Posts Tagged ‘skills for life’
Presenting Your Best Self
Posted on: January 30, 2017
I was intrigued this week listening to Thursday 26 January’s episode of Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4. It was about how the actor Orlando Bloom was flying to Manchester to help comprehensive school pupils in Cheshire learn acting skills. Orlando is teaching them how to use their voice and act. He is honing skills that will help them present themselves well at job or university interviews. These are the kind of skills which are often neglected and help boost your confidence in communicating with others.
Orlando like many of our students has dyslexia and the acting skills helped him boost his confidence and communicate more easily with others. Although many would think acting is a way of hiding the inner self, it is in fact is a way of helping you bridge the gap in your lack of confidence and performance so you can impress your interviewers.
Our Learning Resources Centre has a number of books that will help you further with this. Here are some of our latest ones:
Posters and Presentations by Emily Blethell and Clare Milsom
Develop Your Presentation Skills by Theo Theobald
Brilliant Presentation: What the Best Presenters Know, Do and Say by Richard Hall
The Job Interview Toolkit: Excercises to Get You Fit for Your Interview by Ann Reynolds and Julie Cooper
The Interview Book : How to Prepare and Perform at Your Best in Any Interview by James Innes
Quick Reads go digi
Posted on: June 6, 2016
Last week we added some Quick Reads onto our Dawsonera ebook platform. We love Quick Reads as not only do they suit our students from entry level 3 but we also find them a relaxing easy read as well. Plus we promote them as part of the Reading Ahead scheme we run annually at our college to boost reading and literacy.
Up until now Quick Reads have only been available to us as Kindle editions. Take for instance Lucy Diamond’s A Baby at the Beach Cafe which we gave away at our World Book Night 2016 event. The snag with that for our learners is we currently only let our learners use the Kindles in the classroom. So if they want to read an ebook at home they then need to turn to our ebrary or Dawsonera ebook platform platforms. These platforms mainly offer academic text books which don’t suit our learners doing entry level 3 – level 1 courses.
Now that we can start offering Quick Reads as ebooks this will benefit students on our literacy, dyslexia and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses who can access these on or offsite on laptops or PCs or even download them to smartphones and tablets. Because we have Single Sign On (SSO) students can get straight to the ebook either through logging onto the network and either going through the catalogue record or the VLE Eresources Dawsonera link.
The three we’ve bought this week are:
We Won the Lottery by Danny Buckland
Black-eyed Devils by Catrin Collier
Trouble on the Heath by Terry Jones.
If you are not a Hillcroft student you will find Quick Reads to borrow in most UK public libraries.
Reading Ahead
Posted on: June 29, 2015
On Wednesday 24 June we passed over Six Book Challenge certificates to our students from Future Proof/Next Level and Dyslexia: Reading at our Diversity and Achievement Day. They’ve done a great job reading 6 items each and reviewing them ahead of the 29 June national deadline for the prize draw. We’ll be entering their names for the prize draw. If they win they will get a free trip to London with a friend. There is also the chance to win Kobo Touch ereaders.
Six Book Challenge helps adults boost their reading skills, gain confidence and read more. This is the end of our third year of the programme and it’s a delight talking to students about their reviews and giving them a sticker of their choice as they review each item.
The Reading Agency who run the Six Book Challenge reading programme have renamed and rebranded the programme for next year. It will now be known as Reading Ahead. Same format – just an emphasis that one of the six items you read can be anything from a website to a leaflet, to a recipe, or a magazine article, poem, email or book. We’ll be getting some of the new promotional material ready for starting it in our autumn 2015 term. Find out what Hillcroft College: courses are coming up at Hillcroft on our website.
If you’ve got a child then look out for local public libraries running the Summer Reading Challenge to keep up their reading over the school break. Kingston Libraries local to our college are running this for kids and for adults.
Hillcroft LRC 