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

Social Constructions of Childhood (Exam Overview)

Ok, so I think I need to go into more detail about which subjects my exams are on and what the revision I'm doing entails.

Social Constructions of Childhood is one of the four subjects that I have been studying for my first year of university. It involves a lot to do with the history of education and the theorists supporting these views. I'm going to break this post down into two parts.. firstly I will talk about section A of the exam and secondly section B.

There are four questions in total, two for each section and we have to answer one question from each section.

Section A
This is examining part two of the unit and the first question supposedly deals with older sociological thoughts which therefore means we have to talk about theorists and their ideas about childhood, dating back to historical childhood.

The second question is dealing more with recent sociological thought. So, new theorists ideas on childhood and perhaps linking back to the ideas from previous years and seeing if there are links? Well that's my thoughts on how I would answer that question anyway..however even though I will look over this question I am mostly going to be revising for the first question as I feel this will be the easiest option for myself.

So, for my revision I have made a mind map containing a section for each theorist/idea that may come up under the first question in section A, and I have included a few bullet points of the most important things for each theorist/idea.

Section B
This is all to do with part three of the social constructions unit.
The first question focuses on images, culture or literature. So, how the child is perceived in these views.

The second question, which is the one I have chosen to write about focuses on children in film, TV or news. I decided to pick this one because I remember enjoying this particular lecture the most out of the two and I find it overall more interesting to talk about.

I think it is so important to pick the question that you feel most comfortable talking and writing about, there is no point picking the one that you think the examiners will 'like most' because there is no such thing. It should be interesting to you and therefore encourage you to revise more and come out with a good result in the end because you took the time and made the effort to construct a good response to your specific question.

I hope this blog post gives you an idea into the structure and layout of what you will experience in terms of exams if you are coming to education studies at the University of Bedfordshire next year.

On another note I think I should inform you all that I was able to choose my optional units for next year. It took a while but I am happy with the options I have chosen and I think these are definitely the best ones for me.

If you don't already know, in year two of education studies everyone has the same two core subjects and we are given about five or six optional units to choose from so I chose 'Lifelong Curriculum' because it is recommended for anyone wanting to study a PGCE (which gives you qualified teaching status) after their degree which is what I want to do, and also 'Children and Young people in the Digital Age' which is briefly described on our unit selection document as these three questions:

1. What are the challenges and opportunities experienced by children and young people in the digital age?

2. How are these constructed and understood in different media, settings, policies and practices?

3. What are the potential implications of new technologies for children and young people’s welfare, education, employment and social experiences?

I decided on this other option because it seemed the most interesting for me and I enjoy working with computers and this is one of the main things we will be using, it also involves a 5000 word e-portfolio for our only form of assessment which encouraged me even more because exams are not for me! 

How I felt when trying to choose my options!

Speak soon!