On Tuesday 11 February 2003 9:04 am, Chris Puttick wrote:
Call me silly, but howabout he gets together with a few other schools (and Ian!) to create an Star/OOo equivalent. If he adds up the costs of MS Windows, Office and Publisher plus the outrageous charge by Thomas Telford (that created by public money should remain public!), Agreed! This annoyed me every bit as much as the MS bit! Count me in.
We already have a start with www.theINGOTs.org. I have just mailed EAZs to offer them the certification for the Bronze Ingot as sponsorship. This will pull £3 into the zone for each pupil certificated. I have a number of specialist schools who have built INGOT certification into their development plans and I am currently talking to Anglia Polytec Uni about jointly training teacher assessors. If I can get say 100,000 people certificated and we get sufficient credibility, many in the Zone schools will carry on with it and I will have an income stream that can be used for free software development and further development of things like GNVQ support materials. This is going to take some time but I really need as many people taking up INGOTs as possible as soon as possible. The Bronze is easy, its effectively just accrediting skills that good primary schools will be doing anyway and its available to all the age and ability range. At the moment, getting the GNVQ assignments together is something I haven't time to do but I should think that there are plenty of schools out there with the materials. We just need to find them and them put the materials together with instructions on the web site and make it free. I reckon there is sufficient income from Teacher training and associated merchandising for us to operate this commercially but to make all the materials fee and put the certification revenues into free software. Unfortunately I have to do the day job too. Phil, why are they going down the GNVQ route? The government will be phasing out GNVQs for schools replacing it with VGCSE. If they simply want all kids certificated in ICT, get them to do theINGOTs. It will be much less expensive and much less hassle for teachers and lets face it how many kids got employed on the basis of a GNVQ Int in IT? Regards, -- Ian