In our Lecture today we were introduced to another guest lecturer who was Jane Davidson, Jane Davidson was the Welsh Assembly minister for education and life long learning. She was minister seven years and within her time she produced a document called the “learning country” which was published in 2001. In the document she laid out  the Welsh Assembly’s ten year vision for learning and also the strategies for creating a lifelong learning culture to help tackle the social and economic issues facing the country. Jane suggested that all learners in Wales were the first priority.  The Learning Country(2001) suggests that “by 2010 the increased education and training opportunities in Wales will bear very little resemblance to those available at the advent of the Assembly in 1999” (page 2). Their aim is ensure the best environment to encourage learning to everybody at different stages of an individuals life. The learning country vision is to produce 45 intergrated children’s centres by 2007, free breakfast initiative rolled out to all primary schools that want it by 2007 and also to complete the implementation of the Foundation Phase of education by 2011.  The learning country is currently taking forward a flying start programme for the ages of children between 0 - 3 years living in disadvantaged areas. Also they are piloting the Foundation Phase in to 42 schools in Wales. Jane Davidson wants to promote inclusion in education and training, by doing this she will provide guidance on meeting the needs of pupils with medical needs and by promoting emotional health.

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

22

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

Reflective Learning Task

In our reflective learning task, we had two sheets of information on reflective learning that we had to read, after reading the two sheets we had to create a spider diargam on the key points of relfective learning, Once fininshed I uploaded it to my blog.

Creating our wiki

In our research week we were given a task to create a wiki page and files for "Education of Today". In our group we discussed the different questions that was given to us and that we had to answer, we all chose a different question that was given to us by our tutor, I chose to answer the question on how "Education in Wales today".
In class all of our group answered one of the questions and created a wiki page on our website.

Reflective Learning

Car Insurance

First of all we picked a topic that our group was going to present, and we all picked a different website about that topic and researched the that specific one, we checked the websites to see if it was a genuine website or a fake website and after looking through our websites we all came back as a group and decided which website was the right one for us. We then went to find out what the aspects of the comopany were.

During the presentation each of us spoke and gave our feedback to the class.The good points of this website were that it was easy to use and easy to navigate around, it had a good layout and it used a good scheme of colours. Our group decided that there were a few things that needed to be improved on the website e.g. the company should put a direct telephone number onto the website so that you can contact them with any queries.

About Me

I am currently studying Educational Studies at Swansea Metropoliton University, i chose to do this course as i want to become a Primary School teacher and this has always been my aspiration from a young age.