Guest Lecturer- Steve Gullick, The governing body

This weeks lecture was presented by Steve Gullick, who talked about the governing body and the importance it has to a school and the responsibilities the governors have. Every governor has a different role some of these roles are

• Setting appropriate school targets for pupil achievement at key stage 2,3, and 4 

• Determining the staff complement and a pay policy for the school

• Also they must ensure the school sets up and action plan after an inspection to make sure that their targets are set for the next one. 

Governors are given 2 weeks to draw up this action plan for the school which should show how the school can achieve the targets for the next inspection. Governors are supposed to meet up once every term, but if a school is put into special measure (a school that is failing) they should have nearly 9 meeting every academic year. This was very interesting because it has shown us the responsibilities that the governing body has with the school and how important they are to the children's education


We also had a second lecture and seminar which involved the final discussion about Governors led by Steve Gullick.This session was very interesting as it showed us the true reality of the governor today. It was very shocking to hear that a lot of the governing bodies in Wales do not have enough governors and also that there is a huge lack of interest in becoming a governor from younger people, black and ethnic minorities and parents from underpriviliedged backgrounds.Professor Stewart Ranson of the University of Birmingham carried out research on school governors and improving standards. He found that most Governors in Wales were 'largely white, middle aged, middle class and middle income public service professionals' (2004). His concern was that people from underpriviledged backgrounds were not taken into account. .Often ethnic minorities refrain from becoming governors as they lack the confidence in speaking english. Some parents from underpriviledged backgrounds night not want to join the governing body as their school life could have been a mix of bad memories.  There is also a problem that not many of the governors are attending training sessions. I feel that if someone is to be a governor, then they should have the right training to proceed as a governor. 

Education Policy and Practice- Estyn and overview

Today's guest speaker was Dr Russel Gregg, who is the head of the south west Wales Centre of Teacher Education. This lecture gave us an insight about Estyn which is the welsh inspectorate body. "Estyn inspects quality and standards in education and training providers in wales" (Estyn 1999). Estyn not only inspects schools and universities but also other educational settings such as pupil referral units, local authority education services for children and young people and offenders learning. Dr Russel Grigg also told us that Estyn also provides advice to the welsh assembly government on the quality and standards in the education and training in Wales and also promote the spread of good practice in education and training. He also talked about the three fold purposes of Estyn which are Accountability, improvement and development. We were also shown on the Estyn website examples of Estyn reports. This lecture was very interesting as it shows us the importance the Inspectors bring to the education system in Wales, as it makes a huge difference also in our own education

Education Policy and Practice- The Welsh Scene: Guest Speaker Ken Jones

Every week our Education policy and practice lectures and seminars will be taken by different guest speakers who are going to talk about different key areas of policies and initiatives. Our first guest lecturer was Professor Ken Jones, who spoke to us about education in Wales, to start we were told about the background of Wales, the geography and also about the welsh language used in schools. These were very interesting facts which showed and made us understand a lot about the welsh education. We were also given information about the PISA tests which were introduced in 2006, they are international tests that are done every four years across the country and are then compared with other international schools on their performance. It shows in the PISA test that in 2010 Wales results have declined and the focus in Wales will be to improve literacy and numeracy. Focusing on literacy and numeracy is a great idea as I think that literacy and numeracy is a great importance in a child's education. We were also told by professor Ken Jones about the School Effectiveness Programme (SEF) we was given a website to look at about SEF of professor Ken Jones there are six main areas towards SEF which are Curriculum and Teaching, Leadership, Working with others, Networks of professional practice, Intervention and support and Improvement and Accountability. we discussed that there is an importance in all of these areas to have an effective school.

Windows Movie Maker

This weeks session involved our class in filming and creating a movie. We were split into groups and each group all given a different category on what to record, our group was given the title "the place". all groups were given a flip video camera, the camera was simple enough to use, only having the buttons start stop delete and zoom in and out. When deciding on how we was going to create this video we thought that we would start with video recording the building of Swansea Metropoliton University we used felts and papers to write captions e.g. "library" "canteen" "the place" as we had to find a visual way to communicate to our audience. I enjoyed making the video as I have used windows movie maker before but also at the same time bits of the software was tricky to use.

Wordle

Graffiti Creator

Tagxedo Design

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Technology use in primary placement- Work Experience

During the week in my placement, children used a different variety of ICT

The first day that I was in placement I took a group of children down to the computer suite and they had to use the software microsoft excel to create a data handling graph. The children had questions like "what is your favourite popstar" "whats your favourite colour" "whats your favourite pet" which the surveyed around their class this was then printed off and the children were able to think of another graph they would like to produce.

Another use of ict used in my placement was the 2 simple software, the year 2 class used 2Create a story, to make a story on the computer about the Great Fire of London, with this software they were able to add different colour to their text and were also able to draw pictures with the interactive whiteboard pen. After the created the story there is then a play button and that will go through all the slides of the story.

Glogster