Milo's Day - 7 Reasons To Consider Being A Cat

Hello, Milo here; I will be taking over Nazia's blog for this post and I'm here to convince on you why you should consider to be a cat! Before I get started I thought it would be nice if I told you a little bit about myself.

To begin with, I am a male, Maine coon cat and I am six months old. I am originally from Buckinghamshire and I was 12 weeks old when Nazia and her family drove all the way to Buckinghamshire, to bring me to Swansea to be a part of their family. My favourite pass time is playing on my activity tree and bird watching.

Well, let's get started and by the end of this blog, I will have hopefully convinced you to give up your boring human lives and switch to becoming a cat.

1) Wake up late in the afternoon; no one to tell you when to wake up

2) No financial worries- free food provided at ALL times

3) You will get groomed daily - no effort needed in looking your best

4) Play for hours on end on giant activity trees, with toy mice and much, much more

5) You can bird watch from the convenience of any window (No need for TV, this is a better choice)

6) Unfortunately, we all still have essays to write and work to do (I promise this is the only drawback!)

7) Sleep for hours and hours, dreaming about chasing mice and eating your favourite food (which is available for you in the morning)

Have you changed your mind?

Keep It Delicious!

Today I came across a really useful website called Delicious.com, which allows you to save and organise your website links to share with your friends and family for absolutely free! This website is extremely easy to use and you can sign up for this via their website. This especially comes in handy when you want to show your friend something interesting you found online, but cannot seem to remember the name of the website (this seems to happen to me majority of the time). Well, we don't ever need to worry about losing a website again because delicious will keep it safe for us forever.

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

                                                                       

Reflecting upon academic work is vital for any educational setting and in my case, essential for surviving university.  When I think about the word "reflection" the first idea that pops into my mind is mirror. This is because when you reflect on a piece of work, essentially you are looking at a reflection of yourself in a mirror. You will need to identify who you are; ask yourself questions which relate to your learning processes; for example, how do I learn? What are my strengths and weaknesses?

I know the concept of reflection is heavily emphasised upon throughout academic studies e.g. in comprehensive school peer marking is the way forward; and it sounds to be a very long and tiring process but trust me, stick with it.  

Step one to reflecting any piece of academic work would be to READ the feedback you gain from your teacher/lecturer in detail. I say read as in the comments your teacher or lecturer has written (not to just glance at the mark you receive for that piece of work, close the cover of your file; and place it at the back of the drawer to never to look back on again. This will help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses; with this information, make a list, write down bullet point or create a poster, anything that helps you to understand what you can confidently do well and what you need to improve on. Secondly, make an action plan on how you can improve the standard of your work for next time. Additionally, try to select different sources to include in your work, in order to widen your learning experiences. For example, read some e-books, journals and articles. This may also help you to understand what your preferred learning style is e.g. if you are an acoustic, visual or kinaesthetic learner.

Here I have created a mind map on bubbl.us which acts as a checklist, when I receive a piece of academic work back with feedback. Feel free to use this as a guideline or plan for the next time you need to reflect upon your work. Good luck!

                                                                                                                    

Domain detectives

Well, we are all aware of the various domain endings that are attached to the end of a website address, but what do they mean? The reason for the different types of domains are not so that they can confuse us, but are there so that we are able to easily identify whether the website is for example,  a government website, an organisation or a commercial website.

Not only is this useful but when I first started university, I found it very difficult to identify which websites are useful, valid and reliable to include in my assignments. Academic websites are usually those which include .gov, .edu, and .ac.uk as their domain. If in doubt, you can always check this using a website called easyWhois.com. Through this, you can check the website's domain, registrant, validity and much more.

There are a number of different domain names; some of these include: .com, .net, .co.uk, .ac.uk/.edu, .org, .gov, .int.

 Let's us start with the most common domain, .com. This means that the website you are using is commercial; usually these websites are for-profit. This means that majority of this domain's websites are used for selling. For example, with the website Waterstones.com, you can purchase books and stationary. 

Governmental websites can be identified by the .gov domain. Such websites are credible as they are up to date and reliable. These websites can be used for academic research and demographic data. I regularly use the Welsh government and Swansea government websites for information on key pieces of legislation, the curriculum and demographics on the Swansea area.

Academic institution's websites such as university websites have an ac.uk domain. This hints to the researcher that these websites are valid and can be a reliable source of information.

Different countries have different domain endings; some of these are: .it (Italy)

                .it (Italy)                                                 .jp (Japan)

      

  .

 .       

     

     

      .co.uk (UK)                                                      .fr (France)

         

                                                                                        

The domain .org is defined as organisation. This is associated with non-profit organisations such as the British Heart Foundation  and the PDSA animal charity. however, it should be taken into account that any person can register for a .org domain, so be careful of sham websites.

In this blog post we have explored some of the common domains that are associated with different websites. I hope this post will be of some help to understand some of the meanings behind the domain names; now you can become detectives and investigate for yourselves as to which sites are useful and those which are shams!