KS3 ICT Pilot

[russdev]

Hate to tell you this plug is not being pulled it is going ahead as dfes, tony blair and others want it to...

So scapping tests why any school would do this is beyond me as in two years time your results are reported this means you yes you have to explain to head why test didnt work and kids got bad results, in 2008 cant pull out so why anybody would do it know just beyond belief rubbish test or not...

[kingswood]

I agree- the test will move on regardless of the technical perspective from NMs and technicians. I would also say though that that we ran four very successful sessions this past week with two groups of students and found it quite good.

Feedback was taken by myself and teachers during the test and recorded- with that information and the technical monitoring of the test I carried out whilst it ran we hope to be even more prepared than the two months I had to prepare this year! Students thought the test interface was complicated and that the questions were obscure in the first part of the summative test (Test 1); however, in test 2 they finished on average with 20 minutes on the clock left (there are only two tasks in that one) and told us that they found this one "too easy" and some even said it was "boring".

We had problems with one student account that refused to restart the test even when we logged him on to another system (we made sure that there were four systems spare in case...), and apart from that the APS ran very well and all DPS systems uploaded their results without much problem (some slowdown as the test ended at the same time as other students througout the building also logged off their machines).

It's not *that* bad really. A lot less than I thought it would be anyway.

Paul

[Ric_]

The thin client implementation of the test **sucks** at the moment and the RM engineer that observed our trial (and indeed it was a trial!) can vouch for that.

I understand that the tests will be going ahead and that the trials must take place to improve the software but at the moment it is unusable - we got 14 kids through the 2 summative tests in two days!!!

[RoyG]

So scrapping tests why any school would do this is beyond me as in two years time your results are reported this means you yes you have to explain to head why test didnt work and kids got bad results, in 2008 cant pull out so why anybody would do it know just beyond belief rubbish test or not...

Does it actually matter?!

The main reason I hope these tests die the death (unlikely as some believe this may be) is that the tests themselves are so completely crap! They have no educational benefit whatsoever and the only schools which will show up well on whatever dodgy statistics that happen to be in vogue (League Tables, Value Added, Contextual Value Added or whatever) are those schools which choose to "teach to the test" - for which schools have been recently slated by Ofsted!!

There is no way that techies on their own will have any influence on whether these ill-conceived tests go ahead. But, if everyone involved makes their views and feelings known, there is an outside chance that some sense might prevail.

Check out http://www.tes.co.uk/section/staffro...&messagePage=1 to see how teachers feel about the tests. Talk to your teaching colleagues, talk to SMT, talk to your Head. Make them all take a long, objective look at what's proposed and maybe, just maybe, these views might be taken seriously.

But please, please - for the sake of the kids - don't just accept that this heap of junk must go ahead.

RoyG

[loopy]

another one here that has done it for the last 2 years.