Tuesday 29 January 2008

Extra Money?

A small piece linked from the QCA newsletter said that DSFS was giving an EXTRA £1000 for each student doing a Diploma.
Click in the link to the LA website and it shows that it varies from £780 to £1280 with some LA's getting less and some more refelcting the cost of delivery.
All the info I sw related to level 1 and level 2 at 14-16 though - even though it says that funding for 16-19 has been announced.

Never mond - and extra £1000 to support delivery of Diplomas - got to be good news methinks.

Thursday 17 January 2008

Diploma Positioning by the DCFS

I feel quite heartened by the press.
Headlines like
Ministers make Diplomas a Priority
Stop recommended A levels
The furture of A levels can not be guaranteed

OK, so most of these are sort typical daily mail type "when I was a lad" headlines but the underlying sentiment I think is good.

Things like Key Skills pretty much failed in the market becuase they weren't made imporatnt. The opposite occurred when qualifications like the GNVQ IT was awarded 4 GCSE pass status, it became so popular with schools that it cuased it's own downfall.

So talking up Diplomas is a good thing in my view, and blogs are opinions after all, just hope it doesn't get overvalued and therefore go the way of GNVQ.

Promising though - jonathan

Wednesday 16 January 2008

BETT Show

Lots of QCA led discussion about FS at BETT.
There was even what amounted to a stand up argument in one of the presentations I was in. Quite rightly, the QCA representative was questionsed about the Drama diploma and how teachers could get studnets to "commercially rpesent their show".
QCA said - nothing to do with us
Exam Board (don't know which one) - haven't htought about that yet.
Drama teacher - but I have to start teaching this in Sept
QCA - not my brief

Stalemate! even after he asked it several times, quite funny really.

See the Key skills post about software at BETT, frankly their wasn't much -that's it!

Tuesday 1 January 2008

Evidence that creative use of ILT helps disengaged learners

This piece has been extracted from the excellent Merlin John's blog. www.merlinjohnonline.net

Pro0f that Creative ICT helps the most disengaged learners

There are some basic truths in education and here’s one. You can’t learn or teach successfully unless you are prepared to take chances: and you can’t take chances unless you have confidence.And the relevance of this? A new study, carried out on Becta’s behalf in 10 UK special schools by University of Liverpool researchers, found that creative use of ICT is a powerful tool in helping children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties to experience the successes that can give them the confidence to engage with their teachers and their education.

Enhanced engagement, motivation, co-operation, collaboration and achievement were all observed.It’s something that has long been obvious to some educators, but it took headteacher at Rush Hall School, John d’Abbro, who has pioneered creative work with his own students using state-of-the-art ICT tools from Apple for digital video, animation, music and podcasting, to set up a national research project with support from Apple and Canon.

And he is delighted that some of the insights he has gained from his own experiences have been confirmed by the findings of the researchers. It is backed up with extensive, revealing video interviews with learners, teachers and parents (see student Samantha Bell, above, on her Anne Frank project, and teacher Jan Kirkham, below, on the importance of self-esteem).

(Just go to the blog to see the videos ..... jonathan)