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man and woman holding

This is… Digital Leaders: skills to help you lead change in your school

This programme aims to support teachers develop their leadership, improvement and coaching skills in the context of digital skills. It will provide the skills and knowledge to develop a strategic plan based on the needs of your colleagues, learners and wider school community; develop your understanding of improvement methodology and support you undertake an enquiry-based approach to developing professional learning for teacher digital skills and the digital literacy curriculum planning for learners.

This CLPL will run throughout the academic year 2023/2024.

Register your interest: coming soon.

 
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Entry requirements

Teachers need to be digitally confident:

  • professional certifications, such as Apple Teacher, Google Educator Level 2 or Microsoft Expert are required to demonstrate this

Applicants will need time to be able to deliver training, develop curriculum planning and implement school improvement planning:

  • approval from their headteacher to join the programme

The programme requires an enquiry-based approach to learning:

  • applicants must take the time to read the literature, test change in their practice and reflect on their learning to complete a portfolio of learning

Programme content

Applicants will be provided with a list of recommended literature to ensure they have a deep and informed knowledge of digital skills and learning and teaching. This will underpin their development work in school.

There will be inputs from across Education Scotland to support the applicants’ development of skills and knowledge in:

  • leadership
  • improvement methodology
  • curriculum development
  • effective pedagogy

 

These sessions will provide the practitioner with the knowledge to evaluate their schools’ needs for:

  • teacher digital skills
  • the use of digital to enhance learning, teaching and assessment
  • learner digital literacy curriculum planning
  • engaging families in digital learning

 

This evaluation will be used to identify an area of inquiry to develop their thinking and practice over the course of the learning programme. This will be shared as a final summative assessment to pass the course while informing the Scottish education system of effective digital leadership and practice.

The applicant will need to be able to demonstrate how they took evaluated school needs, developed and delivered professional learning to colleagues, and developed the digital literacy curriculum for learners and engaged families with this. The particular aspects that the applicant identifies and develops will form the basis of their professional enquiry.

Programme calendar

calendar

27 March 16:00 – 15:00, This Is Data Session 3

This Is Data

You may have seen spreadsheet dashboards that react to use interactions, automatically filtering and updating charts and tables. Ever wondered how to do it? This short course will support you to develop you skills to store and process data using tools you already use.

These sessions will show you how to use tables, slicers, pivot tables and charts to bring your data to life. You will be able to use these skills to look at your own data and / or share these skills with pupils as part of their learning.

  • Sample data files will be provided.
  • Basic knowledge of excel will be useful.
  • This set of sessions will make use of Microsoft Excel.

Sign up here for some or all of the sessions below

Session 1 – Monday 13th March 4pm

Preparing data for analysis  – the importance of structuring data in tables, using slicers to filter data, conditional formatting, data validation, custom views and useful formulae

Session 2 – Monday 20th March 4pm

Creating Visual Interactive Dashboards – using your data to create pivot tables and visualisations then bring them together into a single user dashboard

Session 3 – Monday 27th March 4pm

Linking Data – how to link tables and visualise results that draw from more than one data source.

digital xtra fund now open

Digital Xtra Fund NOW OPEN

Digital Xtra Fund launches eighth funding round to drive digital skills for young people across Scotland

Digital Xtra Fund has launched this year’s Round VIII (2023/24) Grant Awards, with the aim to help drive digital skills among young people. To date, the Fund has secured almost £1 million to deliver coding and tech clubs and initiatives nationwide. Over the years, the Fund has awarded 137 high-quality, exciting extracurricular computing and digital technologies initiatives across Scotland, that has helped engage nearly 45,000 young people in tech. In 2022/23, Digital Xtra Fund has supported 35 initiatives covering 24 local authorities and are on target to engage over 7,400 young people by the end of June, of which approximately 50 per cent will be girls and young women. 

Supported activities must be delivered between 1 July 2023 and 30 June 2024 and delivered entirely in Scotland. Activities must also focus on engaging young people aged 16 and under. Applications are welcome from UK-registered companies, charities, chartered bodies, local authorities, schools, colleges, or universities actively involved in the provision of computing education or digital technology related activities, especially for audiences from excluded groups or backgrounds (such as pupils from areas of high deprivation and/or rural isolation, girls and young women and/or minority groups). Eligible organisations can apply for grants from a minimum of £500 to a maximum of £5,000. Similar to last year, applicants will be required to submit their applications via online form found on the Digital Xtra Fund website.

To help applicants with the grant application, Digital Xtra Fund will also be delivering two webinars and also while the funding is open. New this year, Digital Xtra Fund will also be delivering four in-person sessions in Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, and Edinburgh giving prospective applicants an opportunity to ask questions to the Digital Xtra Fund team about the grant application. The team will also bring some popular educational devices (e.g., Sphero indis and BOLTs, micro:bits, Marty the Robot, and LEGO Education SPIKE sets) to these sessions for applicants to try before deciding if they would like to include them in their application.

The deadline for submissions of the grant application is Thursday 6 April 2023 at 15:00. To find out more about eligibility criteria, online application and details about the webinars, please visit: https://www.digitalxtrafund.scot/apply/.

12 December 16:00, **COMPETITION** Me, Myself and AI: How does artificial intelligence impact your life **COMPETITION**

The Scottish AI Alliance have recently launched their first-ever competition for schools and are looking for schools to take part!

The Scottish AI Alliance is a partnership between The Data Lab, Scotland’s innovation centre for data science & AI, and The Scottish Government. They are tasked with the delivery of Scotland’s AI Strategy.

Scotland’s future lies with children and young people and they believe it is fundamental to include their voices in creating a better awareness of what Artificial Intelligence (AI) is and shaping AI’s future in Scotland.

It is in this spirit that they have launched ‘Me, Myself & AI’ – a competition where children and young people are challenged to investigate how AI impacts their lives and share their findings for a chance to win prizes for their class. Any output from the investigation, as long as it can be displayed on a screen, will be considered by the panel of judges. The grand prize is a class visit from their competition partners, The National Robotarium!

With competition categories for P5-P7, S1-S4, and S4+, they would love to see submissions from across the year groups and across subjects. They are happy to talk to teachers to explore how we can best support their taking part but have also prepared a Teacher Pack with background information on what AI is, how it is used and how to investigate further.

 

You can register & find the Teacher Pack using this link: https://www.scottishai.com/schools-competition

Or get in contact with them via aialliance@thedatalab.com

The competition is open until Friday 24 February. We hope you have fun investigating, and can’t wait to see the creative responses to “How does AI impact your life?”

Scottish AI Alliance (@Scottish_AI) / Twitter

Additional Teaching Qualification in Computing Studies CPD Award (2023) at University of Highlands and Islands

The course is designed to allow you to teach computing within secondary schools as it has the required numbers of credits stated by the GTCS. The programme is designed to be a roll on roll off programme as each of the units are separate although designed to encompass what is involved in the computing curriculum by the end of the course.

The module, Web Design and Development will be delivered over 14 weeks and the semester will start week beginning 23rd January 2023 with an online induction and initial lecture.

The courses are open to any teachers with the relevant entry qualifications (degree and existing teaching qualification) who have an interest in computing or cyber security.

There is normally a weekly lecture and support session that lasts for approx. an hour, or more if required, with further e mail support available. The sessions are certainly beneficial as they allow you to ask questions there and then. However, the course is designed to be taught when is convenient for all the students and all lectures and tutorial session are recorded for viewing at your leisure.

There is only one module delivered each semester with no time off required during the school day. The lectures are recorded for students unable to attend in person. All activity is carried out online the majority of which happens asynchronously. The modules have a notional 200 hours per module over the semester. It would depend on your previous experience on whether you needed all that time. If you were able to set aside a day at the weekend or a couple of evenings for study, you would not be far off what is required for achieving the award.

To gain accreditation with the GTCS you need to teach a certain number of hours in computing, and you would need to discuss that with your local head teacher, as we only provide the academic requirement. This equates to 0.42 teaching or 100 teaching days.

The price is £215 per module, and this can be paid on a module-by-module basis. As the modules are 20 credits each if you were to do two in an academic year you may be eligible for SAAS funding. It is suggested contacting SAAS directly if you are planning to start next semester and confirm whether you would be eligible for funding.

 

You can apply through the university web site located using this link or searching for the Additional Teaching Qualification in Computing Studies CPD award at https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/ under courses.

Please get in touch if you have any further questions with this email: Gordon.macpherson.ic@uhi.ac.uk

Your Voice Is Power: Enrich your computing curriculum by bringing together music, coding & entrepreneurship

“Your Voice is Power”? A collaboration between @Pharrell @GeorgiaTech @YELLOWORG @CompAtSch &@AmazonUK

BCS are teaming up with Amazon Future Engineer, Georgia Tech and YELLOW to bring you the Your Voice is Power UK competition: an opportunity for students aged 11-18 can make beats, learn code, and promote equity.

From the Your Voice is Power curriculum and a range online EarSketch training opportunities, teachers can provide all the skills required for their students to mix music using Python or JavaScript. Students can enter the competition with a remix of Pharrell Williams’ song, ‘Entrepreneur’. YVIP is a great way of promoting coding through creative and cross-curricular approaches.

The competition and resources enable students to develop their Python or JavaScript skills, including making use of sequence, selection, iteration, functions parameters and arguments.

With our forthcoming Hour of Code resource, students can code-along, developing the necessary skills and knowledge with engaging content and pause points with an introduction to EarSketch, and how to remix their first track.

The competition comes with a wonderful selection of prizes on offer:

  • Winner receives a £500 Amazon gift card
  • Four runners-up receive a £250 Amazon gift card
  • Grand prize-winning school receives a £2000 Amazon gift card

To get started, access training and find out more, teachers can access:

https://www.amazonfutureengineer.co.uk/your-voice-is-power

 

We would be delighted if you could share this unique opportunity with your networks by forwarding this email or by making use of our social media asset pack (attached or available to download https://tinyurl.com/yvipukassets)

scottish digital literacy week

Scottish Digital Literacy Week 2022 #SDLW22

Scottish Digital Literacy Week 22 is happening! #SDLW22

Put a hold in your planner for the week of the 3rd of October 2022 and join us for exciting interactive live digital literacy lessons. 

We’ll have more details of what to expect in these lessons nearer the time, resources you might require and skills you’ll need. There will be teacher training sessions throughout September to ensure you have the skills and knowledge to support learners in these live lessons.

These lessons and follow-up activities will be base don our refreshed digital literacy support for 22/23.

So, keep your eyes peeled for more updates and details as we release the (everything will be added here) and share on socials #SDLW22