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.