Guest Speaker 3- Steve Gulluck

Steve Gulluck is our third guest speaker of the term for our what is education? module. In this lecture we were taught all about Governors within a school. Before going into full detail about what are governors and what is their role and son, Steve explained all the background knowledge we needed to know. For example,he firstly explained how schools in England and Wales are different and expanded on this. Following on from this, he then went on to tell us about what does being a governor involve and who does it include. I learnt that only those who have a relation to the school are allowed to be governors, such as parents, teachers/staff and those who live in the community. Also those who attend schools in England, Years 11-13 are able to become school governors. How to become a governor? was another question that was raised. Steve Gulluck went into great detail on how the process of becoming a governor works. I was quite shocked how much time and effort it takes in order for a person to become a governor. I was also unaware about the length of time a person is classed as a governor of the school which is 4years, which was of great benefit to me to know this information. I found this session very interesting and beneficial in the way that i was unaware of what is involved etc to become a governor. Wanting to per-sue a teaching career i found knowing this information will benefit me in the long run. I look forward to our next session on this particular topic to have wider knowledge and understanding of this.

Guest Speaker 2- Dr Russell Grigg

Dr Russel Grigg taught us all about the Estyn report. To start the session, he started off by explaining to us what estyn is and where it takes place. Some examples he gave us were places like Primary and secondary schools, adult community learning etc. He further explained what estyn does? which is to provide advice to the Welsh assembly Government and to inspect quality and standards in education. Towards the end of the lecture he described a typical inspection and what it en holds. So we came across things like what is an inspection like, who is involved and the importance of the data from the inspection. Dr Russel Grigg then also gave us two websites for us to look at in the future which were..estyn.gov.uk and ofsted.gov.uk

Guest Speaker- Ken Jones

Our first guest speaker was Ken Jones. He taught us all about the background to education that we needed. For example, the first question he asked us was who is the current minister for education in wales? However no-one knew who this was which was quite worrying as we are doing an education degree. Anyways that got covered and by the end of the lecture we knew who it was..Leighton Andrews. He also introduced us to a policy called PISA starting from the year of 2006-2010.
I found the lecture very interesting as i felt it was of great advantage to what he taught us as almost everyone in the lecture theater did not know this very important information about the education system.

Graffiti Art

In today's lesson we were shown a variaty of ways in which words can be used to create a picture. There were two programmes available called text-image.com and grafittiicreator.net.The programe i chose to do, i found on delicious.com and clicked on the link grafitti art. I created a grafitti art of my name which can be seen below.

Silent Movie!

In my first ICT lesson back from Christmas. Our task was to create a silent movie. We were put into groups of 4 or 5 people and had to choose i theme. The theme we chose was people. We then had to go around the uni with a camera device and film all different kinds of people. Once we gathered our information we then installed our clips onto the computer, and onto a program called windows movie maker. We had a few problems with this as it kept crashing, however we got there in the in end. To make the movie more interesting we speed ed up some of the clips and put voices on top of another. We are due to present our silent movie to the class in our next session :)

Placement Week

The week before chiristmas i carried out a weeks work experinece at Hirwaun Primary school. Before leaving for placement we were given a placement handbook with a number of tasks for us to do. On my first day od placement i got introduced to the head teacher, where she futher asked me which age group i would like to experience. The age group i chose was a year one class. My first day was pretty much getting to know the children and their teacher. At this time period i found the classroom was very hectic and not much work was being done, apart from activities relating to christmas.
My tasks for the week were to observe how the teacher and children interact, help children with their work. For exmaple, i helped children make christmas and folders for them to keep their work neatly. Also the children were practicing for their christmas concert so this was their main focus. The two main tasks i thought were useful to my learning was listsening to a handful of pupils reading; and taking them down to the computer room where i had to teach them to copy and paste festival pictures from google, in order to produce a festival poster. Things i found interesting was each day children had what they called "news time". This gave the children to discuss with each other and with the teacher what they are doing for the weekend or what they did the previous day. I thoughily enjoyed my placement week and look forward to my next placement :)