Personal Leadership training (19 - 1 - 10)

An excellent training day where we learnt lots of great techniques for dealing with problems within out practice. We were given opportunities to discuss practice and we learnt some really useful relaxation techniques. Our teacher and Author for the day was Patricia Clegborn, who has lots of experience and training within this field.

Great, can't wait till part 2 in March

Afro hair show 2009

Excellent styles demonstrated in the student common room

Salon International 2009

Here are some sensible pictures from salon international 2009 on Monday some less sensible ones can be found on my student website along with the photos of my 30th Birthday!! http://sites.google.com/site/ryansclasses/

Jailer or Teacher

Having just embarked on a new module at Roehampton Uni, International Perspective in Profession Practice in Education (IPPPE), we were encouraged to be reflective about our teaching jobs. One lady described herself as being a 'gate keeper'! who occasionally gets to teach. Others felt swamped under with paper work or isolated from other teachers and also unable to reflect on their effectiveness. Some even blamed colleagues for avoiding collaborating. However most felt that the curriculum was far too restrictive to be able to experiment much. My thoughts or reflections of this is that with out the curriculum we could not have any standardization... and of course it would be the students that suffer...

Hairdressers to help prevent suicide

Hairdressers to help prevent suicide
By Mark Simpson BBC Ireland correspondent

Hairdresser Nichola McWilliams is being trained in suicide prevention
Hairdressers and taxi drivers are being trained to help spot vulnerable people who might be contemplating taking their own lives in Belfast.

Very Interesting view the full story here;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8248681.stm

New term

The summer hols are a great time to reflect on the academic year. I really feel that my improved IT and NLP skills have helped me support students better. Particularly in Term 3, I must say however I was glad of the rest over the summer which went too quick. Along with moving house, I had to complete 2 essays for my MA.

This year I am going to be teaching NVQ level 1 Hairdressing with ESOL so I needed to update lots of my resources. Again my best friend google has helped me loads, take a look at some of my new teaching resources and use them if you can...

http://sites.google.com/site/ryansclasses/nvq-level-1-esol-09-blow-dry

...heres a little tutorial if your interested in creating a google account. I would really recommend it, so you can create docs- PowerPoint, word, excel, as well as blogs, sites, photo albums. I even have google desktop now on my net book

http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AcHrji01rQCAZGZycTZiNDRfMTAzYzZnOGhiZHc&hl=en

Happy googling

Cross College Training

Today as part of the cross college training day I did a presentation on setting up a blog and using it as a reflective journal for teaching experiments. I explained to those who attended the great benefits of creating a blog and a google account. I made them aware of the resources I had created and used through google and some where quite impressed with the multiple choice forms on Google docs. I love google docs especially the summaries you get from the forms. We also discussed using a blog as a 'best methods manual' for recording successful supported experiments. Thanks to all who came the P.P. presentation can be found on the link below.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dfrq6b44_103c6g8hbdw

The rest of the day was very enjoyable too, some colleagues took us back through the 'reflect on actions and act on reflections' group activity where a problem is picked from the group and discussed in an open forum. In another session we looked at the benefits of peer assessments and where shown examples of these and finally to wrap up we looked at the future of our experiments and how we would go on from here.

All in all a very good day!