Tax Credits

“The hon. Gentleman also knows that tax credits benefit 6 million families with 10 million children. In total, 20 million people live in households that benefit from tax credits. Of course we want to do better. I look forward to his working with us to ensure that we can eliminate child poverty.”

These are the words of Hilary Armstrong, the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

20 million people benefit from tax credits… a third of the population…and she still wants to do better…ie add more people. Would it not be better just not to tax them in the first place?

SSDN (Scottish Schools Digital Network)

I had my first view today of the SSDN portal as being piloted in a few schools. RM have always said that it would be based on Microsoft Sharepoint but heavily customised. I would not call this heavily done; just a few page themes and a new heading. Themes so far are not that exciting. Web-parts at site entrance have been standardised for local administrators, staff and pupils but otherwise I could not see much new. Each user has a private page which they can alter, including adding pictures. At the moment storage is limited to 10 MB for students and 50 MB for staff. It is not intended to replace local storage.
Much of the admin is devolved to LAs which could be quite costly and burdensome.

There is nothing for Web 2.0, but this may come in the next version of Sharepoint due in 18 months time! There is an XML web-part so whether or not this might be utilised for feeds etc., I cannot tell. Staff freedom to customise will be set at local level.

This is not a new star on the horizon of Scottish Education.

Computer Education

There is a school of thought that is not happy about the apparent sidelining of Computer Education as opposed to ICT in Scottish schools.

According to Edblogger News there is a similar worry in the USA.

My own view has increasingly been towards the notion that Computing should be taught as the science rather than the ICT element of Computer Education and as a minority subject but with close links to further and higher education requirements. This does not appear to be the case at the moment.

Just imagine if Maths in school was not relevant to a Maths degree!

Alternative to Aggregator

Squeet watches RSS feeds you select on a daily basis and notifies you by email. I have been using it for a week or so and found it quite handy.

FOI Scotland

For a while now I have been musing about suitable questions to put to the Scottish Executive under FOI. I feel that citizens should be making use of this new freeedom if they are not to see it wither. I know newspapers are using it but that is not the same as ordinary people exercising their rights.

I am now thinking about the new Curriculum for Excellence. I gather that the groups working on the implementation phase have been told not to leak draft documents. There is a lot of activity on the blogosphere about Web 2.0 and yet we don't know if SEED or any of the administrators of Education in Scotland are taking account of any of it.

I am proposing to ask the question "May I have copies of any documents generated by the implementation phase of ACfE which discuss wikis, weblogs, blogs or podcasts?

What do other people think of this idea?

Flock

Flock is a new Web 2.0 beta version browser noted by

Clarence Fisher at Remote Access. I have just downloaded and am now using it to create this post. So far so straight forward.

Education is Changing

Will Richardson has talked recently about Western New york where there is a real drive to chang. Read all about it on this blog

Wiki on Classroom Change

There has been progress at this wiki - some discussion about grouping students or learners. But it needs more input.

Post to get Squeet working

Just ignore