Thursday, September 13, 2012

Blog Assignment #3



Peer Editing

In the video Peer Editing, it is telling you the basics of peer editing. For example, it gives you the definition of what a peer is, what editing is, and then the full definition of peer editing. There are three steps to remember when peer editing someone else's writing. The first step is compliments. It is important to always stay positive and think about the way you would want someone to proof your work. The second thing to remember in peer editing is making suggestions. You could make suggestions about word choice, detail, organization, sentences, and the topic. Always remember to stay positive though! The third and last stage of editing is corrections. Make sure to check for punctuation, grammar, sentences, and spelling. Important things to remember while peer editing to stay positive, be specific about what you are correcting and complete all three steps of compliments, corrections and suggestions.

Peer Edit Perfection Tutorial

The tutorial on peer editing is somewhat the same as the video mentioned above. In this slideshow it mentions that editing the work of your peers can be fun, you just have to learn how to do it correctly. It gives the definition of peer, editing, and peer editing also. The three important steps to peer editing are compliments, suggestions, and corrections. It is important to remember you are editing someone else's work. Always think about how you would want your work to be critiqued. Some examples of the first step, complimenting, would be: "I really loved your topic, my favorite part was ____, or it was really fun to read because..". Making suggestions simply means that you are giving the author some specific ideas about how to make their writing better. The last and third step is making corrections on your peers assignment. When making corrections, it is important to look for grammatical, sentence, punctuation, and spelling errors. The main thing I have taken from this is to stay positive no matter what! Constructive criticism does not necessarily have to be done in a crude way.

Top Ten Peer Review Mistakes

The students in this video did an amazing job at portraying mistakes that can be made during peer reviews. Like mentioned in the video, peer reviews can be very valuable for students of ALL ages, not just college students. However,some do not know how to do equality peer reviews. The students in the video went through some scenarios of peer review 'bozos'. The mistakes mentioned in the video were: Picky Patty, Whatever William, Social Sammy, Jean the Generalizer, Mean Margaret, Loud Larry, Pushy Paula, Off-Task Oliver, Speedy Sandy, and Defensive Dave. Overall, these 4th and 5th graders did an excellent job at showing us how to not edit a peers work.


Technology in Special Education

This video on how to use technology in special education is so very helpful especially for me because this is the field I want to teach in! I am slowly but surely learning how important technology is in the classroom. After watching this video, I feel it might be just as or even more important to a special education classroom setting. The teacher in the video mentioned how important her computer is to her and how it has changed not only the way she teaches but how her students function. An example given in the video was about a student named Corbin. Prior to technology in the class room he had to have an assistant read to him out loud during 'silent reading' time. Now, thanks to technology, he can participate in silent reading alone and still be with his peers because of iPod touch audio books.

Just like in a regular classroom this teacher uses power points, she e mails assignments, and has made a website for her class and all her students can access these things. When a student was interviewed the teacher asked why she liked computers in the class room and the student replied 'because they can help'. It is so encouraging as an inspiring special education teacher to see the students so excited about technology because it is helping them advance in their education when it might not have been possible before.

Apps in the Classroom

The educational app I chose was Word Wizard- Talking Moveable Alphabet. Just like in the video How the iPad works with Academics for Autism I feel the same method could be applied with this application. With the Word Wizard it allows the child to hear the sounds of the letters and it has a spell check so if they spell the word wrong it lets them know. Before the child might think it is frustrating or boring to learn to spell or understand the pronunciation of words. This app will help make learning more fun and able to learn on their own.

Vicki Davis: Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts

Harness Your Students' Digital Smarts was very interesting. Vicki Davis teaches her students how to interact globally with other students by using technology. She also teaches them about google, blogs, google docs, and avatars. She does not necessarily explain everything in detail to her students because she wants them to take advantage of the dictionary and looking words up on google.

I, personally, did not have much practice in my high school with computers/technology. I think it is outstanding what this teacher is doing within this school. I really admired her for saying, "it doesn't matter if I know the information before I teach it or not". She really leaves it up to the students so that way they can gain more knowledge and understanding. Also, like she mentioned, sometimes the student knows more than the teacher and they teach her new things.