Session 7

In this session we had Andy Gillman from the MOD Education outreach programme as our guest speaker, who talked us through the basic interview skills and techniques that will enable us get that job that we keep dreaming of.

It was a very useful, effective and educative session with him, as we had role plays and discussed several reasons why candidates fail at interview and how to be well prepared for an interview.

Session 6

This session had to do with creating a targeted CV that will make you stand out, as it is often the CV that will make the difference between getting an interview or not. We did task sheet 11 to 13 in this session, where we filled out the task sheets, giving examples of real situations where we demonstrated team working, enthusiasm, motivation, leadership, interpersonal and organisational skills.

We also discussed the importance of a well written CV, I acknowledged that when it comes to applying for a job, the first step we have to take is to complete an attractive Curriculum Vitae  in order to make the recruiter feel interested in you. This is why we must bear in mind this tips in order to make it worthy. Even though a good CV won’t get you a job, but if it’s not good, it can cost you a job.

Session 5

This session was a recap of last week's activity where we completed task sheet8 to 10, Task8 was our personal goals and possible interview questions. Task9 was completed with a partner, were we answered questions regarding our our career goals and task10 was about importance of setting academic goals.



The S.M.A.R.T goal system as displayed above simply says goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

Session 4

In this session we established our targets, it involved career, academic and personal goal settings. Setting goals and targets allows us to aim towards something and thus develop our knowledge in a particular area further and keeps us motivated. Setting our career goals will guides us into doing what we want with our life, rather than moving from one job to the other, a career plan is like a ''Bridge'', it determines our skills and interests, what career best suits our talents and what skills and training we need for our chosen career. 

Academic goals are very essential to every student, as these will enable us to succeed in our course of study, goals such as an increase in grade point average, improvement in note taking effectiveness, or increased usage of an effective study system will lead to academic success.

Personal goal setting is important in life because it allows us to measure our self by how close we are to achieving our goal and how far we will still be able to go. Generally, in this section we learnt how to set specific and achievable targets.

Session 3

This session was on 'knowing our learning styles'. we discussed the importance of learning and why understanding our learning styles will help us. We evaluate our learning styles by filling out a questionnaire(http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire), in the questionairre we were asked several question and in the end you get a result stating your best learning style which mine was read/write.
Knowing our learning styles will help us succeed not only in our academic but also our work careers. Each of us perceives the world in a different way from the other. These perceptions of ours affects the way we think,how we make our decisions, how we prioritize things and our individual perceptions, it also helps to define our natural learning styles and strengths. Each and every individual will have his or her style of learning, so it is very important for teachers to use a variety of methods to reach out to students. It is also very important for teachers to first understand what the students learning styles are in the first place as this will make the understanding more easily. I am aware that I learn best by reading and writing, which I have also discovered how strong it is in this session and I intend to develop other learning skills as this will help me understand teachers more. See a video of what happens when students don't seem to understand or follow their teachers in class;

Session 2

The title of the session was ''Who you are'', this session was basically about us; who we are, our characteristics and our talents. We had to fill up questionnaires divided into five different tasks, the first part was about our academic backgrounds and how we benefited from the studied courses. The next questionnaire was about our work experience, other interests and the final part was about our strengths and weaknesses. The overall session was excellent, and the answered questionnaires was uploaded onto our online portfolio, I found it very clever to collect such information from students as this will enable lecturers to measure our developments, which will be of more benefit to us the students. In this session we discussed many skills development including interviewing skills, which I found very important as these are some of the major skills we need to develop by the end of this module. I  already have a general idea of what to do and what not to do at interviews and am always confident at interviews but planning our target and knowing areas that needs development as we did in this session will make a big difference. Here is a video of the don'ts at interviews

Session 1

This session was about setting up blogs and creating online portfolio, the entire session was very useful to me, I read peoples blogs and I hear of blogs every now and then but I never knew it was this easy to create  one for my self. After the session I was able to set up my own blog, gave it a name,chose a template and gave it a unique resource locator(URL) address(http://eric-mpd.blogspot.com). The creating of the online portfolio was made very easy with the help from the tutor,fellow students and instructions given in the hand out,a big thanks to Jay. I knew how to use hotmail but never attempted using the office part of it so I also learnt something new there, the overall session was very effective. The confidence is already there but learning new things at every session will make me more confident, I am looking forward to the next session.
Thank you,


Eric