 minutes to spare, your input would be appreciated. The results will be used by SQA to determine the way that we develop qualifications in the future.

Glow and Sharepoint

There has been an interesting discussion about Glow's use of Microsoft's SharePoint technology (SharePoint is the technology behind Glow). Some have argued that SharePoint is not a good platform while others have pointed out the importance of having a stable environment on which to build Glow.

I see both arguments. My limited use of SharePoint doesn't fill me with excitement in the same way that some Web 2 technologies do - but I appreciate that Glow needs to be built on firm foundations (even if they are a little bland).

My real worry about Glow isn't so much the underlying technology but the danger that it becomes a sort of "pretend internet" - with so many restrictions on what young people can do that they can't wait to ditch it the second they walk out the school gates.

Wikipedia CD Distributed over BitTorrent at Torrentfreak

Will an information literacy exam become the next SAT?

Smartgroups RIP

Many of you will know that Smartgroups is closing. Smartgroups was used by various teams within SQA to communicate with teachers and lecturers so its demise will be sorely felt. The groups provided teachers with an opportunity to communicate directly with SQA staff. Some of the groups (such as the PC Passport group) have over 800 members - who ensured that we could not rest on our laurels. However, Smartgroups performance over the last few months has been pretty dire so the news isn't completely out of the blue.

Smartgroups closure is also a loss to the Web too since it grew out of "E-Groups", which was one of the original online communities. It's been bought out several times over the years and the most recent owner (Orange) clearly did not see a viable business model - although it might strike some as strange to pull the plug at the very time when social networking is taking off and reaping huge benefits for some.

Smartgroups is currently providing advice on how to migrate your groups to other providers and I plan to use a mix of Yahoo Groups and Google Groups - neither is as nice to use as Smartgroups although Google Groups beta shows promise.

I've setup a Google Group for e-assessment and another for Internet safety so please visit these websites if you want to subscribe to either of these groups.

School leaving age may be raised in England

Connecting With SQA

Ontology is over-rated

An interesting article from Clay Shirky about the use of tags in preference to formal categorisation systems.

British pupils 'cannot locate UK'

Simple English Wikipedia

Simple Wikipedia is a new version of Wikipedia for those with limited English skills. Maybe a good resource for S1/S2 pupils and primary kids?

Derived grades to go

After the controversy surrounding the derived grades procedure, SQA has announced that the procedure is to end.

Assessment 2.0

You've heard of e-learning 2.0, well here are some Web 2.0 technologies applied to assessment. The table seeks to show how teachers can use social software for assessment purposes.

Web service	Example	Use(s)	Assessment type
			Self	Peer	Diagnostic	Formative	Summative
Personal portal	Netvibes	Evidence organisation	x
Calendaring	Google calendar	Assessment scheduling				x	x
E-mail	Google mail	Communication with assessor Evidence storage Authenticating evidence				x	x
Search engine	Live search	Evidence discovery				x
RSS	Bloglines	Evidence discovery				x
Social bookmarking	Furl	Evidence collection				x	x
Blogs	Blogger	Reflection Log book/diary	x	x	x	x	x
Photo service	Flickr	Evidence storage/organisation				x	x
Online storage	Box.net	Evidence storage			x	x	x
Wiki	Pbwiki	Collaborative working Group work Projects		x	x	x	x
Word processing	Writely	Collaborative working Group work Projects		x	x	x	x
Instant messaging	Live Messenger	Authenticating evidence					x
VOIP (incl. video)	Skype	Authenticating evidence					x
Spreadsheets	Google spreadsheets	Result calculation and reporting					x

Google Literacy Project

A slogan in search of a meaning?

New challenge over school science

50 ideas for online learning

Following on from a recent post about the use of social software in place of traditional VLEs, this document describes lots of ways that free software can be used to support e-learning.