WELCOME TO THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH’S AWARD IN ESSEX

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is an enjoyable programme of challenging activities for anyone aged 14-25

On this site you can find out how to get started, when your nearest DofE group meets and ideas for activities.

Leaders can find ideas, resources, policies and forms

News!!!!

Gold Award Presentation on 19th July at St. James’s Palace.

The following Essex Young People will be receiving their awards:

Mr Samuel Pate, Brentwood Open Award Centre
Mr Oliver Smyth, Chigwell School

Miss Anastasia  Michael, Colchester Townhouse
Miss Caitlin Elliott, Colchester Townhouse
Mr Jack Cameron, Saffron Walden CHS
Miss Victoria Pye, William DeFerrers School

If you have any staff or collegues you would like invited to a Gold Award Presentation please complete the Special Region Guest Form and forward to Ros Stafford

eDofE GOES LIVE!!

As of 1st September 2009 all new record books ordered will be Welcome Packs. If you or your DofE group want to keep your records of DofE online – this is the way. Young people can upload information and photos onto their own web page to record their DofE sections. Leaders will be able to view all their participants’ logs and information.
If this is the way forward for you – contact Ros Stafford for more details.

eDofE Update – Issue Ten – June 2010

Welcome to the tenth of a series of updates that will bring you up to speed with the development of eDofE and provide helpful information and resources. eDofE has now been live since September 2009 and is available for everyone to use.

This update is sent to all DofE Offices, who have added information that’s relevant to your Region/Country before sending it to you. Please feel free to send this on to your

DofE centres/groups within your Operating

Authority only.

Distribution to Leaders working through a National Operating Authority is not permitted unless the individual distributing the information has the express permission of their National

DofE Manager.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Delivered in June …

There are 79,334 unique users of the system which shows steady but continuous growth over the last six months.

Expedition section

During the month of May we focussed on upgrading the Expedition section to remove the constraints of having to join a team. The changes were tested by an expert group of DofE

Operations Officers and a representative from the

Operating Authority community. The system was subject to rigorous testing and a small number of improvements were identified.

Alert Box

The key changes you will see when you log on to eDofE will be a new look and function of the alert box with options to mass approve, reject and delete evidence plus a click through feature to view evidence. The new alert box will include the young person’s name, programme level and evidence type. We will delete all alerts prior to June. Those alerts received in the period 1st-13^th June will have slightly less functionality than the new alerts.

We are going to include an online Green Form that will include some pre-populated information stored in eDofE

Once downloaded, the Green Form will travel to its destination outside of eDofE. The training syllabus (similar to the one that appears in the Keeping Track Booklet) will be available to print out and present to the Assessor to demonstrate that the young person has completed all their training for their qualifying expedition.

Participants

The participants must complete these four areas:

− Aims and objectives

− All their training

− Practice plan

− Qualifying plan

The Leader needs to approve the four areas before the section can be completed.
The eDofE guides for centres and participants will be updated to version 1.2 to explain in more detail the functioning of the section.

It is anticipated that after final approval, the new Expedition section will go live on 14 June.

Outside of the Expedition section you will see improvements to the 1 minute wait after entering the wrong password and a suppression of alerts for sectional starts.

Regional

Staff OAs OA

staff Centres Centre

staff Groups Participants

Currently

Registered 83 438 1,512 4,844 8,377 6,924 69,362

EAST

REGION 5 44 123 412 1077 846 13616

What are we working on?

During the month of June we will be focussing our energy on three areas which are:

Achievement Pack

Preparation and user acceptance testing of the Achievement Pack for go live before the end of the academic year. Please remember that when you enter your request to generate your Achievement Pack there will be a 24 hour delay whilst your information is passed from eDofE to DG3 website to generate your personalised.

Achievement Pack.

Reporting Suite

We are working flat out to check user requirements, prepare the hardware and software for the reporting suite. During July/August we will start to write the actual reports to be delivered in the reporting suite.

Navigation

After receiving lots of feedback from our users we have reviewed the navigation around eDofE and we will be prioritising the improvements in due course.

Longer term projects

The following developments are still in the pipeline and these will be undertaken after the successful completion of phase one:

− Improving the resources section.

− Prioritising requests for phase two improvements.

− Introducing proactive housekeeping to prevent errors, edit certain dates and archive information no longer required.

− Looking at the analytics from eDofE to understand how people use the website

− Provision of a training area for people to play with the system safely.

Regional news

− We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Milton Keynes Operating Authority who have processed the very first Gold on eDofE! Well done to everyone involved!

T: 0845 467 0487

E: eDofE@DofE.org

If you require any additional support, our primary contact at the East Regional Office is Belinda Murphy, contactable on:

T: 01908 576322
E: east@DofE.org

Coming soon…

We hope you’ve found this update useful. The next update will be July 2010.

For further information please contact Anne Newcombe, Director – East Region

All eDofE resources and user guides can be found in eDofE and at

www.DofE.org/eDofE