What is Education Guest Speaker.

The start of the week, Monday 16^th January instead of having Andy – What is Education Policy and Practice we had a guest speaker. The guest speaker was Dr Russell Grigg who is head of the South West Wales canter of Teaching Education who gave us an overview of ESTYN.

I learnt a number of things from this lecture such as what ESTYN does.

• ESTYN’s aim is to ‘achieve excellence for all learners in Wales (ESTYN 1998)
• ESTYN also provides advice for the Welsh Assembly and promotes good practice in education and training

Dr Russell Grigg also talked about the 3-fold purpose

1. Provides accountability to the users of services and other stakeholders through our public reporting in providers

2. Promote improvement in education and training

3. Inform the development of national policy by the Welsh Government

I also learnt about the inspections as Dr Grigg had inspected schools himself so I knew the information had come from a reliable source. The inspections involved people and the relationships between Learners, Teachers, Parents and Governors. The inspector would have to judge whether certain areas of the school were Excellent, Good, Adequate or Unsatisfactory.

A good teacher is important as they have a big influence on children and that listening to learners is good practice, The inspectors aims are to further education standards.

Reference’s

Estyn (2002) Retrieved 21st January 2012 from http://www.estyn.gov.uk/

Wordle

This was very simple. To make this I typed some words that linked in with my theme and then I clicked 'randomize' to see what style i liked best.

Tagxedo

I used Tagxedo to create this image with slight animation. I listed the words that I wanted in my image and then used the a shape that I wanted and I used the treble clef. I couls chnage the colour of it and also the font. What I liked about this one was when you scroll over a word it turns the right way up and the goes bigger so you can see what it says.

The graffiti creator

I experimented with 'The graffiti creator' It was up to me what word I chose, so i decided to use my theme 'Music' This would make the word into graffiti, I could then stick to one colour or use a number of colours. The edit features consisted of addind stripes, bubbles and then could also add shadows. I found this one very simple to understand and was fun to use.

Text-Image

I used Text-image to create a image out of text. The theme i chose to work with was 'Music'. The word I used was 'Enrique' as I like the artists music. It was up to me what word I chose but i felt picking a artist was relevant to the image. I could change the background colour but decided to keep it to black.

Placement before Christmas

During my week of placement I went to a primary school. There were 8 classes, starting with nursery/reception and ending with year 6.

Each class had a computer and a interactive whiteboard, during the mornings the teacher would use the computer to do the register and to record information about the children such as if they were having dinners and had paid, if they were entitled to free school meals or if the child was in sandwiches.

In the year 6 class that I went the teach handed each child a mini whiteboard and marker pen and then used the interactive whiteboard for a group activity. This way all the children could interact together by playing educational games. 

In year 4 there was a similar activity but there was no mini whiteboards. The teacher gathered the class on the carpet and one boy and one girls was chosen, these were the 'team leaders'. They did a simple task on place value but really enjoyed being able to use the interactive pen and write on the board. It came more about the Boys V Girls challenge but the children learnt a lot on the topic.

Nursery and reception were a little different  but they did have a interactive whiteboard except it was left on all day on ceebeebies website for children to go on whenever they wanted.

Whilst being in the school I also noticed that there was a PC suite, this consisted of 16 computers and 1 interactive whiteboard. The children would use these to type up letters, make posters and play educational games.