Development Dairy

In the past few months I have continued to keep up-to-date with my coursework in all subjects, despite a 2 week holiday I took during the college term. When I returned home, I admittedly did have to complete a few tasks to get myself up-to-date once again, but I did not find this difficult, and this did not affect my learning in anyway.

I am happy that I took the software strand because the subjects I am now studying are much more specific to the areas of Computing I was initially interested in.

I also received my college report this week just gone, and I was pleased to see I was predicted to achieve DDD (3 Distinctions) at the end of the course. Moreover, I was given positive comments from all of my teachers. This has helped me improve my learning, because I am now more motivated to keep up the good work.

I also feel that I have improved my confidence. As part of our assignment for communication and employability skills, I was asked to do a presentation to a few colleagues. We each performed our presentations in small groups of approximately 5. Our first presentations were drafts; colleagues gave comments and feedback, and we were required to acknowledge the feedback we were given and improve the presentation from this. I feel my final presentation was an improvement because I was more comfortable presenting to the class.

A lot of progress has been made since my last blog post. Firstly, I was asked to make a choice over which strand I wanted to continue with on this course. I chose to continue on the software strand, because it has always been my intention to go on into the software industry rather than hardware.

I have learned all of the material I need to complete my unit 27 assignment for principles of computer networks. This means I can press ahead with the 9 tasks which make up this unit. I have already completed tasks 1, 2 and 9, and plan to spend review week completing the others. I am not required to be in this week at college, but I have chosen to so that I can get it out of the way.
In other lessons, I have been learning in lesson and focusing on my assignment work at home. I have got into the habit of working on week day evenings, so that the material I learnt during the course of that day is still fresh in my mind. This helps because I can complete the work much quicker and at a better quality.

There are very few things which have affected my learning between this and my last blog posts. In general, I have approached the majority of subjects with no difficulty. My motivation has remained the same, and it is this which has helped me to spend more time working from home.

Another factor which has helped me improve my learning is working with my files at home. Previously, I wasted a good few minutes in every lesson making copies of my files, trying to keep my files at home in sync with my files at college. I have now introduced FTP; this means that I can access and edit my files at home from college. I now have just one copy of my files, so I don’t have to waste time in lesson making copies.

I could improve my performance by getting earlier nights when I have college the next day. I find that I feel tired during the college day, and could concentrate better if I had more sleep. I have set a target for myself - to get at least 8 hours sleep every night.