Today was the first day of the rest of my life, day one of the Primary PGCE course in Manchester. I was apprehensive going into the day's programme of events; I have not been in a lecture theatre in at least six years. "What if it was too much for me?", I thought. What if I drowned in content? What if I struggled to concentrate? Oh, the anxiety!
I need not have worried. The day was really engaging, solidly delivered, and the lectures/tutorials were well structured (albeit delivered in two buildings either side of Oxford Road which could get rather exhausting!) In addition to finding out who my tutor is (Lise H), I took in very informative sessions on how to use the library (which I dutifully did after formal lectures), what my first assignment will be (a detailed look at the National Curriculum) and what to expect from the Computing course. On the latter, I learned so much. I learned that in recent years the Government's Education Secretary (at the time Michael Gove) decided that the ICT curriculum was not fit for purpose, and the head of Google concurred. We as a nation of technological innovators risked losing our way if we continued upon the well worn path of teaching sub-par IT to our children. A new way was devised, and this was termed 'Computing'. Computing is an umbrella term and is split into three distinctive sections: Computer Science, which is a lot about how things work (coding/programming, analysing and debugging); Digital Literacy, which teaches children how to use technology competently, safely and responsibly; and Information Technology, which is mostly about content generation (blogs, podcasts, documents, photograph editing etc.). The lecturer asked students to sign a computing pledge, which I did, and to upload the fifteen key points to our showcase blogs (that is this, by the way!) You will find it above, on the tab that says 'Pledge'. I have also created an about me section (also above), which details my experience to date. My next step is to fill in the computing audit that I was given in the lecture. This lists a number of computing technologies and experiences, and I must feed-back on how confident I feel at using them. I am really excited for the rest of the course, to get up to scratch with my subject knowledge, and to get into schools and shape futures... In fact, I am beginning to feel like that great philosopher, Christina Aguileira, who once said: "To be given the opportunity to help shape new artists' careers and mentor them to see their dreams come to fruition is a task I welcome with open arms". (Entertainment Weekly, 2nd March 2011)
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