Guest Speaker 7- Jane Davidson

Today's what is education module? was taken by Jane Davidson who was the Education Minister in Wales for 7years, dealing with skills for life-long learning. To begin with she told us all about the background to education starting with the year of 1983 when the National Curriculum was introduced. She later when on to describe the year of 1997 where labor came into Government and the Weslh Assembly Government was established in 1999. For the remains of the lecture she talked to us about the books "the learning country" which was published in 2001 and "the learning country-vision into action" which was later published in 2006. We looked at things like the goals, policies and principles these documents were setting out.

Guest Speaker 7- Alice Davies

Today Alice Davies took our lecture for what is education? module. She gave us a overview on what widening access in Wales. She then went on to explain what her work is which is a "reaching wider" and what they encourage to do for young children. She then gave us a brief outline about what they do to help those preparing for further or higher education. An progressive program  is put into place starting at a primary are, leading up to year 13 pupils. However, the activities, support/advice they offer are different for each age group. For example, pupils in year 11 have gcse revision classes set up for them. Study skills classes are essential and also each pupil has a mentor to talk to if they have any problems or concerns. Whereas, year 13 pupils learn more about UCAS support and how to write personal statements etc.

Adverts!

In today's visual communication lesson we learnt all about advertisements and how adverts affect peoples opinions on a particular object. For example, to begin the lesson Suzzie gathered us around the interactive board showing us a number of different adverts shown in the Uk. These ranged from car adverts to adverts promoting drinks (tango) etc. Then our task was to arrange ourselves into pairs and to think of an advert we enjoy watching and then to explain to the class what we think the advert is trying to promote. We also had to say why we thought it worked so well or not so well, what we liked the most about it and what screen shots we particularly thought were engaging to the audience. For our advert we chose the diary milk chocolate advert (eyebrow dance. We thought this was a good advert to show as it engages the audience straight away as you do not know immediately what is going to happen. The advert is also very funny and un-usual which again catches peoples attention, therefore we thought it was a good advert to advertise dairy milk chocolate as once you have watched it, you feel the erge to go buy a dairy milk chocolate bar.

Guest Speaker 6- Nick Bennett

Nick Bennet who is the principal of Gower college in Swansea took the lecture for our what is education module this week. The lecture was based on an overview of further education in Wales.We were given a number of statistics which were interesting to see. For example, 20% of further education students are full time, where as 80& are part time. Following on from this, we learnt all the key factors within the Welsh Government Program of September 2011 and how improving welsh skills can increase employment opportunities. Overall, we were given a brief outline but detailed enough to understand the factors and priorities for further education.

Guest Speaker 5- Mike Day

For today's what is education? module, we were taught a number of topics relating to education. For example, its definition, goal, objective, policy and strategy. Firstly, we were given background information on what education policy reflects upon and what education is actually for? Branching on to this, questions such as should education be selective and why is education policy needed? were apposed. Day further went onto to explain who, when, where and why education policy is developed? Unfortuantly, we were unable to complete the whole power-point slides as we run out of time. However, we were told that the slides were going to put up on moodle for us to make further notes on this particular topic.