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