Subject Support Group

We had a productive meeting with the SSG on Friday afternoon. Many thanks must go to Carl Roderick at North Berwick for hosting the meeting and organising lunch. While the official purpose of the meeting being to discuss and review materials for teaching HTML and web design, many other topics were also covered in a relaxed and informal afternoon. Points for discussion included...

• The ability to share a network drive across all computing teachers is seen as a priority - come on IT deptartment! This is something I will be chasing up ASAP.
• The standard of commercial papers this year was not great - particuarly in Higher Info Systems. I suggested that we may have to go down the lines of writing an East Lothian wide paper for each subject in future, which is a shame: I have always been a supporter of commercial papers because of the amount of time it can save a teacher - time that can be much better spend on something else instead of re-inventing the wheel.
• Many felt that the high cost of bringing in an external speaker for only an afternoon CPD session was not wise. I tend to agree! There is enough expertise in the group to do much work internally before needing to branch out.
• The remaining money this year should be spent on videos and other material for the group to evaluate. There are particuarly good programmes available on DVD that cover computing issues, and these could be an area to develop.
• Money could also be spent on any books required by a teacher for CPD, if other funding sources were not available.

The next meeting of the SSG will be on the 5th May. This will be at the usual venue: the Old Clubhouse, Gullane. The next CPD session is on the 12th May and is likely to cover web-based teaching and learning. Dave Rawson and myself are both happy to provide this training, so we'll organise something shortly!