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.

relating to the readings

I have never attempted to make my own blog before as I have never really known what I would write on mine, although when stumbling across them on different sites I have found them quite interesting. I have found setting up this blog quite enjoyable even though im not completely confident on everything I am doing on here yet.
After reading the documents on moodle about reflective learning I can see why writing blogs would aid learning. As I was writing my review on my presentation I remembered different points that I may have forgotten about had I not wrote about it, so this shows that re-writing work helps you to remember it. I have already used 'mind-mapping' previously when revising for exams but i am hoping that by keeping this blog aswell it will help me even more.

Evaluation of website presentation

To begin with we all gave a few ideas of what our topic could be, and then decided that ‘sun beds’ would be an interesting topic to research. We then typed into Google sun beds and browsed through the results the search engine gave us to find one that we were happy with. On the 4^th page we found http://www.sunbedassociation.org.uk. At the first look the site looked attractive and professional, with tabs which looked to contain useful information and links.

We then thought it would be a good idea to list down positive and negative points of the site. Some of the positives included good use of colour and images, good layout and useful hyperlinks. Whilst we were looking at these positive factors, especially the sources of information, we found that some of the sites information and facts were sourced by themselves. While looking further into this we found that one fact/statement was made by a Doctor. At first we found this shocking as the statement he made was claiming that Cancer Research UK were ‘hiding the truth’ about the good that sun beds can do and were saying that sun beds prevent many fatal diseases every year. We then found that the doctor (Dr Hollick) was a member of the ‘UV advantages’ group so this was then biased. 

After concluding that the site was completely biased we then used www.easywhois.com to see if the site was registered and it wasn’t. I think if this site was reliable it would be registered and would have correctly sourced information. I think this goes to show you can’t always believe what you find on the internet as some information may be very dangerous. 

When giving our presentation to the class we decided to present it as if we believed the information on the site, although we knew it was clearly wrong. I believe we presented it well as everyone in the group had a section to present. We didn’t tell the group of the negative points of the website (false sources) until we were asked the questions by them. I think to conclude our presentation was done well as some of the group were shocked by how real the site looked until we looked further into it to find the biased information.