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Digital Thinking

The programme is structured to support digital leaders at all levels to reflect on current and emerging practice and consider the nature and purpose of digital learning and teaching. Participants will be encouraged to examine and discuss the themes of

  • developing self regulated digital learners
  • opportunities for curriculum change and flexibility
  • enhancing a digitally enabled learning environment

The programme is primarily facilitated online. There will be series of online presentations, discussions and readings, along with problem finding activities around each theme. Groups of participants will collectively use their knowledge to identify potential solutions and ideas to address these issues.

The collective outputs from the sessions will be shared nationally.

This programme may be of particular interest to groups of participants from the same setting, for example school working groups.  Individual participants are welcome to invite colleagues to particular sessions that may be of interest.

This is not a programme based on digital skills development, but the application and use of digital skills to enhance learning and teaching.  As such, this programme is best suited to practitioners and leaders who are confident users of learning technologies or have an understanding of how technology can support/enhance learning and learning environments.

There will be a short information session about the programme on 26th August at 4pm.

Register for the information session on 26th August 2021, 4pm

 

 

Term 1: Developing self regulated digital learners

Dates: 30 August 2021 – 4th October 2021, weekly meetings

 

Term 2: Exploring curriculum and flexibility 

Dates: 25th October 2021 – 29th November, weekly meetings

 

Term 3: Enhancing a digitally enabled learning environment

Dates: 24th January 2022 – 24th March 2022, weekly meetings

 

Esports Parents and Carers Guide with NSPCC and British Esports Association

The British Esports Association (@British_Esports) has developed a new Parent & Carers Guide in collaboration with the NSPCC, which aims to educate parents and carers about esports and online safety.

This guide has been created to provide information to help parents understand more about the esports industry.

The contents of the guide include:

  • Information about the British Esports Student Champs
  • Benefits of esports
  • Esports in education
  • Academic pathways
  • Inclusivity and diversity in esports
  • How you can get involved with your child
  • Parents testimonials
  • Online safety

 

Tom Dore, Head of Education at British Esports Association, said:

“At British Esports we’re helping to establish industry standards for safeguarding and keeping young people safe online. Developing the Parent & Carers guide in collaboration with NSPCC has allowed us to celebrate many of the positives around esports, and also highlight important issues around safeguarding and online safety.

It is crucial as an industry that we’re doing everything we can to keep young people safe while participating in esports. We should look to traditional sport, and other established industries, to learn from their ongoing work. British Esports strongly encourages all stakeholders in the esports industry to scrutinise their own practise around their work with young people and prioritise safeguarding and online safety throughout their organisations.’

 

Find out more about the guide

 

View the guide

Running an Esports Club – British Esports Association

Esports (or electronic sports) is a term used to describe competitive video gaming. With 81% of children playing video games online nowadays, games are arguably a larger part of their lives than ever before.

The British Esports Association (BEA) is a not-for-profit national body established in 2016 to promote esports in the UK, increase its level of awareness, improve standards and inspire future talent. As a national body, their aims are to support esports and provide expertise and advice.

They help to educate parents, teachers, media, policy makers and government around what esports is and what its benefits are. BEA aim to:

 

  • Promote esports in the UK and increase its level of awareness
  • Improve the standard of UK esports
  • Inspire future talent

There has been lots of work with colleges in Scotland so far but the BEA are keen to support more schools setup, deliver and develop esports clubs for children and young people. Running an esports club is about more than playing games, there is the setup of equipment, recruitment of friends and peers, and all the digital literacy required to produce videos of their games. In fact, capturing gameplay can become a whole production with sounds, graphics and video editing going on to showcase their gaming skills.

 

Find out more about esports and the British Esports Association with these links:
British Esports Student Champs
Student Champs Resources
Esports in Education Conference
Glasgow Clyde Case Study
British Esports Champs 2021 Aftermovie
Forth Valley College Division 2 Rocket League Interview
Scottish College Cup
Diversity and Inclusion of Esports

Noteable – DPIA Information udpate

The Noteable service providing access to cloud based computational notebooks is now available via the App Library in Glow.

Noteable provides a cloud based environment for coding activities using Python and R/R Studio.  This can be used to support the delivery of Computing Science and Data Science based courses as well as Higher Applications of Mathematics.

  • A DPIA will be required before schools in local authorities can access the service. This document should provide most of the information required for Local Authorities.
  • To access the Noteable app in Unify, the Glow Key Contact has to make contact with RM who will issue an application request form.  Once completed and returned, the app will be made available to admins for the authority who can accept the terms and conditions and install across their establishments

DPIA Support

EDINA, at the University of Edinburgh have provided documentation to help with DPIAs.  This documentation is available below.

Noteable Service DPIA (outwith University of Edinburgh)

Additional Questions and Answers asked by LAs

LA QUESTION:
It states that the legal basis is Contract. What is the basis of the contract? Who is the contract with given the Local Authorities haven’t signed anything directly with Edinburgh University

  • EDINA, at the University of Edinburgh holds an agreement with Education Scotland to integrate and supply the Noteable service through the GLOW system to Scottish schools. Contractual agreements to access GLOW apps fall between Education Scotland and the Local Authority. Service level contracts and agreements between EDINA, the University of Edinburgh and service users are relevant and applicable where there is a legal basis to supply the service as a paid subscription.

LA QUESTION:
Does the Local Authority have to request removal of material from the cloud once the qualification is done or doe this happen automatically?

  • Removal of data on the Noteable service is managed by the Data Retention Policy available on the Noteable website: https://noteable.edina.ac.uk/data-retention/
  • Once a user has been tagged with a ‘Suspended’ or equivalent affiliation by the Identity Management System that feeds into the Noteable system through GLOW, using the SAML2 authentication standard, the user’s account will be made unavailable for access and user accounts are deleted one year after the user’s affiliation is set to ‘Deleted’.User account deletion does not include deleting assignment work submitted to Instructors – this data is considered owned by the relevant Instructor and will remain within their Noteable service user space until the instructor account has been Suspended and Deleted according to the schedules described above.

LA QUESTION:
Please describe the technical measures that will be put in place to support the protection the data in the cloud

  • The Noteable service adopts Jupyter technology into its infrastructure stack and does not link to Jupyter project servers that may be based outside of the United Kingdom. The Noteable hardware and software infrastructure stack are run by and within University of Edinburgh’s IT infrastructure. The Information Security Strategy of the University of Edinburgh includes information on Cyber security incident prevention and management requirements and advice for staff members of the University. (https://www.ed.ac.uk/infosec/information-protection-policies/information-security-required-reading/information-security-strategy).
  • To protect data within the Noteable service, The infrastructure that Noteable is built upon takes nightly backups of the virtual machines running the Noteable service. The service itself runs within Docker containers in those virtual machines. The backups are retained for 4 weeks (this information is available within the Data Retention Policy as well).

LA QUESTION:

University of Edinburgh’s website states: ‘Noteable is integrated with Learn to allow for a central launch point into a pre-set environment without the need for a separate login.’ Are you able to explain what Learn’ is?

LEARN refers to the University of Edinburgh’s specific online learning environment, and in the case of schools the word ‘Learn’ would be replaced with ‘GLOW’ as the equivalent. As these are the University of Edinburgh’s specific websites, information about Noteable will be specific to their use case. Further information on Noteable for schools can be found on our YouTube playlist and website.

LA QUESTION:
Noteable – Cookie Policy (edina.ac.uk) – are you able to clarify the third parties you rely on to sub-contract the processing if this includes personal data

    • Noteable uses New Relic and Google Tag manager for gathering performance and traffic metrics. All data is obfuscated for New Relic and used only for performance metric purposes. Google Tag manager is used on the service launch page and there is no personal data that is fed or added to Google Tag manager.

LA QUESTION:
Will personal data be included on any assignments? E.g. teacher name, signature and pupils name, class, schools?

  • Data securely authenticated by Noteable using the SAML2 authentication protocol used with the GLOW system will possibly include student names to track assignments and school name identification on the launch page and for assignment management.

LA QUESTION:
What departmental controls or controls by University of Edinburgh etc. will be put in place to protect personal data? E.g. ‘Student Guide to using Noteable for Assignments’

  • Personal data is protected and managed by the Noteable service data retention policy: https://noteable.edina.ac.uk/data-retention/
  • Backups of data on the Noteable service are outlined in the policy which includes further information on the virtual machines which run the infrastructure of the service.
  • Personal data is obfuscated in all possible instances and solely used for authentication purposes to access the service and a user’s saved environment and files.

LA QUESTION:
What do teachers have access to?

  • Teachers have access to a user-specific instance of Noteable, including computational notebook files and environments they have created and saved previously, including options to choose computational notebook types with Python and R-based notebooks. Teachers have assignment features enabled when they authenticate into Noteable through GLOW, and can create assignments for their class using the Formgrader tab on the Noteable service dashboard. Teachers have access to the Formgrader feature for releasing assignments to their classes from Noteable as well, which will release an assignment file from the source in the teacher’s user space for students in their class to fetch in the Assignments tab of Noteable.

LA QUESTION:
Do you rely on any sub-processors? The storing of data outside the UK would have to be a yes as University of Edinburgh is a Data Processor. We need to understand if anyone else is ?

  • No personal data that Noteable may use is stored outside of Scotland and the United Kingdom. All data is stored on University of Edinburgh hardware.

DIGITAL FUTURES PROGRAMME – MICROSOFT

Microsoft have created the Digital Future Programme to help young people explore the digital future aims to prepare young people for the technology-driven world of tomorrow, demonstrate how diversity helps build better technology, and how it can be used as a force for positive change. The programme brings together the best resources from Microsoft and our industry-leading partners, and covers these exciting topics:

  • Discover the tech industry
  • Coding
  • AI
  • IoT
  • Big Data

 

Digital Future takes a creative approach to digital skills education with classroom activities, challenges and more. Once completed, students get a certificate to celebrate their success!

 

Digital Future Programme – Microsoft UK

digital skills microsoft

Data, Technology and Digitalisation Series: Digital Skills for Youth – Microsoft

The Commonwealth Secretariat is hosting a webinar in partnership with Microsoft about the skills young people need to be competitive employees, entrepreneurs and digital citizens.

Over 60 percent of the Commonwealth’s 2.4 billion citizens are aged 29 or under. This webinar is an opportunity for young people from across the Commonwealth to talk to industry experts about their digital skills needs and challenges.

Discussions will kick off with opening remarks from The Rt Hon Patricia Scotland QC, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, and Senior Leaders at Microsoft.

The webinar will then offer two panel sessions, the first of which will look at country and organisational initiatives in building digital skills for young people. The second session will be led by the Commonwealth Young Professionals and will discuss youth experiences and ideas on digital skills gaps and opportunities. A demonstration of digital skills capacity-building tools will also be demonstrated by Microsoft, followed by a Q&A session.

 

Participation

The webinar will take place on 10 June 2021 from 11 am (BST/GMT+1)

For more information please contact: Margaret Dalziel, ICT Digital Platforms Coordinator, Commonwealth Secretariat

Digital Quality Assurance of National Qualifications

This post outlines one possible digital solution for a quality assurance process when reviewing leaner evidence.

Using Microsoft Teams and OneNote, learner evidence can be curated and shared with peers. Discussion around learner evidence can be done asynchronously or live, with the results of the discussion recorded in text, video or voice notes.  Every member of the team will be able to access the record of quality assurance to enable them to make judgements about their own learners.

An interactive summary of this suggested process can be downloaded here.

Quality Assuring Senior Phase Learner Evidence

Step 1- Identify Staff Groups

Identify a group of teachers who will work together to quality assure evidence.  Example groupings might be

  • trios of subject departments from across a local authority or regional improvement collaborative
  • a group of single teacher department from across a local authority.

It is likely to be more manageable to limit the number of staff per group.

If possible, when creating groups of staff, distribute staff/departments who are experienced with SQA marking appropriately.

Step 2 – Set up a PLC Team in Microsoft Teams.

One person from each group sets up a team and creates a OneNote notebook to host the quality assurance evidence.  A template page can be created to ensure consistency of recording evidence.  The template text used in the video can be downloaded below.

This short video outlines the process of creating a PLC Team and a structure for the Notebook. At this stage, it would be beneficial if the person creating the team and notebook had access to the OneNote desktop app in order to add Section Groups.

Download the NQ template text

A note about the welcome page – you may wish to add some instructions, links to SQA understanding standards documentation for your subject, or embed the adding learner content (below) videos on the welcome page.

Useful SQA links include

Understanding Standards www.understandingstandards.org.uk

NQ21 pages  to keep up to date  https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/95157.html

Step 3 – Invite/share the team code with the group of teachers

At this point, learner evidence can be uploaded.  This can be done by individual teachers. However, it may be that a nominated person from each department uploads content onto individual pages.

In the first instance, you may want to focus on just one area / topic / unit.  For example, Folio from Higher English.

How to add learner content to page

You may be in the position where you have multiple paper based pieces of evidence for a learner.  For example and exam script. If you have a mobile device, you can use the OneDrive and OneNote apps to combine multiple photos of that into a single PDF and insert it into a OneNote page.

Step 4 – Carrying out Quality Assurance activities

Once the notebook is populated with learner evidence and each page is named appropriately, staff can then carry out QA activities.  This can be done during live meetings of the group where breakout rooms could be utilised and each breakout room is allocated a set number of pages to discuss. Alternatively, the group can agree who will quality assure what pages by a set date and this can be done individually.

Some examples can be downloaded below

Download Example Use Cases

In recent webinars, these use cases were summarised and presented as a set of slides.  You can get these slides below

Quality Assurance Presentation from webinars

Notes about learner evidence

OneNote allows us to store a wide variety of media on each page.  It is important to mindful about data protection and copyright.

  • Ensure that learners cannot be identified – remove any personally identifiable content eg names from images, documents etc
  • If using video content. do not embed videos where a pupil is visible. In these cases, you can play the video in a live meeting, have the QA discussion and record the outcome in OneNote.  You should make a note on the document that this has happened
  • Video content such as a walkaround of a product that pupil has created can be stored on pages, as long as it is anonymous as with photo/text based content.
  • If you are using assessment materials that have been commercially created, do not upload them to the pages.

In Practice

This an example of how the West Lothian English Network are using this method to quality assure evidence of National Qualifications.

Aberdeenshire EAL Header

Aberdeenshire English as an Additional Language (EAL) Service

aberdeen council logoIn Aberdeenshire, our EAL teachers have been working to find the best ways to support bilingual learners and their families throughout the pandemic, as well as class teachers. If adapting to the challenges of the pandemic and online learning were not hard enough, many children and families have also faced the language barrier, as well as perhaps not being familiar with the Scottish Curriculum and routines and norms that may be taken for granted as something all children and families will think of as normal. Over the last year, our EAL teachers have embraced new ways of working and have developed a range of resources and approaches. Telephone interpreting used to be very rarely used but has now seen demand skyrocket with a lot of positive feedback on its effectiveness in breaking down the language barrier and building relationships between school and family. On several occasions schools have been able to speak to parents who they had not previously managed to reach, and as a result have managed to overcome some barriers that had prevented families from accessing online learning. EAL teachers have also been supporting bilingual learners by sharing advice and resources with class teachers, and also working with some pupils through video conferencing, including teaching SQA ESOL courses. The service has also produced translated comments and videos to support families who may be having difficulty in engaging with online learning.

 

 

Translated comments

A range of translated comments were develo­­­­­­ped to support home-school communication and have been used to communicate one way information to families, with comments being successfully used to overcome barriers to engagement:

 

“Aberdeenshire EAL Service covers a wide geographical area with a number of rural remote communities where our families can be distributed and which can pose communication challenges, particularly when schools are closed to most pupils during this time. One of my larger small town schools, that has a wide catchment area, have a family who were not responding to school information circulars and letters home. I sent the school the translated comments information which included a translation and the school came back and said they found it very useful and were discussing whether to send the translations out to other EAL families across the school.”

Sue Clutterbuck (EAL Teacher)

 

Translated Text Graphic

Telephone interpreting

Translated letters have also been developed to communicate to parents when the school would like to make a call and offer options that the parent can highlight for when they would be available. This has resulted in several calls with parents being arranged when the school had previously found it difficult to reach the parents.

 

“I supported a teacher in one of my schools in using the telephone interpreting service for the first time. By using the translated letters we had produced, parents were able to tell her when they would be free and she was able to call them and speak to them for the first time through an interpreter.”

Ian Brownlee (PT of EAL)

 

Our service has been strongly encouraging schools to use telephone interpreting and in general the feedback has been great (see examples of feedback in the picture below).

 

Telephone Interpreting Graphic

 

Translated Videos

We also worked in partnership with Aberdeenshire’s Learning Through Technology Team to develop translated videos that guide pupils/parents on how to log in to glow and how to use Microsoft Teams and Google Classrooms. The videos were produced in the top five most common languages in Aberdeenshire and have been successfully used to support some families in overcoming barriers to accessing and engaging with online learning:

“They used the link, watched the video and it worked! Bingo. ☺️”

Sarah Jane Bennison (EAL Teacher)

“I sent the video on how to connect to google classrooms to 2 of the P1 teachers from one of my schools, I made sure they had a direct access to the video, so they didn’t have to look around for it. They sent the video to the parents of P1 pupils with little English, who had not been engaged and 1 child the following day was online and the other child the week after.”

Amanda Blackburn (EAL Teacher)

Colleagues in other local authorities have also  given positive feedback on the videos:

“Of course, we have also been signposting homes to the brilliant videos on the use of ICT/GLOW/Teams on the Aberdeenshire site!”

“I’ve watched the translated glow videos your service have made – they are amazing! Would you mind if I shared that link with some of our schools?; the teams one and logging into glow are so valuable right now.”

 

Translated Video Screen Shot

 

 

Some aspects of online learning and supporting pupils remotely have of course been challenging and we are continuing to try to find ways to support bilingual learners, their families and teachers through the continually evolving circumstances. However the above examples have been successes that we were really happy with and delighted to share.

Ian Brownlee

Principal Teacher of English as an Additional Language

Aberdeenshire EAL Service

Digital Fire Drill: preparing for online learning

Are you preparing for online learning in January? We loved this guide from Marr College in South Ayrshire about ‘digital fire drills’. These guides allow for teachers and learners to be prepared for online learning by making clear the processes and expectations.

Take a look at this tweet from Miss Wylie, a teacher and digital leader at Marr: