Summary of course taken

I am on a Masters level PGCE Primary which means I spend half my time at the university and half on placement.

It is very intense compared to my degree in Applied Social Studies at Bath! It is never ending you do not just have deadlines and times to hand things in, so no days off! There is always something to do – but the outcome is that you will become a teacher.

I find my dyslexia does not really affect my organisation and time management, but I do not seem to be able to put my thoughts down on paper. That means I seem to have to work so much harder than others and on such an intense course it can be hard to keep up. But I feel that being dyslexic should not stop you doing the course, as you will always find another route even if it takes a bit longer.

I am very creative and people seem to be amazed at how quickly I can come up with ideas – I get a real buzz from making materials for the children.

Description of strategies used.

Because I find it hard to always check my own work and although I do use Text to speech software, it does not always pick up the mistakes I make. In my dream world there would be an on-line checking system where I could send in my text, the people at the other end would not worry about the content so much as the minor spelling and grammar errors! They would send it back and because I know what I want to say I can usually sort out the way content flows.

If I am planning an essay first I will read around the topic, highlight the quotes I need and then I will write down the headings, work out the word count for each section and finally put the quotes in each section and write around them. I seem to have a mind map in my head – a vision of the plan so I do not need to have that on paper.

I find it really hard to avoid plagiarism from my own work and I had this problem in my dissertation. This does not seem to be in the rules available in our handbook or on the web pages. We also have TurnitinUK in Blackboard, which allows you to check your work on-line – but this does not really help you cope your own work so I had to look up self-plagerism on the internet.

When it comes to problems, we had the PGCE FaceBook group and we used to discuss things on-line. I have found that I have used this less and less because it can be so distracting but if you need to discuss meeting plans or other issues with friends who are not on the campus it can be very useful. Recently they have put MSN on Facebook and I think this is so much quicker because you can see who is on-line and contact them immediately.

I had to learn to use Excel the other day for a Directed Activity. I found the lecture hard to follow so I went on YouTube and found a video on setting up a formula. I have also used YouTube for a topic on Robin Hood in my classroom. They needed to know what a castle looked like and I found a video on Nottingham castle. The children loved it!

I want to end by saying – Always back up your work on your USB drive and e-mail it to yourself as you never know when you might have a disaster! I saved my dissertation onto my hard drive with my pen drive in the laptop and suddenly the whole lot disappeared. We never learnt why it happened, but now I know I should have had it somewhere else as well!