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.

Blog Assignment #2

Did You Know?

While watching “Did You Know? 3.0- A John Strange Version” and “Did You Know 3.0” , my brain literally wanted to explode! Those were some interesting facts about technology in our world. It goes to show how dependent we actually are on technology. However, I must say that I am not surprised by some of the statistics when other countries were compared with the United States. Although I feel that we are technologically advanced here in America I have always felt that other countries have been a step ahead of us. Hence the startling fact that 25% of India’s population with the highest IQ’s is greater than the total population of the United States. That fact is literally mind blowing to me!

The most startling fact stated in Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s video is that we are currently preparing students for jobs that do not even exist yet. This tells me that I need to step up my game as an educator. Even though I have a couple of years before I graduate I need to be keeping up with the latest technology now because once I graduate with my degree there is no telling what all will be invented by then! Technology seems to be a never-ending journey. It is already predicted that by the year 2049 that a computer that costs $1000 dollars will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species. It looks like we have lots of work to do as educators to prepare our students for this kind of technological future!

Mr. Winkle

Mr Winkle is an old man who had fallen asleep for one hundred years. The time when he fell asleep there was little to no technology in the world. When he awakes from his long slumber he realizes he ‘is not in Kansas anymore”. Everything looks, sounds, and acts differently now. He notices these machines in the office spaces and hospitals that print things, machines that keep people alive, and even machines that allow people to talk from another country away! Mr. Winkle makes his way down to the nearest school to see if he could find any relief there, and he did. He noticed that everything seemed like it did when he was in school: taking notes, the teacher just talking, and no weird looking machines. Except there was one he noticed, but it was collecting dust in the back of the classroom. Mr. Winkle finally found his happy place.

I can only hope that Mr. Winkle would not be able to find many schools like he did in the ending of this video. Like I mentioned of the videos above, we are teaching our students to live/work in a world that will have devices that are not even invented yet. Even though it might be hard to adapt to the rapid development of technology around us, I feel that it is our job as educators to be just as engaged as our students are with new technology. Even though we might not have grown up with what they have now we have to adapt to their level of technology and learning so that way they can engage on a deeper level.

Sir Ken Robinson

In his video The Importance of Creativity, Sir Ken Robinson argues that we are more concerned with educating students to become good workers rather than creative thinkers. It made me stop and think about my education growing up and if I was encouraged to be creative, and I do not think I can honestly say yes. He has definitely put a new perspective on teaching for me. He mentioned that all children are born with creative thinking, and we tend to educate them out of it.

When Sir Ken said “Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status” was a huge shock for me! I think when we think about creativity we think of art class or a drama class and that is the only places we should show our creativity. How wrong was I? A great example of this was when he told the story of the three wise men during the Christmas play. Instead of ‘Frankincense’ the child interpreted it as ‘Frank sent this’, how clever! That goes to show the creativity of a child’s mind and to think that we could be stripping that away slowly in our classrooms is frightening.

Glass, Schools, and the Future

When watching the videos on Corning's glass I must say I was not able to take my eyes off the screen, I was that infatuated with it. My mind can literally not even wrap around the technology that was being displayed. To think that this is what our future will be like is so exciting. The announcer in one of the videos said that the tablets shown would be used just as frequently as cell phones are today. Almost everyone has a cell phone, and to think that we will all have glass tablets seems foreign to me right now. However, technology is advancing more rapidly than I can imagine!

So what does this mean for our schools and the future? Like mentioned above, we have some serious teaching to do to get our students ready for this kind of future. Not only do we have to teach our students we have to teach ourselves. We need to be taking every opportunity to learn about a new device that comes out and to familiarize ourselves with it. It really puts into perspective of how important it is to educate our children on the right things, unlike the class in Mr. Winkles world. From watching these videos I have a feeling there will be no more pencils and paper in the future, everything will be done on a ‘tablet’ or a screen of glass, so it seems.

Blog Assignment #1

About Me

My name is Kayla Parazine, however it has only been that way for about two months now. I was Kayla Byrd and I grew up in a small town called Frisco City, Alabama. I graduated high school from a small private school there and also graduated with my associate’s degree from Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville, which is right outside of my hometown. From there I moved to Troy, Alabama where I attended Troy University to pursue a degree in Secondary Collaborative Education. While at Troy I got engaged to my husband Ryan Parazine, who attends University of Mobile on a baseball scholarship, and moved back home after the fall semester to take online classes and plan a wedding! We got married this June and now here I am in Mobile and attending USA.

I honestly was never interested in education until a couple of years ago when I went on a mission trip to Ghana, Africa. At the time I was enrolled in nursing school with no intentions on changing my major, much less changing it to education. While in Africa we went into different schools and taught in the classrooms there the truth of Jesus Christ. For the first time I stood up in front of students in a classroom setting and taught something I am very passionate about. Needless to say, I had a life changing experience over there in Africa. It changed my whole view of teaching and that it is not about spitting out facts and hoping the students will understand. It taught me that you have to be passionate about what you are teaching and wanting your students to understand just as you do so they can apply it to their lives. As you can tell, nursing school did not workout and I did exactly what I said I never would do, become an educator.

Randy Pausch on Time Management

From Dr. Pausch’s video I learned that it is important to focus more on doing the right things rather than doing things right because that is better than doing the wrong things really well. Also, that experience comes with time. I like what he said when he pointed out that, that is why we pay so much in American society because we are paying for their experience because that is something you can not fake. Next thing is that failing to plan is planning to fail. When we plan, it has to be done at multiple levels, for example, by day, by week, and by semester. And our plans will most likely change, so that is why we have to plan in the first place! And lastly, having a to do list. It is important to break things down into small steps and ‘to do the ugliest thing first’ ( I love the frog analogy he gave ).

I have learned that Dr. Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he learned in 2006 that he had pancreatic cancer. He gave his infamous “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” in September of 2007 and the media got a hold to it, which he says was unintentional and was made just for his students. As a result of the media outbreak, he co-authored a book called The Last Lecture, which became a New York Times best seller. Dr. Pausch passed away from complications due to his cancer on July 25 of 2008.

Helpful Time Management Exercises

Some helpful tips I took from this article was: being reasonable and setting realistic goals, making sure to stop and rest every hour, start paying attention to the time wasters such as television or how much time we spend on the phone, use waiting time to do small tasks, have a regular study area, not on the couch or bed where you are more likely to become comfortable, and to set priorities for yourself each morning or the night before. Being realistic in your expectations for yourself is most important.