Project Mind map

To make sure that I know what I would like to include in my project I thought it would be helpful if I created a mind map. This way I could brainstorm everything from my childhood up to now. The mind map also helped me be organized because I can categories my life into sections. For example I put holidays as a title and then listed all the places that I have been to, I also put concerts that I have been to and again listed all of the concerts that I have seen. This also helped me to think about my final piece as I brainstormed all of my ideas into categories and then decided which one would make more sense and would be easiest to combine all of my work into a final piece.

Guest speaker - 20/03/12

Our guest speaker for this lecture was Jane Davidson who was the education Minister of Wales for 7 years.  She started off by telling us about the background of education, stating that the National Curriculum was introduced in 1983. She then went onto state that by 1997 there was a change of Government because Labour came in to power, and that from 1993 up until 1997 there was a structured education system where children were being trained rather than educated. In 1999 the National Assembly was introduced. Later on in 2000 Rhodri Morgan became the first minister for Education. She then went on to discuss the book 'the learning country' which was published in 2001, and how people would be passionate about learning from this structured education system. 

Guest speaker - 13/03/12

Today's guest speaker was Alice Davies. She came into speak to us about what is widening Access in Wales, the aims of the programme as well as how it works. It works by increasing opportunities for people from a diverse range of backgrounds to benefit from higher education.  Social classes A (upper) B (middle) dominate HE. WA (widening access) aims to increase the number of people from 'under-reprosented' groups in Higher Education. These being:

• people from specific black and ethnic minority communities
• disabled
• low income families
• looked after children + care takers.

Here are some other things i noted from this session.

• Income
• Employment
• Health
• Education
• Housing
• Access to services.

HEFCW Widening Access Funding.

• Fee planning - justify why they charge so much for fees,
• Wa premium - University gets a bit of money for certain students,
• Wa strategy funding - goes to institution,
• Reaching wider - established in 2002 by HEFCW to look after young people, disabled, ethnic and welsh speakers.

A phew other aims are: 

• Raise Aspiration - making people wanting to go to school,
• Raise Attainment - people are not getting the grades they need.

Progressive Programme,

Primary 

• Arts in action 
• STEM workshops

Year 7

• Literacy support

Year 9

• ACE days
• Mentoring - students who do not always have the support at home,
• Saturday clubs
• Technocamps.

Year 10

• Spring school - Introducing them to the environment
• STAR days - study to achieve results
• Task of University or College life days
• Saturday clubs

Year 11

• GCSE revision - help get their GCSE
• College taster days - young people from schools to the colleges
• Study skills sessions
• Mentoring

Year 12

• Subject specific summer schools - law, modern foreign language through the medium of welsh

Year 12 summer university 

• 4 weeks residential - pic a subject
• Range of subject options
• Skills for HE
• 60 ucas point/grade reduction

Year 13

• Ucas support for summer university cohort.

Enhancing the undergraduate experience.

• Work experience
• Paid work and volunteering
• Student residencies in schools
• Signposting function

LAC and care leavers

• Homework club - Neath Port talbot college
• Well being course - Pembrokshire college
• Performing Arts/Communication workshops
• Talks to foster carers and social workers
• Publication

BME Communities

• Gypsy and traveller groups
• Local community groups

Measurable Outcomes

• GCSE results
• Attendance
• Retention in FE
• Progression to HE
• Impact measurement

Guest speaker - 06/03/12

Todays lecturer was Nick Bennett, he is the Principal of Gower College in Swansea.
His topic for us today was on FE (further education) Policy.
His aim for this session was to give us answers on key questions which were relevant to his topic. These were:

• What is FE for?
• Who runs FE?
• What is FE and what is its purpose?

This is the list of information that I had noted down that could help answer these questions.

What is FE for?

Underpin Social Justice 

• Widening access
• Second chance
• Civic duty
• Cultural awareness

Support the economy

• Work based learning - Learning equal
• Business generation- Welsh medium
• Entrepreneurship - Local
• Knowledge explotation - Go out and help industry.

Learning activity - FE works - based learning providers

• Level 1 -  Qualifications from D-G
• Level 2 - Qualifications from A-C
• Level 3 - Qualifications from A level and national diploma's
• Level 4-5  - Qualifications in professional subjects - Law, accountancy, medicine etc. 

Up to 50% of results are not up to satisfactory level within numeracy and literacy. 

Welsh Government's Programme: September 2011

Leighton Andrews ( current Minister for Education in Wales) 

He wants to: 

• change everything on education.
• reform the governance of further education in Wales.
• work with further education providers

Having disccused all of this information the conclusion to this is that the FE policy has resulted in having a huge number of reviews but they lack coherence. 

Adverts

Our visual and communication session today was on advertising. We started off by watching approximately seven adverts that Suzie had chosen and we then went on to discuss them. Suzie felt that all adverts have a relevance,  so this is what we based our discussion on, as well as how adverts affect peoples feelings twoards a particular object within a certain subject.

                                            Skoda fabia advert

                                          

Volkswagon werbung think blue 

Having discussed these adverts we then went into pairs and did research of our own on an advert of our choice. With these adverts we had to discuss many different topics like camera angles and their purpose, the main story, the targeted audience, our opinion on it etc. The advert  we chose was the Cadbury eyebrows. We thought that it was a good advert to show to our class because it captures the audience's attention straight away as you do not know what is going to happen or going on. As well as being captivating it is also funny and unusual because it is not something you would expect to see, therfore we felt that it was a successful because once you watch it you feel the urge to go and buy the chocolate as it was cheery and exiting. 

Cadbury Eyebrows

Guest speaker - 28/02/12

Today's guest speaker was Mike Day. He began by saying what his aim for this lecture was. These aims were to answer the following questions:

• What is education Policy?
• Who should develop it?
• Where is it developed?
• How is it developed?
• Why is education Policy needed?

Here are some of the answers. 


What is education policy?


It is a definition of terms which are:

• Goals
• Mission - an overall goal
• Objectives - specific aims to be achieved
• Policy
• Strategy

Why is education policy needed?

• 'Guide operational decisions and actions'
• Teacher in classroom - wha to do today?
• Guidelines or straigh jacket

Who should develop it?

When it comes to 'who should develop'  it Mike went onto say if it should be Politicians or Practitioners.
The politicians are elected to represent the people, but they are not subject experts.

The problems with practitioners are:

• they are unable to take the wider view, they only see things happening within their classroom context. They do not see what goes on outside of the classroom so therefore do not have a variety of a view. 
• they see things from their perspectives.

On the other hand practitioners know things  work in practice. 

Where is education policy developed?

• Uk level
• Welsh Government
• Local Authority
• School and Governing body level - (they are not controlled by local authority)

Having had the answers to these questions he then went onto explain the key details of Swamwac (South West and mid Wales). These key principles are:

• Stake holder engagement - continuing openess and partnerships working
• Coherence
• Flexibility - process which can respond to changing circumstances
• Objectivity
• Cost effectiveness
• Resourced - Underpinned by  Investment strategy. 

Suzzie's session on emotions

In our lesson today we were looking into emotions. We had a class discussion on some pictures and we had to discuss what emotions are being showed from them and if so how. Having done this we then had to go and take some pictures ourselves by using an emotion of our choice. We got given 30 minutes to go around the campus to take a selection of pictures that matched our emotion. When we got back to the classroom we had to upload these pictures on to the computer and put them on here in preparation for our next session.  Here are my 6 pictures. Hope you can guess what the emotion is :)

Guest speaker - 21/02/12

For today's lecture we had Graham Allen who is the Environmental manager for Swansea Metropolitan University.  Here are some of the things he went into detail on:


Self learners 
-Clarify and extend the ability of students to think for themselves 
-Encourage students to reflect and debate issues
-Foster learning


Corporate Responsibility is: -
An organization's positive impact on society and environment through operations, products a service through key stakeholders e.g employees, investors, customers, communities & supplies. 
It involves :
- Corporate Strategy, Integration, Management & Performance and Impact. 


He also went into further details on digression and the benefits of growth. Some of these benefits include: - 
-Creates employment
-Higher incomes
-Decreases poverty
-Improves the standard of living.


We also went onto look closer into GDP and learn about which activities add to it. 

suzie's session :)

Today's session was about metaphors, but before we went into details on the subject we finished off what we did last week with the posters. We had to explain each picture that we had cut out from magazines by saying why we chose them and what they meant. Once we had done this we then went on to do work on metaphors. Suzie told us to go into groups of 3 and gave us five minutes to list down as many song lyrics that are metaphors. We came up with :


Lady Gaga - Merry the night
Adele - Rolling in the deep
Rihanna - Only girl in the world
Shakira - Hips don't lie 
Nelly Furtado - Im like a bird
Snow Patrol - Chasing cars
Kylie Minogue - Two hearts


Once everyone in the class had shared the metaphors they came up with we then did a task which was to identify the metaphors from many images of advertising campaigns. We had to put them in a certain order, either from most shocking to least or in categories.  Here are some of the images.

When we all had a chance to discuss the images within our class we all watched a video on Martin Luther King - "I have a dream". The reason for this was because we had to list down the metaphors within his speech, some of these examples are: 

-Lonely Island of poverty

-Bank of justice

-The riches of freedom

-Lift the nation from quicksand

-Roll down like water

-Wollow in the valley of despair

-Thirst for freedom

I am going to leave you with the video :) (click on the picture below)

Visual & communication session

In today's session with Suzie we had the chance to discuss about our ict project as most of us were unsure what to do.
When Suzie had finished explaining what the project was about she got us all to go into groups of three and pick out pictures from magazines that where to do with a sense of place and then glue them down.
Whilst we were doing this Suzie came around to us and had a chat with is individually briefly to see what our ideas were for a topic and how we would build on it to make a final piece.
I went on to tell her how I would like to create a background out of the different money's from each Country and then use a program on my computer called Photoshop and create many collages of me and my family and put them onto the background.
If I am going to stick to this idea I need to think about how I am going to use a sketchbook to build up to this final piece. Here are a phew things I have thought of and why.
Artists work - Andy Warhol because his work involves collage
Hands - I might use mine, my brothers and sisters hand prints and go into detail on the different generation as we have age gaps between us.
Money - I could go into detail on the different currency's
Countries - I could use maps to show where I have been and the distances from here to each one
Collages - Combine more than one picture of me and my family
Jigsaw - Do a jigsaw of a picture

After having this session I was able to decide for sure what I would like to do, and therefor begin some of it.

Our last seminar with Steve.

So today was our second and last seminar with Steve Gulleck. This session was a bit different than the last seminar but it was still to do with Governors. Instead of doing a task like last time we had a discussion on true factors about the governors. One of the main factors about governors is that most schools that are in poverty areas are short of them. Steve went onto say that most of the people who are governors are middle aged and this is because people who are younger tend to be to busy to take on the role. This may be because of their children or other things that they worry about more like money.
Steve gave us a handout that had a list of different types of Governing Body. He then went on to ask us what the pros and cons of these are. This is what we ended up with after a class discussion.


The abdicators
Pros
-They let you get on with it
Cons
-You might need someone else's input/opinion because the abdicators do nothing.


The adversaries
Pros
-Nothing slips
Cons
-Would not be very friendly
-Not very pleasant 


The supporter's club
Pros
-They are on your side
Cons
-They do not ask any important questions to make sure everything is right


The partners
Pros 
-They ask questions
-They support


After going over these different types of Governing Bodies it is clear that the best type are The partners. This is because there are no cons so therefore they are perfect.

Guest speaker on the 13th of February

In today's lecture we had Olive Hopker. She is the head of planning and development. She came into talk to us about Collaboration -v- Competition. Before she went on about this she gave us a handout which had examples of Government Statements. Some of these included statements from schools/Fe Sector and Leighton Andrews. When she moved onto the main subject she went onto list some examples of current collaboration and competition and their benefits. Here are some examples from both.


Examples
Collaboration 
-External Examiner
-Validation Panel Membership - this means that the course has been approved
-Research Projects
-Library access
-ICT


Competition
-Student recruitment
-League tables
-Research funding
-Staff recruitment
-Development funding
-Student places


Benefits
Collaboration 
-Shared expertise and knowledge
-Greater efficiency
-Cost saving
-Greater effectiveness
-Value of 'external eye'


Competition
-Promotes efforts to do better
-Provides choice of alternative products/services


She then went onto discuss the following topics
-HEI  -(Higher Education Institute)
-Regional dimension to the Planning and Delivery of Higher Education

More ideas on my ICT project

So yet again I have been giving this project a considerable amount of thought and after having our lesson with Suzie today it has made me comfirm my idea on a subject. Instead of doing my holidays I thought I would do my life. The reason that the session with Suzie today confirmed this idea for me is because after having a discussion on the five objects I realized that I could go into so much more details about everything that has happend in my life. By doing this I could also include my holidays so in a way I would gain more areas and moments to include.  I am going to include things within my early childhood such as nursery rhymes, pictures, places that I went to, outfits and so on. I am also going to include the places I have been to in my life, as well as collages of pictures and creative things like these. 

Suzie's session 06/02/12

Before research week Suzie had given us a small task to do within our week off which was to bring 5 objects that mean something to us. In today's first lesson back after research week we started off doing the same thing as we did in the last session which was look at pictures and then discuss them. Suzie had put up 5 pictures onto a powerpoint of work from a artist called Tracey Emin. She is a famous modern British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. The pictures we looked at included a bed with the quilt folded and things like bottle of vodka, sigarettes, newspapers and messy things along the side of it on the floor. Another picture was a tent where she had listed all the people she had slept with. This picture had a lot of debate as there were many meanings to what it could be. On the outside of the tent are two dates which look like death dates. This could imply that she wanted to put all the people that she had slept with in the past because she is still alive so it is not about her death. The other pictures included a bed with lots of colours, a pillow with a drawing on it and one of her holding a lot of money. 

Here are the pictures.

Tracey Emin - My bed 
























Tracey Emin - Everyone i have ever slept with

Tracey Emin - Pillow 

Tracey Emin - Meet my past


































After these discussions we then went on to do a task that involved us using our 5 objects. The task was to go into a group of 6 and then go out into the hall way and create a big square containing 6 blocks out of mascin tape. Then we had to put our objects into each square so everyone had their own square. Once we had done this we then went around each individual to discuss why we chose these objects and then we went round again to say which one we thought was the most important. This was a nice task because in a way we got to know eachother even more and we got to relate together as we all had something that ment alot to us. 

Guest speaker on the 6th of February 2012

In today's lecture we had Steve Gulleck again. He went on to go explain in greater  detail about the governors. After last week I thought that I had been given enough information about the governors to understand their job but it turns out there was a lot more to learn. Some additional facts about the governors that I learnt are that there are 23,000 governors within Wales, the governors must meet at least 3 times a year with the school, also that they have to deal with incidents at school. For example if a teacher is ill then it is their responsibility/job to make sure that there is a supply of other teachers to take their place, and if there are fights or accidents with the pupils they must sort it out. When it comes to training for governors it takes a while before they come experts at this job because you cant go from okay to being an expert within a day. 

After we had a lecture we had a seminar session later on in the day. This was a fun session because we got given a task to do within a group. The task was to discuss and list what are the important things to do when it comes to health and safety for children in school when they are going on a school trip that is outside of the school. Some of the things we came up with were : - First aid kit, register, medical details of children, contact details of parents and many more things like these. Once we had done this we then had a class discussion to see if we could add more to our list. Steve then went on to explain why some of these where so important. Some of these examples are that if you are going to note down the parents contact details then you should have a reserve number as well incase the parents phone do not have signal or their mobile phones aren't on, or other similar issue, and therefore they can get hold of the reserved number. Another thing that is very important is a register, this way you can keep track of each child and make sure that no one gets left behind. 

This session was very good because we got to see the responsibility that the governors have to deal with and it got us to think about what to expect when we go into this career path of teaching.  

Class discussion on 'Scream', 'Ich Habe Angs' & 'The big shave'

For the last half of our session we had a class discussion on twoe pictures and then a video. The first picture was the 'scream' which everyone had seen but weren’t aware of it or its meaning. This specific piece of art is to do with expressions. The meaning behind this piece is that there was a man who suddenly panicked about being all alone and so his facial expressions in this piece shows his emotion of panic/shock. 

Ich Habe Angst was the second picture we looked into. This was not one that we had seen before, so we all discussed and gave our opinions on what it was and the possibilities of what could be interpreted from it.

 

The last thing we looked at was a video called 'The big shave'. 

When I saw this I had no idea what it was about because to me it did not make sense but then we had a group discussion and it made sense. Now that I know what the point of it is, I saw how effective the video seemed.

This video was made in 1967 during  the Vietnam war period, so this video was a metaphore for it. The use of colours - the contrast with the red (blood) and white is the opposite of clean and messy so its like a contrast with the beginning and end. It started out peacefully and then turned into gore. 

Here is the link to the video :) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1T93rJ9p-s

First visual communication session

Last week we had our first session of visual communication with Suzie. It was a very enjoyable session. At first we had to go into a circle so that we could introduce ourselves to Suzie as this was the first time she was meeting us. Because not everyone knew what to say we ended up saying our names and how far we had got with art. Once Suzie had gotten to know us a bit we then had to go round the circle again and we all had to say the first thing that we saw that day and the logo within that object. Not everyone named the first thing they saw, instead we all named the object and the logo that we see most of the time.

The reason we did this was because our task then involved us drawing a triangle with the three things that connect with a logo which are the name, audience and brand of it. We had to write down as many brand's as we could. Some of the ones that we came up with as a group were roxy, blackberry, microsoft and other popular brands that are well known. We then had to explain why we chose these and who the target audience were.

guest speaker - 24/01/12

For this lecture we had a guest speaker to come in and talk to us about the governors role within schools. His name was Steve Gulluck. He is the director of all Wales center. He went on to tell us about what their purposes are and what they can and can not do. I learnt a lot from this session compared to what I knew before. Some of the things I learnt were that big schools have a lot of governors, where as small schools have a maximum of 9. The governors want the school to do well and succeed. Steve then went on to tell us how there is a debate on their pay situation when it comes to their involvement within the school. 

The debates are they should get paid because it is a very big position, but on the other hand there's debate that they should not get paid because it might attract the wrong person/people who are just in for the money and do not have the school's best interest at heart. Other things that I learnt about governors was that the head teacher of a school automatically becomes a governor but he/she does not have to if they don’t want to be. Steve then went on to explain how people become governors. The system is that parents are elected by parents, teachers are elected by teachers, and staff are elected by staff. Each parent get a letter sent to them saying that so and so would like to be up for the role of governor and so by sending a letter the parents will see who is up for the job. 

I found this session very interesting.

Guest speakers for 09/01/12 & 16/01/12

09/01/12
Last weeks lecture for 'What is Education', we had a speaker called Ken Jones. He spoke to us about PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), SEF (School Effectiveness Framework) and PLC (Professional Learning Communities). The PISA is compared with equivalents in different countries. He went on to explain about the 2006 and 2010 PISA responses, and improvements that needed to be made here. He also talked about the roles in education as well as the problems with the size and capacity within the local authorities. With the Plc there are three key priorities: namely  to improve literacy, improve numeracy and to reduce the achievement gap to poverty.  This lecture was interesting because I learnt about topics that I did not know about before. 


16/01/12
In this week's session on 'What is education' we had a speaker named Dr Russell Grigg, who came to lecture us. He is the head of the South West Wales Centre of Teacher Education. He came in to talk to us about Estyn. Estyn is the inspectorate for Education and Training in Wales. He went on to explain  his involvement within it, and also what it is that Estyn does. An example of what Estyn does is to provide advice to the Welsh Assembly government on quality and standards in education and training in Wales, and they also promote the spread of good practice in education and training. He also showed us examples of a variety of inspections and reports. Two examples of reports are thematical which covers the whole of Wales, and the other report is annual which covers schools. He had a list of three key questions in his powerpoint and asked us as a class to discuss with a partner which one we thought was most important. The examples were quality, leadership and resource management and provision. I chose provision because I feel that it is important that the children are being looked after and therefore will feel safe to be within the classroom. It is also important that the children are being watched by teachers because that way the teacher can assess where the children are when it comes to developing certain skills. After having this session it made me realize how much goes into inspections when it comes to having an awareness of everything that goes on and how much needs to be taken into account when it comes to making sure that when the schools are being inspected that everything is up to standard and that children are being taught the right way. By doing frequent inspections in schools it will help improve the way that children are being taught as these inspections can pick up on the good and bad things and therefor help improve on the bad things.

Graffiti and text image

Today we had been given two links to go onto where we could either create a graffiti on a word of our choice, or we could upload a picture of our choice and the website would create the picture in text. The links are  http://www.graffiticreator.net/ and http://www.text-image.com/
This is what i achieved by experimenting with diferent effects.

Movie maker

In today's ict session we had been given a task to do which was to go into a group of five and chose a topic of our choice and then go off to do a film. The topic we had chosen was people. With this topic we had to go around the university and film people around the university and then once we had done that we had to go back to the ict room and put everything that we had filmed into a film. We had a bit of trouble putting it all together as the computer was freezing now and again but we got there in the end.

Ict in Placement week

When it comes to ICT in the classroom that I was in on the first day there was not that much within the class. The only thing ICT related was the white board and the computer. When the children had finished their work they were able to go onto the computer and play a game of their choice. They also used the computer to do some work, and as it was christmas period, the task was for them to create a card using an art programme. The white board was not used on the day that I was in as they did not need to use it because the children where finishing off all their other work from the previous weeks.
When it comes to ICT within the nursery the only thing that was being used was a computer and television. The computer had the programme paint set up on it so the children could play with the mouse and draw something of their choice. The television was in the quiet room for the children to watch when they all sat together within the room.
There was not that much use of ICT within reception class apart from again the computer and television.
All of the classrooms within the school had a white board built in, which also means that they all have a computer in the rooms. The only classrooms that have a television in them are nursery and reception.