China

So I am off to the far east tomorrow for 2 weeks with my academy. Hoping to get internet access out there on a regular basis to update the blog with pics and so on, but it might be a quiet spell as i will of course be contending with the great firewall of China! 0816909 out… for now.

Millwood’s Visuals

In one of my LO’s, I shamelessly used Richard Millwoods graphic from his blog as an image for the title page as it was a great shot of an AI planning session and looked very pleasing to the eye (well mine anyway). This was a LO looking at Action Inquiry from a research perspective.

A latter LO is now the workplace application. I have since become fond of this image and had the brain child of transposing it into my work setting. Below is the result. Its a little more imitation than transposition, but it is in my workplace all the same. My colleagues thought it was my world domination plan and were reluctant to remove it before lessons began. A great way to start the day at 7:27 in the morning!!!

UAI LO3 Conclusions

Above is my conclusion of LO3 of UAI hopefully explaining:

• Genre selection
• Issues encountered
• Strengths / weakness’ identified

Made in iMovie 09 and my first real attempt of creating a ‘vid-cast’

Basic principals of my study

Here is a bit of an off-beat post to outline the components that I am so thankful for and could not imagine doing my studying / researching / learning without. First up its the underpinning element:

This is the framework on which I do 90% of my work (the other 10% is my learning journal which is a blue lined book, nothing special.) I have been involved in the IT industry for a while and without (hopefully) sounding like a bit of a bandwagon tag-along, Mac OS X has really facilitated the work I have produced so far with its simplistic file management, redundancy and time machine.

I suppose the enclosure for the previous (and all to follow) would be my fantastic laptop the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 15″ The best laptop I have ever had. It keeps on surprising me with most things, could not recommend a brand/model as much as this!

This little gem would have to be the secondary framework. Doing a research / distance learning degree would be rather difficult without web access and Firefox allows me to access all I need to on the web with the ability to support plugins such as Zotero.

The common room / lecture theatre / tutorial space and everything else, FirstClass is the University. It brings the Cohort together to engage in a communal learning environment and also allows students to connect with other cohorts, past and present.

Another Apple product now, still not a fan-boy, iWork 09. I have only been using it really in Semester 2, really to try it out. I have had all versions previous to 09 (through site license) but never really ran with it. 09 has really been a saviour for me, alleviating the need for buggy, slow, putrid Office:mac 2008 that I am only using for my reference page for each module as it has interoperability with Zotero, a feature iWork has yet to support.

Oh, now my favourite, Spotify is a service like iTunes that provides all music in its database (around 2-3 million) for free, streaming and instant. See my previous post to see the love!

I suppose this would be another component of the mix. Zotero is a FANTASTIC premise, but not fully developed in my opinion, head over to their website to read all about it and see how it can help you.

Oh come on, not everything is good with hiher education, this is how the descrepancies are dealt with!

What could you not do without???

BA/BSc what’s the difference?

A question i have always tried to put my finger on. Traditionally you would think that scientific subjects are BSc’s (Bachelor of Science) and everything else would be a BA (Bachelor of Arts,) but this is not the case. I have seen an array of courses ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous with BA/BSc seemingly picked at random as a classification, but i think i have now hit the nail on the head. To put it simply its BA = qualitative data and BSc = quantitate data. These are the different types of data used by the different courses, so a dissertation (3rd year project) for a BSc course would include statistics, maths and results from a study to do with numbers whereas a disertation for a BA would have conclusions based on responses and assumptions that could not be classified as 20%, 0.05, 4:1 and so on.

Have i hit the nail on the head? Anyone think different? Answers on a postcard in the comments.

p.s. couldn’t find a more appropriate picture, so there!

Research Question

“How can I drive a sense of urgency and engagement in my students at both KS4 and 5?”

This is the question i will be using in the majority of my studies from this point forward until the end of the semester. I will apply an action inquiry to this question and perform reflective analysis. Im quite excited at this point, as this is so true to life and i have already started making progress with the area of engagement but hoping that studies will provide me assistance in formulating a plan. Will go nicely in the CPD evidence folder too!

Workload increment

Okay, so im not feeling too bad about this but looking at the prospect of researching three learning objectives and producing 3500 words conclusively on them all is pretty daunting. Im trying to stay on top of it all and not falling behind and im feeling okay about it. To be honest im really enjoying doing this work as i truly feel that my mind is really being exercised and im learning so much all the time. Lets see how the posts pan out over the next 14 days…