Tagxedo - take two

Tagxedo

So we had to create a picture using words from our blog. Just to try out the site (tagxedo), I linked to the site to Twitter to create my picture. I liked the results and thats why I have put it onto my blog. I will use my blog to create a picture in my next post.

Placement 5/12/11-9/12/11

During this week, I was on an observational placement in Terrace Road Primary School. I was placed in a year 5 & 6 class for the week. Even though I was mainly there to observe, I did walk around the class and help the children who had a problem with their work. On the 8th December, the class teacher (who is also deputy head) had to go on an inhouse course. There was no substitute teacher arranged for the day, therefore the class was left with me and one of the women who who helps out in the class, with a small amount of work set. For most of the day we just looked back through theior work books and asked them to do work based on something they had already covered.

The maths sessions throughout the week consisted of long division. There was one table of girls who found it difficult, so I set with them and used a small white board to help them work out a few of the calculations. I noticed that these children found it easier to do their calculations on the white boards first and copy it onto paper later. English lessons meant that the children had to write a letter to their pen pals in Africa. There were no science lessons this week. The welsh lesson meant that the two year 5/6 classes went into one room and did work as a large mixed ability group. During the ICT lesson, the class made a graph based on data that they had collected about the number of different cars that drive past the school. They were very excited about changing the colours and background on the chart.

The rest of the week was spent praticing the school Christmas play and making Christmas cards and calenders.

Glogster - Roman Empire

Animation

In the last seminar, I had to create an animation.  This was done using a program called '2Simple'.  At first, I just played around with the program after being shown what do to.  In the program there are two types of animation:
Simple- which has a small amount of buttons
Advanced- which allows you to speed up your finished animation and record the 'between' stages of your animation.
Once, everyone in the group had got to grips with the program, we had to use it to create a clue to a phrase that everyonewould know.

This was a very helpful seminar because this program woudl be a good teaching tool and it is a good way to capture a childs attention.

Creating a Wiki

Last week in the seminar we created a wiki as a group.  We had to create a page and folder all about 'Education in the Future-20 years from now'.  Within this section we had to include any ideas that we thought education might be like in the future, including what classrooms might look like in the future.  It was quite hard to do because there is no research for this far in the future but it was a very good lesson.

Research week

Last week we had a research week, with plenty of work to do to keep us busy.  My week mainly consisted of reading the chapters that we were given about computation (for Developing key skills in Numeracy) and special educational needs (for What is Education?).  Both of the readings were long winded but I got there in the end. 

Then it came to actually doing the theories of thinking and learning assignment, which is due today.  That took a while too, as I had to remember how to search the library catalogue online.

That was basically my research week....and I managed to squeeze in a cheeky night out, good times.