How is Education Studies taught?

Hi everyone, hope you all had a great week!

In this post I'm going to try my best to talk you all through the different teaching aspects of my course, 'Education Studies' so I hope this will tell you all a little bit more about the way the course is set out and hopefully give those of you looking to start this course a little more insight into it rather than feeling like you're going in blind as that can seem extremely scary!

First things first this course is mainly about lectures and seminars, in your second year there is one unit which requires you to go out and find a placement however other than that you can either do a placement as well as your university studies but you will have to find this yourself. There are careers advisors who you can talk to who will be able to put you in the right direction of a placement so you're not entirely alone on this part. However, I would suggest if you think this would be for you to write a letter and/or a generic email and send it to several different schools in the area or wherever you can travel to asking if they would take you for some voluntary work experience and I'm sure some will get back to you.

So, the course is split up into three years and I thought I'd explain year by year:

• Year 1: This consists of four units all of which are core which I know some have changed since I was a first year but basically this year will be entirely lecture based with assignments dotted about in each term. For most units you will have two to three assignments, so around I'd say between 8 and 12 for your first year. This year is not difficult and no it does not count towards your final university grade, however you do need to put effort in because if you don't pass your first year you will not be allowed into second year which you obviously need if you want a degree. The assignments will most probably be mainly essays, but also presentations too. 
• Year 2: This year also consists of four units, two of which are core and two are optional. So, you do get to choose two out of your four units this year. The two core units for me this year were 'Comparative Education' which was all about different countries education and history of education and 'Research Methods' which is a unit dedicated to preparing you for your dissertations. There were several options to choose from including 'SEND' which is special educational needs teaching, 'Understanding the Workplace' which is the one that requires you to find a placement, and the two that I picked are 'Lifelong curriculum' which supports this wanting to go straight into a PGCE or some kind of teacher training, its basically all about the curriculum, 'Children and young people in the Digital Age' which is all about technologies influences on children and young people. This particular unit assesses you through a web folio which you work on throughout the whole unit and the final deadline is at the end of your second year, I really enjoyed this assignment. 
• Year 3: Now I can't tell you much about year 3 in detail as I haven't actually started it yet however as you all will know this year consists of your dissertation and a few other assignments within your units. The main thing this year though is the 8,000 word dissertation. 

There is a lot of use of facilities throughout the degree, the library is used a lot and particularly for m in second year there was a lot of computer suite use for my digital age unit as the web folio assignment is all online there's no paper submission for this assignment. 

If you go onto the universities website and search for 'Education Studies BA Hons this is the overview it gives you: 

Choose Education Studies BA (Hons) degree at Bedfordshire and:

• Learn about the workplace and choose optional themes depending on your own interests
• 
  
• Study inclusion, disability and special needs education, education and technology, sociology of childhood and education, philosophy and psychology of education
• 
  
• Develop your employability skills through work placements, volunteering and a research project
• 
  
• Gain a qualification that allows you to progress to a teacher training course such as postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) or graduate teacher programme (GTP)
• 
  
• Benefit from studying with staff with extensive experience in teacher training and education, with teaching informed by the Education Research Institute
• 
  

- See more at: http://www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/courses/undergraduate/education-studies#sthash.dwysHULF.dpuf 

I hope this post has given you a bit more information about how this course is taught. 

Until next time, 

M

A Week Gone By...

Hello again!

So as you can see by the title of this post, I will be giving you an overview of the past week(since my last post).

The weekend went by and I was just busy working apart from Saturday which I had off for my friend's baby shower. It was so fun I've never been to one before so it was a nice experience.

Monday came quickly, I had been given a two week extension for my Children and Young People in the Digital Age formative deadline due to illness and bereavement which made my deadline for Monday just gone. I got everything submitted in time which was a bonus and I have also received my feedback from my lecturer.

For those of you that don't know what my 'Digital Age' assignments are here's a brief description... we have a 5000 word webfolio to produce and a presentation. The webfolio is made up of six tabs which are on a software called pebble, this is just where we store our work and where lecturers mark.

Here is a screenshot of the pebble page, as you can see the six tabs are Presentation, Learning Activities, Social Change, Literature Review, Digital Research and Risk.

The tabs I had to complete for my first submission date were Learning Activities which we did in class, Social Change which was a 300 word section and Literature Review, this is 1,500 on any chosen topic and it is also a first draft. On the far right are three tabs, the tick with the number 1 underneath is the feedback tab.



Here is a screenshot of the feedback tab, as you can see it shows I have one piece of feedback which is expected. I'm sure you can see the feedback is quite good, especially seeing as we have another formative deadline before the real thing.

Formative deadline: a deadline before the actual deadline to gain feedback to help better the final grade.

Personally I love formative deadlines because it means the more work you put in for the deadline, the more feedback you get and therefore more chance of getting the best grade possible.

So yeah, there's an insight into Digital Age seeing as that's been my main focus this week.

I also went out this week(Wednesday night is student night in Bedford) and it was such a good night, I haven't been out for a couple of months due to illness. It has been a fun week with friends and successful in terms of uni work so I'm very happy!

My other lectures went well, the usual.

Next week is going to be focused on Lifelong Curriculum and my first assignment as I will be handing that in next Friday(I had another two week extension). So I'll inform you all about this unit and what it entails.

The university offers extensions if you have appropriate mitigating circumstances which I haven't ever made use of until this year as my personal tutor advised it was needed. It is a really good scheme and has really helped me out.

Until next time

M

Third term has begun!

I'm sure you can tell by the title of this post, yes it's official the last few weeks of my first year of university began on Monday and I am definitely the most worried about this term...might have something to do with my two exams at the end of this month? Yes, it certainly does... I'd love to go into more detail but I'm afraid that will have to come after I have actually sat the exams. A word of advice though.. START REVISING EARLY!
I know that everyone used to say this to me at school and I was never overly bothered and dare I say it..didn't care that I wasn't revising as much as was expected, but I have definitely learnt my lesson with these two exams and am revising because you have to pass these exams to carry on into your second year and it would be such a waste to ruin it all with failing your exams at the end of the year.. so yeah REVISE!

So it has been revision revision oh and more revision...urgh. Well I say 'urgh' but it's actually going really well and I feel extremely organised, which is a first for me because I was never the 'organised one' when I was in school and sixth form. Oh well, I think I've changed for the better in that respect.
After my two revision lectures on Monday I am most worried about the Social Constructions of Childhood exam..purely because I have been given a number of questions that will definitely come up in my Understanding education exam..so I'm most prepared for that one for sure.
I'm not saying these exams are easy, but I certainly feel more confident about these than I did about any of my A-Level exams...which is not what I was expecting at all.

Here's a picture of my revision..how exciting!

As far as contact time with university is going, I have actually finished all of my lectures for the year..so I'm actually back at home now for the summer basically. So I am having to motivate myself from home which in some ways I find easier and in others..more difficult. I would say I had more distractions at uni because I lived with flatmates and went out during the week..whereas at home I've not got many distractions
during the day as everyone is either at work or school..and then I have my little part-time job which sometimes gets in the way but I suppose that's the price you have to pay if you want to run a car and live a comfortable lifestyle.

Sorry to bore you with revision talk all the time but I'm afraid that is what my life consists of at the minute...I can't wait to tell you all about how the exams went and my grade(preferably if it's a good one)!

Organisation skills.....

This post is going to be all about organising your time, things, work and everything else that comes into being a university student.

I thought I was quite an organised person if I'm being honest but that all seemed to go majorly downhill after being at uni. I didn't really think about organising my work and notes beforehand and focused more on making my room as homely and nice as possible..which it did haha...here's a picture!




However my notes from lectures etc looked a little something like this...yes it's an over exaggeration but they were pretty all over the place!




I've been trying to think of ways I can make sure my works not all over the place next year and I've made a pact that I'm going to keep everything in order so that I can find anything from any lecture within seconds rather than having to sift through hundreds of unorganised pieces of paper.
Its getting really annoying not being able to find anything to revise from and I've even been thinking of using my iPad next year but I can't find the right software to be able to edit slideshows on and add notes. I need to think of something before second year as I can't be having this next year as well!

Another thing I've realised I'm not a pro at is organising my time efficiently and to my best advantage... I often find myself rushed for time when writing assignments or even just getting ready to go out so I need to start giving myself extra time before completing tasks even just ten minutes to have a breather.. so that's going to be another pact of mine for second year...I feel like I'm writing new year's resolutions again which I kind of am, new year of university, new resolutions and goals.

Speak to you next week!

Megan

Lectures, Seminars, Workshops

Hi everyone!

I thought I would write this weeks post on what really goes on at university in terms of studying and timetabling. As some of you may already know university consists of lectures, seminars and workshops so I'm going to break those down and explain them to you.

I am going to talk about them in relation to my particular university and degree as I don't want to generalise and then end up being wrong as I'm sure all universities have different ways and means.

Lectures
A lecture for me consists of every single person studying education studies as well as (dependent on the topic of lecture) certain other degrees for example 'Childhood and youth studies' are also in my Young Child lectures and 'Disability studies' accompany us in our Inclusion Through Professional Practice lectures.

So they have the biggest capacity of students sitting in lectures. I think this is because Education Studies has a lot of similar degrees and therefore we all need to study the same things sometimes so why not put us altogether and kill two birds with one stone.

Certainly this is the case for a lot of first years that I have spoken to from other universities. We will all split off into more specific groups in our second years we've been told and I do think the way they do it is a good efficient system.

I have four lectures a week, all but one are two hours long and the other is just one hour, however the time is made up with a two hour seminar. The lectures give you all the information you  need for what you're studying that week and it is entirely up to you to make notes and gain the best knowledge you can from them as you don't have lecturers nagging you like school, one thing about being a university student is how much independence you have compared to what you did have at school.

In my case, lecture notes are put up in advance so that we can print the slides off and make notes from them as that is how some people like to organize themselves. However, I do know that some lecturers prefer to put the slides up after the lecture has finished as it encourages students to attend the lectures.

This is pretty much what my lecture halls look like. Some this size and some smaller, we have a screen at the front which the slides are projected onto.

Seminars

A seminar is a group of about 20 students who have been broken down from the larger lecture group to allow a more one on one experience for the students with the tutor. Seminars always come after the lectures and are a chance for us to recap and discuss what went on in each weeks lecture within a smaller group of people. 

We often have activities to do in seminars which are always something to do with the lecture that would have happened beforehand. These are good because they allow us to think about the lecture in more depth and also hear other peoples outlooks on the lecture and topic. 

Seminars are usually an hour long with the exception of the one I have already mentioned which makes up for the short lecture. They are worth it because they allow both us students and tutors to listen and build a relationship with each other, they also give students more of an opportunity to speak out as some panic if they have a question to ask when in a large group and then never ask it. 

Workshops

Workshops are optional and are about anything and everything. I couldn't find my workshop timetable when writing this post so I will just have to give you a couple of titles of some that I can remember. 

They are basically extra lessons that specify in a very particular topic to allow students to brush up on the skills that they are not so hot at. 

A few workshops I can remember which will hopefully give you a good idea of what they are like:

• How to write a university standard essay
• A guide to referencing 
• Brush up on punctuation skills

That should give you a good insight into how a workshop works. 

They are held in the library and are open to anyone and everyone and personally I think they are a brilliant idea.They are there for students who may be worrying about something excessively and will give them the help they need to understand whatever it is they are worrying about.