www.tagxedo.com

I created this using http://www.tagxedo.com. I really enjoyed using the website as it gave a good variety of different styles, fonts and colours to use aswell as letting you choose your own fonts and colours if you wanted to while using as many words as you wanted. I also liked that by embedding the link to my blog i am able to see the effects of it and the tags. The only thing I didnt like was that once my i age was embedded into my blog it makes the blogg writing very slow andoften crashes although i dont know if this is a problem with tagxedo.com or blogger.

www.graffiticreator.net

I created this using http://www.graffiticreator.net/. At first I didnt really understand how to change to image apart from changing the colours so I found it quite boring but then I discovered that I was able to change different parts of the words to different effects such as 'bubbles', 'sunset', 'stripes' and 'shadows'. I think by experimenting with these I created a good effect. I think I will definitely be using this website for my project. The only problem I had was that I couldn't embed it to my blog and had to copy it to Paint and then crop it so it was just the image.

wordle.net

I created this image using http://www.wordle.net/. I used the theme of music to link in with my project which will be about my life including where I live and my interests. I found the website easy to use and enjoyed it. There were many different layout, fonts, and colour options available to use. I think when I start to make my project I may see what the image would look like if I added more words to see how effective that is.

Text image.com

I created this image using http://www.text-image.com/. I chose to use an image of Wales as I thought it would be relevent to what my ideas are for my project using the theme 'my life'. I searched for an image using Google to find one that I think would suit the purpose. I thend decided to only use one word as I wanted the focus to be on the image and not really the writing, therefore I chose 'Wales' as my word to put through the image.

I enjoyed using this website as I thought the images looked very effective and I think I will be using the website again for other parts of my project.

Guest Speaker - Dr Russel Grigg

For the lecture on Monday January the 16th to cover Andy's absense again Dr Russel Grigg who is head of the South West Wales centre of teacher education, came in to speak to us. Although we had previously heard a little bit about Estyn and the work we do I didnt fully understand it so found this visit very helpful. Dr Russel Grigg told us all  about the work that Estyn does, what their 3 fold purposes are, about thematic Reports and he also talked a bit about Ofsted reports which do simular things to Estyn. I also found it interesting that he showed us an actuall report off www.estyn.gov.uk of a school in the Pennard area of the Gower, I think this was good as after explaining to us what they did I thought it was really beneficial to look at a real report and shown the different grading criteria.

Guest Speaker - Ken Jones

For my lecture on the 9th of January due to Andy's absense, Ken Jones came in the give us a lecture. I enjoyed this lecture and found it interesting as it was someone different who had a lot of experience in what he was talking about. The lecture included topics such as PISA international tests, the 3 key priorities and SEF (school effectiveness framework). Although we had previously done a bit of work on these topics Ken Jones gave us a lot more information about them with some interesting figures of the drops in PISA scores. He also gave us websites to look at including, www.sefcymru.org which I think will be interesting to read more into to understand it better. I also liked that Ken talked about local stratergies and policies aswell as national, and stratergies and policys in other countries. I hope in the future we are able to have another lecture from him.

Glogster Task

Before given this task I had not previously heard of Glogster and was interested to find out what it was. At first I found the website quite confusing and it was not easy to understand which icons did what. As we were able to make the Glogster poster on anything we wanted, I decided to create mine on different entertainment we use as we grow up, from birth to late teens. I found the actual making the glogster easy but not very interesting. I think if I was to do the task again I would have maybe done a topic more interesting with more detail. I think this task was my least favourite as I really did not like the website, I seemed to have many problems with it such as my writing disapearing after I had saved it and re-opened it which I am not sure why?

placement week

Before christmas I went on placement to a local primary school for a week. Whilst there I witnessed many lessons being linked with ICT, in the classroom and also in the ICT suite that they had there. In the classroom the teacher used the interactive whiteboard and over-head projecter to demonstrate and show examples of what the class was going to do. The pupils were also able to come up to the board to interactively answer questions.
Whilst there I also helped in a year 3 and 4 ICT lesson, the pupils were making posters advertising their christmas concert using Microsoft Publisher. I was suprised at how much the children knew how to do on their own which shows how much technology with children has changed since I was their age.
In a year 6 class that I was also in for an hour the pupils had made an animated movie with a recorded voice over from themselfs, again I was suprised at their ICT skills doing this so well.