Blog Post Assignment #3

Peer Editing and Reviewing

This week we were assigned to watch YouTube videos on Peer editing. The first video we were assigned to watch, What is Peer Editing?, was about constructive criticism and knowing how to approach critiquing in a positive yet effective way. The video explained how important it is to compliment as well as criticize your peers. This was a great short video on how to know how to effective help someone with their writing without offending their work.

The second slideshow, Peer Editing with Perfection, was a slideshow reinforcing and breaking down all of the things that were discussed in the previous video. It emphasized the importance of complimenting before criticizing and demonstrated the proper way to critique someone's work.

The final video that we were assigned, Writing Peer Reviews Top 10 Mistakes, was a video with an elementary school child leading a video on how to teach her peers good skills on critiquing. It was a rather cute video that had some information within it that was very helpful. It explained how the way that you say something can come across as something either rude or constructive. Word choice plays a huge part in something being portrayed as either helpful or hurtful. Overall, these three videos/slideshows were very effective and will help me effective complete my future assignments in this class as well in my own classroom someday.



Adaptive Technology

Technology in Special Education was a great video! This video is about a teacher named Lacey Cook who is a special education teacher. She takes a video camera around her classroom to show how helpful technology has been in her classroom. Cook talks about how much easier is its for non-verbal students to communicate on the laptops and how something as simple as headphones and an ipod could keep disturbance levels down in her classroom during silent reading.

This video really put technology into a perspective that I had never really thought about. Technology has become a necessity in life especially in special education programs. Educational electronics can read to students who are blind or magnify words for students who cant see very well. Technology can allow students to communicate to teachers instead of teachers assuming things for their students. Technology has made a great impact on the special education community in the most positive way. Computers are instruments in the classroom that have become things may be second nature in a regular classroom but heaven sent to students who could not otherwise communicate or function in a classroom as efficiently.

Ipads for Autism

Autism is a growing condition within children in the upcoming generations. As a future educator, there is no doubt that I will have to teach children that are effected by autism.How the Ipad works with Autism is a video about how children with autism can learn with education apps on the ipad. This particular video shows how a young boy with autism is learning to count, read, and write with different apps on the ipad.

The Apple Education App store has all sorts of options to download for students in classrooms with or without learning disabilities. One app that particularly stuck out to me was one called "Sentence Maker. I am an english/education major so I thought that this would be a great way to teach my students the structures and parts of sentences. The apps that have been created to be compatible with technology and learning in the classroom is a great breakthrough for parents of students with learning disabilities that have not been able to effectively teach them before.

Digital Smarts

Harnessing Digital Smarts is a youtube video about a teacher, Vicki Davis, teaching her students how to blog properly, use social networking effectively, and use technology to their advantage. The biggest lesson that I took from this video is to get rid of the perception that you have to know everything about a subject before you teach it. She allowed her students to teach her certain things about technology that she had never even heard of. I thought that-that was a powerful tool to teaching, learning from your students. This was a video that I thought was cool and made me want to change the way english is taught in most classrooms with just physical books, pens and paper. We should become more hands on in showing our students how to cite sources, use the internet properly and know how to identify whether or not information is outdated or not. This was an awesome video!